CHAPTER TWELVE
WHENMATTEAWAS fully recovered, they started to take their morning walks as a trio, and Beatrice forced—she liked to claim she encouraged—brother and sister alike to discuss their history, and their feelings, in a way they never had before.
“I hate this,” Mattea complained.
“As do I,” Cesare agreed.
Beatrice, in headmistress mode, only smiled. “Excellent. We’ll make it a family tradition.”
They found a prestigious acting camp in the States and Mattea, grumbling all the way, allowed them to pretend to bully her into going. She assured them that the whole thing was dumb and she would hate it, but when it came time to come home after the agreed-upon week, she stayed. For the rest of the summer.
A summer during which there was much speculation in the press about the engagement that wasn’t, until Marielle ended it by marrying a minor royal, and even the gossips moved on. A summer, hot and sweet and long, that allowed Beatrice to make amends with the staff who thought she’d infiltrated their ranks to get to the master. Something she insisted was necessary, despite Mrs. Morse’s support, though Cesare disagreed.
But he had nothing to argue about. For the first time in his life, he was simply alive. He took Beatrice to his bed at night, he loved her with all the passion he had inside him, and he woke up with her every morning.
“If this is an obsession,” Beatrice liked to whisper when he was deep inside her, making them both grown, “at least we share it.”
They saw the doctors together, took all the tests his attorneys required, and discovered they were having a little boy.
“I do not want to raise a son the way I was raised,” Cesare confessed one night, out on the terrace where the setting sun bathed him in gold. “I could not bear it.”
“Then we will find another way,” Beatrice agreed at once.
One night as the summer came to a close, they sat with his father’s letter and Cesare read it to her, point by point. And they agreed that a man could be imperfect and still deliver good advice—but also that it was not necessary to take that advice as gospel.
And so Cesare carefully folded up the letter, tucked it back in its old envelope, and secured it behind the portrait of his father that hung in the gallery. Where he could find it again if he needed it.
But he didn’t think he would.
Mattea returned from her acting camp bright and happy. And when it was time for her to go back to school, she took Beatrice aside, and confessed that she didn’t know how to go back to a place like Averell and not be the troublemaker she’d been before.
“It will be your best role yet,” Beatrice told her.
And somehow, Cesare knew that his sister was going to find her feet. And very likely the stage lights, too.
In September, when Mattea was back in school and already involved with her first theater production, he took Beatrice back to Venice.
This time, they both stayed in the private hotel that he had bought in the meantime, so that it could always be theirs when they wanted it. They walked along the canals, held each other close in the piazzas, and she took great pleasure in tossing coins into this fountain and that.
“So we will always return to the people and the places we love,” she told him.
And one night, as he danced with her to the sound of a street musician’s instrument on a bridge in this city of sighs and wonder, he stepped back. He got down on one knee, held her gaze, and placed his grandmother’s ring on the only hand where it could ever belong.
“Please,” he said, a word he was getting better at all the time. “My little owl, mi tesoro, I love you with all that I am. Will you marry me?”
She did, with none of the fuss or pomp that he had previously imagined his wedding would require. They did it quietly with the village priest and a trip to the estate’s ancient chapel, a beaming Mrs. Morse and Amelia and Mattea as witnesses.
Then they celebrated by walking back through the fields in the vineyards, toward the grand old house that was, he finally realized, just a house without these people he loved. Just a place.
They were the heart, and they made his beat.
Because Beatrice did not simply teach him how to love, she insisted upon it. She loved him back and she told him so all the time.
And for every step he took her closer and closer to the kind of love he thought his wife deserved, he dedicated himself that much more fully to expanding her imagination when it came to the things they could do between them. He did love to watch her eyes go wide.
He also gave her the great big family she’d always wanted.
There was Mattea, who was not their daughter but who they loved as if she could be nothing else. Their son was born that first fall, dark-haired and golden-eyed, like a cannon blast straight through the center of everything Cesare had imagined he was.
“I had no idea love could be like this,” he whispered, holding his precious child in his arms for the first time. He gazed down at his miracle of a wife. “But you did. You always did.”
“It will only get better,” she promised him.
And as with most things, Headmistress Higginbotham was right.
Over the years, they made seven more little creatures, each and every one of them messy and sticky and wild and feral—and absolutely perfect.
And at the end of those years of baby bellies, sleepless nights, and love so great it left them hollow with all that laughter, they sat out on his favorite terrace. They listened to Mattea lead the children in the musical revue that, by that point, people would pay to see her perform on stage, and smiled at each other.
They sat the way they had so long ago, Tuscany a gleaming bit of glory all around them. But all Cesare really needed was Beatrice. Even when he wasn’t touching her, he could feel the things that held them together.
Like steel girders. Unbreakable and true.
The real legacy was this. Them. This passion that only deepened with time.
The family they’d made and the laughter they shared.
And the love he’d almost turned away, far brighter than any single candle in the darkness.
Because their love was molten gold, day after day and year after year, as bottomless as the sky and as dependable as the dawn.
And forever was a foregone conclusion. That was the only plan that mattered.