Chapter Twelve
THE FOLLOWING YEAR Arlo was his parents’ only attendant in their Christmas wedding, there in the chapel in the woods near the grand old house by the lake, in the shadow of those towering Italian mountains that felt like eternity.
“I have something to tell you,” Rafael had told his son that first Christmas morning together, after the little boy had lost himself in a frenzy of gifts and wrapping paper and subsided to playing with his current favorite video game. That day.
“Is it about cake?” Arlo had asked without setting the game aside. “I like cake. Yellow cake, but chocolate is okay.”
“No,” Rafael had said, wondering how it had been possible to feel that awkward and yet that right at the same time. “I wanted to tell you that I’m your father.”
Lily had been sitting there on the couch, pretending not to listen. She’d been doing it loudly.
Arlo had seemed preoccupied with his game. Then he’d asked, “Forever?” after considering the matter.
“Yes,” Rafael had told him solemnly. “Forever. That’s how it works.”
“Cool,” Arlo had said, and that had been that.
His mother had been a different matter.
Rafael gazed at her now as she took one of Arlo’s hands and he took the other. They smiled at each other as they walked toward the priest who waited for them at the small altar.
“Marry me because you want to,” he’d said as Christmas gave way into the brand-new year. They were still together. They were filled with that half hope, half certainty that their complicated past meant they’d already weathered the worst storms anyone could. “Not because I told you to.”
“Because your son must have your name?” she’d replied lightly, with that teasing glint in her blue eyes but, he thought, something more serious beneath it.
“My son will have my name,” Rafael had assured her, every inch of him the powerful head of his family’s fortune. And the man who loved them both. “It is only a question of when.”
But it turned out Lily thought there was some ground to cover first.
There was the issue of her resurrection, first and foremost. For Arlo’s sake, they decided to say she’d had amnesia all these years. That running into Rafael on the street had jolted her back to herself.
“And in a way,” Lily told him one night as they lay tangled together in his house in San Francisco, “that’s even true.”
“It’s the kinder story to tell,” Rafael had agreed, smoothing a hand down the length of her lovely back. “For all of us.”
She’d fielded questions from all sides, and not all of it the media.
Her old friends, who’d mourned her death and now wanted nothing but to bask in her return.
All the various parts of the life she’d left behind and found so different now that she’d come back to it.
She’d discovered her time running Pepper’s kennels gave her rather more managerial skills than she’d imagined they might, and when a position came up at the Castelli Wine corporate office in Sonoma, she took it.
She’d visited her mother’s grave and told Rafael that she found some comfort in knowing that the woman was finally at peace.
But it was dealing with his family that she was the most worried about, he knew.
It helped, Rafael thought, that they’d already had a son. There was no hoping the family would get used to the idea—there was a little boy who didn’t care whom his grandparents had been married to before his birth.
And after the initial shock, Gianni Castelli had shrugged in a rueful way of his that reminded Rafael of when his father had been a younger man.
The child bride—Corinna—had been having a loud conversation on her mobile phone out in the abundant sunshine that danced through the cypress trees at the Sonoma Valley chateau, and Gianni had gazed at her fondly before turning his gaze back to his son.
“Love levels every one of us, one way or another,” he said. “It helps if you don’t brace yourself against the fall. You’re more likely to break something that way. Better by far to let gravity do what it will. It will anyway.”
Luca, of course, had merely laughed. Then clapped Rafael on the back, hard. Then laughed again, but that time, Rafael had laughed with him.
Lily reconnected with Pepper under her real name, and even tracked down the sweet Canadian couple who had spirited her out of California that fateful night, finally able to pay them back for their kindness to her.
And then, on an autumn day in the south of France where they’d flown for a wine show, she’d finally agreed to marry him.
“I don’t know what took you so long,” Rafael said gruffly.
“Because,” she said fiercely, stopping dead in the middle of a bustling market in Nice to look up at him solemnly, “I wanted to be sure this time.”
He’d been unable to keep himself from touching her. He hadn’t tried. “That I wouldn’t run away?”
“That I wouldn’t,” she said softly, and she smiled up at him, her strawberry blond hair like a halo in the fine French light. “And I won’t, Rafael. Not ever again.”
And so at last they stood there in the small chapel and recited their vows, to each other and for their son.
When they were finally husband and wife, they walked back to the house while Arlo ran on ahead, pressing their shoulders together the way they had long ago.
Inside, the rest of the family waited to join in the celebration and tip it straight into Christmas, but first, Rafael stopped her at the door before she would have gone in.
It was cold, but when he held out his hand, palm facing her, she met it with hers.
This was who they were. This heat. This connection. It had defied their scandalous beginnings, the possibility of death and far too many lies. It had endured when they didn’t trust each other at all, and while they’d taught each other how to smile.
“All the rest of our days,” Rafael said. “Mi appartieni.”
“And you belong to me,” Lily agreed, the glimmer of tears in her gorgeous blue eyes. “Forever.”
And then he took her hand in his, his wife at last, and led them safely home.