Chapter Twelve Cracks in the Ice
The gala changed something between them, though Elena couldn't have said exactly what.
Dante began seeking her out in the evenings — not out of duty, not with the careful distance of the first weeks, but with a kind of hunger for her company that surprised them both.
He read the same books she read, though he pretended he only picked them up by accident.
He learned, without being told, that she took her tea too sweet and pretended not to notice when the sugar bowl in the sitting room began refilling itself more often than the housekeeper's schedule required.
"You're staring," she told him one evening, curled in the window seat of her sitting room with a book she wasn't really reading, aware of his eyes on her from the doorway.
"I am."
"Are you going to stop?"
"No." He crossed the room and settled on the arm of her chair, close enough that his fingers found their way, absently, into her hair.
"I spent thirty-two years of my life believing I didn't have room for anything except the business.
My father made sure of that. And now I find I resent every hour I have to spend away from you, which is inconvenient, given how much of my life still belongs to men like Salvatore Calvetti. "
"That almost sounded like a confession."
"It was." He tipped her chin up with two fingers, searching her face with an intensity that had once frightened her and now, she realized with some alarm, did something else to her entirely.
"I don't know how to be soft, Elena. Nobody in my life has ever required it of me.
But I find, with you, that I want to learn. "
She set the book aside, unread, and let him kiss her — slow, unhurried, nothing like the desperate hunger of their wedding night, something closer to devotion — and thought, not for the first time, that hating him had become a much harder project than she'd expected it to be.
"I don't hate you," she admitted against his mouth, quiet, like a secret. "I thought I would. I wanted to."
Something in him went very still. "And now?"
"Now I don't know what I feel. Except that it isn't hate." She pulled back enough to search his face. "Is that terrifying to you? That I might actually — that this might actually become real?"
"Terrifying," he agreed, low, "and the best thing that has happened to me since my mother died." He pressed his forehead to hers, and for a long moment, neither of them said anything else, content simply to breathe the same air.