Chapter 6
Isla
The second sirocco of the season came in without warning, three weeks before the wedding, while I was up a ladder trying to rescue a string of lights from a wind that hadn't even properly started yet.
"Get down from there," Roman said, appearing at the base of the ladder with the particular urgency he only showed when something genuinely alarmed him, which in three weeks I'd learned was a very short list.
"I'm almost done."
"You're eight feet up a wooden ladder in gusting wind. Get down."
"Bossy."
"Correct," he said, and held the ladder steady with both hands until I climbed down, and didn't let go of my waist once my feet hit the ground, which neither of us commented on, though neither of us stepped back from it either.
The wind built fast after that, faster than the first one, screaming in off the water by early afternoon with a heat that felt almost physical, like standing too close to an oven.
We went through the villa together, latching every shutter, hauling in anything the wind might take a personal interest in, and by the time we finished, the whole coast had gone that same bruised purple-gray, the lemon trees thrashing, the sea below the cliff churned white and furious.
"This one's worse," I said, breathless, watching through the last gap in the shutters before I latched it closed. "Feels different."
"Feels like something's been building," Roman said, and I didn't think he was talking about the weather, and judging by the look on his face, he knew I knew it.
We ended up in the kitchen, the whole villa dim and close with the shutters sealed against the wind, candles lit because the power flickered twice and then gave up entirely, the storm outside roaring against stone that had weathered a hundred summers just like this one.
It should have felt claustrophobic. Instead it felt like the whole world had been reduced, deliberately, to exactly the size of that kitchen and exactly the two of us in it.
"I made too much food," I admitted, surveying the spread I'd thrown together before the power died — bread, olives, a wedge of cheese, tomatoes still warm from the counter where they'd been sitting all afternoon.
"Storm cooking. I always overdo it. My grandmother used to say I cooked like I was expecting a small army. "
"I'm not complaining." He took a piece of bread, tore it in half, handed me the larger piece without seeming to notice he'd done it, which I noticed anyway, the same way I'd started noticing all the small, unconscious kindnesses he handed out like he didn't expect credit for any of them.
"Though I should warn you, if this becomes a regular occurrence, I'm going to start requesting the storm specifically. "
"You want it to storm more."
"I want an excuse to sit in your kitchen by candlelight. The storm's just efficient packaging."
"That might be the smoothest thing you've ever said to me, and you said it about weather."
"I contain multitudes."
I laughed, and topped off both our glasses with the last of the wine, and for a while we just talked — nothing about the wedding, nothing about the contract, nothing about Marta's seating war or Vitale's lemons, just easy, unhurried conversation the way I imagined actual couples talked, the ones who weren't keeping a ledger of what was real and what was performed.
He told me about the first bike he'd ever rebuilt, at sixteen, from parts three different men had told him wouldn't fit together, and how he'd proven all three of them wrong out of pure stubbornness.
I told him about the summer I'd tried to run the vineyard alone at nineteen, certain I knew better than sixty years of my grandmother's experience, and how spectacularly, expensively wrong I'd been about the irrigation schedule.
"She let you fail?" he asked, something like admiration in his voice.
"She let me fail loudly. Then she fixed it without saying a word about it, and let me figure out on my own that she'd fixed it.
It took me two weeks to notice." I turned my glass, the old habit neither of us had ever mentioned catching from the other.
"That was her whole philosophy, really. Let people learn the expensive way, then quietly make sure the lesson didn't cost them everything. "
"Sounds like a good way to raise someone stubborn enough to fight a will's marriage clause instead of just selling."
"She'd have been furious if I'd sold."
"She'd be furious at a lot of things right now, probably," he said, and there was something careful in the way he said it, testing the ground, and I understood exactly what he meant without either of us saying it outright — that whatever was happening in this kitchen had wandered a long way from the version of events my grandmother's will had actually been designed to produce.
"Maybe," I said slowly. "Or maybe she'd recognize exactly what she was doing when she wrote that clause in the first place."
He looked at me for a long moment, candlelight catching the line of his jaw, and something passed between us that had nothing to do with wine or storms or contracts.
"We never talked about the fig," I said, because someone had to say it eventually, and three weeks of very careful avoidance had apparently reached its natural expiration date.
"No," he agreed. "We didn't."
"Do you want to?"
"I want a lot of things I've been very disciplined about not saying out loud." He said it lightly, but there was nothing light underneath it, and the candlelight caught something unguarded in his face that I'd only glimpsed in pieces before — never the whole thing at once, not like this.
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed again. "It isn't."
The wind slammed something loose against the outer wall, hard enough that I flinched, and he was across the kitchen before I'd even fully registered moving, hand steady at my elbow, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him even through the thin cotton of my dress.
"Just the wind," he said quietly.
"I know." I did know. I stayed anyway, close enough that neither of us was pretending distance mattered anymore, the candlelight flickering gold across the line of his jaw, and something in me that had been holding very still for three weeks finally, deliberately, let go.
"Roman."
"Yeah."
"I'm done pretending this is for the performance."
He went very still, searching my face for something — permission, maybe, or certainty, the same careful calculation he brought to everything, except this time I could see exactly what it cost him to run the numbers instead of simply acting on what we both already knew.
"Isla," he said, low, "if you're sure—"
"I'm sure."
That was all it took. He closed the last of the distance between us and kissed me like he'd been waiting three weeks for permission he hadn't let himself ask for outright, careful at first and then not careful at all, one hand coming up to cradle my jaw the exact way mine had cradled his that day on the terrace, like he'd been holding the memory of it just as carefully as I had.
I kissed him back with everything I'd spent three weeks calling a performance, and it wasn't a performance, it had never once been a performance, not really, not since the second night when he'd fixed my shutter latch and looked at me like I was a problem worth solving properly instead of a contract to be managed.
"This isn't in the terms," he murmured against my mouth, and I could feel him smiling even as he said it.
"I'm amending the contract."
"Unilaterally?"
"Completely unilaterally. You can object in writing if you'd like."
"I withdraw all objections," he said, and kissed me again, slower this time, deliberate, like he was finally letting himself do the thing he'd apparently wanted to do since a stranger spilled wine down his sleeve that had never actually happened.
We moved toward the bedroom without either of us quite deciding to, hands finding buttons and hems with an unhurried, deliberate patience that matched everything else about him — nothing rushed, nothing careless, every touch weighted like he was memorizing something he intended to remember for a long time.
The wind screamed against the shutters the whole way, the candlelight following us down the hall in long, wavering shadows, and I had never in my life felt so completely, dangerously unguarded with another person.
"Tell me if I should stop," he said quietly, at the door, one hand braced against the frame, giving me the exit he'd built into every version of us from the very beginning.
"Don't you dare stop," I said, and pulled him through the doorway myself.
The bedroom was dark except for the one candle I'd carried through with us, its light throwing long, unsteady shadows across the walls, the wind still hammering the shutters outside in a rhythm that felt, absurdly, like it was keeping pace with something neither of us had said out loud yet.
What followed was slow in a way that surprised me, given how contained and controlled he was in every other part of his life — I'd half expected that same precision here, and found instead a man who seemed to want nothing more than to learn me properly, unhurried, attentive to every small sound and shift, like cataloguing me was its own kind of pleasure separate from anything else.
He undressed me like he was solving something delicate, patient hands mapping the places that made my breath catch — the curve of my waist, the line of my collarbone, the small hollow at the base of my throat where my pulse had already given up all pretense of steadiness — and when I reached for him in turn he let me, guiding nothing, simply present, entirely there in a way I don't think anyone had ever quite managed to be with me before.
His skin was warm under my palms, the candlelight gilding every place I touched, and when my hands finally found the last of what stood between us, he went very still for a moment, breath catching audibly, like he was memorizing exactly what that felt like too.