Chapter 32
FABIANA
When I woke up the next morning, the first thing that greeted me was a feathered aquamarine dress in a puddle on the ground.
Shit.
It took a few seconds to convince myself that what had happened the night before wasn’t a dream.
A shiver ran through me as the memories rushed back all at once, vivid and disorienting.
I could still feel the scrape of Cosimo’s beard against my inner thighs, the grip of his hand around my neck, the slow, warm drag of his lips over my breast.
But he’d stopped. Stopped before we took it all the way.
I sat up in bed and reached for the glass of water on the nightstand.
I hadn’t asked him to stop. I hadn’t even wanted him to. I’d been ready last night. More than ready. I was twenty-five years old, married, and tired of being a virgin. I’d always said I wanted my first time to be with someone who knew the real me.
Cosimo did.
Actually, the man appeared to think he knew me better than I knew myself.
Save it for your second husband.
Irritation rolled through me. That wasn’t his decision to make.
But it told me something all the same. For all the thinking he’d apparently been doing about me, he still viewed me as temporary. When the time came, he was prepared to let me go.
I wished I could say the same with confidence. But I couldn’t.
Because this wasn’t just physical for me anymore. Not even close.
I…liked Cosimo.
I liked the way he spoke with actions rather than words. If you weren’t paying close enough attention, you’d miss what he was really saying.
But I paid attention.
I paid attention to the moments of unexpected empathy. To the instinctual way he’d jumped in to protect me. To the pain he carried from all the past betrayals.
He was a complicated man, and some part of me wanted to keep unraveling all that complexity, even if he didn’t make it easy.
His actions told me he felt something for me too. But maybe both things could be true. Maybe he could have feelings for me and still be ready to walk away when the six months were up.
A small ache opened beneath my ribs. I pulled my knees to my chest and looked at the window.
What was I going to do now? At this point, there was no clean way through this.
No way to avoid getting hurt. Maybe I was better off not fighting it.
Maybe I should just enjoy whatever these next five months with him turned out to be instead of drawing lines in the sand only to watch them wash away.
I climbed back under the covers and took Gino’s journal from the nightstand. It was the closest thing I had to distract me from my thoughts.
I opened on a random page and found a careful rendering of what looked like an idyllic home in the Italian countryside.
Olive trees grew to the side of it, and beds of lavender bloomed up front.
In most of the other sketches, there weren’t any people, but he’d drawn a whole crowd here.
Three elderly women sat at a table beside one of the olive trees, while a young boy who’d climbed into the branches watched them from above.
In front of the house was a table filled with people having supper.
And just to their left, three more boys played in the grass.
They all wore sweaters with a letter on their backs.
A. R. C.
Alessio. Romolo. Cosimo. Gino’s children.
Under the drawing, he’d written a short line. “I hope that one day my sons will visit Villa Lucente, the place where I’d spent many happy summers.”
I flipped through a few more pages and then forced myself to get up. Mia and I had agreed to meet up for an early afternoon pottery class, and I had to start getting ready.
Maybe she’d be able to give me some advice.
“Feel the clay breathe under your hands,” the instructor called out from across the studio.
Mia and I sat side by side working on our vases. I was using both hands to coax a little more shape into the neck of mine. Beside me, Mia’s work in progress spun with a worrying lean to the right.
“This is so much harder than it looks,” she said, dipping her hand into the water bucket before trying to steady the walls of her vase. “Yours looks incredible. I hate you.”
“I’ve had more practice.” I grabbed a paintbrush, dipped it into a green-colored slip, and touched it to the vase. I let it drift down slowly so that the walls got an even coating.
Mia groaned. Her vase had collapsed.
The instructor—an elderly woman with pink hair and round glasses that I adored—appeared at Mia’s wheel with a sympathetic tut.
“Just try again, flower. Remember the centering is everything. Tuck your elbow into your torso. You want to be almost leaning into the clay. Push with the base of your hand, and get that nice seal on the bottom by pressing your pinky finger right into the base.”
For a second, it looked like Mia had it. Then the whole lump lurched sideways and slid half off the wheel.
“Why doesn’t yours ever do that?” she demanded, glaring at my nearly finished vase.
“Don’t worry about anyone else’s progress,” the instructor advised. “You must learn the fundamentals before you can move on to the next step. Your wheel’s too wet. Wipe it down until it’s dry and start again.”
I waited until she moved on before glancing at Mia. “When things first started with you and Romolo, how did you decide to go for it? You must have assumed there was no future there given the family he’s from.”
Mia blew out a breath. “God, that feels like forever ago. So much has changed since then. But, yeah, in the beginning, I told myself it was just a fling. We both did. We were hung up on each other, and it was driving us crazy, so Romolo basically suggested we get it out of our systems.”
I stared at her. “And you went for it?” It sounded too pragmatic for my friend. I could see Zo or even Nina agreeing to something like that, but Mia was more like me—far more likely to get in trouble because of her feelings.
She gave me a sheepish smile. “I know. It wasn’t like me.
But something about Rom was just…different.
I was already torturing myself trying to stay away from him, so I thought maybe I could torture myself in a more enjoyable way.
” Her grin widened. “And we both clearly enjoyed it too much, because now he’s talking about proposing. ”
I gasped. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. He’s been looking at rings. He doesn’t think I know, but he left his iPad lying around one day, and when I picked it up to look at a recipe, I saw it. He’s designing a custom ring.”
“Oh my God, Mia. I’m so happy for you.” I really was. After everything that Mia’s dad had put her through, she deserved to be outrageously happy. “Are you going to say yes?”
She blushed. “Yeah. I’m not getting rid of him. The other day, he took forever to get ready for brunch, so I told him I was ditching him. He came out buttoning his shirt and said, ‘Try it. See how far you get.’ Don’t know why that kind of turned me on.”
I giggled. “I get it.”
“But why are you asking? Something to do with your husband? Have things been warming up between you two?”
Carefully, I lifted my vase off the wheel. “Things have definitely changed compared to a few months ago.”
Mia looked pleased. “Well, that’s good, right? Your situation is completely different from mine. You and Cosimo are already married.”
“Yeah, but the marriage started off as just business,” I said. “And I wonder if it’s better to let it stay that way.”
“If you’re starting to feel things for him, I think you should lean into it,” Mia said. “Give it a proper chance. If you stay guarded the whole time, you might never find out how good it could be. There’s no reason to hold back.”
I bit down on my lip. No reason besides the fact that no matter what was starting to happen between Cosimo and me, there was no long-term future here.
He might want me physically. He might even like certain parts of me. But I’d never been confused about one thing—he would never want me as his wife. The real kind. He’d made that abundantly clear.
“Do you think a don’s wife can afford to be this gullible?”
I was still that girl. Still too trusting. Still too eager to give people chances. And the more of myself I gave to Cosimo, the more it would hurt when it ended. “I guess it’s just a bit scary.”
Mia nodded. “I get that. But you have to be brave sometimes.”
I was still trying to figure out what bravery was supposed to look like when Mia gave me a sly little smile. “By the way, I had a feeling you were going to ask me something like this.”
“Why?”
“Romolo mentioned that you and Cosimo are going on a honeymoon.”
I blinked. We were?
“He told me Cosimo canceled a bunch of meetings because he’s going to Italy for a few days, and I made the obvious assumption.”
Something inside me sank. Cosimo hadn’t said a word to me about it.
Wait. Italy? He was going to Italy?
Grottaglie. He was going there. Without me.
What. The. Hell.
“You have to send me pictures,” Mia said, too distracted by her vase to notice the expression on my face.
I grabbed a towel and wiped my hands. “Mia, I have to go. I’m sorry. I just remembered something urgent at home.”
She looked up and frowned. “Is everything okay?”
“Yep. Fine. I’ll call you later.”
The next moment, I rushed out the door and slid into the car waiting for me outside. “Is Cosimo at his office?”
The driver met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “Boss’s home.”
“Great. Take me there. Quickly.”
If Cosimo thought he could fly to Italy to chase down a lead I got him without so much as telling me, he was about to find out otherwise.