24. Mel
— ? —
Mel
Lunch with Massimo Bianchi isn’t an event I ever expected to survive, let alone volunteer for.
But here we are, the three of us in a back booth at Rosie’s Diner, surrounded by red vinyl seats and the smell of fresh pie, while Santino’s father orders a black coffee and studies the menu like it contains state secrets.
“The meatloaf is… acceptable,” he says finally. “Though I question the green beans.”
“They’re from a can,” I tell him. “This isn’t Tuscany.”
He looks up at me. His face gives nothing away, it never has, apparently, in sixty-two years of existence. Chiara once told me that Massimo Bianchi smiled at her birth and then didn’t smile again until her eighth birthday, and she’s not entirely sure that one wasn’t a muscle spasm.
“No,” he agrees. “It isn’t.”
We order. The food comes. Santino eats in tense silence, watching his father like a man expecting a bomb to go off, and I realize with a pang that he’s spent his entire life waiting for this man to explode. To show a feeling. To give him anything at all.
Massimo eats his meatloaf methodically, without comment.
“I’m separating from Vittoria,” he says, as casually as if he’s announcing the weather. “The paperwork will be filed by end of business tomorrow.”
Santino’s fork stops halfway to his mouth.
“I keep the business,” Massimo continues. “I built it, and I will die in it. But my wife will not see a single lira of mine again, and her name comes off everything it can come off of.”
He says this like it costs him nothing. Like ending a thirty-five-year marriage is just another item to be handled before lunch.
But I see the way his hand tightens on his coffee cup. I see the small tremor in his jaw.
This is Massimo Bianchi’s version of falling apart.
“Why?” Santino’s voice is rough. “Why now? Why not two years ago, when you knew - you had to know what she did.”
His father is quiet for a moment.
“Because two years ago,” he says finally, “I believed that protecting the family name was the same as protecting the family.” He looks at Santino, and for the first time, I see those cold eyes flicker. “I was wrong.”
It isn’t an apology, and it isn’t close to enough.
But it’s a beginning.
The moment stretches, fragile as spun glass. And then, on an instinct I don’t examine, I pull out my phone.
“Here.” I slide it across the table, the screen showing a photo from last week, the twins on the porch, Leo grinning at the camera with Santino’s fearless eyes, Junie clutching her stuffed rabbit with my cautious green ones.
Massimo Bianchi looks down at the screen.
And his eyes shine.
For one moment, one single, shaking breath, I see emotion crack through sixty-two years of granite. I see a man looking at his grandchildren for the first time. I see what might be grief, might be joy, might be the weight of everything he’s missed.
Then he clears his throat, and the mask is back.
“The boy has my mother’s chin,” he says quietly.
That’s all.
It’s enormous.
Lunch ends quickly after that, the way Massimo ends everything, with a nod, a firm handshake, a promise to be in touch that might actually be kept this time. He walks out of Rosie’s Diner like a man going to war, shoulders squared, face composed.
At the door, he pauses.
“Melanie.”
I look up.
“Take care of my son,” he says. “He’s better than I ever was.”
And then he’s gone.
***
The second the door of the farmhouse closes behind us, we look at each other.
Me. Santino. Chiara, who met us on the porch with a bottle of wine and a grin that could light up three counties.
For one long moment, nobody speaks.
Then Chiara throws her arms up.
“WE WON!”
And suddenly we’re jumping, all three of us, bouncing in the kitchen like kids, arms pumping, absolutely ridiculous, because the wicked witches are DEAD, ding dong, GONE, and I’m laughing so hard tears are streaming down my face while Santino whoops like he’s seventeen and Chiara is chanting in Italian, deeply profane by the sound of it.
The jumping turns into hugging, three people clutching each other in a tangle of arms and joy and two years of impossible finally becoming possible -
And then somehow it’s just Santino and me, still hugging, and the hug becomes a different kind of hug.
My hands slide up his chest. His arms tighten around my waist. And when I tip my head back, his mouth finds mine like it’s been waiting, easy and natural as falling, as gravity, as the current I’ve been fighting for two years that’s been going exactly where I wanted to be all along.
A pointed throat-clear from the doorway.
“I’m still here, you freaks.”
“Then you should leave,” I grunt against his mouth, “if you don’t want a show.”
Chiara cackles, loud and delighted and absolutely unsurprised. She hugs us both hard enough to bruise, whispers to Santino in Italian, and his ears turn red, and shows herself out with a wave and a slammed door.
The house goes quiet.
The twins are asleep, checked on them the second we got home, both of them sprawled in their cribs like tiny starfish, exhausted from a morning of being absolutely adored by their Aunt Chiara.
We’re alone.
For the first time since this whole mess started, really alone, with no crisis brewing and no villain lurking and no apocalyptic mortgage reveal waiting to destroy us.
Just Santino and me and the slant of afternoon light through the kitchen window.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“We should probably talk about-”
I kiss him again, hard enough to make him grunt, and his hands grip my waist and lift me onto the counter in one smooth motion that does things to my nervous system I’m going to have to examine later.
“Or,” he manages against my mouth, “we could not talk.”
“Option B,” I agree. “Definitely option B.”
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, really look, his pale blue eyes tracing my face like he’s memorizing it all over again.
“Bedroom,” he says. It’s not a question.
“Please.”
We make it halfway down the hall before he pins me against the wall.
His mouth finds my neck, my jaw, the spot behind my ear that makes my knees go liquid, and I’m fumbling with his shirt buttons because two years is such a long time to miss someone’s skin.
“Mel.” His voice is hoarse. “We have time. The twins-”
“Are asleep.”
“So we have time.” He catches my hands, brings them to his mouth, kisses each knuckle like I’m made of gold. “I want to take my time.”
I stare up at him, this man who was supposed to be my enemy and my ex and my biggest mistake, who turned out to be none of those things, who showed up at an orchard in Texas and learned how to prune apple trees and wear overalls and earn back the thing he never should have lost.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Take your time.”
He does.
The bedroom is warm with late-afternoon light, gold and honey through the thin curtains, and he eases me back onto the quilt like I might break. His hands shake slightly as he unbuttons my sweater, one button, then another, then another, and I realize with a pang that he’s nervous.
Santino Bianchi, billionaire, former CEO, the man whose touch used to make me forget my own name.
Nervous.
“Hey.” I catch his hand. “It’s just me.”
“I know.” He swallows. “That’s why.”
He slides the sweater off my shoulders, and his breath catches when he sees me, just a simple white bra, nothing fancy, nothing designed to seduce, and his expression makes me feel like I’m wearing silk and diamonds.
“Two years,” he murmurs. “I used to lie awake trying to picture your skin in lamplight. I never let myself finish the thought.”
“Why not?”
He traces a line from my shoulder to the curve of my breast, featherlight. “Because if I got it wrong, I’d have lost even that. And I would have gotten it wrong. I’d have made you gold. But you’re not gold.” His fingers brush lower. “You’re more like sunrise. Pink and impossible.”
“That’s either very romantic or you need your eyes checked.”
He laughs, soft and helpless and warm, and then his mouth follows the path his fingers traced, and I stop thinking about anything except the heat of his lips and the rasp of his breath and the way his hands are already sliding down to my waistband.
“This okay?”
“Yes.”
He peels off my jeans, then my underwear, and then I’m bare beneath him while he’s still fully dressed and it’s devastatingly intimate, about being seen like this, studied like this, while he hovers above me with eyes that can’t seem to decide where to land.
“My turn,” I manage. “Fair’s fair.”
His shirt is already unbuttoned, but I push it off his shoulders anyway, needing to touch.
And God, the shape of him now, I let myself look this time, really look: the heavy slabs of muscle, the ink climbing his ribs, the deep cut of the V that disappears below his waistband that I’ve been pretending not to notice for weeks.
I put my mouth to the tendon in his throat because I’ve wanted to since the orchard, and feel his pulse jump against my lips.
The tattoos are there, the ones I’ve only glimpsed in pieces, the ink that tells the story of two years I wasn’t here for.
I trace the lake over his heart, my name woven into the water, and feel his heartbeat thunder under my palm.
“Does it hurt?” I ask. “When you got it?”
“Not enough.”
His pants come off, then his boxer briefs, and then we’re skin to skin and his weight is pressing me into the mattress in a way that feels like coming home. I hook a leg over the back of his and pull him flush, feel him hard and hot against my hip, and the sound he makes is half a growl.
“Mel. We have to slow down or I’m going to-”
“Don’t slow down.”
“No, I-” He pulls back, breathing hard. “I want to do this right. I want to touch you until you can’t remember why you ever stopped letting me.”
His hand slides between us. Finds me wet and aching. His fingers circle once, twice, and my hips jerk off the bed.
“There,” he murmurs. “Just like that.”
“Santi-”
“I know.” He works me with maddening patience, slow and deliberate, while his mouth traces the line of my collarbone. “I know what you need. Let me give it to you.”