An Heir for Christmas
Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER ONE
HannahHansenmadeher way into work one morning that December fairlyburstingwith the holiday spirit.
Part of it was the gorgeous Italian scenery that beckoned from every direction. The hills were browner this time of year, the skies less gold and blue, but Hannah thought that only made the magic of Tuscany more apparent. That magic was in the mist that clung to the hills and the church steeple. It was there in the quiet stone streets of the hilltop village she drove through today, the one she was coming to consider her home. This was a magic that was right here, all year long, stamped down into the earth like its long history even when the bustle of tourists was gone.
There was something about Italy in the cold that made her heart ache in all the best ways.
Especially during the Christmas season.
It had been a difficult decision to leave the United States behind three years ago. It wasn’t something Hannah had ever imagined she would do, but then again, there were a lot of things about the last few years that she never could have imagined in advance.
This morning she had left the best of those things—her son, the sweet and good-natured Dominic—playing merrily with his toys in the care of the marvelous Cinzia. Cinzia, who had started as the landlady, had become the very best neighbor imaginable. And she was now, for all intents and purposes, the family Hannah had always wished she had.
Instead of the family she did have, all of them still clustered together in a scrum of judgment and shame in a tiny town outside of Omaha, Nebraska.
The prospect of Hannah having a baby out of wedlock had scandalized them all.How can we hold up our heads at the market?her sister had asked once.
In all seriousness.
This and many other similar interactions were why Hannah had decided, at six months pregnant while she still had some savings left, that she deserved better than being treated like the blackest of black sheep in the state of Nebraska. With a set of scarlet letters to boot.
And she had always dreamed of going to Italy one day, because didn’t everyone? So she decided thatone dayhad come. She’d bought herself a one-way ticket to Florence, the city that had inhabited her dreams for as long as she could remember. She’d wandered aboutpiazzas, ate too much gelato, and spent too many nights in lustily robusttrattoriasbefore making her way to a tiny little village out in Tuscany’s undulating hills that felt familiar the moment she saw it. As if she’d always been meant to find her way here.
Aside from thefateaspect of it all, she was pretty sure she’d read about this village once, back when she’d still been living in New York City.
New York City.
She shivered a little as memories of that frenetic, exuberant city and her time there washed over her once again. The way it always seemed to do no matter how many times she assured herself that she was done looking back.
Hannah blew out a sigh as she navigated her way through the narrow streets of the ancient village that clung to the side of the hill, stones steeped in thousands of years of history. She followed the winding road down toward the fields again, and tried to breathe deep a few more times as she headed up another rolling hill on the far side.
It was hard to imagine on crisp and beautiful December mornings in Tuscany, far away from any sort of city, that she’d ever lived in the thrilling, overwhelming, concrete sprawl of Manhattan. Like she was remembering a television show, not her own life. Because those short, busy, overwhelming years seemed like not just a different life entirely, but something she might have dreamed up one night. One of those dreams that didn’t go away in the morning, but lingered on forever.
“And then ended poorly,” she muttered to herself as she crested the hill, lest she forget the crucial part of her Manhattan years.
Though Dominic made up for pretty much anything and everything that might have happened before his birth.
But she stopped thinking about the past then, because the view before her opened up again.
She sighed again, but happily this time, the way she always did at this point in her drive to work from her darling cottage on the other side of the village. Because there, lolling across the spine of the next rolling Tuscan hill, was the estate.
Not quite a castle in any classic sense, it was a collection of manor houses strung along the hillside like a necklace fit with jewels that some indolent Italian noble had tossed aside on his way to some or other Renaissance. Once the home of a succession of minor nobles, the estate had fallen into disrepair by the early twentieth century. It had been bought and toyed with by one optimistic and/or wealthy individual after the next since then, because the vineyards still produced rich red wines and the cypress trees still marked the age-old roadways. It was a place that seemed half sky, half ancient earth, strung round with olive groves, lavender, and vines of determined wisteria.
But a place like the estate required vision to fully resurrect, and so it had stood dormant for some time.
In the village, they called the attempt to launch a pile of stones and abandoned houses into something luxuriousuna follia, a folly.
Nonetheless, some ten years ago, the wife of the extremely wealthy Italian businessman who had recently claimed the place had taken it as part of her divorce settlement. She had then renovated the whole of the estate, transforming it into a hotel that exuded style from every newly polished stone. La Paloma, as both she and the estate were known, was infamous for her deep delight in taking petty revenge on those she felt wronged her—meaning, all of her ex-husbands, and she’d racked up a fair few—as well as her architectural flair and eye for design.
Hannah had walked into the hotel a scant ten days after she’d arrived in Italy, the gluttonous week in Florence behind her, because she knew she needed to find a job. She had driven into this village, overcome with that sense of homecoming. She’d eaten in the tiny trattoria in town, and had watched the old men gather in the square. She had stayed in apensionea bit of a walk from the center of the village, and it was while walking back to her room that she’d seen the estate on the hill.
It was so beautiful. That had been her first thought.
When she’d learned that it was a hotel, she’d been thrilled. Because she could work in a hotel. It had to be better than a restaurant. Because anything was better than the nightly chaos of a restaurant.
