Trust some brash, reckless American to call all that into question.
Because if his food had no soul, then neither did Antonluca.
He had gone to New York to find out, once and for all.
What he had discovered instead was Hannah.
Hannah with her golden hair, her eyes like emerald fields, and her total trust in him. Hannah, who had somehow humbled the man who had once been called so arrogant that he circled back around to charming.
Maybe because he had known, even if she hadn’t, that she shouldn’t have trusted him at all. That he bore her significant ill will, confused though that had become once he touched her and felt that unmistakable fire blaze to life between them.
He had thought,Absolutely not.
But he had done it anyway.
Because he could hardly bring himself to recall why it was he should treat her as anything but a revelation when he got lost in all that green and gold.
Yet even now, blindsided by a woman he had convinced himself could not behisHannah Hansen, Antonluca did not regret that night.
How could he, when he could not recall a single day that had passed since that he had not remembered some part of it in minute detail?
Now, standing in this library that had been spruced up considerably since he’d known it as a younger man, when he’d visited Paloma and one of her husbands here—to cook for them, though that was not the story the Paloma liked to tell, as if there was some world where a street kid from Rome and one of the most famous socialites in Europe would interact otherwise—he watched as Hannah’s perfect face…reddened. He watched her green eyes go wide.
She looked very much as if she’d seen a ghost, and he found some kind of solace in that. Because, clearly, she hadn’t been anticipating running into him today, either. He found that there were a thousand questions he needed to ask her.
Only some of them involving the running of Paloma’s pet hotel.
But they were alone in this room. And the last time they had been alone together, they’d both been naked, tangled around each other as the morning light streamed into the hotel he’d taken her to. He’d meant to leave her several times before he’d actually managed to do it. And so his last memory of her was her sprawled out on the bed they’d torn apart, a smile on her face and that lush body he had come to know so well over the course of that long night limp and boneless.
He could probably paint that image, so perfect was his memory of it, if he possessed even the slightest bit of talent in that area.
Her lips parted as if she meant to say something, or was trying to say something, but no sound emerged.
Antonluca moved closer to her, and this was a different time. A different country. This washiscountry and if he hadn’t been standing here in front of her, watching her react to the sight of him, he would have been certain that she’d set this up somehow. That she’d gone to the trouble of anticipating Paloma’s whims—a risky proposition at best—and had then inserted herself into the project, hoping that it would one day throw her into his path.
He would have been certain of it because he already knew that people went to great lengths to insinuate themselves with him. It was one of the major reasons that he had more or less cut himself off from anyone he hadn’t known for years upon years. Because he could no longer trust the motivations of people who appeared out of nowhere. He could never be certain if they wanted to knowhimor his empire.
But Hannah did not look triumphant. She looked shaken to her core.
And before he knew it, he was standing before her, close enough to touch.
She was wearing those heels again, the ones that he remembered vividly from New York. She had charged down the street in them as if they were flats. More importantly, they had made her tall enough so that all she had to do was tilt her head back, just a little, to look him in the face.
When he was not a small man.
Antonluca had worked hard for the whole of his life to strip himself of the recklessness and rashness that had plagued his family since before he was born, if what he recalled of his mother’s stories was true. Cooking had saved him. Cooking was the art of marrying precision with process, and he’d been good at that. He’dexcelledat it. And running a kitchen involved intense focus and control not only of himself, but of others, and he’d excelled at that, too.
In these last years, he had decided that what he needed most of all was peace. No carrying on in kitchens. No drama, no concerns about the fakeness of the people around him, no need to worry about who wanted to cozy up to him or worse, one of his more vulnerable siblings.
If he retreated to Tuscany, which had always seemed to him—a street kid from the grand old mess of a city that was Rome—as a beacon of hope and tranquility, he was sure that he could find it.
But she had shattered any hope of finding peace three years ago.
So Antonluca shattered it further now by moving closer still, sliding his hand along her jaw as if he had the right, then drawing her closer so he could settle his mouth to hers.
It felt like burning himself alive, beautifully.
It felt like coming home.
