That was the trouble. She remembered entirely too well what it was like to lose herself in him. She remembered the particular wildfire of his touch and the way he seemed to read and understand every single one of her body’s responses.
Alone in bed in her cottage, snuggled down deep beneath the covers, she shivered. Shefluttered.
More than once.
And then, as the days grew shorter and darker still, the real holiday bustle began. Hannah had to trade in her intimidating heels for boots that she could wear to trample over the field at the base of the hill where they were setting up the hotel’s own Christmas market. It was this part of their so-called Christmas Jubilee that Hannah was the most proud. She had pitched it to La Paloma herself, having been so entranced by the winter markets all over Europe—particularly in Florence—and was sure that the hotel could do something exciting.
She was overseeing the setting up of the many booths on the morning the market began, happily wearing layers against the cold, when she became aware of that same brooding presence, right there at her shoulder.
“I have never understood the appeal of a Christmas market,” Antonluca told her flatly when she looked over at him.
“I don’t think that it’s the sort of thing that can be explained,” Hannah replied mildly. She nodded at one of her vendors, and tried to unobtrusively herd Antonluca away before he offended everyone. “You either think it’s delightful or you don’t.”
When she looked at him then, he was staring around at all the different stands festooned with Christmas colors and piled high with holiday wares. And not as if he was in the least bit delighted by what he saw.
“Let me guess,” she said with a sigh that she told herself was amused. “This is not your favorite time of year.”
He seemed to take his time looking back at her and she swore that there was something almost…guardedin his gaze then. “I prefer to work through Christmas. And every other holiday. People need to eat, and in any case, I have never felt the urge to…reach out to assorted angels or proclaim good news to anyone.”
But he said this so gruffly that it made something in her ache. More than it should have.
“Christmas was the one day a year where everyone pretended to get along,” Hannah told him softly, running her fingers over evergreen boughs piled high on a table as they passed. “It was the one day a year where I could pretend that everything was the way it ought to have been. It always felt magical.”
“What is magical about pretending that something is other than what it is?” he asked. Tersely, she thought.
“It’s better than nothing, I think. Isn’t it?”
They had stopped walking at some point, and while Hannah was dimly aware of all the workmen and vendors rushing around them, all she could really focus on was Antonluca. He looked like something out of one of those dreams she liked to have, alone in her cozy bed. He wore a dark wool coat and a silk scarf and he was so beautiful that she was tempted to tell him that he need only believe in the archangel he found in his mirror—
But that was a bit fanciful, even for her.
“It’s perfectly all right if you don’t like Christmas,” she told him. “But between holiday pricing and our expectations of profit from the Christmas Market, not to mention the other events we have planned throughout the rest of this month, the hotel will make enough that it could close for the rest of the year if it wished. We will have to see in January if my projections are correct, but look around.” It almost hurt then, to pull her gaze from his and to gesture about at the commotion on all sides. “Everyone else is thrilled.”
She expected him to bark something back at her, but he didn’t. Once again, he surprised her. He really did look around, that dark, restless gaze of his moving this way and that.
Taking it all in, she thought. Adding it all up in that ledger in his head, pluses and minuses. Or, anyway, that was how she assumed wealthy men thought about the world when, for all she knew,thiswildly rich man was hanging around for vibes only.
Something she did not intend to say to him.
When his gaze returned to her it seemed darker, somehow. “I assume your projections will be correct. It’s one of the reasons why my restaurants have always stayed open on Christmas Day. Profit is hand over fist.”
And he had made such a point of telling her he wasn’t American. Orpuritan, as he had put it. She had to take that to mean that there were different boundaries here.
So she asked him a question she would not have asked the forbidding La Paloma. Not without second-guessing herself, that was. “What are some of the other reasons?”
She thought he looked taken back, which was a kind of victory in itself. He let out a sound that might have been a laugh, though it sounded far too bitter.
“My mother usually made certain that she was completely out of her mind on Christmas,” he said in the same sort of tone. “I normally had to keep watch over her, to make sure she was still breathing. More than once, I was convinced she wouldn’t wake up. Joy to the world, indeed.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said at once. “I didn’t mean—”
“I understand the utility of a Christmas program, whether in a restaurant or, indeed, in a hotel that is attempting to become a premiere location in a country filled with such places.” He sounded almost impatient, now. “I also understand that this is some kind of test for you. You are expected to face it and in so doing, prove your worth.”
Hannah cleared her throat. “That would, obviously, be the preferred outcome, to my way of thinking.”
“I will tell you now that I find it unlikely that there will be any other outcome,” Antonluca told her. Gruffly. “Once Christmas is done, I will leave the hotel to you. There is very little that your capable hands cannot handle.”
He looked so remote then, as cold as the blustery December day all around them, but something inside her seemed to twist in on itself. She had the strangest urge to reach out and put her hands on him. To make him feel better. To soothe him.
