“Thank you for thinking of me,” he replied dryly. “But I believe I would rather swim to Australia and be eaten by sharks en route then engage in anything calledCrimbo.”
His other siblings made similar demands. He ought to come to Los Angeles. He was welcome anytime in France and Germany.
It was perhaps unsurprising that his youngest sibling, Rocco, called for entirely different reasons. Rocco had been born when Antonluca was ten. By the time he was aware of the world, Antonluca was already successful. Rocco therefore hadn’t struggled like the rest of them. Or not as much, anyway.
“What is this about a hotel?” Rocco demanded from Rome, where he was tasked with managing the original restaurant. Emiliano’s. “Since when are we in the hotel business?”
“Arewein a business?” Antonluca asked, swirling his nightly Negroni in its tumbler as he glowered out his window at the hotel on the next hill. “You understand my confusion. I was under the impression thatIran a business and merely carry you all along with me, like so much ballast.”
Some of his other siblings would have taken offense at that. Or worse, been hurt. Rocco only laughed.
“I’ve been saying that we should expand into hotels for years,” he said stoutly, though Antonluca could not recall any instance of that occurring. Not in his hearing. “It just makes sense.”
It was another late night. Antonluca had taken his time walking home, because Hannah had been working one of the hotel’s events and had therefore been wearing an evening gown in place of her more typical daytime attire.
Now he did not need to remember the curve of her shoulder, the slope of her collarbone. Not from New York. Now he’d seen them again.
And yet had not been able to press his mouth to the pulse in her neck, or smooth his hands down the length of her body to cup her bottom, pull her close, and make them both groan—
The good thing about a call from Rocco was that it was distracting.
“I have never heard you mention a hotel or any expansion ideas of any kind,” he told the youngest Aniello. “That must be the sort of thing you tell those idiots you carouse with all over Europe, funded entirely by my legacy.”
That set him to thinking about legacies. This castle, for example. He had thought it a daring, over-the-top purchase back in the day, but he’d never regretted it. This was the place he came to when he wanted to hear himself think. This was the place that was entirely his and did not exist only because he provided services to those who came here.
No one asked him for anything here. He kept a skeleton staff because after a lifetime of too many siblings and restaurants filled with various dependents, he needed very little but his own company.
It was here that he’d spent a lot of time in the kitchens, wishing he felt inspired to experiment again.
It was here that he’d come to the conclusion that his experimentation days were over and what he had before him instead was the bolstering of his reputation, and that legacy he intended to outlive him and all the rest of his siblings, Rocco included.
“Your legacy is a generous benefactor,” his brother was saying. “Grazie.As for your new hobby, why don’t I come and manage it? Just think what I could do with a hotel.”
“If you want a hotel, I’m sure we can find you one.” Antonluca had showered off the cold and now stood at the window with hisaperitivo, the way he did every night. He stared across the expanse of fields and vineyards drenched in the dark to that hill in the distance, where the hotel gleamed against the night.
Like his very own star of Bethlehem.
“What’s wrong with the one you have now?” Rocco asked. Perhaps with a slight hint of belligerence in his otherwise easygoing tone.
“La Paloma already has a manager,” Antonluca told him. “And quite a talented one.”
“She might be talented,” his brother argued, which told Antonluca that Rocco had been paying much closer attention to what happened in Tuscany than he’d imagined. “But she’s not family, is she?”
And that stung a little because Antonluca had always been open about the fact he liked to keep things in the family. It was easier that way. Not that his siblings couldn’t squabble amongst themselves, because they did. But each and every one of them felt a deep connection to one another because they’d all made it out of their childhoods. They’d survived.
They felt even more connected to Antonluca because he was the reason why.
No need to worry about motivations when it was family.
What he found was that he really didn’t like being reminded of this.
“She is not,” Antonluca agreed, a bit more icily than necessary. “But I trust her just the same.”
And it wasn’t until a couple of days later that he realized he could not have said anything that could have alarmed his brother more.
He realized this because when he finished walking home that night, the week before Christmas, he found Rocco waiting for him in the grand hall of his castle. With some stranger beside him, looking snobbish and pinched-faced.
Antonluca took against the stranger immediately.
