Inside, the little boy was still fast asleep in his crib.
Beside her, Antonluca made a small sound, almost beneath his breath. But she heard it.
It made her heart kick at her, so hard it made her ribs ache.
And there was something exquisitely painful—though whether it was a terrible joy or a kind of loss, she couldn’t have said—to watch as the man that she’d created this perfect little boy with beheld him for the first time.
There was something almost sacred about it. Hannah found her hands over her mouth as Antonluca moved to the edge of the crib and looked down, that dark fury on his face changing almost at once to something that could only be wonder.
He put his hand out and she almost stopped him, but she thought better of it.
And so she watched as gently—so very gently that she thought she might start sobbing—he settled that big hand of his on Dominic’s belly.
For a long, beautiful, impossible moment, it was as if they all breathed together.
Hannah watched as Dominic’s faint restlessness went away. As if he knew his father’s hand and the heat that came from it.
As if he’d been waiting for exactly this to truly settle him down.
And still, it was the look on Antonluca’s face that almost undid her. There was something so bright and sharp in his gaze. There was something about the way he held his mouth, a tenderness she hadn’t imagined a man so gorgeous could possess. She wasn’t close enough to him to hear what he whispered over the sleeping figure of the little boy, like some kind of prayer.
Her heart thought it knew.
But then it didn’t matter, because when he straightened from the crib and turned back to her, his face was like thunder.
Hannah could hardly bear to look at him, though she was equally incapable of looking away. But she had to give him her back as she led him out of the room again, and it wasn’t any better when she faced him again on the other side of Dominic’s bedroom wall, his door shut once more.
And then they were standing there, facing each other, in the main room of this little cottage that had never felt smaller. That, in fact, seemed to shrink more with every breath.
Once again, Hannah cast around for the right words to say to make this… Well. Notbetter. But understandable, anyway. Because it had made a kind of sense to her…
Yet nothing came to her, because there wasn’t anything to say.
There wasn’t any making this understandable.
And with every breath, every second that she continued to not speak, she could feel it all get darker and stormier and more furious between them.
She couldn’t blame him, but she still couldn’t manage to get a single word out.
“What I want to know—” and Antonluca’s voice was so low and so furious that it seemed to shiver through her “—is if all of this was deliberate.”
Hannah started to speak then, but had to clear her throat. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Why did you come to Italy?” he demanded. “But why start there? We can go back even further. Did you plant that story in the newspapers because you knew how I would react? Has this all been a setup from the start?”
She blinked at that, that feeling of paralysis leaving her, slowly. But surely. “A setup?” She asked that carefully, as if she needed to sound out the words. “You think someone would set up…a whole baby?”
“I think many women would do exactly that, and happily.”
“I didn’t know who you were. If I had known, I would have told you the moment I discovered I was pregnant.” She kept her voice even, or as close to even as she could, under the circumstances. “Instead, I shamed my entire family, was unwelcome in my childhood home, and decided to go make a life for myself and my child elsewhere. Why would I have done any of that if, all along, I could have reached out to you instead?”
“You truly want me to believe that you just happened upon this village, out of all the villages in Italy?” She had never seen him like this, and all she could think was that he was sobig.He towered over her. And there was that anguish and that fury all over him, making it so she couldn’t decide if she wanted to reach out to him. Or run. “Youjust happenedto find your way here from Nebraska, of all places?”
“I have always wanted to go to Italy,” she told him in a low voice, aware that her hands were in fists at her sides. “It had nothing to do with you.”
He leaned closer. “Bullshit.”
She felt as if he’d slapped her, but she made herself stand straighter. “I can’t defend my choices. I should have told you the moment I walked into that library. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t.”
