He made a low, furious sound. “Neither do I.”
Hannah pushed on. “But before that, none of the choices I made had anything to do with you. I wasn’t trying to get close to you. I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to because I didn’t know who you were.” She made sure to emphasize that as she said it. Again. His storm cloud eyes flashed, so she continued. “We did very little talking that night, as you may recall. And in the morning, I was called into the restaurant to stand and accept two hours of yelling, and I did. I took all of that as my due.Youweren’t there. I had no idea I’d ever met Antonluca, world-famous chef. I simply got fired, licked my wounds a bit, and then sorted myself out as best I could. All by myself because I had no way to even contact you, whether I knew who you were or not.”
He made another low, furious sort of sound but he didn’t say anything. This time.
Hannah made herself pull in a breath, though she couldn’t seem to unclench her fists. “By the time I realized I was pregnant, I’d been in Nebraska for a month and a half. Maybe more. I thought about attempting to call the restaurant to find out who that man had been at the bar that night. But how would I do that? Who do you think would speak to me at that point?”
And she saw him actually take that on board. He knew how tight-knit and sometimes toxic restaurants were. He knew how everyone banded together—as much for self-preservation as loyalty.
There was no way anyone who wanted to keep working at that restaurant would risk being the one to tell someone like Hannah—who had drawn fire from above and was persona non grata in restaurant circles—something that might end up getting them in hot water, too. It wasn’t worth the risk.
He had to know that. She could see that he did.
Hannah watched as he accepted that, though he clearly didn’t like it.
“Fine,” he said, his voice darker than she’d ever heard it. “I can understand that. But there is no justification for you not telling me here. The very moment you recognized me in that very first meeting.”
“I agree.” But he was staring at her as if he wanted her to justify it all the same. “You won’t understand. And I don’t blame you, either. All I can do is tell you that I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was trying to protect Dominic.”
“Dominic.” He said the name and he said it again, with more of Italian flair, beneath his breath. And she felt it like music inside of her. “You named the baby Dominic?”
“Yes,” she said. “His name is Dominic.” And she was aware that something in her was shaking. Trembling. “I… I’ve always liked that name.”
She watched as he took that in. As he raised his hands to his face as if he needed to rub understanding into his own skin.
Then something in her hitched a bit when she saw that he was shaking, too.
“I knew that once I told you everything would change,” Hannah made herself say, and it sounded so silly when she said it out loud. So selfish and small in the face of the simple truth that she hadconcealed his own childfrom him. What had she been thinking? “And I didn’t want things to change. I like this life exactly as it is.”
He made a sound, and she hurried on. “I’m not defending myself. Really, I’m not. I’m just telling you how and why—”
“My back story is sanitized,” he told her, and that dark gray gaze of his seemed to pin her to the wall even though they were standing away from it. “Everyone loves the story of a scrappy rise from modest beginnings, but no one wants to know what it was really like. Do you, Hannah?”
She had the distinct feeling that, in fact, she did not want to know. “What I want to say most of all,” she tried to say in a rush, “is that I’m so very sorry—”
“Oh, no,” he said, cutting her off, his voice deceptively gentle when the look in his eyes was anything but. And made her blood seem to chill and then light itself up at once. “No apologies, Hannah. It is too late for that.”
“But…”
Antonluca slashed a hand through the air, and she fell silent.
“My mother was a prostitute,” he told her flatly. Matterof-factly, she would have said, if she hadn’t been able to see the look in his eyes. “If you ask my siblings, they will tell you that she had trouble with drugs. That is also true, but that’s not the whole story. Her pregnancies were all deliberate, as she thought that would curry favor with the men who controlled what she did. It never worked.”
Hannah stared at him, feeling paralyzed once again. Because she knew his story the same as anyone else did. A stunning rise from poverty thanks to a benevolent restaurant owner, a bit of dishwashing to make it relatable before the Michelin stars and widespread acclaim, and the rest was history. She supposed that when she thought about it, she’d assumed that the poverty he’d risen from was more…genteel.
A bit more entertaining than upsetting, if she’d had to guess. More cheeky orphan makes good than desperate climb from a swamp.
And she was sure that no one had ever mentionedprostitutionwhen they’d been spinning these tales of the self-made, self-taught chef who took the culinary world by surprise, then reigned over it as he pleased.
“I have three brothers and two sisters, all younger than me,” Antonluca was telling her in the same fierce, flat way. “And it was clear to me exactly what future we all had in store for us if I didn’t do something. So I did it.”
“That only makes what you’ve made of your life more extraordinary,” she said quietly. “I hope you know that.”
But if anything, that seemed to incense him further.
“What I know is that I vowed back then that I would never bring another child into this world,” he bit out at her in that same low, furious voice. “I have already raised five.”
And Hannah felt guilty. She could have handled all of this better, clearly. Maybe she should have tried harder to find him while she was still pregnant. But even if that really had been as impossible as she’d found it at the time, what she really and truly could not account for was why she hadn’t told him over the past couple of weeks.
