While he was trying his best to put himself back together, Hannah leveled another look at him—no less direct nor grave than their son’s. Then she stepped back and allowed him inside once again.
He didn’t know why he followed when everything in him was screaming at him to run. Maybe the trouble was that he didn’t know whether he wanted to runtoward heroraway from her.
Maybe that had been the issue with Hannah Hansen from the very start.
He followed her into the cottage’s one main room, and it was just as he remembered it from the night before. Even with toys strewn across the floor, it was bright and cozy.
Happy.
Nothing like the grimy flats—if they’d been lucky enough to have a flat, that was—that he recalled from his own childhood.
Hannah went to the brightly colored woven rug in the center of the floor and sat down, setting the little boy onto his feet beside her. He was happy to stand, and then peered up at the strange man in his house. Hannah, meanwhile, looked up as if she expected Antonluca to ponce about and avoid the toddler like the sticky gingered plague he likely was, but if there was one thing in this world that Antonluca knew better than he’d like to, it was children.
He found himself sitting down on the rug, too, then quickly getting drawn into an inspired discussion about the merits of plush toys versus little race cars with this tiny, chirpy human, who spoke in a mix of Italian and English and lisped his way through it all.
Antonluca became so engrossed in this debate that he almost forgot where he was. Until he looked up and saw Hannah looking at him, her eyes shining.
The finest green he’d ever seen, he couldn’t help but think.
“Stay where you are,” she told him softly. “I’m going to make Dominic some breakfast.”
He thought about the occasions his mother had cooked for them. There weren’t many, and it had never been breakfast. That had been afend for yourselfaffair, and God help you if you were the one who woke their mother while she slept. “What does Dominic eat?” he asked.
“Today, pancakes.” Hannah blinked, then looked at him, her gaze guarded. “Would you like a pancake, too?”
Antonluca couldn’t help but think how strange this was. How they were treating each other with such odd formality after what was not, by any definition, aformalinteraction last night. And when they were both here, sitting on the floor with a small child and a collection of toys.
“Thank you,” he said, though he had meant to say no. And then he heard himself continue, “I haven’t had a regular pancake in years. That would be lovely.”
He stayed where he was, sitting with Dominic as Hannah got to her feet, and moved across the airy main room into the open-plan kitchen area. Then he had to try to concentrate on every last detail of this miraculous little boy in front of him while also being keenly aware of the things Hannah was doing in her kitchen.
He heard the stove click on as she lit it. He smelled sweet butter warm in the pan, heard her stir with efficiency in a glass bowl, then listened to the sizzle of batter.
What he could not remember, however, was the last time that anyone had cooked for him. He was not certain that anyone ever had, unless, of course, he had deliberately gone to patronize their restaurant. But such occasions were rarely intimate.
Not like this.
And there was something about this—or perhaps he meant there was something abouther—that seemed to fill him up from within this morning no matter how furious he ought to have been with her. Because Hannah seemed to have no qualms at all about serving a world-renowned chef with a selection of Michelin stars to his name a very simple pancake she’d whipped up in this rustic kitchen. From, if he was not mistaken, a premade boxed mix,
If she gave any of those things the faintest bit of thought, he saw no evidence of it as she set an old, chipped blue plate down beside him.
But he had to think that it was her very matter-of-factness, with no hint of anything even resembling preciousness, that was the reasonwhythis pancake he ate sitting cross-legged on the floor with a child would rate higher than many desperately indulgent meals he’d eaten all over the world.
He couldn’t decide if he was pleased or humbled by this.
Yet more fascinating by far, he told himself when he was finished quietly rhapsodizing aboutpancakes, was watching Dominic. He would have recognized the child even if he hadn’t known who he was and where he’d come from, because he looked like all the rest of them. That dark hair. His gray eyes. That particular, mischievous smile—though Dominic smiled a good deal more easily than anyone in Antonluca’s family ever had.
“He seems healthy and happy,” he acknowledged later, the taste of sweet pancakes still on his tongue.
“He is both,” Hannah replied. Her green gaze met his with a hint of affront. “Of course.” She seemed to consider the implications, then frowned at him. “Did you have some doubt?”
“I have nothing but doubt,” he told her, perhaps more darkly than he should have—but he could still taste the food she’d prepared for him, when no one dared prepare food for him, and the betrayal of this all seemed to hit him more keenly. “You tell me whether or not you would trust a person who kept your own child hidden from you.”
“In future, you should perhaps give your one-night stands your name,” Hannah replied crisply, though she smiled at the little boy when he looked at her. Then lost the smile when she looked back at Antonluca. “Just to get ahead of this trouble you find yourself in.”
“I see that I’m not the only one who stayed up all night, coming up with clever replies to wield at will.”
“I told you last night that I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about Dominic the moment I saw you here,” Hannah said then. But her gaze stayed grave on his. “I meant that. But there’s nothing I could have changed about what happened before that.”
