She tilted her head a bit to one side and looked at him as if the words he used made no sense. “I think about work all the time. That’s why I’m good at it. And I do not have an empire, like some. I have to work. It’s how I take care of Dominic.”
“That is not something you will need to worry about again,” he said then, surprised.
And maybe a bit too intently, because she frowned.
“If that is supposed to make me feel better, it doesn’t,” she told him.
“I don’t know how you are supposed to feel, Hannah. I don’t know howIam supposed to feel. Do you think there is a manual for this situation we are in? If so, I would love to see it. But do you really think that fussing over a Christmas market will make any of this better?”
“I can’t answer that for you.” She said that simply. Quietly. It made him feel small, somehow, that she could stand there before him and simplyexudedignity. “I suppose you will do whatever it is you need to do. But I warn you, I will also do what I have always done, which is to take care of my child.”
“Our child,” he corrected her.
Softly, but with heat behind it.
He wasn’t sure if he expected her to argue or not, but all she did was incline her head, her gaze on his.
And Antonluca felt something in him loosen. A knot he hadn’t even known was there. Something tight and hard that he hadn’t understood was buried down beneath too many layers to count, deep in his chest.
Yet Hannah made it go away, that easily.
He would have considered it magic, if only it didn’t ache.
But what he knew too well was that there was precious little magic in this world. He had experienced it himself, when he was so young that he should have seen magic everywhere. He had lived too many lives already, that was the thing.
Antonluca had never intended to bring a child into this world. His own childhood had been too rough for him to imagine continuing on in that fashion. Or at all.
He never meant to do it, but he had. Just as he had taken no precautions last night, either, like a fool.
Or maybe…not such a fool, now that he considered it.
Because Antonluca had never planned or wanted to become a father. But now that it turned out he was one, he knew exactly what it was he had to do.
Andwoulddo.
Whether Hannah liked it or not.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“We must get married,” Antonluca informed her, as if issuing a decree.
But since it wasimpossiblethat he had said such a thing, all Hannah could do was stare at him.
“What?”
That was not the sort of polished reply she was known for, but it was all she had.
It was the week before Christmas. They had been running around all day, preparing the hotel for its grand tree-lighting ceremony tonight. Hannah had expected that Antonluca would make things difficult for her after he’d discovered Dominic’s existence. She’d expected…retaliation, perhaps. Or at least some version of coldness or pettiness in case she was tempted to forget that he thought she deliberately betrayed him.
Last time around, despite the night they’d shared, he’d had her fired and blacklisted.
Lest she forget.
But this time around, with much higher stakes, he had disconcerted her by acting like a consummate professional. If she hadn’t known only too well that he had only found out that he was a father a handful of days before, she wouldn’t have had the slightest idea that anything had occurred in his personal life. She was certain no one else had noticed any change in him at all.
He is as unchanging as the sea,Léontine had murmured at some point.
The sea is ever-changing,Hannah had replied.That’s the whole point of it, surely.
