“Love is a beautiful thing,” the priest said to that, with a beneficent smile. As Antonluca had been certain he would. “Especially at this time of year, is it not?”
The only slight wrinkle in all of this efficiency was that Hannah did not seem quite as delighted as Antonluca felt she should.
It seemed to him that she had taken some sort of step back even as she had agreed to the wedding, and he didn’t like it. But he didn’t want to risk discussing it and thereby ruining their forward momentum. He therefore decided that what he needed to do was keep his eyes on the prize.
He had to marry her. He had to make certain that she was his and do what was necessary to claim his son, too. Everything else could be handled later.
Once Hannah was his.
“We will get married tonight,” he told her one morning at La Paloma, with no preamble or attendant fanfare.
It seemed to him that Hannah took much too long looking up from her computer screen and even longer to meet his gaze.
When she did, he thought her gaze was unduly measured.
“Thank you for informing me,” she said.
Very calmly.Toocalmly, to his mind.
Antonluca had the nearly ungovernable urge to vault over the desk, get his hands on her, and remind her how easy it was for neither one of them to feel the least bitcalmabout anything, not while they were busy tearing each other apart.
Because they were so damned good at tearing each other apart.
“We will go back to the castle after work,” he told her in the same tone, as if delivering a list of demands. “Cinzia will be waiting and she will have Dominic with her, of course.”
At that, Hannah’s mouth curved, and Antonluca felt something flood through him that could only be relief—but he didn’t want to admit that. He didn’t want to accept that it took only the faintest smile from her to make him feel soothed. To make him feel…
Well. Anything at all.
“Dominic will be very excited,” Hannah said then, still smiling. “He’s always wanted to visit a castle.”
He didn’t want to categorize the feelings that charged through him then. He didn’t want to believe he was capable of that kind of softening. His voice was unnecessarily gruff when he replied. “Then he will be even more excited to live in one.”
Her green eyes flashed as they met his and he expected her to argue, or at least respond with something other than that calm, quietcompetenceof hers, but she didn’t. He watched the column of her throat move as she swallowed. Carefully.
Everything about Hannah was socarefuland it made him…want to mess her up a little. Just enough.
“Then he will be the luckiest boy alive, clearly,” she replied.
Without inflection.
Very much as if she knew that she was getting under his skin.
He believed she did.
And it was closer still to Christmas now. There were a thousand different things going on in the hotel, all calculated to make the guests feel as if they were in a fantasy version of home, whatever that meant to them.
This was why Antonluca did not shadow her when she left him in the office later that morning. Hannah had been asked to personally supervise a particular VIP group of guests into Florence for the day. It was but one of the services the hotel offered to those who settled in and made a holiday out of their stay. Excursions to anywhere with the same luxurious attention to detail available at La Paloma, all with the same casual presentation of that luxury that made a certain kind of remarkably wealthy person feel downright cozy.
And as he was one of those people, he should know.
He waited for her later that evening. He sat in her sterile office, wondering why she had no pictures of Dominic on her walls or her desktop. It was tempting to imagine that she’d been hiding the baby from him that way, but he didn’t think so. According to all reports and his own observations here, Hannah was a consummate professional in all things.
Too much so, to his mind.
Still, he had discovered today that he could be, too, as he’d stayed at the hotel and had answered many of the calls that would normally be within Hannah’s purview. It was a far cry from the loud, busy kitchens that had defined the height of his career, but Antonluca had enjoyed himself all the same.
There was something deeply satisfying about solving the guests’ various problems in ways that made them happier than before. He supposed it was not so different from the kind of customer service he liked to offer in his restaurants—but he wasn’t sure he’d ever been so personally involved in the process.
