Cinzia had watched as Antonluca had taken his leave, informing Hannah that he had meetings in London, but would be flying back that night. She’d watched as Antonluca had moved in and kissed her, deeply. As if they were alone.
And once he’d left, the older woman had made no bones about watching the way that Hannah flushed. Deep and long and very, very red.
Dominic was sitting on one of the high chairs at the counter, and started wiggling in a manner that suggested that he was moments away from flinging himself toward the kitchen floor. Hannah took that as an opportunity to take him down before he cracked his head open. She set him on the ground, with the added benefit that this gave her something to look at besides Cinzia.
“Il primo amore non si scorda mai,”Cinzia said quietly. Hannah wasn’t sure of the translation—something about first love cutting the deepest, she rather thought. “But this is a good thing, is it not?”
“I don’t know what it is,” Hannah replied, keeping her eyes on Dominic as he played with the chair leg, as if it had suddenly become deeply intriguing to him. “Maybe there’s no point analyzing it. Maybe there’s only living it and hoping for the best.”
“Remember,” her friend said, and her voice was so kind that Hannah found herself blinking back tears, “this isyourmarriage.Yourfamily. Whatever happened before, with your parents or whatever his past might hold, you can choose to put it behind you. You can choose, if you like, to make something new instead.”
“You say that as if you’ve never heard of ghosts.” Hannah looked at her then, fighting the urge to wrap her arms around herself. “But this country is so old. You must be surrounded by them.”
“There is never any shortage of ghosts, child,” Cinzia told her with her wise, wide smile. “But here in Italy, we make friends with the things that haunt us. How else could life be so beautiful?”
Hannah found herself thinking about that all day.
That night, she put Dominic to bed in his castle room that he liked so much that he sometimes asked to go sit in it at different points in the day, just to be in it. She read him an extra story and tucked him into the big boy bed he’d moved into when they’d come here. And then, when he was finally asleep, she found herself padding around the strange, empty old stone rooms like she was the ghost here, after all.
She got her book and went in by the fire, but if she read anything at all, she didn’t know. Because the next thing she did know she was waking up to find Antonluca braced above her, a stern, arrested sort of look on his face as he gazed down at her curled up in his chair.
“When did you get home?” she asked.
His eyes seemed to darken at that, and the air between them seemed to thin. And Hannah understood that using the wordhomewas loaded, here. In this bright fire of theirs where everything was a feeling and nothing was ever discussed outright.
She sat up straighter, rubbing her hands over her face, less sanguine than she wanted to be. Less in control of herself than she needed to be around this man.
My husband,she thought, and that word never failed to make her heart kick at her.
“I got in now,” he told her.
And she wasn’t sure that she could tell the difference between the appropriately remote boss he was at work and the man who stood before her now in yet another bespoke suit that made him look every bit as powerful as he was.
Or maybe she was tired of pretending they were two different men.
She uncurled herself from the depths of the chair, and it seemed to her that it took him a little too long to move back as she did.
But he did move. And then she was standing, and they were still too close, or that was what her body was telling her, anyway. Her heart was going wild beneath her ribs and she was sure that he could tell that she was flushed. Everywhere.
In all the places he liked to taste.
“You must be hungry,” she said. When he only stared at her, she shook her head. “What is it? You keep looking at me as if…?”
His mouth curved, but she was not sure that she would call it a smile. “I apologize. I do not have the familiarity with casual domesticity that some do.”
She moved then, because it was that or fling herself at him. And while she was sure that would happen later, there had to be more to all of this, didn’t there? Because it felt like there was. It felt like every step they took was surrounded by layers upon layers of meaning.
It felt like they knew each other better than Hannah had ever imagined it was possible to know another person.
But then, on nights like tonight, she would sit and glare at a book and find herself unable to recall if they’d talked substantially about anything.
She walked toward the kitchens, and could hear him following her. And her head might have been full of fairy tales, but her heart was made of resolve as she went and settled herself at one of the counters and watched as he heated up the food the staff had left for him.
The way he always did.
“Why don’t you cook?” she asked.
Hannah saw the way he tensed at that, and regretted the question—
