“You live in an empty castle,” she told him, enunciating each word so that it felt like a slap. “It’s like you’re already a ghost.”
When he only stared back at her, somehow as shocked by that as if she had hauled off and slapped him, she kept going. He could see the glitter of temper in her gaze—or maybe it wasn’t temper at all. Maybe it was some other passion that he couldn’t understand, that the gigantic weight inside him was still sitting on.
“You have nothing personal in this entire pile of old stone,” she said. “Not one thing.”
He scoffed at that. “Says the woman without a single personal item in the office where she spends most of her days.”
“That is anoffice,” Hannah replied, shaking her head a little. “It’s also a job that I started while pregnant. It was necessary for me to make it clear that my being a mother in no way inhibits the work that I do. You’ve been in my cottage. You saw exactly how it was decorated.”
He made a noncommittal sort of noise, and even told himself that he could not possibly remember the decor of a cottage he had rushed to get her out of—
But she laughed at whatever expression she saw on his face. “I know you saw all those pictures on the wall. Baby pictures of Dominic. Dominic and me. Dominic and Cinzia. Happy moments from a happy life, Antonluca. But you don’t have any of that, do you? Not a single indication that you have ever been alive at all, anywhere, with anyone.”
“I apologize,” he said, moving in closer to her, “if I have somehow made you feel less thanalive, Hannah.”
And he reached out for her, a half-formed thought chasing through him. That he would crush his mouth to hers, set them both on fire, and see how they burned. Maybe that would prove…whatever needed proving here.
But instead, when he pulled her close, she melted against him.
As if there was no anger here. As if he was the only one fighting, shadowboxing his own apparition.
It seemed to take his knees out from under him, so when he fit his mouth to hers, it was something else.
It was a kiss, but itached.
It was sweet and sacred. It wasimpossible—
And, suddenly, he understood far more than he wanted to about that weight inside him, and his own foolish heart, and the sheer magic of this.
Of her.
He kissed her again and again, never getting any deeper, never pushing, because this already felt like too much.
This felt like home, in all the ways he least wanted it to.
It felt… He felt…
He couldn’t let himself get there.
But she was the one who pulled away, and stood there a moment, her fingertips pressed to his hard jaw. Her breath still heavy and tangled with his.
“Don’t you see?” she whispered. “You live like you’re in prison, Antonluca. Like you’re serving time for some hideous crime and I don’t think you know what that crime is any more than I do. But I do know this. Dominic and I are now serving time with you. Right here in this prison you’re so proud of, with its bare walls and its cold, harsh stone.”
“Hannah—” he began, trying to find some way to explain all of that mess inside of him. All of that unbearable weight. “Hannah, I—”
“And I can’t bear it,” she told him, her voice solemn and this time, her gaze, too. “Because I love you.”
“You can’t,” he growled at her even as everything inside of him seemed to take a seismic hit. “That’s not possible.”
But as he watched, Hannah shifted back. She wiped at her eyes, and she even offered something like a smile when all he could see was the resolve behind it. Her spine straightened and he remembered when he’d first seen her in his restaurant in New York. She’d held her shoulders just like this.
As if warding off a terrible blow.
“I’m afraid that it’s more than possible,” she said, in that calm way of hers that made everything inside him seem to freeze. Then turn into a sharp pain that made him want to double over. Yet she showed no signs of stopping. “I love you, Antonluca. I suspect I always have. And I don’t have the slightest idea what will become of any of us, because no matter how pretty you make the prison, it will always be this at heart.” She looked around, managing to take in the whole of the castle, and then she slammed that green gaze at him. “It doesn’t matter how big it is. It’s still a cell. It will always be a cell, Antonluca, until you figure out a way to open it up, and set yourself free.”
“I don’t have any such need or desire,” he began, because that was always his knee-jerk reaction to…anything.
“And if you can’t do it for yourself,” she said quietly, cutting him off that easily. And in such a dignified way that he thought she might as well pull one of those stones from the wall behind her and smash it straight through his chest, where his heart ought to be. “Do it for your child’s sake. Do you really want him to grow up and be like you?”
