CHAPTER ELEVEN
After she’d creptin to relieve the staff member who’d babysat Dominic and assured herself that her son, at least, was sleeping soundly, Hannah cried herself to sleep and then slept badly.
And with all the things she’d said to Antonluca in the middle of her typical Christmas Eve heartache—though, usually, it was less pointed and more of a generalwhat will become of meringing in her head—she decided once she woke up the next morning that she was afraid to actually admit she was awake.
Because she wasn’t sure she wanted to get up and face the mess she’d helped make last night.
Instead, she lay there with the covers pulled up over her head. She was keenly aware that Antonluca had not joined her in bed last night, at any point, for the first time in their admittedly short marriage.
Hannah didn’t like to think about what that could mean.
And so when she heard Dominic begin to sing in his room, it felt like a relief. Even if it was still dreadfully early.
At least this part was perfectly normal.
She poked her head out from under the covers and, sure enough, she could hear his little feet moving across the floor, and up the few stairs the way he liked to do now. When he made it to the side of her bed, she leaned over and scooped him up, kissing him all over his face as he laughed and squealed and babbled in a mix of Italian and English to say the same thing.
It was Christmas, did she know? Because he was certain, as only small children could be, that Santa had come.
“Do you think you were a good boy?” Hannah asked him, very seriously.
His gray eyes widened in outrage, and he was so much like his father that it hurt.
“Mamma, lo ero. Lo so!” he cried at once. Then he said it again, in English, in case she needed a translation. “I was good, Mama. I know I was!”
She kissed him all over his face. “I know you were,angioletto,” she agreed. “You always are.”
Hannah had planned out their Christmas morning in advance, fairly certain that her husband was not likely to wake up filled with anything resembling Christmas cheer. The good news, to her mind, was that Dominic was too little to expect anything. He didn’t have any picture in his head about what Christmasoughtto be. So she had decided she would make it as relaxed as possible. Breakfast. Gifts. Later, she would take him over to Cinzia’s, and perhaps they would join in the Christmas meal that Cinzia and her family always had.
This was almost exactly what she had done last year, and she’d loved it.
But as she got up from the bed, her attention was caught by the sunrise outside the windows and the beautiful, brightly colored light that spread across the sky and highlighted something else.
The fact that it was still snowing.
“Look,” she told Dominic. “It’s a white Christmas. Just like the song.”
She pulled on her own clothes and then brought Dominic down to his room so that he could get dressed, too, since he liked to kick off his pajamas in the night. They sang “White Christmas” the whole time—or she did, anyway, and he hummed along, with more enthusiasm than tune.
It was only when Dominic insisted on walking down the stairs of the tower, which meant that she had to keep herself angled in front of him in case he took a tumble, that Hannah realized there was something else magical about the morning.
It wasn’t simply the snow outside and a happy little boy. There was a glorious, sweet scent, everywhere.
She thought she had to be hallucinating cinnamon rolls.
But when they got to the bottom of the stairs and made it out of the tower and into the rest of the castle, both she and Dominic stared around in wonder.
Becausethiscastle wasn’t the one she’d been in last night, before bed.
Overnight, as if by the wave of a magic wand, it was like they were in a completely different castle altogether.
“What happened?” asked her sweet little boy. “Was it Santa?”
“Maybe,” Hannah said.
She had an idea who it might be, other than Santa Claus—but it seemed so outlandish. So deeply impossible. So much so that she scooped Dominic up and settled him on her hip because she needed to hold on tosomething.
Then, together, they wandered through the main floor of the castle as if it was new.
