Brando still had my hand, and I knew it wasn’t only the heat that made me sweat. It was nerves. With a hand on my lower back, my husband was the only force keeping me upright.
“Mm.” I made a thinking noise, trying to find the right words. I waved a hand that seemed thin and paper like, as though exposed to cold for too long, despite the heat. “Mi sento troppo qui.”I feel too much here.
Brando stared down at me, putting the side of his thumb to his lower lip.“Anche a me.” Me too.
Before I could ask him what he meant by that, my mother and father, along with Charlotte, Travis, Charles, and Gwen thebambinaia(as Charlotte started to refer to her for this particular meeting), came to meet us, putting a halt to expanded conversation.
My mother looked fragile and pale under her pink dress and gold jewelry, wildly unlike her model self, and she reached out a hand and seized Charlotte’s. Her other hand reached out for me.
Whether it was from anxiety alone, or from plain shock, I stood there a moment staring at her hand. I felt as though I stood at the top of a high cliff, looking down at the drop, and her hand came up, trembling, reaching out for mine.
Brando nudged me in the back. I swallowed hard and took her hand. Both of our hands were chilled.
Charlotte in all white (ever the demure one—ha!), and usually the one daunted by nothing or no one, had droplets of sweat popping from her skin like morning dew, but she raised her chin and forced the three of us forward.
She could be brave, I thought cynically. She had never seen our dead grandfather on the hunt for our living grandmother—and on her wedding night. I had, in Slovenia, during a reckless storm that brought him to me during a stroke of white lightning. As much as I appreciated his…presence, the visit unnerved me. Maja seemed to sense that the night after his apparition. She had taken me by the hand during our post-wedding dinner and told me not to worry, that he was only looking for her.
She was right. After our honeymoon, she was found on the castle’s grounds during another snowstorm, frozen with cold but with a peaceful look on her face. A cloak that no one had ever seen before had been wrapped around her shoulders.
I was coming to find that Maja Resnik had kept plenty of secrets.
Before her death, she had requested Brando and I release her ashes to the wind at the castle in Slovenia. I had said a prayer and hoped with all that I had that the two star-crossed lovers found their way back to each other.
Sensing our nerves, the men gave us room, hovering behind, along with Gwen and Charles, who had come to settle into his little life after they changed his bath schedule and gave him a pacifier. He cooed a lot and laughed more often.
Charlotte sighed after we trekked a steep road of cobblestones, preparing to knock on the rich mahogany door. The stone above us curved in a medieval arch, ancient ironwork outlining the framework, a lantern dangling right below it. “At leastBabickadidn’t take a step down.” She wiped a finger above her upper lip, smoothing the sweat that collected there, her gold and diamond bracelets jingling and catching the light. “I had always assumed that Matteo was a penniless artist,a fling.”
I didn’t miss the look she gave Brando over her shoulder and neither did he. She was barking up the wrong tree. His mood was a mixture of unease and harbored anger. “Un uomo ha solo un lancio quando la donna è sbagliata, per lui,” he said, his tone not flippant, but direct as a flying arrow. “Se ha ragione, e può, la sposa.”
Charlotte tensed. The reaction seemed to send an electric current through my mother and then me.
I grinned at his words:A man only has a fling when the woman is wrong for him. If she is right, he marries her, no matter the cost.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her in Italian. “Eat a tart?”
Her face was pinched, and she was mighty close to sayingWell!in that huffy tone she employed frequently.
Brando put a hand to my back at the same time my mother used her most refined voice to admonish us before we could get started.
The three of us straightened up, our mouths falling at the same time, as Monica—yes, she was around my mother’s age, perhaps just a few years younger—opened the door in a rush of cool air and fantastic perfume.
My mother was a gorgeous being, all elegant lines and soft features. Maggie Beautiful was a beautiful feminine creature—more sexual and alluring. But Monica Attigliano was breathtaking. She somehow combined my mother’s elegant lines with Maggie Beautiful’s sexual essence. Her long, straight raven hair reminded me of dark waterfalls rushing along sand-colored stone—her skin was flawless, though the lines around her eyes gave her life, stories to be told.
Her eyes. I suoi occhi.They were green, only a little darker than my own, set off by the dress she wore, which was a shade close to mine but true lavender.
I found myself in her right away, though only in the eyes. Perhaps I was too stunned to notice the rest. She noticed too. Her eyes were on me, searching for the connection. Finding it, her plump lips widened in a flawless smile, making her eyes crinkle and throwing the lines around them in sharp relief.
“You have Matteo’s eyes,” she said in Italian. Her voice was smooth and robust, with that sensual Italian flair, like good Chianti. “I have them. My mother as well.”
I knew her as soon as my thoughts caught up to my brain—she was a wildly famous sex symbol in Italy, and even in America, though I never recalled her name or connected the two until that moment. Pictures. I had only seen her in pictures in magazines.
“I do?” I finally found the will to speak, but the question came out soft, almost stunned.
“Sì.” She tilted her head to the side. “They tell me that a young dancer has the look of me. I do not believe it. Not until I see it. I see you.” She reached out a manicured finger to touch the edge of my nose. “I have seen you over the years in photographs. In person—” She raised a shoulder and then let it fall. “It is real. All of you are real.”
“Do I have…anything from him?” Charlotte’s usual bravado failed her. Her voice came out as small as mine. I felt a sudden pang for her. “Matteo, I mean.”
Monica looked her over, as though she studied a puzzle of some sort.
