Alessandro shook his head. “I prefer more predictable weather.”
In truth, Catarina and Massimo had been so caught up in their arranged-marriage-turned-love-match that he had spent very little time with them, beyond cursory meetings and formal gatherings. Alessandro was pleased that his uncompromising brother appeared to be happily married, but it baffled him to see how the relationship had changed his brother, who let so few people inside of the hard exterior he had forged early in life.
In a twist of irony, it was Alessandro himself who had made the winning arguments for his brother’s marriage, an idea that Massimo only reluctantly accepted. At the time, a marriage of convenience had seemed to be the wisest course of action, as, unlike Alessandro, his brother had never struggled with keeping his emotions under control and would therefore withstand any weakness that marriage could trigger. However, seeing the way Massimo visibly softened around Catarina had shaken Alessandro, awakening echoes of feelings that were better to remained buried.
So Alessandro had stayed away. At first, his brother had not noted the rift, too caught up in his newly discovered romance. But after months of Alessandro’s excuses about why he could not meet for dinner or an evening in their flat, Massimo had confronted him.
“You are avoiding me,” his brother had said with his usual stark directness that bordered on harshness. “Explain.”
“It seems that falling in love truly does make a person detached from reality. I wouldn’t have believed it would happen to you, but…” He ended this with a shrug. He was so good at deflecting emotional traps that even Massimo believed him. At times, a part of him wished these deceptions didn’t work as well.
But his brother’s features had softened, and he gave a nod, as if Massimo himself had agreed with Alessandro’s assessment that love detached him from reality. “I just don’t want Catarina to think that this is about her.”
Alessandro had looked his brother in the eye and told him it wasn’t, because that was the truth. It wasn’t her. The problem was the way he was watching his brother change before his eyes. It stirred up a reluctant admiration but also an inexplicable discomfort he didn’t want to think about. His parents’ relationship may not have warped Massimo, but the anger it triggered in Alessandro was a poison inside him that should never be allowed to rise up again.
Though his brother had found himself carried away by his marriage, Alessandro could never let himself fall into that same trap. He reminded himself that he was under control, despite moments of unsettling intimacy the nights with Ann-Sophie had triggered. There was no tomorrow for them. There was only this dance and the heat of her skin under his hands and her soft, lush body pressed against his. There was tonight, and he would spend it in her now-familiar hotel room, surrounded with wine and decadent desserts, with the moon sparkling on the ocean below. They would talk and eat and lie naked, her body against his, and he would get his fill of satisfying Ann-Sophie, over and over.
When she spoke again, her voice was airy. As if none of this weighed on her. “Surely you must have visited the Nordic countries before?”
“Occasionally. But our company has only started to expand to the region, and my brother prefers to be the one who travels there these days,” he said, and then, before he could think to resist, he disturbed his careful boundary between now and their lives outside of this hotel. “And you will return to your apartment and recover from the demands of all of us self-important clients?”
“I am the mediator of ideas. I’d rather like it that way,” she said, maybe too brightly.
Alessandro found this comment frustratingly guarded. “Surely you must want to use your own voice. I, for example, have been enjoying it immensely this week.”
Ann-Sophie laughed. “They pay me a premium to keep my own thoughts—as well as theirs—to myself.”
The idea didn’t sit well with him, but her hair brushed against his cheek, and he let that sensation distract him. They danced in silence, and he told himself everything was right, the way it should be.
“I will travel to Milan now and then in the coming months,” she said after a moment. There was a hesitation in her voice, an uncertain catch in her breath, and Alessandro knew without a doubt that she was about to tread into forbidden territory. She was opening the topic of the future. He had, of course, encountered this problem before, but instead of shifting the conversation, the way he always did, he was overwhelmed by a vision of her in his own bed. Maybe this vision would have been less disturbing if it had been of her soft cries as he pleasured her, the hard thrusts as he took them both to ecstasy. Then he could have simply written it off as lust. But the image in his mind was of Ann-Sophie sitting on his bed, cross-legged, with the morning light shining in her hair like a halo. She was drinking a cappuccino and laughing. It was startlingly, horrifyingly domestic.
But the time to be to take control and redirect the conversation had passed because she was speaking again.
“I was thinking it might be fun to meet up again. You know, have dinner or just…” She shrugged in that carefree way she had. “Do whatever we feel like doing.”
A jumbled mess of emotions bombarded him, so ominous that the only thing Alessandro could think to do was shut them down. Shutherdown.
“We have no future, Ann-Sophie.” He told himself he had kept his voice under remarkable control, considering the torrent of stirrings that were seeping through the cracks of his hard-earned equanimity. He could not let them through. He had buried all these emotions long ago. The alternative was to let them erupt, the way they had all those years ago. The way his parents still spread their poison.
Ann-Sophie’s eyes widened, and her forehead creased in a vulnerable sort of confusion that unsettled him further. He was making this worse. The smile that slid from her face told him his voice had not been nearly as moderated as he had planned.
The music was still playing, but she had stopped swaying, and Alessandro was keenly aware of the way they were standing in the middle of the ballroom. He watched the hurt slash across her face and had the nagging feeling that this was taking a distinctively bad turn. He had the baffling urge to walk back on his declaration, a reaction that released another jumble of emotions, this one more disturbing than the last.
He had to get the situation under control. This was not the first time he had divested someone of their impression that a future between them was possible, and it would not be the last. He had no choice but to go forward. But as Ann-Sophie blinked up at him, he inexplicably found himself wondering whether there was another path. Then anger washed over her face, and the thought was gone.
“My mistake,” she said, her voice cool.
She stepped back and he fisted his hands, keeping himself still. Ann-Sophie’s eyes were filled with accusations, but she gave him an exaggerated curtsy and a smile that could only be called mocking.
“I would say it was a pleasure to meet you, but I’m currently reassessing that,” she said, her voice now hard as stone. “I’d say I hope to see you again, but that would definitely be a lie.”
Then she lifted her chin and turned away, leaving him in the middle of the dance floor.
Chapter Two
Seven months later
“THE GOOD NEWSis that your baby is doing well.”
