“In the water, I feel a little bit more like my old self,” she said.
“I like you the way you are,” he said with a smirk.
She raised an eyebrow, as if she was matching these words against his reaction to her in the library.
“I can demonstrate how I feel,” he said, and she laughed.
He was telling the truth. The explanation for his reaction was too complicated to get into. That would come later, after their marriage. Then he would deal with the part of him that had simply lost the ability to be the person he should be. But if he was going to make it through these next two weeks, he needed to focus on these moments, right now.
Chapter Six
AS ONE DAYdrifted into the next, Ann-Sophie was lulled into a cocoon of the luxurious present. She could choose the quiet stillness of her favorite library alcove, bathed in sunlight, or she could chat with Olivia and her niece, Cinzia, as they washed and chopped the vast bounties of the day’s harvest from the garden. But most of the time, she and Alessandro were together. They spent days at the pool, or walking through the groves of orange trees that were ripening in the countryside just outside the village. She ate fresh oranges from the trees with peels so soft they fell apart, and the sweet juice ran through her hands. Everything about her life right now could be summed up with the worddecadent.
But there was one way that she had not yet given in to decadence. Every night, after a long, lingering supper on the terrace, filled with wandering conversation and course after course of freshly prepared foods, Alessandro would walk her to her room and kiss her with a hunger he didn’t try to disguise. But since the day she arrived, he had never once mentioned sharing a bedroom, let alone marriage. She understood that he was enticing her, using every one of his persuasive skills to enchant her, but she couldn’t bring herself to care because this was the Alessandro she knew from Nice, the man who had charmed her with no end goal. Before he abruptly ended all contact, she reminded herself. She couldn’t forget that piece.
She was going along with this for the baby, she told herself. All of this pleasure, and all these leisurely, drawn-out evenings lingering by the table must be doing something to lower her high blood pressure. And then she would return to Stockholm. But the idea of looking out her apartment window into the gray autumn skies as the daylight grew shorter felt so far away, and Alessandro’s teasing voice, his soft, sensual caresses, his laughter—it was all so very present. So she tried not to think too hard about the fact that the end was coming closer.
One evening, as the sunset turned the sky bright oranges and reds and made the leaves on row after row of grapevines shimmer, Alessandro pulled the lounge chairs to the edge of the terrace to watch Mother Nature’s evening show.
“Tell me about the kind of life you would like when the baby comes,” he said softly, seriously.
This life. She almost spoke the thought aloud. But the life she imagined here was with Alessandro, and she was almost sure this life had limits they would run into at any time. So instead, she imagined herself back in Stockholm. “I have paid maternity leave for over a year, so I imagine there will be plenty of diapers and feeding and walks in the park.”
Over the last seven months, she had passed countless mothers with prams in Vasaparken, and yet she still couldn’t picture herself doing the same. It felt so unreal.
“Is that what you want?” His voice was soft, and there was something guarded in his expression.
She swallowed. “Honestly, I don’t think parenting a newborn has much to do with what I want.”
The corners of his full mouth quirked up at the wryness in her voice.
“Point taken,” he said. Then his smile faded. “I still think you should ask yourself this question.”
She tried to ask it that night as she lay in bed, with the sweet caresses of Alessandro’s lips still lingering. But after years of separating want from need, it felt wrong. As if just thinking about her wants was asking too much.
After a week, she and Alessandro stood in a spacious examination room in a doctor’s office, taking in their surroundings. Alessandro had tempted her into walking to the appointment with a promise of a stop at a café in the main palazzo for her new favorite mid-morning snack, a decaffeinated cappuccino and a fresh pastry from the bakery. The doctor’s office was just off the palazzo in a majestic stone building with tall windows and stone gargoyles guarding from the top floor. As they had wandered in, she had expected to find the same sort of evidence of times past that she had seen in all of the town’s shops, as if the building was etched with a history of the comings and goings of the little town’s residents.
But the inside of the doctor’s office was nothing like anything she had seen in town. It looked newly renovated and startlingly well-equipped for a village practice in the rural countryside. When she glanced at Alessandro, he was studying her as if trying to read her.
“The doctor will come to the villa at any time, of course, but she suggested a visit at the office, where she had the ultrasound machine and any other equipment she might need at hand,” he said.
Her surprise turned to amusement. “I have been to countless doctor’s appointments during my pregnancy, and not once have I considered the possibility of a doctor coming to me. I’m perfectly fine with an office visit.” Her gaze drifted to the computers and machines that filled the place. “I just can’t believe that a small town would have the same services that were in the hospital in the center of Stockholm. This place seems prepared for anything.”
Alessandro gave a little nod. “When Massimo and I were young, my grandmother made a long-term commitment to significantly boost the finances of this place. The equipment, building upkeep, bonuses for the staff, whatever they needed.”
She blinked. “That was quite generous of her.”
“In a way.” His expression turned darker. “My grandmother took over some of my father’s business roles so he could focus more on his family. When she understood that Massimo and I would be here without the attention of our parents, she switched tactics and built up the community around us to help.”
She looked around her at the fully equipped office. “But this is for everyone. She could have just hired a doctor.”
“I think she understood that we were a handful, and the task she needed required more than money. Quite frankly, I think she wanted the town to have an incentive to take care of us.”
She tilted her head to the side a little. “Maybe that qualifies as self-interested, but this whole town has a state-of-the-art practice. Good has come from it.”
He flashed her a wry smile. “I guess all this money does have its uses.”
A knock on the door saved her from coming up with a good response to that. A woman with long, graying hair walked in.
