I stop kneading. "A dog?"
"A very ugly dog," she says. "Missing half an ear, one eye, and apparently the worst attitude anyone had ever encountered."
I laugh. "No."
"Yes."
"You're making this up."
She shakes her head, her eyes filled with tears from laughing. "I'm not." She points the wooden spoon at me. "He found it on the edge of one of the family's properties. It had been hit by a car."
"And he disappeared because of a dog?"
"He took it to an old caretaker's cottage and stayed there looking after it."
I stare at her, shocked to my core. It doesn’t seem like him at all.
"Apparently he was feeding it scraps of steak and sleeping on the floor beside it."
My jaw drops. "You're lying."
"That's what I’ve been told."
I can’t contain my laughter. "What happened when they found him?"
"Oh, Cesare lost his mind."
I grin. "I would have paid money to see that."
Her smile is so wide, it’s beaming. "So would I."
"What happened to the dog?"
"It lived." Something warm settles in my chest knowing that he saved the dog. "He tried to convince his father to let him keep it," Vittoria says, laughing.
I nearly choke on my coffee. "He what?"
Vittoria nods. "Apparently, he argued for two hours."
"What did Cesare say?"
She looks at me like I’m crazy. "No."
I sigh. That sounds like Cesare. "Of course he did."
"Then Lorenzo stopped speaking to him for two weeks."
I laugh so hard my stomach hurts. "Oh my God."
"Lorenzo has a soft spot underneath all that hardness,” she tells me softly.
I look at her as silence spreads between us. I know he does, he’s one of the sweetest people ever. I look down at the dough beneath my hands and smile. He’s a protector, he’s made me safe and I imagine a thirteen-year-old Lorenzo Mariano sleeping on a floor beside an injured dog. Nobody would ever believe it, but that’s because they don’t know him.
I do, and he’s more than a protector, more than a man who does things I may not agree with. He’s my husband, the man that I love.
Oh, shit. I love him?
The dough slips through my fingers. I blink, as though that’ll help make my thoughts disappear, but nope, I still feel it, I know it deep in my soul.
