“Why haven’t you married her yet?” Violet demanded every time she saw him, particularly when Paige was with him. He could only raise his brows at this woman he loved more than he’d imagined it was possible to love anyone, and wait for her to answer.
Which she was happy to do.
“I’m not sure I’ll have him, Violet,” Paige would reply airily. She would pat her ever-larger belly and smile blandly, and Giancarlo thought that they’d both transitioned from a working relationship to family rather easily. Almost as if Violet had planned it. “I’m considering all my options.”
“I don’t blame you,” Violet would say with a sniff. “He was horrible. I’d tell you he gets that sort of inexcusable behavior from his father but, alas, Count Alessi was the most polite and well-mannered man I ever met. It’s all me.”
“I don’t think anyone thought otherwise,” Giancarlo would say then, and everyone would laugh.
But he never asked Paige again. He kept his promise.
“And if a single photograph or unauthorized mention of my daughter appears anywhere, for any reason, in a manner which benefits you without my express, written consent,” he told the great screen legend Violet Sutherlin one pretty afternoon, in her office in front of her new assistant so there could be no mistake that he meant business, “you will never see her again. Until she is at least thirty. Do you understand me, Mother? I am no longer that four-year-old. My daughter never will be.”
Violet had gazed at him for a long time. She hadn’t showed him that smile of hers. She hadn’t said anything witty. In the end, she’d only nodded, once. Sharp and jerky.
But he knew she understood that he’d meant it.
Five months and three weeks after the night he’d turned up in Maine, when Paige was big and round and had to walk in a kind of waddle to get down the makeshift aisle, she married him at last in a tiny ceremony on Violet’s terrace. Violet presided. The bride and the officiant wept.
Giancarlo smiled with the greatest satisfaction he’d known in his life. And kissed his bride. His wife.
“Don’t ever torture me like that again,” he growled against her lips when they were in the car and headed home, finally married, the way they should have been more than ten years before.
“Surely you knew I’d marry you,” Paige said, laughing. “I’ve been pretty open about how much I love you.”
“I’m not at all certain I deserve you,” he said, and was startled when that made great tears well up in her lovely changeable eyes, then roll down her cheeks. “But I’ve taken that on as a lifelong project.”
She smiled at him, the whole world in that smile, the way it had been that long ago day on that set when they’d locked eyes for the first time. And Giancarlo knew without the slightest shred of doubt that this was merely a particularly good day on the long road toward forever. And that they’d walk the whole of it together, just like this.
And then her expression altered, and she grabbed his arm.
“We’re going to have a lot of lifelong projects,” Paige said, sounding fierce and awed at once. His beautiful wife. “I think my water just broke.”
* * *
They named their daughter Violetta Grace, after her famous grandmother, who’d insisted, and the less famous one, who’d died before Paige was born and Arleen had gone completely off the rails, and she was perfect.