She’d never heard that particular scrape in his voice before. Never seen such a bleak, devastating anguish leech out all the green to completely gray his eyes. His fingers on her arms were gentle, but she felt pain from them. His pain.
An urge to comfort pressed her heart toward him, giving her a flat, aching sensation against the inner wall of her chest. She wanted to tell him it was all right, but it wasn’t. And he knew it. He felt it. He wasn’t as oblivious as she feared, which filled her with that wretched, misguided hope that kept sparkling before her like a lure.
He very tenderly caressed her cheek, fingertips smoothing her hair back and tracing a line down her jaw. The backs of his knuckles grazed under her chin and down the delicate, pulsing cords in her throat.
“We’ll save sleeping together for when we reach Italy. I want you to rest as much as you can while we’re here. Heal.” His touch, the look in his eyes, made it sound as though he wanted more than physical repair for her. As though he understood her heart was fractured and needed time.
The first tendrils of mending began as she glimpsed the man who’d turned her inside out on a three-week honeymoon, concerned and focused and with a touch like magic, thumb grazing her bottom lip so it felt puffy and incapable of anything but kissing.
Their next course came, but they just stood there, looking into each other’s eyes. After a long moment, he dropped one more very, very gentle kiss on her mouth and slowly released her, leaving her burning as he drew her back to their table.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE WENT TO Naples with him. They landed three weeks later and went straight to see his grandfather at the Castello di Ferrante.
The castello would be Alessandro’s one day, but all of his extended family came and went, treating it as a hotel. A few members were more or less permanent, something Octavia privately viewed as squatting. Alessandro’s youngest sister had been one of them until recently, before her modeling career took off. Now she might have a room here, but she spent most of her time in Milan, Paris and New York.
From the few times they’d spoken, Octavia had liked all of her husband’s sisters, but the older two had families of their own and lived in other parts of the country so she didn’t see them often. Alessandro had far more cousins than she did and was close with many of them. It was an odd dynamic for her to have been thrust into since most of her father’s siblings had emigrated to America and Australia before she was born and her mother was standoffish with her side. Octavia had grown up in a familial void made worse by being an only child. It had made her feel like an anomaly in her own country, where big dinners and frequent reunion s were the norm.
She’d always wanted to feel a part of a warm, gregarious family and suspected she would turn into the clichéd Italian mother doting on her son into his forties, but for now she was still daunted by the many-stranded web of Alessandro’s blood ties.
And she had never been able to see herself as the matriarch of that network and this house. Whenever she came here to the castello, she felt like a very temporary, barely tolerated guest.
She loved the place all the same.
As they began the climb that wound through the lower portion of the vineyard, she took in the beauty of the estate. Even in winter it was covered in the lush confusion of the estate manager’s intensive farming techniques. With the land so fertile, Alessandro’s grandfather put every speck of dirt to work. Olive trees bordered the rows of grapes. Beneath the orange trees, the lavender had been cut back for winter. Garlic and runner beans would soon spring up in the lemon grove. Strawberries, their leaves faded by winter, surrounded the fig trees and the stacked plots where the tomatoes and basil would grow were freshly turned and ready.
Then the house rose to its full glory. Its yellow stone and red-tiled roof held a matte finish in the weak sunlight, but its sprawling wings and elegant balconies were as aristocratic as ever. It was gracefully aged, never old.
The driver pulled the SUV to a stop in a crunch of gravel between the fountain and the wide front steps. They were keeping the protection of a security team as a precaution, but Bree was quick to leap from the front seat and scan the layered balconies and small terraces across the upper levels of the castello. She was only four years younger than Octavia, but made her feel ancient.
Octavia bumped knuckles with Alessandro as they both tried to release the baby from the straps of his car seat.
“I’ll do it,” Alessandro said, but caught her hand. “Rings still don’t fit?”
“I didn’t try them this morning. Too tired,” she said truthfully, disturbed as he gave her fingers a gentle massage, trickling warmth through her.