“You’re being silly. You’re beautiful,” he told her.
She pulled the door closed to lock him out.
His blurry silhouette remained on the far side of the frosted glass. She stayed where she was, watching him.
He stepped closer, one hand pressing so his fingertips were a half circle of dots, as if he was trying to touch her through the barrier. “Octavia.” That was his sex voice and sent the best kind of shivers down her spine. “I wish we’d had the lights on last night. I liked everything I felt.”
A giddy happiness broke open inside her, making her smile wobble as she admitted breathlessly, “I did, too.”
He stood there a moment, as if he might be willing her to come out again. She was tempted, but then he finally said, “You’ll meet me downstairs?”
“Fifteen minutes,” she promised.
“Grazie.” He left.
While she stood at the door much as he had, as though she was waiting for this translucent barrier to dissipate so she could be with him and finally see him clearly.
Alessandro meant to spend the week in town, but he felt a lingering unease where his wife was concerned. Despite the delicious physical connection they’d enjoyed the other night, her leap to suspicions in the morning told him she still didn’t trust him. As he spoke to her through the week, she reminded him of the woman she was in London, offering facts with very little editorial.
It made him dwell on the conversation with his grandfather that had kept him up late their first night here.
“Your father taught me to let my son make his own choices, so I will support all the decisions you’ve made, Sandro,” Ermanno had said.
“You were furious at some of the choices Papa made,” Sandro had scoffed. “Eloping with my mother...”
His grandfather had swept his hand through the air. “Her family was...well, you know we’ve had to carry some of them at different times. And her capricious ways...” He shook his head. “Such a wild little bird.” But there was fondness in his papery voice.
“She’s bringing her new fiancé to your party. She wants your blessing. I couldn’t talk her out of it,” Sandro warned. “If you want me to—”
“No, no. I would like to see her,” Ermanno insisted. “She’ll have my blessing. She loved my son.” His grandfather’s eyes had gone watery and sincere. “And she gave you to me, even left you here when she went off to marry her Englishman. I have come to love her like my own daughter. I was angry with your father for marrying her, but now I’m grateful. And I worry for you, because Octavia doesn’t love you.”
Sandro’s heart had derailed in his chest.
“Yet,” his grandfather had added, voice distant and muffled in the rush that filled Sandro’s ears. “Your wife can come to love you, Sandro. Mine did.” His grandfather sobered with the grief he still felt nearly ten years after Nonna had passed away. “If you let her.”
The anguish in his grandfather’s face hadn’t been an advertisement for the joys of love. More like a cautionary tale.
Sandro didn’t want the sort of vulnerability that came with loving, but he had never disregarded his grandfather’s wisdom in his life. It wasn’t as though Octavia had asked him for love, though. She’d made a point of telling him it wasn’t required. If she wasn’t prepared to risk her heart, that was good, because neither was he.
He wanted her trust, though, and told himself it would come with time. Today he had news that he hoped would put the worst of their conflict behind them.
“You came home for a swim?” she asked as he found her new swimsuit and dug out his own. “It’s a nice day, but not that nice. Have they even readied the pool yet?”
He shook his head. “Not here. Is he done?” He grinned at the drunken look on his son’s face as he finished nursing. Sandro tossed the suits on the bed, then scooped up Lorenzo to burp him. “Scusi, figlio, you’ll have to stay home,” he said, patting the baby’s back. “Too hot for you. I looked it up.”
“What is?” Octavia asked, holding up her swimsuit and wrinkling her nose at the thought of wearing it.
Sandro wanted it to be a surprise. Thirty minutes later, they were in a private water taxi, puttering through the towering cliffs of a narrow gorge to the baths carved by ancient Romans into the rock walls. By then she had figured out where they were going and the hot springs were a lovely treat, but—
“You should have told me before we left the house. I wouldn’t have worn my new ring,” Octavia said as she came out of her changing room, a towel wrapped over her modest two-piece.