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“I do.” The words come out breathy, full of emotion, because I’d assumed all of that was still back in New York. The fact that he thought to bring that for me, along with my clothes and favorite toiletries and my sleeping pills, at a moment when his entire family was threatened, and he was busy picking up the pieces from the danger that I brought to his door—that takes my breath away far more than any landscape.
I can’t ever deserve this man, even if he was willing to be mine. The thought makes my chest ache, and not for the first time. I wonder what it could have been like if I’d met Gabriel before all of this. Before Pyotr, before my doomed wedding, before all of the fear and trauma, and now the retribution that Igor Lasilov is determined to bring down on me—on us. If Gabriel had somehow been the man that my father had decided to promise me to instead.
My life could have been so different.
But it’s not, I remind myself, as the SUV turns down a winding road, one that gradually gets rougher as we make our way down it. My life is what it is, now. And nothing can change that. I just have to get through to the other side.
Without my heart breaking into even more pieces than it already has.
“There it is!” Cecelia squeals next to me, and my attention is briefly dragged away from my own anxieties and back to the landscape in front of me. The road we’re on has narrowed, two tracks winding through a treeline, to the edge of a hill. A stone house, the stones a rustic mix of creams and browns with a terracotta-colored roof, stands at the top of the hill. It has a classic Italian villa shape—three stories in the back, with a two-story section on the east wing, and then a smaller, L-shaped one-story wing jutting out in the front. Trees and bushes surround it, with an overgrown garden in the front, and I can see immediately that while most of the landscaping has been well-tended, the garden has been mostly ignored.
Agnes and Cecelia will both love that, I think, as the car rolls to a stop. Beyond the hill, I can get a glimpse of everything the house overlooks—a broad vineyard that takes up a good bit of the acreage, and in the distance, pastures for livestock, and a large stone barn far in the distance, surrounded by smaller outbuildings. Some of the pastures look newer, wood-fenced, and others have that uneven stone fencing that I saw as we drove here. In the far distance, I can see the shimmering dot of what must be the lake that Gabriel mentioned.
The sun is setting over the house, the sky awash in pastels of peach and pink, and I slide out of the car, feeling the soft warmth on my skin as I stare at the house and grounds with a feeling that approaches awe.
“What do you think?” Gabriel asks, coming up behind me, and I shake my head, speechless for a moment.
“The house in New York is beautiful,” I say quietly. “But this?—”
“It’s something else,” he agrees. “Come on. The men will bring in everyone’s bags. I’ll show you around the house.”
If the exterior of the villa took my breath away, the inside is something else altogether. I’ve always loved old things—old movies, vintage photos, first-edition classics—and the inside of Gabriel’s family home tugs every one of those strings and more.
It’s a house clearly in need of work. Every piece of furniture is covered in dust cloths and plastic, and every inch of it not covered has a layer of dust. All the fixtures are old, the floors in need of refinishing, the baseboards and windows, and pretty much everything else in need of a good cleaning, an update, or both. The paint and wallpaper are in need of a good dose of TLC. It’s a project that hasn’t been touched in years, and I feel a flood of excitement with every new room that we walk into. The feeling is a breath of fresh air, pushing away the heavy cloud of dread for a moment, and replacing it with a lightness that I haven’t felt in so long.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathe as we walk up to the third-floor rooms at the back of the house, and Gabriel eyes me, skepticism clear on his face.
“It’s kind of a dump,” he says flatly. “It hasn’t been touched in probably eight years. It’s in disrepair. A lot of things need to be fixed. They needed to be fixed eight years ago, when my parents were still alive and putting money into it. Now, it’s just the things that absolutely have to be kept up that are getting financed—the things that make money. The horses, the vineyard. The house hasn’t factored into it in a long time.”
“It’s not a dump,” I say firmly, turning in a circle in the hallway. I see what Gabriel sees—faded wallpaper, scuffed floors, doors in need of replacing—but I also see what this house must have looked like before, in its prime. I can see all the history here, and it makes my palms itch with wanting to get my hands on it. “It’s a project.”
“I planned to have it renovated,” Gabriel says, still looking at me as if he’s not quite sure what to make of my enthusiasm. “That was part of the business I was going to take care of here. But now—” He trails off, looking around the hall again. “I can talk to Agnes about working on it. I’m not sure how she’ll feel about it, but she does like a good project. And since you’re taking care of the kids?—”
“I’ll help,” I say immediately, with an enthusiasm that makes Gabriel blink at me.
“What?”
“I’ll help renovate. I want to help.”
Gabriel purses his lips. “Do you know anything about doing work like that, Bella?”
“Does Agnes?” I shoot back. “Anyway, are you going to bring someone else in to do it, now?”
He shakes his head. “No. I don’t want any strangers around here for a while.” The solemnity in his voice pushes back the lightness I felt, for just a moment, and I want to claw to get it back. I feel my chest tighten, and I shove the panic down, trying to focus on this possibility of a distraction that I suddenly want very, very badly.
“The house needs to be cleaned up, at the very least, to make it comfortable to live here.” I shrug, trying to look more casual about it than I feel. “And the rest sounds like fun, Gabriel. Agnes and I will figure it out. I bet Cecelia will even want to get in on it, too.”
He looks at me for another long moment. “I might have hired you as a nanny, Bella, but?—”
“Girls like me don’t usually scrub baseboards and dust for cobwebs?” It’s my turn to smirk at him, and it feels good—like I’m more myself. Like I really am shedding some of the fear and dread that have plagued me for the past few days. “I don’t know if you’ve figured this out yet, Gabriel, but I’m not your typical mafia princess.”
His gaze meets mine, and there’s that heat in it again. Like he’s remembering everything we’ve done together that a typical mafia princess also might not do. “I know that,” he says quietly.
For a moment, I think he might close the distance between us. I wait for him to reach for me, touch me, kiss me again. I want to take back everything I ever said about this ending with just one night between us.
And at the same time, I know it’s the best rule I ever laid down. Because Gabriel’s boundary was no feelings, and I already know that if I were to spend too many nights with him, I’d fall hard.
Harder than I might already be falling.
