CONFUSED AND DISAPPOINTED, Marco leaned back on the limo seat. He didn’t say anything else to Eleanora through the drive to the penthouse. When they got out of the elevator, the cats raced to meet them.
“I forgot to text Wisdom!”
Eleanora removed an earring. “You’re just a few hours late with their dinner. They’re fine.”
The cats looked at her as if she’d ruined their favorite toy.
Marco would have laughed but he could see she was tired and hurt.
The fact that he was the one who had hurt her by asking her to marry him, confused him so much he had no idea what to say or do. But he did realize her going to bed so they could discuss this in the morning was a good idea.
But she wasn’t in a talking mood the next morning either. The irony of it perplexed him so much he couldn’t think. He took the cats out for a walk, letting the fresh air give him perspective.
He loved her and wanted to marry her. But he’d made it clear to her that he didn’t ever want to get married and that he didn’t even want to be in love. So now that he loved her, she didn’t believe him.
What he needed to do was woo her. As Sunrise and Sunset trotted along, he realized he’d done that. He’d wooed her so sweetly and sexily one night he’d about driven himself crazy—
But he’d done that while they were under the umbrella of their “deal.” When they were just having fun. No strings attached. Nothing serious.
No wonder she didn’t believe him. He’d shown her he could be a romantic while under the umbrella of a deal he’d made because he believed he would never love anybody.
To her, his marriage proposal had probably stunk to high heaven.
He let the cats trot along, wondering if he should try another proposal. Sure, the dinner had been nice. But because he’d been nervous, he’d kept everything simple. Maybe what he needed was a grand gesture?
He and the cats walked some more as he tried to decide on a grand gesture. It was too cold for a hot-air balloon. It was too close to Christmas to take her to Cabo San Lucas.
He could hire a mariachi band and make it light and fun. Or he could find a first-edition copy of her favorite book and say something serious and touching—
He stopped dead in his tracks. The cats stopped with a jerk and gave him a look. “Sorry, guys. I think I figured out what I did wrong.” He turned to the right, went into a coffee shop. A few people eyed Sunrise and Sunset disapprovingly. He smiled apologetically, got a cup of coffee and quickly removed his cats from the premises.
When they reached the park, he sat on a bench, tied the cats’ leashes to a tree beside it and sipped his coffee.
The cats looked at him. “I can’t do something over the top like a hot-air balloon ride. That’s meaningless. I have to think of something romantic to say. The problem is I used all my best lines the night I seduced her.”
Sunset looked away, distracted by a leaf blowing in the light breeze.
Sunrise still gave him his full attention.
“I don’t want to be repeating lines. I also need to go in a more romantic direction than...well...” He winced. “You know. Seductive.”
An old man passed as he said seductive. He turned and gave Marco a curious look. Marco saluted him with his coffee.
“You know what? We’re far enough away from the penthouse that I can think about this as we walk back.” He unwrapped the cats’ leashes and started them in the direction of his building.
As they happily trotted along, he drank his coffee but nothing appropriate came to him.
But one thought did surface and take hold. If he didn’t figure all this out before she returned to Rome, there’d be nothing to figure out. She’d be on her home turf. She’d take care of herself. She’d make plans without him.
His heart stumbled. He had until he left for Vermont to figure this out and he sure as hell hoped his brain came up with better ideas for proposing soon or he was going to lose her.
Eleanora took advantage of the time Marco was outside with the cats to repack her suitcase. She’d slept in her original room the night before and would continue sleeping there. She needed to get her clothes and toiletries out of the primary bedroom suite.
She was no longer confused. It might not have been a mistake that she and Marco slept together the night of the grand opening—it had actually been wonderful—but trying to fix something questionable with a bungled attempt at sharing her pregnancy had been wrong.
She should have realized she was too emotionally invested to share the pregnancy with Marco. She should have realized that pretending to be on the same page emotionally was a trap. But she hadn’t. The day before, though, her thinking had cleared.
For as much as she ached for him to love her, he didn’t. His proposal proved that. A man who truly loved a woman and was handing her a beautiful, symbolic ring, would have had love shining in his eyes and joy in his voice.
Technically, she’d put him in this awkward position. He liked her enough and wanted to be involved in their child’s life enough that he’d begun imagining he wanted things that he didn’t.
She had to set him free, go back to being smart, savvy Eleanora who knew the right things to do. No matter how much it hurt.
As she rolled her suitcase up the hall to her original room, she wondered why she was staying. She’d seen her parents at Thanksgiving, and they were still a bit miffed at her. More at Marco. But her too. Christmas would be stilted at best. Plus, her sister was coming home with her kids for Christmas. If she went to her parents’ house, her dad would probably go off on another one of his tangents about her not getting married, and everybody’s holiday would be ruined.
If she kept walking up this hall, to the elevator, down to the street, she could get a cab and be at the airport in a little over an hour. Once there, all she had to do was find a flight and she could be in Rome tomorrow.
Marco returned to the penthouse to find Eleanora had gone. At first, he considered she’d simply moved back into the bedroom she’d been using when she first arrived, but her suitcase wasn’t there either.
He plopped on the sofa, ran his hands down his face and tried to ignore the two cats giving him a condemning glare. “It’s not like I fired Wisdom. She’s the one who feeds you.”
The glares got worse.
He took a breath. “You know... Eleanora might have gone to her parents’.” Sunrise perked up. “She was staying so she could spend Christmas with them. It’s a few days early but if she’s angry enough with me—” Insulted. The word she’d used was insulted. “Then maybe we just need a break.”
Unimpressed, Sunrise sleekly trotted away. Sunset jumped up on the sofa and curled into a ball for a nap.
The quiet and cold feeling returned to his penthouse. His cats, two fairly amusing felines, didn’t seem like the good company they usually were. He could do some work, but he didn’t feel like that either. His job had shifted from being interesting and energizing to being just stuff.
He pulled in a breath at that thought. The Grand York was not just stuff. It was who he was.
Really? He was his job? A glorified bean counter?
Not liking his train of thought, he picked up his phone and called Eleanora’s parents. He mentioned that she’d gone without finishing a discussion on something important and her mother said, “No. She’s not here and she didn’t call to say she was coming, but if she comes, I’ll have her call you.”
“Good. Good,” Marco said, simultaneously tongue-tied and foolish. Her parents were not his allies. Even if he told them he wanted to marry their daughter, they’d still give him the side-eye.
What the hell had happened to his life?
After disconnecting the call with Eleanora’s mother, he called the head of security for Grand York.
“Do you have any way of finding out if someone is on a flight?”
His chief of security, Brandon Feathers, said, “What?”
“Eleanora is returning to Rome. She didn’t take the company jet.” He forced himself to sound professional and detached. “Meaning she’s on a commercial flight. I want to know when she’s arriving in Rome. So I—”
Damn it. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He’d taken it one step too far. He should have stopped at wanting to know when she was arriving.
“So you can call her?”
“Yes. Sorry. It’s so close to Christmas that my head’s going in too many directions.”
Brandon laughed. “Don’t I know it. I still don’t have a gift for my wife.”
“You’ve got a couple of days.”
Brandon’s laugh got louder. “You’re such a newbie. If you don’t get a gift by like the twenty-third all the good stuff is picked over. You can’t do things last minute.”
For some reason or another that stuck Marco oddly. He didn’t have a gift for his dad. He didn’t have a Christmas gift for Eleanora either—
No. It wasn’t the Christmas gifts bothering him. It was the words last minute. He’d waited until she was angry with him before he’d seen the light. It probably did look like he’d only asked her to marry him because he thought he had to.
“Give me a second and I’ll get the manifest.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah. Just give me a couple of minutes.”
He hung up the phone and waited. When Brandon called back, he gave Marco Eleanora’s flight number and departure time.
He thanked him and hung up the phone. Sunrise looked up at him. Sunset sat up on the sofa.
“Yes. I’m going after her.” He looked at the time. “But I’m not going to catch her at the airport.” He dialed the number for his pilot. “I’m going to get to Rome first because my jet is faster.”
Not sure how long he would be staying, Marco quickly packed a bag and was downstairs in fifteen minutes. Sam awaited him. He opened the door and Marco slid inside.
As Sam pulled out, Chiara texted him. Three days until Vermont.
He groaned. All this time he’d worried Chiara would be the one to disappoint their father but maybe it was going to be him.
He answered Chiara. She sent him a smiley face. And he squeezed his eyes shut. No one in his family had any idea the mess his life had become.
Sam got him to the private airstrip housing his jet and the pilots were already there, the jet on the tarmac ready to leave.
He really would get to Rome before Eleanora did.
He boarded the jet, suddenly tired, and glad he could nap as the pilots flew him across the Atlantic. Forcing himself to remember he wanted to be rested when he got to Rome, he talked himself into letting his brain go blank and falling asleep.
His jet landed and within seconds his phone rang. Thinking it was Chiara, answering his text with a call, he glanced at caller ID, and groaned. Not only was his dad calling but he was video calling.
With a long drink of air, he clicked to answer. “Hey, Dad!”
“Hey, Marco. Just calling to see what time you’re getting here on the twenty-third.”
“I’m really not sure.”
His dad’s expression dissolved into confused unhappiness. “Not sure?”
“I mean I’ll be there.” He hoped. “I’m just not sure what time.”
“Really, because I would think that would be something that would be easy to figure out.”
“It’s complicated.” If he thought telling his dad he’d gotten Eleanora pregnant was going to be difficult, explaining that he convinced her they shouldn’t get married, but now he wanted to marry her, and she didn’t believe him would be doubly so.
Hell, sometimes he didn’t understand it himself.
His dad continued talking. The whole time Marco could hear nervousness in his voice. He decided his dad was simply worried that his kids were going to bail on him for Christmas Eve again. But he couldn’t say anything to assure him that wouldn’t happen. After an awkward minute or two, they disconnected the call.
He got off the jet, shaking his head. His life was a mess, but his family was a bigger mess. They hadn’t had a Christmas together in three years and when they finally decide to see each other it was as if they couldn’t do it.
Because they hadn’t dealt with his mother’s death?
He almost stopped walking.
They hadn’t dealt with his mother’s death. None of them had.
Recognition fluttered through him. He could see that now. Not because time had passed but because falling in love with Eleanora for real gave him the strength to see the truth.
He’d talked about his mom with her the day they’d danced in the lobby of the Grand York, and she’d told him things that had given him peace.
After ten years, he finally had peace about his mother’s death.
He would always miss her, but that conversation with Eleanora had changed him. In these past weeks, he wasn’t trying to figure things out so he and Eleanora could co-parent, he’d been falling in love. Not in the paper-thin way he’d always believed love to be, but in a deep, abiding way.
This was serious. This was love.
He was ready for everything he and Eleanora could have together. The way his mom would have wanted him to be.
Except he’d blown the proposal.
He knew she loved him. He loved her—
He thought back to the words he said the night he’d asked her to marry him. Everything about him and Eleanora had always been easy and fun, and he’d made that proposal flat and inelegant.
He’d wanted to fix it. He’d tried to come up with a way to ask her to marry him again that would show her that he loved her, but he hadn’t. He wasn’t any good at real love. She’d be crazy to take him back, crazy to even listen to another proposal.
He stopped walking. If he kept pursuing a woman who was now hell-bent on getting away from him, he was the one who was going to end up hurt.
His limo driver opened the passenger door. Obviously having been apprised of why he was in Rome, he said, “I can drive you to the airport, sir.”
“Do you know if her flight has landed?”
“Yes. But they haven’t deplaned.”
“They haven’t?”
“Gates are crowded.”
“Then let’s get going!”
He waited for his brain to go nuts with warnings about being hurt but nothing came except a reminder that she was hurt. He’d hurt her. And he couldn’t have that. It was his job to love her. She was his.
His brain stumbled. She was his. She had always been his. This was what she’d been waiting for, for him to have the overwhelming realization not just that they belonged together but that his life without her was intolerable. That she made him laugh and think and they were amazing together in bed.
As they drove to the airport, he realized he had always loved her. It had taken until now to recognize she was his. For real. Forever. No matter what. By God, that’s what he intended to tell her.
The risk of it whispered through him. He’d always controlled the things in his life that he could control and handled the unexpected. But he suddenly saw that life was nothing without risk and even less than nothing without love. That was what his dad had been going through. That’s what their family had been going through. Emptiness caused by fear or loss.
Well, he was done being afraid and living half a life.