CHAPTER TEN

      SHE MADE HIM work for it. And she made him wait.

      And Giancarlo had no one to blame but himself for either.

      “How do I know that you want to marry me and not simply to claim the baby in some appalling display of machismo?” she had asked him that first night, naked and astride him, when his intentions toward her, personally, could not have been more obvious.

      “Set me any test,” he’d told her then. “I’ll pass it.”

      She’d considered him for a long moment, her inky hair in that tangle he loved and her eyes that brilliant green. And the way she fit him. God, the fit.

      “Don’t ask me again,” she said, her tone very serious, her green gaze alight. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

      “Take your time,” he’d told her with all the patience of a desperate man. “I want you to trust me.”

      “I want to trust you, too,” she’d whispered in return.

      But the truth was they learned to trust each other.

      He flew back and forth from Italy as needed, and didn’t argue when sometimes, she refused to go with him. He shared her tiny studio apartment with her in her snowy New England town, a hundred miles or more from anywhere, and he didn’t complain. He shoveled snow. He salted paths. He made certain her car was well-maintained and he never pressured her to move.

      She told him more about her childhood with that terrible woman. He told her about his childhood with a woman less terrible perhaps, but deeply complicated all the same. And they held each other. They soothed each other.

      They came to know each other in all the ways they hadn’t had time to get to know each other ten years ago. Layer on top of layer.

      Until he came back from another trip to Italy one snowy March weekend and Paige said that maybe, if he had a better place in mind for them to live, she’d consider it.

      “I don’t know anything about homes,” she told him, her attention perhaps too focused on the book she held in her lap. “But you seem to have quite a few.”

      “You make every house I have a home, il mio amore,” he told her. “Without you, they are but adventures in architecture.”

      And he had them back in his house in Malibu by the following afternoon, as if they’d never left it ten years ago. The sea in front of him, the mountains behind him and his woman at his side.

      Giancarlo had never been happier. Except for one small thing.

      “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.

      Extraordinary.

       Theirs.

      And they spent the rest of their lives teaching her, in a thousand little ways and few great big ones, what it meant to be as happy as they were the moment they met her.

      * * * * *