“You don’t watch television?”
I chuckle at that. “I don’t have the time. And if there’s a show or movie my sisters insist I must see, I watch it on my computer or iPad.”
“But lots and lots of books,” he comments, standing in front of my bookshelf.
The shelf itself is an antique that I picked out from the vast Alighieri family storage warehouse in Chianti. The books are a mix of contemporary and classics.
Italian and English.
Fiction and wine.
I don’t know why, but his scrutiny of what I read is intimate. I divert him and walk him to the kitchen.
I love this space.
I had it redone when I moved in. It bears the mark of use:a copper pot hung where it’s easy to grab, olive oil on the counter, a bowl of late figs waiting to be consumed.
I usually eat here—sometimes food sent over from the estate restaurant, sometimes what I cook myself, depending on the day and my energy.
Outside, the pergola connects everything. The house. The tasting room. The courtyard where I drink coffee in the morning and wine in the evening, depending on what the day demanded of me.
“This is yours,” Nico muses quietly. Not a question.
“Yes.”
I’ve lived here for years. Long before I became a wife. Long before anyone cared to notice. This house knows my rhythms—harvest mornings and fermentation nights, silence and exhaustion, and the rare, perfect stillness when the vines sleep.
Nico stands in front of the large window of my kitchen and looks through it past the courtyard at the rows after rows of vines stretching toward the horizon.
“This is the House of Alighieri,” he murmurs.
I smile at that. “This is the Tenuta Pietra Alta.”
He faces me. “Yes, it is. But it’s…this is the heart of what we do, Alessia. I am realizing that you are the heart of the House of Alighieri. I don’t think many people know that.”
I frown, puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
He lets out a soft chuckle and shakes his head. “Neither do I, fully,” he reveals, telling me nothing.
I step back and go behind a kitchen counter as if putting distance between us will tamp down these unfamiliar emotions coursing through me.
“I…should make dinner,” I blurt out.
His eyes gentle as he holds my gaze.
I am mesmerized.
The man is handsome, Adonis handsome.
And, according to Zoya, he smells good.
And…he’s going to sleep in my bed with me tonight.
What does that mean? Will we make love?
I look away because that thought reminds me how long it’s been since I shaved downthere.
Oh dio! Oh God! Oh God!
