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“I’m glad he told you,” she whispered. “And I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Christmas is a time for family,” he said, repeating her words back to her.
“So it is,” she smiled.
“And I’m not going anywhere again,” he promised, kissing her hair.
Her eyes swept shut and sleep closed in around her; she welcomed it, she accepted it, but she didn’t bother hoping she would dream of Vitalo – not when he was right there with her. She hoped only that when she woke up, she would discover this was her reality.
And she did, because it was.
Forever more.
*
“She looks nothing like me,” Vitalo teased, smiling down at their baby with her pale skin and pink lips. “Thank God.”
Bella grinned, tired but happier than she’d ever been. “She has your chin,” she contradicted, pressing a finger into their baby’s dimple.
“And your smile,” Vitalo said, looking towards his wife.
“She’s only a week old,” Bella laughed. “We haven’t seen her smile.”
“You do not think this is a smile?”
“The nurses said it was gas.”
“Grumpy old women,” he demurred, and she pulled a face – mock stern, but silently she agreed with him. The two midwives who’d attended her delivery had been less besotted with Alexandria than Bella would have liked.
“Your mother and Lorenzo will be arriving later today,” he said, reaching into the cot and lifting their sleeping baby.
Bella reached out and playfully slapped his arm. “Don’t they say never to wake a sleeping baby?”
“I am not waking her,” he said, breathing in their baby’s sweet fragrance. “I am holding her. There is a difference.” He walked to his wife and put an arm around her, bringing the two people he loved most on earth together.
“It’s a shame Sophia can’t come,” Bella said, sadness briefly creasing the corners of her eyes. “But she can’t travel while in mourning, and we can’t go there until Alex has had her shots…”
“We will go as soon as we can,” he promised, a matching grief briefly marring his own handsome face.
“And Cleo?” She prompted, wondering at the half-sister she was yet to meet. “Any word?”
He shook his head, his expression tight. “Nothing. It is as though she disappeared completely off the face of the earth. One day she will be found,” he said, but Bella could tell his confidence was assumed.
“And we’ll be here for her,” Bella soothed. “Her family.”
“Yes,” he agreed, throatily. “Our family.” He leaned down and kissed her forehead. Alex stretched in his arms and both parents looked down at their infant, both with the same thought at the same time: there’d never been a more perfect, more beautiful baby in all the world.
“Family,” he said, and now his smile was genuine. “I never thought I would have this.”
“You do,” she said simply, and when their eyes met, it was with a surge of destiny and fate, of rightness and perfection. Because they had found one another, two people born separately but designed to live as a pair, two strong, intelligent individuals who were a formidable force when side by side.
Two people who belonged together, for all time, and always.
EPILOGUE
Sophia
HE’D DIED WHILE SHE was somewhere over the Atlantic, probably catching up on old episodes of Friends. He’d died while she was high in the sky, and she’d wondered if his spirit had passed through the aircraft, on its way to heaven.
