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“I will take that as the highest compliment imaginable,” Julienne replied.
It took him another year to convince Paola to move into the villa, where she could be mistress of the house at last. And his grandmother might have been in her nineties, but she ran the villa with an iron fist. And ordered Cristiano, Pietro and the three other sons Julienne bore him around at her leisure.
“It is not difficult to make a good man,” the old woman told him on her hundredth birthday, grinning at him over her cane. “All it takes is a woman’s firm hand.”
Cristiano could not disagree.
But the hands he preferred on him belonged to his wife.
Julienne was his north star, his lodestone. She carried his babies, she raised his sons and when she was not busy creating tiny humans, she served on the Cassara Corporation board as well.
And, finally, together, they made it the family company it never had been in his grandfather’s hands.
“That’s because you are the man your grandfather never was,” Julienne told him, year after year. “You love your wife. You would die for your family. You have honored your grandmother, and yes, Cristiano, you have rescued each and every one of us. Over and over again.”
But Cristiano always knew the truth.
Julienne might have been the one to walk into that bar, determined to sell herself. But she had been the one to do the rescuing.
“I love you,” he told her, every day of their lives.
And better still, showed her.
In any way he could, in every way that mattered, he showed her.
How he loved her. How crucial she was not only to his happiness, but to the mechanics that kept the world turning. How perfect she was and always had been, just as she was.
And in tougher times, or when things seemed the darkest, they would take out that stone that was shaped like a heart, and it would make them laugh.
Cristiano would tell her stories about ogres and trolls and terrible fools. Julienne would tell him stories about princesses who were born on hilltops, who came down to the sea to find their Prince Charmings.
Again and again, they wove their stories around themselves until they were right again.
Until they were whole.
“Happy-ever-after isn’t made,” Julienne liked to say as they lay in their bed, still wrapped around each other tightly twenty years on. “It’s mended. The days are the thread, the years are the colors, and all we have to do is sew.”
“I love you,” Cristiano told her.“Ti amo, mi amore.Tu mi completi.”
His heart, his love, his wife.
His whole life, gleaming there before him. Light and joy.
And then he rolled her over, and showed her how he loved her in the language he was most fluent in, once again.
Until she sang their love back to him, the way he loved best.
The way she always did, and always would, all the rest of their days.
