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Tiziano moved then, stepping toward Ago as if he couldn’t stop himself. As if he didn’t try.
“Ago,” he gritted out. “Brother. Be honest for the first time in your life. I beg of you.”
Ago wanted to argue that he was nothing but honest. That he’d spent his life being excruciatingly honest, and that had cost him.
But he found that standing here in this enchanted cottage, drowning in all the rest of these things he could not understand—or perhaps understood too well, as little as he liked it—he couldn’t seem to say a word.
His younger brother looked at him and saw all of him. Ago could see that he did. Not just who Ago had become, but that mischievous little boy that Ago himself hardly remembered. Bright. Fearless. Funny.
Not irresponsible, but not eaten alive with a sense of duty. Not any more reckless than any other child while, at the same time, not unaware that big things would be expected of him one day.
Then his grandfather had started to get sick. And his father had gotten angrier. Ago supposed his mother was a factor too, though he had never been encouraged to examine that situation. Not the way Tiziano clearly had.
And the very thought of treating the child Victoria carried the way he had been treated...
It made him want to break things.
And Tiziano, damn him, saw that, too.
“Do you really want to do to your son what was done to you?” he asked quietly, but the words seemed to land inside Ago like stones. One after the next. “What would happen if you just loved him, Ago? The way they should have loved us. The way they couldn’t.”
“Tiziano,” Ago began. He shook his head. “I have underestimated you.”
His brother grinned. “I have wanted you to,” he replied. “I prefer it that way.”
Then he reached out and gripped Ago’s shoulder, with a fire blazing in his dark blue gaze that took no quarter. “Ask yourself what would happen, Ago. What if you took your wife and your son as an opportunity to make your own legacy, once and for all?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
VICTORIAWOKE,CONFUSED.
There was someone leaning over her and she understood at once that she was in hospital, for there was the beeping and there was something stuck in her hand—
And the next second she knew nothing but sheer panic.
“My baby,” she managed to croak out, though her voice felt treacherous in her throat, and came out like a stranger’s.“Is my baby all right?”
The nurse above her made soothing noises. “Settle down, Mrs. Accardi,” she said. In an accent that told Victoria that she was not in Italy any longer. “Your baby is fine. You are fine. You’ve just given us a scare, that’s all.”
But Victoria was already struggling to sit up. She was pressing her hands all over her belly, finding the baby’s head, but feeling nothing—and not believing for even one second that she would be in a hospital if something terrible hadn’t happened.
Then in the next moment, the baby kicked, punishingly. Then again, as if he thought it was a fine time to trampoline against her diaphragm.
It was wildly uncomfortable, even as she hissed in a breath. And still, the joy was so intense that she didn’t care how it was she’d come to be here or what else might be wrong. As long as it was wrong with her, not him. She wiped at her face with the hand that wasn’t connected to all these machines, not caring at all that it was trembling.
And that was when she saw him.
Belatedly, the fact that the nurse had called herMrs. Accardisunk in. It was the right thing to call her, of course, but she hadn’t heard anyone say that in the whole of her short-lived marriage.
But there was no time to think about that, because looking at Ago made the rest come rushing back.
That oddly perfect Christmas, even though she knew she planned to leave. The nursery, and what it meant that he’d gone to such trouble for no other reason than to make her happy. How desperately she’d wanted to believe that something like that meant more than it did.
Because there she’d been, falling in love. While he’d been prettying up the cage.
Although she had to admit, looking at him now, that it was hard not to wonder if she might have overreacted.
Ago looked...rough, for him. He was not clean-shaven. The stubble on his jaw lent him a roguish sort of air that seemed to make everything inside and out prickle. He was wearing trousers and a fine cashmere jumper that she understood was casual, for him. There was no suit in sight.
