“Okay, now you’ve gone from misguided gentleman to a-hole. Not sure what happened there.”
He crossed to the table and set her cereal in front of her.
She looked up at him. “I want coffee.” Caffeine just might make this morning, and him, bearable.
“I don’t make coffee.”
“Oh, for the love of…” She stood up. “Hold her, please.”
He looked stricken, his face frozen. “Hold her?”
“So I can make coffee, so we don’t have to figure out a way to mainline the grounds directly into my bloodstream.”
He took a step back, his expression closing off slowly, his black eyes going flat. “Let’s go out.”
“What?”
“All of us. It will make a nice photo-op for the press, don’t you think?”
“I…suppose so.”
“Why don’t you go and get ready,” he said.
“Okay.” She stood from her chair and held Ana close as she made her way out of the kitchen and up to her room.
And that was when she realized that it had been her request for Dante to hold Ana that had triggered his idea of going out. And that in all the time since they’d come to live at his house, Dante had never once touched Ana.
* * *
After breakfast, Dante had spent the day in his office, working, avoiding Ana and Paige to the best of his ability. But it was impossible when they seemed to be everywhere. On his deck, in the living room. Paige’s clothes were in his closet.
He stood from his desk and stalked out of the office, walking down the hall. He would go out and get some air. It was late and the lights were off in the house. Everything was quiet, blessedly so.
He walked down the stairs and to the living room, headed out toward the deck. And stopped cold. Paige was there, cradling Ana, who was wrapped in a blanket, in her arms.
He could hear her, singing softly, even through the closed doors.
It all came into focus slowly, and for a moment, he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Paige smoothed Ana’s hair with her hand, her expression so loving, so serene.
It choked him. Pain rose up in him, tightening its hold on him. Memories of another lullaby. Of his mother.
He loosened his tie, trying to get breath, clawing at the button on his shirt collar. He felt surrounded, crowded. Like nothing was his own anymore. Like his control was being pried from his hands.
He walked away from the scene, taking the stairs two at a time. He threw his bedroom door open, feeling his hold on his emotions, on his control, slipping from his grasp.
He turned and hit the wall with his open fist. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t take away from the explosion of feeling in his chest. He drew his arm back and punched the wall, pain biting into his skin, a dent in the plaster, a smear of blood on the paint that had been perfect and white a moment ago. He looked at his hand and dropped it back to his side, his eyes on the damage he had done.
Damage that he couldn’t simply wash away. He could have someone come and fix it, of course, but that wasn’t the point.
He stood there for a long time and simply looked. At what he had done. At the evidence of what happened when he lost his control.
Then he went into the bathroom and ran cold water over his stinging knuckles, focusing on the pain, on this consequence. Letting it overtake the suffocating emotion that had risen up inside of him. Letting it bring back his clarity of mind.
He needed space. He would spend the night in his office in the city. Anything to get away from this scene of domestic bliss. The vision of the kind of love that had been torn from him so many years ago.
Just a little space. That was all he needed. And he would be back in control.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ANA was finally asleep, at eleven-thirty, and Paige was avoiding Dante. Which seemed pointless in some ways, as he’d been avoiding her since breakfast yesterday.
After they’d eaten, he’d disappeared into his home office. And then last night he’d disappeared completely, leaving a quick note saying he’d had a work emergency he’d had to go in for. At ten-thirty on a Saturday night. And today, she’d hardly seen him at all.
She’d spent time on the deck with Ana and a canvas, painting bold, brash colors that had nothing to do with the scene in front of her.