The next thing she knew, she heard heavy footsteps coming into the room. Her eyes snapped open, locking onto the clock. It was after three now.
She was on her back, moving into a sitting position. “Alex?” she asked, her heart thundering heavily.
“Gabriella?” Her name sounded strange on his lips. As though he were convinced she was some sort of apparition.
“Yes. Is this your room? I should have investigated further, but I…” Didn’t want to. She couldn’t very well finish that sentence.
Couldn’t tell him that a part of her had been hoping this was his room. That she would encounter him later.
Shortsighted. As well as a little bit creepy. Shortsighted mainly because she was still wearing her sweats, which was hardly the official uniform of seduction.
“You were asleep,” he said.
“Yes. I fell asleep waiting for you to come back. I thought maybe you were dead.” Her other concern hit her, cold and hard. Obviously he wasn’t dead, but he could very well still have been having sex. “Were you with a woman?”
He let out a heavy sigh and sat down on the edge of the bed. “No. Would it have bothered you if I was?”
“That’s a stupid question. Of course it would have.” She saw no point in playing coy. She was sleepy, and cranky, and a little bit gritty behind the eyelids. She was in no state to play coy.
He shifted his position, lying down beside her, and her breath caught. There was still a healthy expanse of mattress between them, but still. “It was my brother. My half brother, Nate. I told you about Nate.”
“Yes, you did.”
“He found the ring. It has an inscription on it. B.A.”
“Bartolo,” she said.
“Probably. They are the same initials on the painting, Gabriella. They were his. She was his, just like your grandmother said. But it’s more than that. I know that my grandfather had to start over when he came to America. And I wonder just how completely the new beginning was.”
“You think he was my grandmother’s lover.” His suspicions mirrored her own. It made sense. There just didn’t seem to be another way someone could possess all of the same objects that appeared in the painting. More than that, it was her grandmother’s reaction to everything. The fact that she had seemed to want Giovanni to have the painting. “She knows,” Gabriella said. “She figured it out before we did.”
She thought back to the way that her grandmother had looked at Alex when he’d first come into the room at the estate in Aceena. “I bet you look like him,” she said. She couldn’t see him now; she was staring through the darkness, looking in his direction, barely able to make out his silhouette against the dark bedspread. “I mean, like he did.”
“I guess that’s why she let me take it in the end.”
“They loved each other. They couldn’t be together because she had to marry royalty. My grandfather.” Suddenly, her throat felt tight, painful. “The artist… Bartolo…he did love her very much. I know. You can see it. It must’ve killed him to part with those things.”
“Not quite. He’s still very much alive. For now. It wounded him to part with them. I wonder if he thinks seeing them will return some of his strengths.”
“It isn’t the objects he needs,” she said, her voice wistful.
“You are right.” He reached across the distance between them, drawing his fingertips slowly across her cheek. She closed her eyes, tried to fight the tears that were welling in them.
“It is a tragedy, Alex. To think of that. Just think of how much they loved each other all those years…”
She could see her life suddenly, stretching before her. Bleak and lonely. She realized that she could never marry a man who didn’t incite fantasy in her. Down to her very core. That she couldn’t possibly ever marry a man who understood art the way she did, or appreciated books, or had a library. That she couldn’t marry a man who was closer to her age and experience or didn’t think of her as an owl. Because that man wouldn’t be Alex.
It was Alex for her. Now and always. Forever.
She realized now that maybe she had not been protecting herself so much as waiting for this. For him. For the kind of desire that reached down deep and took over your soul. For the kind of desire that went well beyond common sense. The kind that didn’t care if heartbreak lay down the road. Even if it was a short distance away.
She thought of the way her grandmother had spoken of Giovanni—because she was certain that Giovanni and Bartolo were one and the same—of the fact that no matter the heartbreak she could never regret their time together, and it made her tremble. She wasn’t certain if she was that strong. To grab hold of an experience while giving no thought to the pain that the consequences might cause.
It was the kind of thing she had been avoiding all of her life. Being like her parents.
But they don’t do anything because of love. It’s because of selfishness.
Her chest felt like it had cracked open. Of course. That was the difference. Action was always empty, dry, when there was no love. There had been a time when her mother had kissed her goodnight before going off to a party, but the gesture had been empty. And the proof was in the fact that now that Gabriella was an adult neither of her parents ever spoke to her. Those goodnight kisses could not be a happy memory, not now that she could see them so clearly for what they were. The proper motions that her parents went through in order to salve what little conscience they had.