Page 14 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

“I can. Except this decision controls her also. As long as you have this place, she is tethered to it. It determines what sort of life she can live. My mother is dead. She is controlling me from the grave. Because she can no longer control everything in life.”

She walked out of the room, and left him there to contemplate his eggs. He could see that he was in an uphill battle. When a person could not be manipulated with money, he simply had no idea how to proceed.

He wasn’t used to being at loose ends. At least, not these days. During his childhood, he had often spent hours alone. Moving about in darkness. Living in tainted luxury where only one space was ever sacred.

His bedroom had been a necessary refuge. One that he had controlled fiercely.

The old manner home had secret passages, and they had allowed him to move through the walls, to access different portions of the house. So that he didn’t have to walk down the cluttered hallways. But still, there were no other spaces in the house that his mother had not claimed with her illness.

He didn’t like being trapped somewhere. It was too reminiscent of that time in his life. It was too reminiscent of days he would rather forget.

How he loathed it.

It was drafty in this house. And it was old.

Even though the manor home he had grown up in had been much more stately than this, it had still been old. And old equaled chill. Damp. Particularly where he had lived in the Italian Alps.

Many people thought of warmth when they thought of Italy. Not so where he had resided.

He could well remember winters where they had been blanketed in a deluge of snow. He had never liked it. It had increased that feeling of being isolated in the walls of their home.

And so it was now.

But he was concerned about his charge.

She had become his charge, somehow.

He did not fear illness, but he had a preoccupation with cleanliness and the control of said cleanliness, because in his childhood home he’d had no control of his surroundings. Still, it had become a fixation on cleanliness, and this was pushing against his comfort level.

But he would simply wash his hands more often.

There was no one else to care for her.

He had never cared for another person before. He had never had occasion to.

He had spent his life caring for himself. As a child it had often felt like a matter of survival. There had been two elderly household employees who worked for his mother, and they handled meals, such as they were.

As an adult, it felt like a luxury. To be able to care for himself, more or less, without the interference of his mother making it more challenging. Because that was how it had been. Ever and always. If he could find a way to ease things for himself, she would often make it more challenging with her impossible demands and needs. She wanted control. Over everything. Including him. When he had stopped being malleable, when he had stopped being a child, she had found all that much more difficult.

He decided that the best way forward would be to build the fire. So, he was going to take charge. And that was how it would be.

CHAPTER FOUR

HERHEADWASPOUNDING.Or perhaps it was just a pounding happening outside. It was difficult to say. She sat up, feeling groggy, and wondered if she had fallen asleep, or if she had just drifted out of consciousness for a moment.

She looked at the clock. Only twenty minutes had passed since she had come upstairs. It was possible that she had dozed. She felt terrible. She rolled out of bed, and went over to the window, and what she saw outside made her brows rise.

He was out there. Chopping wood.

In a suit.

Without thinking, she opened up the window. “What are you doing?” She looked down at the man himself, knee-deep in the snow wearing clothing that probably cost more than she had ever seen in her life.

“Go back to bed,” he said, looking up at her ferociously.

“Are you practicing to cut me into tiny pieces and take the house from me, or...?”

“I am not practicing the fine art of dismemberment. I am cutting firewood. That I might warm the library, seeing as you have a chill.”

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