Page 35 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

“Because. I either have to continue building, forever and ever, or I have to marry and produce an heir. You don’t want me to build over the top of Holiday House. Increasingly, I don’t want that either.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it would hurt you,” he said. “And I don’t want to do that.”

She clung to that. Imagined holding it in her fist like a bright, shiny jewel.

If he cared about hurting her did that mean he cared?

Or was this the manipulation?

She didn’t know, but she knew what she wanted to believe.

“But... But what would marriage between us entail?”

“I think we only just had a small sample of what it entails,” he said, his voice low and seductive, and how she hated him for that. How she hated him for the ease with which he could take her back there. Could make her want to say yes regardless of whether or not it made any sense.

That bastard.

Was this what he had always planned on doing?

“You are looking at me as if I am a monster, and you did not look at me like that only moments ago,” he said.

Her face went all hot and she resented it.

“You... Is that why you slept with me?” She was so aware that she knew the people who were passing by, at least by face, if not by name. So aware that she was playing out this intimate moment for all the town to see.

“No,” he said. “Of course not. Of course that is not why.”

“Was it your plan all along?”

“No. My plan was to bulldoze your bed-and-breakfast and build a hugely lucrative resort property. But this is another way forward. An alternative.”

“What if I don’t want your alternative?”

“Then I will proceed as I had originally planned. That is up to you. Though I do not know why you would want to make it so difficult.”

She realized then that she was standing at the cusp of an improbable issue. An unsolvable problem. She couldn’t go back to the life that she had known before he had come into it. That was the simple truth. She had been trying so hard to cling to her existence. To what she knew. And part of her had believed that once he left, as long as she won, as long as she was able to win this fight with him, then she would be able to go back to the way things had been. To that simpler time. Her simpler self.

But it wasn’t true.

She was changed by knowing him.

It was an utterly horrendous thing to realize. She was altered for having met the man. Part of her would always be missing if he was gone from her.

No, she wasn’t in love with him, but she felt something for him. There was no pretending that she didn’t. And if he left, if he went away, it wouldn’t be like he had never come there. Because she could never be untouched by him. Unkissed by him. She could never go back to how it had been before she was possessed by him. She was changed. Forevermore.

And always she would be living a half life. The one from before and the one after.

“So wait a minute,” she said. “I marry you and...”

“I will give your mother the money that she wants. She will be cared for. The mother-in-law of a billionaire. You will have Holiday House, preserved, though you will not be able to be there all the time, you will of course be able to go there as you wish.”

“But you and I will be married.”

“Yes. And I live mostly in New York City.”

She grimaced. “New York City. I have never been there, but it sounds vile.”

---