He began to laugh, and once he had started he couldn’t stop—but then he had never laughed with quite such uninhibited joy before. It was like balm to his soul, music to an ear starved of sound.
Lucy stared at him as if he had taken leave of his senses. ‘Shh! You’ll wake Nicci!’
He pressed his lips together like a schoolboy trying not to giggle in church. ‘Let’s get this straight, Lucy. You want to live in New York because I do—and I want to live on Mardivino because you do?’
‘Um…well, yes, I suppose so. Oh, Guido—this is terrible—it’s like Catch 22! What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t think we need to decide right this minute, do you? I think that there are rather more important things to do.’ Like finding the right words to convince her that he didn’t care where the hell he was, just as long as she would be by his side. He felt like a blind man who had just stumbled into the light. And that, he knew, was the restorative power of love.
‘Guido…’
‘Shh.’ He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it, then wrapped his palm around it very firmly and led her over to the crib. In silence they stood there, looking down on their daughter. Her dark lashes were like crescent moons on her perfect skin, and her little rosebud of a mouth pursed itself and made tiny sucking noises. One miniature arm was raised above her head, and it ended in a tiny clenched fist.
‘Do you think she’ll be a fighter?’ he whispered.
And Lucy recognised that she had so nearly thrown in the towel and given up on Guido.
‘Oh, I hope so,’ she answered fervently. ‘I really hope so.’
EPILOGUE
IT WASN’T all plain sailing from there on in—of course it wasn’t. No marriage ever was, and especially not one which had started out like Lucy and Guido’s. Guido had much to learn, and so did Lucy—about living together, about being newly-weds and new parents—oh, the list went on and on!
Mainly they had to learn about each other, but the magical thing was that they both wanted to—with a passion which made the steep learning curve seem like a doddle, and all the little hiccups fade into insignificance.
What had started as a tiny thaw in the ice which surrounded Guido’s heart melted under the onslaught of the love given to him by his wife and his daughter. It was crazy, but love really did change everything—the way he felt, the way he viewed the world, and his place in it.
His own love flourished, and he learned that to show it did not make him less of a man, but more—for it made him a complete man. And as Guido’s love grew, so Lucy basked in it, growing more secure and more confident—certainly enough for the feisty streak in her nature to re-emerge.
The two of them were back to their magnificent combative best! In fact, as Gianferro remarked rather drily to Guido, it was something of a relief for the rest of the family now the house he’d had built for them in Lejana was finished!
It was, Lucy decided, the most beautiful house she had ever seen. So airy and light and full of windows—all the better to see the commanding sapphire of the nearby sea, which beat and roared and filled the air with its siren music.
The grounds sloped down to their own private beach—where Nicole would learn to swim and sail, taught by her father, who these days had the time.
Because Lucy had been right all along, Guido realised. She had told him often enough that he was achieving for the sake of achievement’s sake, and he didn’t need to do it any more. If he wasn’t careful then life would pass him by while he was tying up unnecessary deals. And now that he had a family of his own the lure of making money in his property business had begun to pale—especially if you looked at it with the cool logic he always liked to employ—except maybe where his wife was concerned.
Even if you discounted his inherited wealth—which he had put into a Trust Fund for Nicole and any future children—he had earned all the money he could want, and more.
So he’d stopped wheeling and dealing across the globe, and put his energies into Mardivino instead—and his expertise in property stood him in good stead to advise on issues of architecture and planning.
As a couple, they stayed away from a lot of Royal functions—unless, as Lucy joked, they needed to ‘swell the numbers’. They were happy to help out when needed, but that was all. Guido hated the rigidity of Court life, and Lucy wanted to create for him as normal and as happy a nuclear family as she could. The kind he had grown up missing…
The two of them were sitting on their terrace one evening, watching the setting sun sink like a blazing lollipop into the vast sea. It was the end of a baking hot summer day—there had been a family picnic, and the last of their guests had gone. Nico and Ella and Leo had been there—Ella pregnant with their second child, being fussed over by her husband, while their son played happily on the sand with Nicole, watched by an ever-attentive nanny.
Gianferro had—surprisingly—agreed to make a place in his busy schedule to come, too. As the King’s health declined, so Gianferro’s workload increased. Lucy had thought how utterly exhausted he looked as she watched him build a sandcastle for Leo to demolish, and how rare it was to see him let his guard down.
Bathed in the red-gold light of the setting sun, Lucy turned to her husband, revelling in the fact that his lean, hard body could look so relaxed these days. When she had first known him he had been so fired-up—always restless—as if he had been constantly seeking something but hadn’t quite known what it was. Had he found it?
‘Didn’t you think Gianferro looked tired today?’ she questioned slowly.
Guido shrugged. ‘No more than usual.’
‘Well, I think he drives himself too hard.’
‘But that, cara mia, is the natural consequence of his destiny.’
‘Can’t you and Nico help him a bit more?’