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My aunt was not a soft woman. She was tough.

She helped her husband run the family ranch with two small children.

She often worked as hard as the men, especially after my uncle had been killed in the car accident.

Her skin almost resembled leather, her hair hay, and her fingers were as calloused as my husband’s.

However, there were times…

She pulled me in and hugged me. She hugged me so tightly, I almost started to sob.

I knew she had pulled me in and hugged me because we could relate to each other.

Our stories were similar, even if I had not been able to toughen my skin as much as she had.

She released me in a rush, cleared her throat, and went back to cooking the meal.

It was enough. Always enough. I did not feel so alone in the burdens I carried because of the family name.

Atta entered the kitchen with Angelo, and after Atta started to help with dinner, Angelo went to find Mariano. It did not seem as if Angelo wanted to leave his wife as well. I had my own language with my husband, and Atta had one with hers. However, when he sent her a look, I understood it.

Our honeymoon cannot come soon enough.

I sighed.

Atta sighed.

Zia Bianca looked between us, then shook her head and said, “Even when love feels as if it will break if we stretch the connection, our stomachs still need to eat. Cook. ”

Atta and I started laughing. She fed me a piece of apple I had chopped for the fall salad and then took one for herself. When Hannah came into the kitchen, Atta went to feed her grandmother a piece, but she shook her head.

“There’s a phone call.” Granny Hannah looked directly at me. “For you.”

“For me?”

She nodded. “Italy.”

I had not realized it, but my aunt and cousin came to stand on each side of me, almost protectively.

“My father,” I whispered.

Granny nodded.

I stared at her for a second before I borrowed Zia Bianca’s new kitchen towel to wipe my hands on.

They were still sticky, but my heart was racing, and it felt as if I needed to get this over with.

My boots tapped on the old wooden floor as I made my way to the phone.

It was an older one. It had actual buttons to dial.

My father heard the breath I exhaled when I picked up the phone. He did not wait for me to greet him. He plowed right into his message.

“We have had a visitor. Signor Clint Herndon from America. He wears a patch over one eye.”

“I do not know of a man who wears a patch,” I whispered.

“LIES!” he roared in Italian. “It seems you have been busy backstabbing me, daughter.” Then he went on a tangent about how the Fausti family had stolen me from him. From the family business! He did not approve of this. For Capri, yes, but for me, no!

My sister’s name seemed like a trigger, and heat swelled up in me, as dangerous as a bunch of angry wasps.

“This is not your decision to make,” I said. “I will love who I love.”

He stopped his rant cold.

“Love?” he scoffed. “Love is nothing! This is a business we run. A business that has been going strong since before you were born, little girl. You are a top designer. Creator! What lives inside of you comes from me. I gave it to you. There is a rule. The Fausti family knows this. They are infamous for following the rules their family sets. We happen to have a law we share. You know the one.”

“I do. However?—”

“However, if Mariano Leone Fausti believes he can just steal the other Capello daughter and behave as he wishes, he is not upholding his end of the law. There are punishments for those who do not.”

“You can veto this law,” I whispered.

“I can, but I will not! I told him no. No, no, no ! He does not listen. Mariano Leone Fausti is a plain thief.”

“Call him or his family and say this to their faces.”

He grew quiet, and it was a deathly quiet, as if he was attempting to stop his heart from attacking him before he spoke again.

“I will speak to Signor Luca Fausti about this,” he said, and I knew when he did, he would not call Luca’s grandson a thief to Nonno’s face. He would become proper in the face of the family that had employed ours for hundreds of years. “In the meantime, you will come home.”

“Will I?” Even to my own ears, I heard the musing in that question.

Yes, I might have been prodding him, but for good reason.

He was not willing to allow me to marry Mariano, but he would allow my sister to marry him.

All because she wanted to. If my father told her no, she might fling him off her porch and into the canal.

All because I was talented, and she was not.

I was useful to the family, whereas she was usually a problem.

“You will ,” he said. The confidence in those two words almost made me hang up on him, but the stickiness of the apple made it feel like the phone had been glued to my hand, and I could not disconnect from it.

Perhaps because I knew. I knew he had found a way to hurt me. He had designed my buttons. He knew how to push them.

“You will , because if you do not, and I find he married you, I have every right to kill him, and there is nothing any of the Fausti family can do about it. You will arrive in Italy by tomorrow, or it will be done. Understand me, Sistine?”

I took a shaky breath. Two. Three . Then. “ Sì. ”

He hung up on me, and in the darkness of the house, I still could not set the phone down. Mariano had not told me that. He had not lied to me, but he had omitted. He was keeping the truth close to his heart. As close as he kept me. I was a part of that truth.

Of course, my husband had known this. He had married me to prove to the world that his name, Mariano Leone Fausti, would be connected to mine, even if from the grave.

A scent that my nose and lungs rejoiced at smelling—him—drifted in the cool air. He was close. In the shadows. Perhaps listening to my side of the conversation. I finally found the strength to set the phone down.

“Sis?” Atta’s soft voice floated toward me.

Slowly, I turned toward my cousin and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I must get back to Italy.”

This was when my husband stepped out of the shadows as the camouflaged hunter he was.

“Fuck if you will,” he breathed out. The tone of his voice was so cold, it made me shiver. The air felt chilled. Thick with it instead of thin. I was frozen in that moment with him.

“I will do what I want to do,” I said, and although the fire was there, it was not touching his iciness. I was shivering from the clash—his coolness and my hotness—and I attempted to hide it by crossing my arms over my chest and sticking my chin up at him.

His eyes almost glowed in the dimness, a fire behind them making them seem clear against his darkness.

Atta looked between us and stepped out of the room.

“I am your husband,” he said in Italian.

“Does this mean you only married me to call me this? Your wife? To defy my father?”

He became statue-still, his eyes boring into mine, and I knew that, if I moved a slight bit or breathed the wrong way, he was going to come for me.

He was going to swoop me up, throw me over his shoulder, and attempt to haul me back to our cabin.

He was going to show me through the power of his body how wrong my words were.

I did not feel as if they were wrong in that moment. Perhaps my heart did, but I was ignoring it. I was pissed that he did not tell me that! My family could kill him without anyone being able to stop it!

“You did not tell me that my family has the right to kill you!” My body went forward a little, only a breath. I was going for his neck.

There it was.

The movement he was anticipating.

Before I could even get that close to him, he hauled me up, threw me over his shoulder, and took me to our cabin.

We faced off—the tension between us wilder than the land around us, and we were swept up in it, hidden by it. Our anger was the only fire we had to see through the impenetrable darkness surrounding us.