The east wing stretches longer than I remember — or maybe time moves differently when you are walking toward a man instead of running from one.
Luca leads me through corridors I have never explored, past the family quarters, past the guest rooms, to a section of the estate where the walls are older and the lighting is dimmer.
"My room is at the far end," he says, almost apologetically. "Staff quarters, technically. The distance from the main house is deliberate. Close enough to be useful, far enough to remember my place."
The observation lands without bitterness. Fifteen years of service, and they keep him at the margins like furniture that serves a purpose but does not belong in the formal rooms.
His door is plain. No ornate carvings, no family crest. Just wood and a brass handle that he turns with a familiarity that tells me he has done this thousands of times, always alone.
The room surprises me.
Not because it is luxurious — it is not — but because it is so distinctly him. Bookshelves line one wall, overflowing with paperbacks and botanical guides and volumes of poetry I would not have expected.
A drafting table sits near the window, covered in sketches of garden layouts and plant diagrams. The bed is simple, neatly made, and there is a small terrarium on the nightstand with succulents arranged in careful rows.
Luca watches me study the space. He does not apologize for its modesty or try to explain it. He just leans against the doorframe and lets me look, patient as always, while I wander his room like a guest at a museum.
I pick up a worn copy of Pablo Neruda from his shelf. "You read poetry?"
"Everyone needs something that does not make sense," he says, and his voice carries the warmth of a man sharing a secret he has kept too long. "Poetry does not have to be useful. That is the point."
I smile. Actually smile — not the performance I have been wearing at dinners, but an expression that crinkles the corners of my eyes. "You are secretly a romantic. This whole time."
"Secretly implies I was hiding it."
"You were absolutely hiding it. The brooding gardener act is very convincing."
"It is not an act." His mouth twitches. "I am genuinely brooding most of the time."
A laugh escapes me — light, easy, a sound I have not made in this house since before my wedding fell apart. I move to the terrarium, peer at the tiny succulents, touch the glass. "Did you plant these?"
"Grew them from cuttings." He pushes off the doorframe and crosses toward me, his footsteps quiet on the worn floorboards. "That one—" he points to a small purple rosette, "—came from the garden. Your jasmine hedge."
The detail catches me off guard. A piece of my garden, alive in his room all this time. A fragment of the sanctuary I built, preserved by a man who never asked for permission to keep it.
I turn sharply, intending to say thank you, or perhaps something teasing to cover the emotion climbing my throat, and walk directly into his chest.
He steadies me with hands on my shoulders. Neither of us moves. The space between us has collapsed to inches, and I can smell him now — soil and soap and the warmer undertone beneath both that belongs only to him.
His hands rise to cup my face. Slowly. Giving me time to step back.
I do not.
He looks at me. Just looks — not assessing, not calculating, not demanding anything. His hazel eyes trace my features with the same quiet attention he gives everything, and the looking goes on long enough that my heart begins to race, pounding against my ribs with an urgency that has nothing to do with fear.
"Ari," he says, and my name in his mouth sounds like permission and prayer woven together.
He kisses my neck.
Tender. Slow. His lips brush against my pulse point with a gentleness that makes my chest ache, nothing like Nico's claiming or Dante's consuming. This is an offering. A question asked with infinite patience.
I melt into him. His lips travel higher, behind my ear, and the sensation sends warmth cascading down my spine.
My hands find his chest, his shoulders, the back of his neck. He walks me backward toward the bed, kissing me, still slow, still careful, and when my knees hit the mattress I sink down and pull him with me.
The intimacy unfolds with excruciating slowness, and I discover I do not want it any other way.
Luca lays me back against his gray quilt, the fabric cool against my shoulder blades. He kneels between my thighs and traces the hem of my shirt with his fingertips, not lifting it yet — just touching the boundary, asking permission with his hands.
"Is this okay?" he asks, and the sincerity in his voice undoes me more than any practiced seduction could.
"Yes," I whisper.
He peels the fabric up inch by inch, his mouth following the path of exposed skin. His lips brush the soft plane of my stomach, and my muscles contract involuntarily. He pauses there, breath warm against my navel, until I thread my fingers into his hair and urge him upward.
"You are beautiful," he murmurs against my skin. "I have thought so since the first time I saw you in the garden, on your knees in the dirt, talking to the jasmine like it could hear you."
"You were watching even then?"
"Everyone was watching." His mouth finds the curve of my ribs. "You were impossible not to see."
I fumble with his shirt buttons. My fingers are clumsy, trembling, and he helps me — shrugging the fabric off his shoulders, revealing the body I glimpsed in the library. The scar on his ribs is longer than I thought, a pale ridge of tissue that runs from his side to his sternum.
I trace it with my fingertip. "What happened?"
"Bar fight," he says quietly. "I was twenty. Defending someone who did not ask to be defended."
"Did you win?"
"I survived. That was enough."
I kiss the scar. Taste the salt of his skin. Feel his breath catch when my tongue follows the ridge toward his chest.
"You deserve better than surviving," I tell him. "You deserve to actually live."
His hand cups my face, tilting it up until our eyes meet. "Tonight, with you, I feel like I am."
The words settle into my chest and take root there, tender and unexpected. I pull him down to me, and his mouth finds mine with a certainty that steals the last of my hesitation.
His hands are patient where others were urgent. His touch asks instead of takes. When he finally slides inside me, the fullness overwhelms me, and the sound I make against his throat is raw and honest and stripped of every performance I have been giving since I arrived at this estate.
He moves with devastating slowness, each stroke deliberate, and I discover that gentleness can undo a person more completely than force ever could.
The night has just begun.