Page 72 of In Italy for Love

‘Saying you don’t want to get another pet isn’t quite the same as holding your heart away from other people,’ she pointed out tentatively. ‘Sometimes you can’t help it.’ Those words seemed to echo in her mind with more meaning than she’d intended.

‘It’s self-preservation,’ he said with a shrug. ‘My life has been self-preservation since the day I had to make that decision.’

‘That makes sense,’ she had to admit. At least this time she wouldn’t make the mistake of deciding to stay here – for him. IfLuca had told her upfront he didn’t think he could love her, she would have been spared so much heartache.

The only problem was, with Alex, it felt like a choice between heartache now and heartache later.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and pulled on a pair of underwear. ‘I’m going to check on Attila.’

‘Sure, I’ll… I’d better go to my…’ She couldn’t find the end of that sentence.

She let him go before half-heartedly searching for her tracksuit bottoms. Her feelings were too raw to head back to her own cold room. She heard the rain pattering in the courtyard, the distant rushing of the creek, and she thought miserably to herself that she’d rather have the heartache later, thank you very much.

Dragging herself out of bed eventually, she was surprised Arco wasn’t sprawled in the hallway waiting for her. Padding to the kitchen in her thick socks, she peered in to see Alex sitting in a chair by the stove with Attila in his lap. He looked half asleep, which wasn’t a surprise. What she hadn’t expected was the woolly figure of Arco next to him, his snout on Alex’s knee.

Alex’s hand rested on Arco’s head and Jules’s gaze landed there and stuck. Arco was a young, energetic dog who couldn’t always be properly controlled, but he sensed something was wrong. He must be trying to comfort Alex. He’d never felt moreherdog.

‘Alex,’ she said gently as she approached. His eyes flicked open. He’d made the most difficult decision a husband could make. It was clear he would rather have died in her place than give the instruction to turn off the machines. But he’d loved Laura enough to do what needed to be done.

When his gaze focused on her, his eyes crinkled and a smile stretched on his lips. ‘Jules,’ he replied, his voice rasping. ‘You didn’t go.’

Her knees threatened to give out. ‘Are you going to come back to bed?’

‘Are you going to stay?’

‘I don’t particularly want to be alone right now.’

Lifting his hand to her face and around to the back of her neck, he warned her, ‘I won’t sleep.’

‘I know,’ she reassured him. ‘I’m not expecting to fix you. I just want a cuddle.’

His smile grew broad with a flash of teeth and he leaned up to press a wobbly, affectionate kiss on her mouth. ‘A cuddle sounds good.’

After settling Attila on a side table in Alex’s room and fetching a blanket for Arco, Jules couldn’t help chuckling at the bedroom menagerie. She settled her head on the pillow with a hesitant glance at Alex, who stretched out sleepily beside her.

‘Roll over,’ he mumbled, nudging her to turn away from him.

She did as he asked, wondering if this was something to help him ignore her and go to sleep, but he shuffled closer and draped an arm over her, holding her against him with her back to his chest. His deep sigh blew her hair onto her forehead, but she didn’t care as the weight of his arm over her, the closeness of his body soaked into her skin – beneath her skin.

When he pressed a lingering kiss to her neck and nuzzled her ear, the sensation was so sharp and bright that she thought ithadto be worth the heartache later. Much later, she hoped.

30

She noticed Alex moving around in the night, but only through the haze of brief wakefulness. When her eyes popped open to see the blades of sunlight around the edges of the shutters, she glanced warily across the pillow to find him deeply, solidly asleep, his cheek squashed against the cotton. He snuffled lightly, his breathing as even as the beat of a slow song, his bare shoulders looking impossibly broad when he lay on his side.

He hadn’t slept through the night – she knew that and she hadn’t expected to solve a deep problem he was wading through himself. But seeing him asleep next to her was its own tiny miracle, no less astounding for its fleeting nature.

Hearing a miaow loud enough to wake him, she slipped out of bed as quickly and quietly as she could and fetched Attila from the table, where he was staring disdainfully down at Arco. The cat didn’t seem impressed with the fact that Arco appeared to have adopted him into his pack after the heightened emotions of the night before. Attila was breathing normally and when she set his food bowl in front of him on the windowsill in the kitchen, he ate immediately, which made her smile.

She took Arco out briefly and then she couldn’t resist, she opened Alex’s bedroom a crack, hoping to catch another glimpse of him gloriously asleep. But he rolled over at the sound of the door opening.

‘Come back to bed, Jules,’ he mumbled, lifting a hand briefly before it flopped back on to the sheets.

‘That’s a request I can’t refuse,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘Did you sleep sort of okay? Did I bother you?’

‘No,’ he said immediately. He cracked one eye open. ‘Did I bother you?’

She shook her head, turning back the covers and slipping underneath. ‘I slept fine. I really didn’t want to go back up to my room. Attila’s eaten already, by the way. He seems better.’

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