to the other on the cobblestones in front of Forno Leoncini. Cursing himself for leaving his gloves in the car, he blew into his cupped hands before shoving them into the pockets of his corduroys.
What had previously been a light snowfall had gained strength over the past few minutes, the thick flakes swirling around him as the wind kicked up. He knew he couldn’t stand out here forever, but he wasn’t ready to make his presence known. Not yet.
Despite the cold, his skin grew hot as he peered through the bakery’s garland-framed windowpane. His eyes focused on the woman standing before a rectangular stone table, her flour-covered fist punching a ball of dough. The last time he’d seen her in the flesh, she was standing in a church vestibule, wearing a wedding gown, preparing to marry his older brother, Cameron.
Three years later, Aiden was still conflicted over how he felt about Cameron being a no-show for his own wedding. On the one hand, he was grateful he had not been forced to endure years of seeing Nyla and his brother living as man and wife. Aiden doubted he would have been able to stomach it, knowing that she was only pretending.
Yet Cameron’s decision to stand her up at the altar had been the catalyst that prompted Nyla’s hasty move to Europe. She’d left Atlanta a week after the aborted nuptials and had not been back since.
But here she was, a mere twenty feet away. And she was as sexy as ever. More gorgeous than he remembered, if that was even possible.
Aiden turned up his coat collar as the snow began to fall in earnest. Uncertainty, entwined with a heavy dose of nervousness, kept him rooted where he stood, just outside the warm glow cast by the bakery’s interior lights. He was unsure how Nyla would react to him tracking her down to this small town tucked away in the hills of the Siena region in Tuscany.
He’d debated the entire drive here whether to contact her but decided against giving Nyla any notice. Aiden was convinced she’d make an excuse for why he shouldn’t come, just as she had done the previous three times he’d suggested they meet in the month since he’d been in Zurich, Switzerland, consulting on an IT project for a worldwide banking giant—a job he only accepted because it brought him to Europe.
No, he wasn’t giving her a chance to back out this time. He’d come too far to find her—he’d crossed a damn ocean.
Yet Aiden still couldn’t bring himself to take these last few steps. Because worse than having Nyla make excuses about why she couldn’t see him would be to have her flat-out reject him to his face.
His gut clenched with a sharp ache. Nyla wouldn’t do that.
Even though she had.
Aiden mentally blocked the words she’d spoken the last time he saw her face-to-face, as he had more times than he could count over the past three years. He never believed them anyway. Guilt and fear had forced her to say the things she’d said that day. He knew what was in Nyla’s heart.
Which was why, when she mentioned on Facebook that she would be spending Christmas alone, he canceled his nonstop flight to Atlanta and rented a car instead. He’d made the six-and-a-half-hour drive from Zurich to San Gimignano, Italy, in just under eight hours. If not for the snow, which he’d never driven in before, and the road signs written in a language he didn’t understand, he would have been here much sooner.
Once he’d made the decision to finally go to her, Aiden couldn’t get here fast enough. Now he just needed to take this final step.
Not yet.
His eyes remained focused on Nyla as she labored over the dough, punching it down, flipping it over and reshaping it. Memories of the countless hours he’d spent perched on the kitchen counter at his parents’ home, or—later, as they became closer—at Nyla’s house in Kirkwood, watching her do this very same thing, had his chest tightening with a mercifully sweet ache.
His favorite fantasy of all time was imagining Nyla coming to him, sweaty from the kitchen heat, with that sexy smile that used to curve up the corner of her mouth. She would crook her finger and he would obey. He would take her then and there, on the kitchen table, up against the counter. Anywhere he damn well pleased.
Aiden shut his eyes against the onslaught of wanting that crashed through him.
Why had he let her pretend that the attraction between them was one-sided? Why had he let her get away without fighting for her?
None of that mattered anymore. She was here now, and Aiden wasn’t letting her get away.
He straightened his spine.
He hadn’t come all this way to stare at Nyla through a window. He’d come with one goal in mind, to convince her that he was the Williams brother she should have been with all along.
“You can do this,” he whispered.
He had to do this. He was tired of living without her.
Aiden sucked in a deep breath of the frigid air, opened the bakery’s front door and walked inside.
* * *
Nyla Thompson held the crayon drawing she’d received in the mail yesterday close to her face while she held her phone out in front of her with the other hand.
“I love the Christmas card you made for me, Angelique. It’s the most beautiful drawing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” she told her niece through her phone’s web-chat app.
“It’s me, Mommy, Daddy, Landon and the Christmas tree,” the four-year-old said. “Jack is behind me,” she tacked on, referring to the old beagle Nyla’s sister Rae had owned long before she became a wife and the mother of two.
“Your aunt Nyla needs to get back to work,” Nyla heard just before Rae came back into view. Her sister took the electronic tablet from her daughter and smiled at Nyla. “I don’t want to keep you too long, but she demanded to talk to you before we left for the cabin,” Rae said. “She was so afraid her Christmas card wouldn’t arrive before Christmas.”
Nyla’s heart melted. “She’s such a sweetie. You have to bring both her and Landon the next time you come here.”
“A four-year-old and a two-year-old on a nine-hour flight across the Atlantic? You must be delusional,” Rae said. “I think it’s high time you made it back to Atlanta for a visit. Patrick and Lana will soon have another niece for you to meet. I’m hoping for a New Year’s Day baby.”
Their brother’s wife was due with their first child in just a matter of days. The desire to be there to welcome her newest niece into the world was so overwhelming that Nyla had seriously contemplated doing something she had not done in almost three years—return to the United States.
“I’ll think about it,” Nyla said.
The sarcastic look on her sister’s face spoke volumes. “Sure you will,” Rae said. “We have to get on the road, so I’ll talk to you later.”
“Drive safely,” Nyla said. “And tell everyone I said hello when you get to the cabin. I’ll call you all Christmas morning.”
“Make sure it’s Christmas morning our time, not yours.”
“Yes, I know,” Nyla said with a laugh. She waved goodbye to her sister and ended the face-to-face Web chat.
Pocketing her phone, Nyla pushed back at the wave of melancholy that threatened to wash over her. She had become an expert at battling homesickness, but it was always worse during the holidays. That was the one time of the year that her scattered family came together. The tradition had started when they were kids, when her parents would take them to a cabin in the Smoky Mountains to enjoy the holiday. For the third year in a row, she was missing it.
She thought about the legal pad sitting next to her computer, upstairs in the apartment over the bakery that she sublet from Murano Leoncini, the bakery owner’s eldest son. The pad had a list of properties that could possibly house a high-end bakery. She’d started her search for available retail space in