The Temporary Wife: Luca and Valentina's Story(107)

I smile at her sheepishly as I lift our joined hands to my lips. “I’ll make you a deal,” I tell her. “For the rest of our lives, I’ll let you punish me for the things I’ve put you through, okay? I hear corporal punishment is all the rage these days. Something to look into, perhaps?”

She giggles and shakes her head. “Isn’t being married to me punishment enough?” she asks as the flight attendant scans our boarding passes.

“No,” I tell her seriously. “It’s the greatest blessing and my greatest honor.”

We walk onto the plane together, only to pause at the entrance, both of us freezing. “What the fuck,” I mutter as realization sinks in. This is not a commercial plane. It’s the Windsor private jet, and it’s filled with faces I didn’t expect to see.

“Luca,” my grandmother says, “Val.” She smiles in that way she does, undecipherable.

I stare around in shock when my brothers, Sierra, Raven, Faye, Silas, and Alanna all rise to their feet. “You made it,” Lex says, holding up his phone. He turns it toward me to show me the code that’s flashing on his screen. “I was getting tired of waiting. Maybe Last Call was a bit much, though. Did you guys run?”

Grandma clears her throat and looks at me with remorse in her eyes. “Luca, do you think that you can find it in your heart to forgive this meddlesome old woman? Val’s condition continued to worsen after her grandmother passed away, and doubt continued to creep in for you too. When you came home without Val and barely left your house for days on end, I felt like I had to intervene. I witnessed the way she was withering away, and I’d hoped she’d snap out of it, but as the weeks passed, the distance between you grew. Val needed something to live for, something to fight for. You both did.”

She looks away then. “I saw an opportunity to give the both of you a fresh start, and I took it. It was because of me and my manipulation that the two of you got married with so much standing between you, so I felt it was only right that I remedy my errors. I did what I could to take away the conditions that led to your marriage, so you would have an opportunity to choose each other, the way it always should have been.”

Valentina and I look at each other as all the puzzle pieces fall into place. “You played us,” I murmur, anger and relief warring for dominance.

“Right from the very start,” Valentina adds, her tone conveying her disbelief.

“When did this start?” I ask, my voice eerily calm.

Grandma hesitates, and then she grabs a photo from her purse. She hands it to me, and Valentina and I stare at it in surprise. “That’s the two of you, days after Valentina was born,” she explains as we take in the photo of me at age five with a baby in my arms. I look terrified but enamored, and Valentina looks tiny. “Luca, your mom and dad had gone to visit Val’s parents, and they’d taken you with them. You were positively smitten with her, and they’d joked then that they should arrange a marriage between the two of you. After all, Val is technically a Garcia, and your fathers were friends.”

Valentina tenses, and I tighten my grip on her. I couldn’t have kept our fathers’ friendship from her forever, but I wish I could have.

“It started off as a joke, but in the years after, your mother kept bringing it up. She adored Val, and she always joked she’d love to have another daughter, but since that wasn’t an option, she’d just have to make Val her daughter-in-law. It was nothing formal in the slightest, and at most, it was a few comments in passing here and there, but it stuck with me as something your mother wanted for you.”

She looks away then, sorrow overtaking her expression. “When we lost your parents, I also lost track of Val, until she applied for a job with us. I reached out to Val’s mother to ask if she’d consider an arranged marriage, but she vehemently opposed and told me that she’d make Val quit her job if I so much as mentioned it again. She didn’t even want Val working for us and wanted nothing to do with our family. I have no doubt that if Val had other job offers, she’d have asked her to work somewhere else. There was nothing I could do, and I figured that if you two were meant to be, as your mother seemed to think, then something would develop between you naturally. I waited for years, yet nothing happened. Even worse, Val stopped coming home for dinner at some point… so I took a risk, hoping everything would turn out the way I thought it would.”

I wrap my hand around Valentina’s waist, neither of us able to look away from the photo Grandma gave us. “You forced an engagement with the Ivanovs,” I murmur. “I’d either break it off because of Valentina, or I’d marry Natalia and we’d gain a strong ally. It was a win-win situation for you.”

“It was,” Grandma admits. “But I didn’t anticipate that the past would haunt you the way it did, and I should’ve known my meddling would result in the clashing of both your strong personalities. I noticed it whenever I saw you two together. You loved each other, and that love continued to grow throughout your marriage, but there were some insurmountable boundaries between you. When you’ve lived as long as I have, it becomes a little easier to spot the wounds people carry. You both don’t realize it, but you carried yours on your sleeve. I know you don’t believe me, but I just wanted you to be happy.”

I glance at my siblings. “And you guys? Were you all in on this?”