“I need you, Dad,” he said. “I always have.”
“Huh. Well, it took some doing. You’re a stubborn cuss when you put your mind to it, just like me, but—Stop sweating. You’re making me nervous.”
Dimitrios buried a grin.
A murmur from the sixty friends and associates filling the hall had him looking up. His mother was coming down the stairs, holding his daughter by the hand, and suddenly he was so choked with emotion he could hardly swallow. The pale, listless little waif he’d worried about and fretted over for so long had turned into a sweetly rounded sprite whose cheeks were as pink as the rosebuds in her hair.
“Cut it out,” his father muttered brokenly. “The men in this family don’t cry in public.”
Behind him, all the people who’d helped him come to this day—Erika and Alexio, Noelle and everyone else who’d given his daughter back her life, friends he hadn’t known he had until he needed them and they were there for him—every last one rose from their ribbon-festooned chairs as the harpist tucked in the lee of the curving staircase segued from Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” to Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus.”
And suddenly, there she was, his bride, his Brianna, descending the stairs with the innate grace she brought to everything she did, her hand resting lightly on Carter’s arm, her ivory silk gown billowing around her, her lovely face shadowed by a gossamer veil.
He’d been wrong to think she’d lose her looks with age. Wrong to believe she’d have nothing left. Hers was a beauty carved from love, from compassion and deep generosity of spirit. It would cloak her features with softness, illuminate her from within, when she was old and gray and youth was but a memory. She would always be a beauty. His beauty, his life.
She was closer now, covering the last few meters that separated her from him, carving a graceful path through the rose petals Poppy was flinging enthusiastically before her.
He squared his shoulders and held out his hand. Her fingers closed around his, warm and firm and sure. His father was crying; his mother, too. But Brianna was radiant, her smile for him alone.
He was home at last.
The Giannakis Bride Page 16