I exploded with laughter, falling into him. He made anung!noise when my elbow found a hard place to land—his still-hard cock. But he held me close, his body shaking with laughter, as we lay sprawled out on the dock, the crushed chair beneath us.
After a while, we both sighed, and even though we were still on the hard ground, my eyes started to droop. My knight had saved me from getting hurt. He’d literally wrapped himself around me so not one part of my body hit the dock.
“Thank you, my husband,” I whispered. “I might be bruised from all the sex” (because I was, and he didn’t seem to like it when he saw the purple marks in the bright light of day) “and your love marks on me, but…you broke my fall.” I turned and kissed him over his heart. “Thank you.” A breath and a kiss. “Thank you.” Another breath and another kiss. “Thank you.” A third breath, but this time, my kiss lingered on his skin.
I was determined to feed his heart words of love and gratitude. It didn’t seem like he had ever had that before. And when I was alone and thought about how starved he was for love, for…a woman to treat him like a man and not a machine, it made me want to cry—ugly cry. He had so much love to give. I just couldn’t understand how any woman could look into his eyes and not fall deeply in love with him—so deep in love, she’d hurt herself before she hurt him. But there would be no other woman who loved him as much as I did, if love was even a strong enough word. I didn’t believe it was. I believed what we shared couldn’t be replicated or replaced. It took the two of us to makeuswhole.
“You make me the man I have always longed to be, the man I am, the man I will always be,” he said, and it sounded like he was almost speaking to himself. “You have no idea how long I havewaited for you,my Amora. Perhaps…” his voice seemed to linger in the breeze, his hands lifting before they came back to me gently. “Centuries.No.Even longer. Before time even began. I would carve my own heart out before any harm ever comes to you. I refuse to live this life without you, now that you are here.”
Rising with me in his sheltering arms, he carried me inside thecastello, but we didn’t get any sleep.
Chapter 30
The Island from a Different Perspective
Even though my husband only spoke the truth, and he spoke to me enough, sometimes he could turn inward, so reflective, like an image of time wavering against the reflection of clear water, but his thoughts were too deep to find. I would have thought it was just him, but I noticed Luca Fausti was the same way, and so were his sons. Romeo less than Brando and Dario, but at times, Romeo could be that way too. Their wives noticed it. Sometimes they would bring them out of the mood, and sometimes they left them sitting inside with it.
Rocco hadn’t mentioned it to me, being reflective again, but I’d figured out one of the reasons why he was determined to leaveCastello Burraneaand explore the island.
He was out to prove—to himself mostly—that what existed between us was more than just sex. He knew what we had was real, but he was almost…hesitant to believe that what he’d always craved was finally his.
The “love” between us.
He’d retract into himself so deeply, he’d stare at me, unblinking, and after however long—either I’d call his name or he’d snap out of it on his own—he’d shake his head, like he was surfacing, waking up from a dream.
It was Juliette who had told me how Rocco had been used for his, er,entirebody. Even the thought of it sent anickfactor through me, the green monster rearing her crazed head. But…to paint the entire picture of his life up until that point, how he came to be that ghost in the window of my photo, I had to consider his past and how it had changed him.
And for something to change a man like him…almost like an island…it took years and years of erosion.
Erosion of his wants.
His desires.
His heart.
Juliette had also told me how many hearts he’d broken because he never felt a connection to a woman. It was always an understanding.
An arrangement.
So many damn rules boxing him inside of his life.
Then there I came, the wildest thing he’d ever felt a connection to, and he could barely keep me contained in his heart. Our connection was just as strong outside of the bedroom than it was in it. The bedroom only brought our bodies together in some kind of harmonious joining that no words could describe, nor did it need any. Just like our relationship, it was part of us, what made us melt into each other without rhyme or reason.
The only way I could describe it…
My heart needed his to survive, and his needed mine. As long as we both breathed, we could live.
To the realists of the world, it would probably sound like the crazed ramblings of a newly delivered author to the romance world, but…the tension, the pressure for me to flee New Orleans to make it to this island…my heart believed it went deeper than being chased by a killer. Some deeper part of me sensed that my reason to live was about to die. The killer was symbolic to what was about to happento meif Rocco would have set his other foot in the cold grave.
Dramatic? Maybe. But the truth was the truth.
We both didn’t seem to exist without each other, but unlike my mom, it was like we still held on to who we were separately. Our differences contrasted us like two colors that only enhanced, or maybe even enchanted, each other. I was an old soul with wild-child ways, and Rocco was his age with rules reigning over his life—but only laws that his family abided by. It didn’t seem like maiming or murder mattered much to his people. He was cold about it. Almost detached. Almost like I had been when writing the criminal thriller.
All that to say…we explored the island.
He was determined to give me a tour from one end to another. I was determined to absorb it all, and not to prove anything to him. He was the only one who could blink for the last time and realize…This is the truth of my life. Believe it. Live it.And I’d be there, smiling at him as he brought me into focus for the rest of his life. But I justlovedbeing with him. Spending time with him. Getting to know him and sharing parts of my life with him, both known and unknown. We were building a life together. Putting down a solid foundation for the years to come. This shelter we were building was for what existed between us—theitthat had no name but somehow did—in the secret part of the heart we shared.
We seemed to talk about everything and nothing as we explored day after day, our age difference not mattering because I could be just as deep and reflective as he could when the mood struck.
