How could he put himself in jeopardy knowing what he had become to me?
Everything!
How could he dare fate over a term—a label.
Wife.
He did.
He put his life on the line to say it! To prove to the world that I was his and he was mine.
This was exactly what I did not want to happen. I did not want a man to depend on for my heart to keep beating. I did not want to depend on anyone but myself. I had never had anyone before. Anyone but my aunt, my cousins, and a woman who considered me one of her grandchildren.
However, they did not live in Italy, and the only time I spent with them was on vacation.Sì, a vacation from the blues with my family in Italy. Perhaps I had wished for the months to turn into years, but magic was for witches who believed she could turn minutes into centuries with her magic. I was not astrega, even if my eyes were wise and my laugh cackled when I was nervous.
My time on the ranch had always been temporary. A brief reprieve from my life in Italy. I had never allowed myself a place inside of the scene. I kept to the outskirts of it. The pain of accepting a life that was not mine was too great to even consider, especially since I knew from the beginning that my time was limited.
In that moment, I might have been crazed, but the truth cut through my red fog.
Mariano Leone Fausti had becomemyscene.
The perfect one.
My life.
I was deep into our scene with him, the scene the quilt would one day show to the world—he and I, our children, if God allowed it, and all the time we would spend together. The placeswe would go. Our hearts would start out as two, but the closer one peered at it, they would notice.
Only one heart remained.
We shared it.
If he was torn away from me…
I shook my head, my heart feeling as though it would beat out of my chest at the mere thought of it. It was not easier to think of me tearing my heart away from his first, but I would rather do the leaving than be left behind. I could not stand this life without him in it, now that I knew what it meant to haveall mine.
“Stop thinking it!” he roared.
I blinked up at him. He had my wrists trapped in his hands and he was staring at me as if we shared a mind. He had read my thoughts.
“You pulled away from me,” he snapped. “I will not allow it. I will not allow it! Youare mine. You pull away from me, you fucking rip the heart from my chest.” He set one of my hands there, and I realized he was speaking in two languages as well. “If you’re going to do it, fucking do it.”
“How could you do this?” I barely got out. I hated the pleading note in my tone. I could not deny it. I could not deny the truth, damn it! I could not deny that if something were to happen to him, I would suffer the worst fate a woman could suffer. I would be lost in this world without him.
So lost.
“My heart cannot take it,” I whispered. My head, all the weight inside of it, overflowing from my heart, fell against his chest. All of this was much too heavy to carry alone.
I needed him. Needed him so much, it frightened me to my core.
“Look at me, Sistine.”
It took me a minute to do so. His stare had always been penetrating, and I would get used to it. How deep he could goinside of me. However, this time, I had to acclimate again. I had to allow his searching gaze to go farther than he had ever gone before. He had found a secret spot where I had buried all the fear and resentment, and for the first time, I wiggled away from it. I attempted to take my wrists from the sudden shackles that were his hands.
“‘That is not what this is, Mariano Fausti.’” He was repeating what I had said to him in the heat of battle. He held tighter to me when I kept trying to wiggle. “Tell me,mywife,” he said in Italian, refusing to let me go, refusing to soften the penetration of his gaze. “If it is not rage, what is it you are feeling.”
“I do not have to tell you a damn thing, Mariano Fausti!”
He rolled his teeth over his bottom lip, and even though I was fighting it, he moved us toward the wall, setting my back against it. “Try again,” he said, using his knee to part my thighs.
