“This is us,” I whispered.
He cleared his throat and kissed my fingers. “Yeah, it is, but Annie—I don’t want you leaving to protect me. I don’t want to follow in their footsteps when it comes to how they did that to each other. It killed my old man. It killed mamma.”
“They are very much alive,” I pointed out.
“They are,” he agreed. “They heal each other. But the thought of you leaving me doesn’t sit right in my soul. You’ll rip the heart from my chest. I’m not my father, and you’re not mamma. My old man would grin at this, in that sarcastic fucking way he has, but I’m going to speak my truth. Or maybe I’m fucking weak where he was stronger. You walking away from me would kill me. We’ll make a vow. Here. Now. In the bed we’re making together. Or the quilt, as you call it.” He waved a hand. “Wherever we go, we go together.”
“I’ll make this vow,” I said, kissing his fingers. “Only if you will vow to trust me with theentiretruth from this moment forward. If I am moving with you, I can only move in the right direction if I know the correct direction we are moving in.”
“I won’t allow this fucking rule to rule us,” he said, his entire body going rigid, except for the bulging vein on his forehead. “It doesn’t have the fucking right.”
“You are not answering me, Mariano Fausti.”
“Sì,” he said simply.
“Sì,” I said. “I do not move unless you do.”
The next day, we moved together.
Back to Italy.
Part Two
Chapter 34
Sistine
Butterflies fluttered in my stomach as my family’s palazzo came into view in Venice. Although we were about to face my family’s wrath, I could not help but to be thankful for the place where I was born and raised, and how this area of Italia had set the scene for an epic love story to be told.
Ours.
It was romantic and ruthless.
If the book or play had a name, it would simply be…
Fausti.
The man next to me, wearing a custom-made suit while the Venetian sun played in his dark hair and in his light eyes, his skin tan from a summer full of heat and hard work, would always play the lead to my heroine. I could not call him a hero or a villain. He was Mariano Leone Fausti, my husband, and whatever that entailed was who he was to the world or to me.
My breath caught when he looked over at me and met my eyes. He had given me a pair of sunglasses that had a tortoise finish, were oversized, and diamonds decked out the sides in an almost baroque pattern. His were much simpler but gave him an aura of cool that upped hisdo not fuck with mevibe to an infinite degree.
We were riding in a private water taxi, the wind running its cool fingers through his hair and only tugging at the end of his long black jacket. The scent of him filled the space between us, and I kept breathing him in, thinking back to the first days of when we had met.
How ornery I had been with him.
How I could not help but to run after him when I had a feeling he might be in danger.
How we would spar over words—he would take my comment and make it about him.
“You love me, Annie. You know you do. You even said so yourself with the whole ‘love is not a game’ speech.”
“What? This isnotwhat I meant!”
“You said it.”
I growled at him.
A grin came to my face, and he squeezed my hand. His eyes came to mine and then moved forward. He had been doing this the entire ride.
