I groaned, clenching my fist as I tried to contain how much listening to all of this again pissed me off. He held up a hand as if to say, don’t lose your shit yet; there’s more.
“In my idiotic, love-drunk twenty-one-year-old mind, I saw an opportunity. If I married Elle, you’d have to move to my estate with her, because she’d obviously want you to keep being her bodyguard. We’d live together. I’d form a marriage alliance with the Buccinis, securing my position and giving me a powerful ally. I knew Elenora didn’t love me or even really want to be with me, and she craved freedom. Once we were married, I’d sit her down with you and tell her about us. I knew you trusted her, Finn, so I thought it would work. She’d keep our secret, let us be together, and in return, she’d be free to have affairs and do whatever sheliked, as long as she kept up appearances at public events as my wife. She’d told me she wanted children one day, so I knew she’d be happy to have her own and would make a great mother. In my eyes, it was a foolproof plan. Obviously, I had no idea she was in love with Alessio Barbieri. I honestly didn’t think you’d be as upset as you were. I’d figured out a way for us to be together.”
I shook my head. “That… wouldn’t have been us being together, Enzo. That would have been me trying to hold on to something that would never truly be mine. I wouldn’t have survived living like that.”
“I know,” he sighed, the words scraping out of him like glass. “I know that now. And it was unfair of me to expect you to be okay with it. But back then…” He rubbed his head, his eyes shining with vulnerability. “Back then, I was living in fear. I was my father’s son, haunted by his cruelty, and I thought the only way to survive was to hide who I was. Having half a life with you was better than having no life with you. I was selfish, thinking only of my own needs and not yours. I’m going to be brutally honest now, because that is what you deserve, even if you will probably hate me even more for it.”
“I don’t hate you, Enzo,” I reluctantly admitted. “I’ve never hated you. That’s the problem.”
He exhaled, glancing away quickly before forcing himself to look at me again. “I never truly believed you’d leave me. Even after you broke up with me when you found out about my plans with Elle, I thought you’d eventually understand and see it could be good for us. That I was doing it for us, building something stable to protect all three of us.” He started chuckling, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “I even thought that once I married her, even if it took months or a year, you’d come back to me. That you’d realise the plan worked for everyone and thank me for it. I was crazy, I know.”
“Yeah. You were fucking insane.”
He nodded, a ghost of a smile dying on his lips. “Ten years give a man too much time to sit with the truth. To face the mistakes he made. Finn, I was never ashamed of you. I was ashamed of myself. Ashamed that I could never be the man to love you in the light. I was scared of how brutal the world would be if they knew. I was terrified of losing you, because loving you openly put a massive target on your back. And you were a Buccini soldier. It just wasn’t acceptable in our world. And all the fear I held on to, all the cowardice, meant I mistreated you, disrespected you, and ultimately lost you.”
Enzo’s jaw worked, the muscle twitching as if he were struggling to hold back his emotions. My own were on the brink of surging forward, so many conflicting feelings that I didn’t know how to process.
“I loved you so much back then, Finn. In every clumsy, wrong, toxic, half-hidden way I could, because I still didn’t accept myself. After you moved back to Sicily, I knew I could never marry. I could never produce an heir, because you were all I wanted. And I knew deep down that if I did, I’d lose you for good. So instead, I kept loving you in the dark and from a distance. But today and for the rest of my life, I will love you without fear. Without disguise. I don’t have anything left to hide behind.”
I inhaled sharply, my heart fracturing and rebuilding itself around those sentences. This was the part I’d been dreading, the moment he’d talk less about the past, about the wrongdoings that I could protect my heart behind and focus on the present. On what he was offering me for the future. Because we both knew he wasn’t the same man who’d broken both our hearts ten years ago.
He leaned forward, scooting his ass to the edge of the seat so our knees brushed. “Before I even open my eyes every morning, it’s you I think about. Everything I’ve done over the last few years has been to build me up to this. To sit before you, hopingyou’ll no longer see the man I used to be but the man I’ve become. This man. The one staring into your eyes right now wants to beat the crap out of that little shit for hurting you, for letting you walk away from him and not fighting harder, and for not loving you the way you deserve to be loved, Finn. Because you deserve the most epic, soul-consuming devotion.”
I wanted to say something, or run, but his eyes kept me pinned to the seat.
“If I’m lucky enough to be given a second chance, this time it will be different,” he whispered. “Because I’m different. I’ve done the work. I don’t care who knows. In fact, I want everyone to know. Let them talk. Let them stare. Let them come for me if they don’t like it, but I’m not hiding who I am or how I feel about you anymore.”
He stopped talking, his shoulders rising and falling. He reached forward and tugged the laptop from my hands. He placed it on the seat beside me, then took my hand in his, brushing his thumb across my knuckles. My eyes flicked over his shoulder to the soldiers behind him, who were glancing our way.
“I can’t undo what I did, Finn. But if you let me, I will spend the rest of whatever time I have left proving to you that I’ve finally learned what love is supposed to look like.”
Then he slowly, deliberately leaned forward and gripped the armrests on either side of me. Our foreheads touched, and my eyes widened as my heart pounded over the roar of the plane’s engine, everything too loud.
We held each other's gaze, a silent plea from him, before he gently brushed his nose against mine. I sucked in a breath, my whole body shuddering at what I knew was coming. I should have pushed him away. But when his hand slid up my jaw, feather-light yet steady and sure, something inside me fell quiet. All the noise, all the stares, the whole world melted away.
He hovered over my lips, waiting for me to meet him halfway. To take the last inch and agree that I had always been his and that he was still mine. The last of my restraint snapped, and I did. The kiss wasn’t soft. It was fire. A claiming. A promise. A breaking point.
The moment our tongues slid against each other, my hand snapped into his hair, dragging him deeper, and a moan slipped from his mouth into mine. The announcement that we were preparing to land burst the bubble around us and reminded us where the fuck we were. We broke apart, both panting. My eyes darted to the soldiers, who all quickly looked away, pretending they hadn’t just witnessed that, but the shock on their faces said they’d seen it.
“I’m done hiding,” Enzo said, his full lips widening as my gaze met his again. “You’re mine, Finn Rossetti. It’s time for the world to know.”
And to prove it, he kissed me again.
Chapter eighteen
Present Day
The moment he closed the gap between our lips, my world spun back to life in a flurry of technicolour.
He’d kissed me.
The desire and love that had always burned between us exploded when his tongue stroked mine, and I happily surrendered to the destruction. How had I forgotten how devastating those lips were? That kiss was… everything, yet nowhere near enough.
Just like all good things, the kiss had to end because we were landing, and I reluctantly moved back to my chair, trying to get myself under control. My lips tingled from his bruising touch, my heart pounded out of my chest, and my dick… fuck, it hadnever been harder. But it was the hope and pure happiness swelling in my chest that I was struggling to contain the most.
I’d forgotten how addictive this feeling was. He was the only one who had ever had the power to create it, and I’d fucking missed the lightness after years in the dark; the side of me that breathed only for Finn Rossetti.
I couldn’t wipe the shit-eating grin off my face as I stared at Finn’s flushed cheeks and the way he shifted in his seat, sliding his laptop back over his thighs to hide his raging boner. But my smile soon fell when I realised that, even though I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him, he wouldn’t look at me.
