The Marquez family did business with family men. He now had a wife. The timing was useful. Chelsea got protection from Francine. He got access to the Vancouver property. Clean lines. Clear incentives. The kind of deal he understood.
That she was also soft, and brave, and earnest in a way that made his cynicism feel like a language he was suddenly struggling to speak, that she had come to his building in a cotton dress and carrying a Bible and not knowing what he looked like, that she had given herself to him with a trust so absolute it bordered on the kind of faith he'd never had in anything—-
Incidental.
Chelsea shifted in her sleep, her fingers curling tighter against his thigh, and Olivio's hand moved of its own accord to cover hers.
He looked at their hands. His, large and dark against the pale silk. Hers, small, the fingers slightly ink-stained from her highlighters.
He had watched what love did to the men in his family. Had watched Miguel become a ghost for a decade after Paulette, and Aivan turn himself to stone for twenty-three years. The person who left was the only one who stopped hurting. Everyone else just kept going, carrying the weight of an absence that never got lighter, it just became the shape your spine learned to hold.
Control was the only thing that couldn't walk out the door.
Chelsea murmured something in her sleep that sounded like it might have been his name.
His thumb traced a line across her knuckles, back and forth, back and forth, and the city blurred past, and he told himself this was nothing. A deal.
The tightness in his chest did not ease.
He told himself it would.
Chapter Five
CHELSEA WOKE TO THEpress of her husband's mouth against the curve of her neck, and for one disoriented breath she thought she was still dreaming.
Because that was what this first week had been. A dream inside a dream inside a life so extravagantly unlike her actual one that her brain had stopped trying to categorize it and had simply given in to the impossibility, the way you gave in to a current that was stronger than you and warmer than you expected and going somewhere you couldn't see.
To wake up every morning in this house, in this bed, in Olivio Cannizzaro's arms. To have his breathing change the moment he knew she was surfacing, slower, watchful, as if he'd been waiting for her to cross back from wherever sleep had taken her and was only now allowing himself to be present.
And to have him still so wanting of her, his desire growing fiercer with each passing day instead of diminishing, as if every night they spent together only deepened a hunger that no amount of having her could sate.
That was the part her mind simply could not hold.
"Good morning, wife."
Low. Warm. His accent thicker in the mornings, as if sleep stripped away whatever it was he spent his waking hours keeping in place.
