"And I always will."
Epilogue
ONE MONTH LATER
His hand was on her waist.
Just resting there, warm and sure through the fabric of her dress, while his voice carried on with whatever the call was about. Something involving quarterly projections and a property in Yorkville and numbers that Chelsea's brain had long since stopped trying to follow, because his hand was on her waist and the city was scrolling past the tinted windows and this, right here, this ordinary moment in the back of a car with her husband's palm against her hip and his voice low and warm in her ear, was still enough to make her breathless.
One month, and it still made her breathless.
She sat very still. She was being good. She was not going to distract him from his call, because she was a supportive wife and a mature adult and she understood that quarterly projections were important even if she could not for the life of her remember what a quarterly projection actually was, and—-
His fingers moved to her knee.
Chelsea jumped.
A low chuckle escaped him, the kind that vibrated through his chest and into the space between them, and the sound of it, oh, the sound of it. Olivio Cannizzaro chuckling was a relatively new phenomenon in the universe, and Chelsea had not yet developed any immunity to it.
He ended the call.
"You," she said, turning to face him with what she hoped was a look of dignified accusation, "were having fun."
"You—-"
She didn't get to say anything else, because his hand was at the back of her neck and his mouth was on hers and he was pulling her into his lap with the easy authority of a man who had decided that quarterly projections could wait. Her hands found his chest, his shoulders, the warm skin at the open collar of his shirt, and she was about to melt against him the way she always melted against him, the way her body had apparently decided was its default setting in all situations involving this man—-
He raised his head.
"To be continued."
"H-Huh?"
"We're already here."
The limo slowed to a stop, and Chelsea blinked, her brain scrambling to reassemble itself from the wreckage his kiss had made of it. It was only when she glanced out the window and recognized the iron gate and the old stone wall and the row of elms that lined the path that she understood.
