Warmth floods my cheeks, and I swat at his shoulder. Then his mouth is on mine again. There are no frantic edges now, just patient hands and little sounds when fingertips memorize old terrain. He lifts me higher up the bed and cups my knee, my hip, his mouth mapping a devotion I don’t know how to hold without trembling.
“I love you,” he whispers into my skin, a quiet litany as he travels over my shoulder, down my throat, and to the center of my chest where the blossom lives. “I love you. I love you.” He presses a kiss over Livia’s name like a vow.
I thread my fingers in his hair and pull him up until our foreheads rest together. It would be so easy to deflect with a joke, to put steel where softness belongs, but I don’t. Nottonight. “I love you too,” I murmur, and it’s both a surrender and a homecoming. His eyes spark, green going luminous, and something inside me eases that’s been clenched since I was eighteen and stupid.
He worships me like he’s learning a prayer with his mouth. It’s tender and wrecking. He slows when my breath snags, he smiles into the kiss when I tug him closer, and his palm finds mine above my head and laces our fingers like a promise.
His cock is heavy against my thigh, and I can almost feel the desire raging through him. Still, he goes slowly, savoring every moment. The need begins to build again, pooling hot and wet between my legs.
“Matteo,” I murmur against his mouth. “I want you inside me.”
“Then who am I to deny you?” He smirks and settles his hips between my thighs. Like always, we just fit.
When he finally slides into me, it’s a relief that feels like a release. There’s no violence in it, no apology. Just us. We move together unhurried, the old rhythm softened by the new truth. He keeps my gaze and I allow it, because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be found.
We move together, each thrust pushing me toward that elusive high. He helps me find it again and again. Once we’re both sated and floating on the lingering sensations, he gathers me like I might drift away. My ear finds his heartbeat, steady and stunned. The rain hushes the window.
His voice is rough at the edges when he finally speaks. “I want this for the rest of my life.” It’s almost shy, which breaks me all over again. “Us. Livia. A home that doesn’t have bars in the windows unless you’re counting goat pens. Manhattan if you’ll have it, a real family in the sunlight. Or—” He cuts himself off because he must have felt me stiffen.
I tilt his jaw so he has to see my face when I answer. “I love that you want that for us.” The truth is warm and heavy in my mouth. “And maybe, one day, I’ll take you up on it. But I need time, Matteo. Livia needs time. I kept her hidden to keep her away from our world. I can’t drag her into a different danger because my heart is greedy. I have to make sure the life we choose is the kind that doesn’t ask her to pay the price.”
“Then I give it up. All of it. We go to Sicily and live by the sea. I’ll break every tie to Gemini, walk away from everything with my name on it. I’ll ride a Vespa and learn how to make bread like a man with nothing but time. Just say how you want it to look, Cat, and I’ll build that life for us.”
I nod. “I know you will.”
His head dips, jaw softening. “We go slow. We make a plan that passes the Livia test. School runs and soccer Saturdays. You set the pace, and I’ll match it. We’ll do whatever you say.” He kisses my knuckles, one by one. “But know this, whether it’s in a high-rise in Manhattan or in a shack by the sea in Sicily, I’m in either way. I don’t need the crown to be yours or to be herpapà. I just need the two of you. Forever.”
Emotion tightens my throat. “Okay,” I breathe, and the word feels like a door opening. “We’ll decide together.”
“Together,” he repeats, burying his smile in my hair.
We fall asleep tangled, the kind of tangle that says stay. In the blue before dawn a car hums up the lane and a goat complains. Matteo kisses my shoulder and slips out of bed, dressing in the quiet like a man who finally knows what he’s walking toward. At the door he looks back, softer than morning. I lift the covers once, an invitation and a promise.
“Come back to me,” I whisper.
“Always.” And for once the word doesn’t scare me. It sounds like a real life.
CHAPTER 48
ALMOST HOME
Matteo
The lane out of Noreen’s is a green tunnel, hedges shouldering in like they’re trying to keep us. I sit in the back seat while one of Leo’s locals, Brian, whose soft-spoken eyes are always on the mirrors, guides us toward town. Leo wanted to drive me himself, but I told him to stay with my girls. The sudden possessive streak still startles me in the best way.
We hit the main road and the countryside trades peat and quiet for petrol and damp brick. My phone vibrates once, twice, then lights up with Ale’s name across the screen. I stare at it like it’s a sin I haven’t confessed to yet.
I’ve spoken to him a handful of times, but I’ve yet to tell him about Liv. It makes everything too real. I just wasn’t ready…
“You should take it in case it’s important,” the driver says without looking back.
I swipe. “Hey, cuz.”
“About time,” Ale breathes, the city in his voice even from an ocean away. “When are you coming home? Yourpapàhaspacked twice and your mom is going crazy. Nico says he will fly over there and drag you back by your ear if he has to.”
My laugh is a low thing. “I’m sure you’d love that visual.”
“Yourpapàwould love to stop pacing holes in the marble in the office.” A beat, softer. “Are you okay? It’s been weeks.”
