“I can! And I do!” He tucked me impossibly closer. “Supra l'onori di mi matri, Kitty. On my mother’s honor.”
And because I didn’t believe in his honor, but Lauren’s, I trustedthat.I broke down against his chest, hating that I needed him, hating that his words and his body took away my fear.
Then he started humming a song I’d never heard before, one that made me think crazy stuff.
Like, was that a Sicilian lullaby?
Would he sing that to his…ourchildren?
He would, wouldn’t he?
Someone so proud to be Sicilian, not Italian, would sing those songs and teach his kids the dialect, imbuing as much of his heritage into his children as he could—wherever he lived.
And I shouldn’t be thinking about babies.
I. Should. Not.
Not when I needed him to co-sleep with me likeIwas a baby.
Not when he was the damn reason I needed a co-sleeper!
“I hate this.”
“You can’t help it, my dream girl.” He pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. “Was it the…”
Dante’s dick doing what it hadn’t done.
My chin trembled. “Yeah.”
That dick going where it hadn’t.
“Why am I more scared now than when it was happening? Why can I imagine it happening when it never did?! And it can’t happen anyway. The bastard’s dead!”
“I don’t have any answers,liunissa.”
“Don’t call me that!” I half-screeched, half-wept. “I’m not a lioness. Look at me. I’m crying like a baby. I can’t sleep undisturbed unless you’re next to me. I-I don’t feel likeme.”
“That’s because you’re healing. Do you want to hear a story?”
“Like a fairy tale?” I muttered in disbelief. Saying that, he could probably read me the classified ads section in a newspaper and I’d be lulled into resting.
Cute jerk.
But he snorted. “No. I mean, I can if you want…”
I heard his teasing and, finally, humor bled through the terror from my dream. “What kind of story?”
“Less a story and more a truth.”
His fingers toyed with my hair and it was so relaxing that I hated it.
I hated this dependency.
I hated how much I needed him when I barely knew him and what I’d come to learn terrified me. Never mind what he’d made me learn about myself.
But no matter how stupid I knew I was behaving, somewhere deep in my goddamn soul, I recognized him.
He might accept it as easily as eating chips—which he did, like they were going to stop importingRicetta Campagnolatomorrow—but I refused to think about soul mates.
