“Here’s the thing,” she said in that same urgent way, and she sounded something like frantic. “I can love you enough for both of us. I don’t need you to love me back. I can love you however you need to be loved. Wherever you go, whatever you do. I’m not saying it won’t hurt, but I’ll love you anyway, Giaco.”
He stared back at her, something like awed and humbled at once.
And also furious.
She pulled in a breath. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think I would have agreed to this arrangement if it was anyone else but you. Don’t you see? I’m already used to loving you even when it makes no sense.”
“Who taught you this?” he asked, not sure he could speak until the words came out of his mouth.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I have no desire to be loved like that,” he said—except it sounded as if he was shouting. Maybe he was. He wasn’t sure he cared. He wasn’tactingwith her and that felt a lot like jumping off a very tall building. But he didn’t want to stop. “I don’t want someone to love meeven thoughit hurts them. I don’t want to be loveddespitethe fact I’m apparently so broken that I could betray the person I’ve made promises to without a second thought. I don’t want to be lovedbecauseI am broken.”
She frowned at him. “I don’t understand. I think it could be beautiful.”
He moved toward her then, coming so that he was on the bed too and leaning over her, his fists on either side of her folded legs. Directly in her lovely face.
“I want to be loved fiercely and possessively,” he growled out at her. “I want to be loved with expectations. Of fidelity. Of trust. Of intimacy and honesty. I want to be loved so much that a single lifetime cannot contain it and anyone who happens to venture near it cannot help but bask in it, too. I want to be loved so hard that my own children admire it. That’s the kind of love I want, Ivy. And I warn you, I won’t settle for anything less.”
“But…” She shook her head, and he could see that there were tears in her eyes. They made his heart hurt. “I can love you as best I can, but—”
“I want that love, Ivy,” he said, leaning in close to cut her off, “because that is how I love you. That is how I will continue to love you for the rest of our lives. I just spent over a decade convincing the world that I’m useless so that I could take revenge on a man who could not, for the life of him, love my mother enough to make her want to live.” He moved closer still. “I don’t want any part of that kind of love. I wantyou. I wantus. I want everything we had in Capri, every day, always.”
He reached out with one hand and touched her, and everything was immediately better with her cheek in his hand. The heat of her seeping into his skin. “I don’t want any half-assed, sacrificial martyr shit, my little saint. The only crosses I ever want to see you climb on in this marriage will be for fun, not self-flagellation. Do you understand me?”
“Giaco…” she whispered, and the tears were flowing from her eyes then. He could feel them on his hand. “You took revenge? This was allrevenge?”
“You have never been anything to me but light,” he told her urgently. “Even in the midst of darkness. I swear it.”
“I don’t think you understand,” she replied, and then changed the whole world again with a smile. “Am I to assume that it worked?”
He took in her smile and found his own mouth curving in response. “It was a triumph in every regard.”
“And here I thought I could not possibly love you more,” she whispered, her eyes damp. Lest he forget that Umberto had not loved Ivy’s mother, either. That they shared this very specific burden. That she, too, had every reason to celebrate this win.
It made him feel a whole lot more like celebrating than he had before.
“All you have to do is trust me,” he promised her now, in a low voice. “That’s it, and I acknowledge that most would laugh at the idea. But I swear to you, Ivy—I swear that I will do everything in my power to be worthy of that trust.”
She blew out a breath. He thought he saw her shiver. Then she was moving closer herself, and putting her hands on him, too.
“I love you more fiercely than you could possibly imagine and I have no intention of letting go,” she told him, with notes of that ferocity in her voice. He could feel it in him, too. More of that joy, and far better because none of it was tainted with the years of revenge. This was all his. And she wasn’t finished. “I want our children to be happier than we ever were, Giaco. I want to raise them to know, always, that joy is an option worth fighting for. But most of all, I just want you.”
“You’re in luck,” he told her, allowing his smile to take him over, and all of it was real. Because this was real, and true, and theirs. “You already have me. We’re already married. And the only thing we have left to do is make sure that everything that comes after is steeped in joy.”
That was exactly what they did, tucked up in his bed, with the future all around them like moonlight, making them glow on into forever.
Chapter Twelve
IVY NEVER KNEWhow Giaco convinced Umberto to release her inheritance, only that he managed it. And it only took a year or two.
She gifted most of it to her original charity in London. And with the rest, she sought out other charities that she could bolster, too.
“Not because I’m a saint,” she told her husband when he teased her. “Because I’m not. Definitely not.” Given what they had just done to each other in the marital bed, there was no denying that was true. “But I see this as dispensing my mother’s love as far as it can go.”
“She would love that,” Giaco said, and kissed her.
Ivy knew she would. She could feel Alana’s love inside her, bright like a guiding light.
