She pulls back just enough to look at me, her eyes shiny. “You said you’d move to New York.”
“I did.”
“Don’t say things you don’t mean,” she says, and there’s a warning in it.
“I rarely ever do,” I say quietly.
“I don’t want you to give upyour family for me.”
“You wouldn’t be asking me to give them up. I want to be there with you.”
“Ask or not, that's still what it would be,” she says, frustrated. “I don’t want you to resent me. I couldn't handle that."
“I won’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Yes, I can,” I say firmly, gently. “Elsa, I’ve spent my whole life watching men lose themselves. To power. To pride. To anger. To things that don’t matter. My own grandfather. So many of my uncles.” I hold her gaze. “I refuse to be that. I refuse to lose the best thing that’s ever happened to me because of a two-hour drive.”
Tears shimmer in her eyes, but she blinks them back.
"That's not all it is, and you know it. Two hours might as well be a world away when your family is here."
“My family wants me to be happy.”
"But I want you to be happy too." Her voice breaks, and a tear spills over.
I brush my thumb over her cheekbone. “The only thing I know right now is that the last couple of weeks? Being with you, even with all this? That’s the happiest I’ve ever been. That’s a fact.”
"Me too," she says with a hitch in her words.
“So, for tonight, we don't think about it. We don’t need to decide anything right now, okay?”
She looks at me for a long moment.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
Relief I didn't realize was coiled in my stomach unspools. I lean in and kiss her, slow and deep, letting the kiss spin out, in no hurry for anything but just to have her. The taste of her. The feel of her.
When we finally pull apart, I'm holding her as close as two people can get with their clothes on, and her hands are fisted in the back of my shirt.
“Now eat,” I murmur against her lips. “Or I won’t show you what we have for dessert.”
She mock-gasps, but her lips curve into a smile. “Blackmail? How uncivilized. I thought you were above such things.”
“Where you’re concerned,dolcezza, I’m not above anything.”
She laughs, carefree and real, and the sound fills the room and me.
Chapter Forty
Elsa
I pace the length of Antonio’s living room for what has to be the hundredth time, socked feet whispering over hardwood I’ve memorized down to the seams.
Five days.
Five days of the same rooms, the same walls. Sure, the view is beautiful, but it feels like a cage when I can’t go outside or even open a window. Antonio was adamant about that—no fresh air, no “just a crack.”
