He strips the rest of my clothes while I'm still trembling. Strips his own. Then he's back, skin to skin, and the fury between us finally goes quiet enough for me to feel what lives underneath it.
Fear. Grief. A month of missing him I refused to name.
"Stefano," I whisper.
"I am here."
The words are simple.
They break something open anyway.
He pushes inside me in one slow, relentless stroke, and we both go still, forehead to forehead, breathing each other's air. I feel full and furious and found, and I hate that the word for it is home.
"No more leaving," I say against his mouth.
"Never again."
"Don't lie to me."
"I am not."
My fingers curl in his hair. "Then move."
He does.
It's nothing like Miami. There's no seduction in it — just deep, driving need, his hips meeting mine in a rhythm that builds from slow to punishing, his hand finding mine and locking it against the sheets, his mouth at my ear telling me, low and rough and certain, that I'm his, that he's mine, that he's done running from what that means.
Only need.
Only apology.
Only love so strong it scares me.
I come apart beneath him with his mouth against my throat and our joined hands white-knuckled in the sheets, my body pulsing around him and dragging him over the edge with me. He follows with my name breaking on his lips, his body shaking once before he goes still above me.
Sometime later, Stefano lifts his head and his eyes move past me toward the bathroom door. The drawer beside the sink is not fully closed.
“Maya,” he says slowly.
My stomach drops.
He reaches for the sheet, pulls it around me, then sits up.
“What are you hiding?”
I close my eyes. There is no good way to say it. No careful moment left to choose. When I open them, Stefano is staring at me with the same stillness he had on the auction floor.
“I took a test today,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
Then I whisper, “It was positive.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Stefano
For a moment, I do not understand the words.
