She was still in front of the mirror when Valerio came to find her.
He stopped in the doorway. She watched him stop, in the mirror, this man who never hesitated at anything, and she felt the look travel over her like a hand.
"It's silly," she said, suddenly shy. "There's nowhere to wear it. I just wanted—"
"There's here."
He crossed the room slowly, giving her every chance to laugh it off, and she didn't laugh it off, and his hands settled at her waist from behind, and in the mirror they looked like a painting somebody rich would fight over.
"Do you know what I thought," he said against her ear, "when you came out of that fitting room?"
"That the tailoring was—"
"That I wasted eight years." His mouth found the slope of her shoulder, taking its time, and her breath went thin. "And that I intend to waste nothing else. Ever."
The zipper was a long, slow argument he won inch by inch, his eyes on hers in the mirror the entire time, and the gown that had silenced a boutique pooled on the bedroom floor like it understood it had done its job. She turned in his arms then, and it was her hands that pulled his shirt free, her rising up on bare toes, brave the way she was only ever brave with him, and he made a low wrecked sound and stopped letting her lead.
He laid her down in the middle of the enormous bed and took her apart with a patience that bordered on cruelty, kisses pressed down her body, slow, deliberate, one debt at a time, every gasp of his name met with more, until she was begging in broken half-words, and only then, only then, did he finally move over her and into her, and the two of them found the rhythm that eight years had somehow failed to erase.
"Look at me," he said, when her eyes fluttered shut, and she did, and what she saw there undid her faster than anything his body was doing. "There you are.Ma belle.There you are."
She broke first, with his name and her nails and a sob that had joy all through it, and he followed her down with his face buried in her hair, shaking again, this man who wasn't scared of anything, and afterward they lay tangled in the dark listening to each other's heartbeats negotiate their way back to normal.
"Valerio?"
"Mm."
"I kept the tags on the other dresses." A pause. "In case."
He laughed. She felt it before she heard it, a low earthquake under her cheek, the rarest sound she knew, and she lifted her head to watch it happen to his face.
"Tomorrow," he said, recovering, pressing a kiss to her hair, "we're going back for the rest of the street."
"Valerio!"
Chapter Ten
"ITEM THREE," VALERIOsaid, over breakfast. "The dates in March. Clarify."
"Sick days," Louis said, not looking up from his cereal. "Mama had the flu. He docked her twice and made her come in on the Thursday to clean the Chainsaw building because nobody else would do the fourth floor."
"She had a fever of a hundred and two."
"A hundred and two point six."
"Excuse me," said Aislinn, from the stove, in her brand-new robe that she still wasn't used to being warm in, "I'm right here, and also, what's happening at my breakfast table?"
What was happening, it turned out, was that her seven-year-old and the man she loved had spent the weekend, between a shopping trip and a chess rematch, comparing notes, and this morning, the first school morning of their new life, had been designated for what Valerio called an errand and Louis called, with relish, item three.
"You're not," Aislinn said, pointing her spatula at each of them in turn, "going to visit Mr. Dominguez."
"No," Valerio agreed. "We're going to visit my new company."
The spatula lowered slowly. "Your what?"
"The sale closed at seven this morning." He sipped his coffee like a man remarking on weather. "Cleaner Than Evah Commercial Cleaning. Forty-one employees, three contracts I intend to renegotiate upward, and one operations manager whose file I've now read twice."
"Valerio."
