Welcome to the family.
Something in me settled with unexpected peace, and when I turned back to Pietro he was still staring at me as if he had not recovered from the sound of my voice saying yes.
I squeezed his hand lightly and leaned closer, speaking only for him.
“I’m not sacrificing myself,” I murmured. “I’m joining a family. I’m joining the life of the man I love.”
His breath left him in a way that almost undid me.
Then he bent his head and kissed me, not with the kind of hunger he kept for when we were alone, but with something softer and infinitely more dangerous in a room like this. A reverence so open it made my heart ache.
When we broke the kiss, the look in his eyes immediately made me suspicious.
“What?” I asked.
“I have a surprise.”
I narrowed my eyes. “That sentence has a questionable history in our relationship.”
“This one is a good surprise.”
“That is exactly what a man with a poor track record would say.”
He smiled then, that private, devastating smile he only seemed to wear for me. “Come on.”
He blindfolded me in the car, which I would once have objected to on principle, but loving Pietro had opened in me a niche tolerance for dramatic gestures. The drive wasn’t long. When he helped me out, the cold hit first, then the silence, then the strange openness of wherever we were. He turned me once, very gently, and removed the blindfold.
I blinked at the landscape in front of me.
Field.
Winter grass. Open sky. An empty stretch of land with none of the revelation I had expected.
I stared at it for several seconds, then at him.
“It’s ours.”
I looked back at the field. “Empty field. Thanks.”
He rolled his eyes. “You are impossible.”
“No, I’m confused.”
He stepped closer and pointed out what I had missed at first glance, the markers in the ground, the plans already approved, the quiet evidence of intention beneath apparent emptiness.
“It’s where our house will be,” he said. “I told you I would never take decisions away from you again, so I didn’t choose the house. I chose the place. We build the rest together.”
That hit me harder than the ring ever could have.
Not because of the land itself, although that was enough to steal my breath, but because he had understood the thing beneath the thing. This was not a performance. Not a declaration meant to overwhelm me into gratitude. It was space. Room for my hand in the blueprint. Room for my taste, my voice, my future.
A life with him, but not one arranged around me like a gift I was expected to admire.
One built with me.
“You mean that?” I asked, though I already knew he did.
“With everything I have.”
