Page 93
I don’t have a ring on me. It’s at the estate. So I do the only thing available. I get down on one knee on a hospital floor.
My side pinches. I don’t care. This is the first time my knee touches the ground for another human being, and I won’t sully it by showing the pain. “Veda Raines, doctor, captive friend—the best and worst decision I ever made, and the only one I’d make again. Marry me. For real this time.”
Her breath catches.
“Choose me, and I will spend the rest of my life making you proud of your husband.”
Her smile catches fully as she whispers, “Yes.”
I get up off the floor, slowly, because of the side, and she steadies me, just like she always has.
And then she takes off her clothes.
I laugh, startled, delighted, and she’s already pulling me toward the empty hospital bed, mindful of my side even now. Her hands check my bandage in the same motion they’re wrecking my shirt.
“Are you sure about this?”
“I’ve never been surer about anything,” she says between kisses.
Once naked, I pull her onto my lap and let her take charge. Mostly because I don’t have a choice. I’m getting better, but if I were to go at her like I usually do, I’d need the hospital bed for less fun reasons.
My future wife straddles me slowly, making me wait to feel the kiss of her wet body on mine, and when I do, it’s all I can do not to come right then. We’ve had weeks of being in the same house, her hating me, me pretending to not be bothered by the hate. The stiff dance of two people not saying what needs to be said, and every minute of it was driving me crazy.
We’re careful of the wound and reckless about everything else. It’s slow comfort. Just two people who almost lost each other finding out they didn’t.
She sets the pace, and I let her, and it’s the truest surrender I’ve managed in a life spent never surrendering. Her core clenches on me, clinging to me like she needs me. I cover her mouth with my own when I know she’s close, and when she finally breaks, my name shudders out of her lips into mine. Then I follow her, the first orgasm since my gunshot.
I’ve never been into pain with my sex before, and now is no exception. “Fuck, ow.”
She’s hazy, but not too hazy to check on my wound while she gasps from her own climax. “Not bleeding,” she rasps.
A slight relief coupled with the comedown after my orgasm. “Not our usual pillow talk.”
She snorts and lies against my chest in a narrow bed in a borrowed room, and neither of us moves for a long while. The machines down the hall keep their ordinary time. My mother is somewhere being smug. My daughter is down the corridor mending. And the woman I love has said yes.
“Four terms,” I murmur into her hair. “You went easy on me.”
“I’m saving the rest for the marriage.” I feel her smile against my chest. “There will be so many more terms, Sartorre. You have no idea.”
“Name them all. I’ll agree to every one.”
“I know you will. That’s the problem with you.” She props up on one elbow and looks down at me, and there’s no chart in her eyes now, just her. “Stop agreeing so fast. I want to enjoy watching you cave.”
“I’m afraid you’ll suffer a boring marriage then, because I enjoy giving you whatever you want.”
“A lifetime of getting whatever I want sounds awful.”
I laugh and kiss the top of her head. “Positively dreadful.”
33
VEDA
It’s been three months since the conference, and I’m about to upend my entire life again. Seems to be a daily occurrence since I met Lupo Sartorre.
I always knew life could change in the blink of an eye. My emergency rotation taught me that cliché in real time, over and over—a normal day turning into the worst day of someone’s life between one breath and the next.
Our wedding is small, in the garden where Sarah and I count lizards. The cypress row stands witness the way it has for everything—the arrivals, the walks, the night I left and the road that brought me back. Chairs in the grass, white flowers Nonna approved after rejecting three vendors, a small arch built by two of Lupo’s men with a carpentry hobby. According to Lupo, they built their own bed from an ancient shipwreck, so he trusted their ability to work out a simple arch.
