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“Liliana!”
Antonio exploded into a run and caught her before she hit the ground in a dead faint. After a frenzied exam proved she was physically fine, he rushed her to his bed. The bed he hadn’t come near since she’d left him.
Though he knew from his obsessive follow-up of her condition that she was perfectly healed, she looked so spent and fragile. Just like he’d felt...until he’d heard her screaming his name, seen her standing there, her eyes open to him again, showing him into the depths of her soul. Until she’d said she loved him and asked him not to go.
Holding her made him feel as if the heart that had been ripped out of his body was restored. Feeling her warm and whole and there, he felt that the life that had oozed out of him every second since he’d lost her was returning. She was here to revive him, to give him another lease on life.
She came to with a gasp, her eyes frantic before she saw him. Then she came apart, clinging to him, a quaking, weeping mass.
Her sobs tore him up inside. “Don’t go, please. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me anything of yours. I want you, only ever you...please...”
His lips silenced her agony, his tears mingling with hers. “And I want only you. I wanted to leave everything behind when I thought you could no longer want me back.”
She wrenched at his neck, his chest with trembling lips, soaking his flesh with her tears, covering it with the worship he’d withered without. “I’ll stop wanting you when I stop breathing. Probably not even then.”
Before he succumbed to the need to reclaim her, he had to know one thing for sure.
He rose above her, holding her precious face in his trembling hands. “Do you forgive me, mi amore? Really forgive me, for how I once planned to use you? I don’t want the least doubt or bitterness lurking in your heart. That’s what you said that day I let you go—that’s why I couldn’t persist anymore. I felt I could overcome your pain, but I would never erase your mistrust. And I couldn’t do that to you. So do you really believe that I loved you from the beginning, and that I did change for you?”
She burst out in another weeping jag, dragging him down to her and deluging him with kisses and tears. “I believe you. I’ll always believe you.”
After the storm had abated, she drew back to look at him with such earnestness. “But I want you to promise me that if you ever feel any differently, you will tell me. You must never hide anything from me again, whether you’re afraid it would hurt me, or know for sure it would.”
“I take it this is a two-way street? If you ever stop feeling the same as you do right now, you’ll tell me?”
“Since I’ll never stop loving you, the only thing I’ll confess is that I’m loving you more.”
“But if for some unimaginable reason you stop loving me?”
She rose, her eyes telling him everything he needed to breathe again, to live again. “I’ll always tell you the whole truth. You know I’m incapable of saying anything else.”
“I know.” His groan exorcised the last of his tension. Then he let her push him on his back, reveling in her beauty and honesty and openness, all the treasures he’d thought he would never be blessed with again, in the absoluteness of her love, which he’d thought he’d destroyed. “It’s why I was in such despair. I knew you would never exaggerate to punish me, so I truly thought I’d lost you forever.”
“I would have remained yours forever even if I never found my way back to you.”
“And what good would that have done me?” he exclaimed.
She took his lips in a deep, devouring kiss before she pulled back, a grin lighting up her beauty. “I’d already found my way back to you. When your brothers arrived to give me your insane bequest and tell me of your crazy plans, I—”
He heaved up, his whole body tensing. “Those bastards! I’m going to strangle each and every one of them. I told them not to—” Then it hit him. “What am I saying? It’s because they disobeyed me that you’re here in my arms again.”
“Actually, it isn’t. That’s what I was trying to say. I was coming to you when they came knocking.” She looped her arms around his neck. “It seems I felt you were going to do something drastic, and I reached my limit at the same time you did.”
“Even if you hadn’t, and you decided much later to call me back, I would have come running.”
“If I
’d missed you, you would have come back to find your brothers roasted.” At his incomprehension, she grinned sheepishly. “They put me through their elaborate tests to determine if I’d been manipulating you into giving me what you left me. It almost made me too late to stop you. If it had, I would have turned into a fire-breathing dragon.”
A guffaw escaped him, the world suddenly bright and limitless again. “That must have been Jakob and Ivan. No other brother who got his wife’s seal of approval on you would have dared suspect you of any ulterior motives.”
“Yeah, it was Starsky and Hutch.” As another laugh burst out of him, she clung to him again, her shudder shaking through him. “Promise me that whatever humanitarian missions you undertake won’t be in areas of active conflict. If you don’t want to kill me with worry.”
Taking her down, he covered her, pressed into her, as if he wanted to absorb her into his being. “I’d never put myself in harm’s way when you need me.”
Her fingers convulsed in his hair as she pulled his head up, her eyes fierce with conviction. “The whole world needs you, alive and well and being the irreplaceable force for good that you are. And this brings me to your bequest. All I’ll ever need from you is your heart, your trust, your appreciation. But only you can direct everything you’ve built and achieved.”
