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“You do have a better scientific mind than me.”
“My mind and whatever else I have are at your service always. It will be an honor, a privilege and a pleasure to work with you in any capacity. But only you know how to bring everything together, to create and grow the best businesses that are beneficial to the world. You must take everything back.” She suddenly chuckled, her golden eyes gleaming. “If you only saw your brothers imagining me filling your shoes, you wouldn’t have had the heart to suggest it. Holmes and Watson were having little heart attacks at the very thought.”
His laughter rang out with hers, until they were both almost in tears all over again.
Then merriment turned to passion, then to desperation and they were tearing each other’s clothes off, competing to give more pleasure, to drag the other deeper into oblivion.
After repeated storms, full domination and surrender, Antonio rose above her and finally touched the places he’d avoided all night. Her faint scars. As he traced them, tears blinded him.
At her gasp, he raised his gaze, found her own eyes streaming again. She realized how he felt.
He still needed to put his feelings into words. “Those moments when your lifeblood bathed my hands as I struggled to stem it, when I was forced to cut into your flesh to save your precious life, when I felt you fighting me so you could let go... I’ll never heal from them.”
Hers sobs fractured her breath, her words. “I’m sorry, so sorry.”
Wiping at his eyes, he smiled with everything in him. “Never be sorry for anything. Just like you made me a new man who has no rage or darkness, who can be ecstatically in love, who can be a son and a brother, you’ve probably absolved me from every sin I’ve ever committed. This punishment is enough to take care of all of them. I only wish you didn’t have to get hurt so I’d be punished. It’s a catch-22 really, since I can only be hurt through you.”
Her dawning grin caught on another sob. “I hate being your Achilles’ heel.”
He hugged her again. “But I love having you as my only vulnerability. I can’t live without you being everything to me. My strength and weakness, my joy and agony, my desire and dread.”
“You’re all that to me and everything else and it’s...enormous.”
Heart swelling with gratitude, he nodded sagely. “Humongous.”
They shared another moment of total communion, before they laughed again. Their mirth caught fire again and they were again surrendering to the power of their bottomless passion and hunger.
* * *
Afterward she lay satiated in his arms, wondering what she’d ever done in her life to deserve him.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he turned her face to him, his words sounding like an irrevocable pledge.
“The heart that grew inside me from the first moment I saw you is yours forever because you gave it life. You changed my perspective and priorities. You made me let go of my anger against my family even before I met them. It’s because of you that I gave them and myself a chance, why I have them back in my life now. You’re the reason I have a life, not just a race for more achievements and acquisitions. You’re the reason I want to live forever.”
The tears that came so easily to her now flowed again, ones of bliss this time. “Maybe immortality should be my new research, then. I’ve been eyeing gene therapy for longevity for a while now.”
“If anyone could find its secret, it’s you.” He gathered her tighter, his expression becoming adamant. “And it is you who’s more qualified scientifically to run the research division, while I want to give back to the world now. And that’s another reason I’m yours. Until I met you, I took what I thought life owed me, and I gave back only strategically, to increase my profits. But now that I’ve found you, now that you love me, the world has given me far more than I can ever deserve. Now I have to create balance, give back everything I can so that I can continue to deserve having the miracle of you and your love.”
Drowning in his love, in relief and gratitude, she took hold of the hands that had given her her life back, took them to her lips as she gave him her own pledge.
“And I only want the privilege of sharing your exceptional journey. You have all of me—the heart that grew to love you, the body you awakened and owned and saved, the soul that became whole only when you healed it, and everything else that I am. They’re all yours, my love. Now and forever.”
* * * * *
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