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But now, looking back, he couldn’t think what else it could have been.
Because now he knew what love was.
Annika had showed him.
“You could have laughed off those additions to my father’s will,” she said. “So could I. Yes, I love Schuyler House, but there were other ways I could have gone about taking charge of it. But we jumped right into this marriage instead.”
“Passion fades, Annika,” he said, urgently now. “And then what are you left with?”
But she only shook her head at him. “Passion fades not because passion itself is temporary. But because it can’t be the only thing that links two people together. If it is, then of course, in time, it will fade. But what if it’s sustained by other things? Love? Respect? Genuine affection? Why would that fade?”
He moved without meaning to, freeing one hand so he could gently cup her face. “Because you’re the expert on these things.”
Her gaze lightened then, but she didn’t smile. “I’m an expert on you, Ranieri. I’ve studied you for years. Falling in love with you was a slow process that took most of my life, and then a whirlwind these few months. But it was always inevitable.”
“Annika.Amore,” he managed to say. “I cannot bear the idea that one day, without even meaning to, you and I will become my parents.”
“That will never happen,” she assured him, with another flash of that ferocity he loved to see in her. “Because you are not a small man, forever looking to others to make you large. And I am not a dissatisfied woman, looking for others to blame.” Her lips curved then. At last. “And I always know that if all else fails, I can always roll out the unicorn initiative and get you right where I want you.”
Ranieri shocked himself by laughing. Because that was what she did to him.
And suddenly, he got it. In a way he never had before. This whole time, he’d reeled from one emotion to the next, convinced that being with her was fracturing. That she was breaking him down into all these pieces—and he could only assume that this was how it began. Losing his sense of who he was, and then, and inexorably, turning into all the things he liked least about his family.
But now he knew better.
The trouble with his family was that they felt nothing. They thought only of themselves. But with Annika, he felt everything.
Everything.
He had thought of little but her since the day of that will reading. If not long before, during his five years of acting as some kind of guardian to her.
And loving her, with everything he was, with all these different parts, was the only way he would ever be anything like whole.
“Annika,” he managed to say, because he got it now, and he was filled and whole and new, “I love you.”
Her smile then was so brilliant, so bright, it drowned out the city outside.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know you do. I love you, too.”
Ranieri only remembered at the last moment that he was in the conference room in the middle of the Schuyler Corporation offices. The walls were made almost entirely of glass and half the company was right on the other side, no doubt watching every moment of this.
It would be the very opposite of appropriate to handle this moment the way he wanted to, naked and horizontal.
So he did the next best thing.
Fully aware that he would likely see a video of what he was about to do on the nightly news, Ranieri Furlan swallowed back the damnable pride that had done nothing for him in all his life, and dropped down to his knees.
“You have already married me,” he said, gazing up at her as her gaze widened. “But Annika, I want you to be my wife. In full. No restrictions, no rules. I want to build a life with you and I want it all. All those words we said in our vows, I want to make them real. Sickness. Health. Richer and poor. I want them all. And I want you by my side, always.”
She looked down at him, her eyes sparkling, that fathomless green. “Where else would I be?”
“I want to love you as well out of bed as I do in it,” he told her gruffly, not sure he could even put into words these things he felt. But he could try. “And I promise you, I will not let the Furlan pride tear us apart. I vow it with all that I am.”
“Oh,” she said, though she was smiling big and bright, “you don’t have to worry about that.”
He gripped her hands. “Since that day in the law firm, when I heard your father’s wishes, I have worried about little else.”
But she smiled down at him. His wife. His love. His future.
