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“Are you all right?” Annika asked him now.
He followed her into their bedroom, watching as she bustled around. He found he loved this season of their lives, where the passion he always felt for her only grew—but he was always having to wait. Until the children were in bed. Until they had a moment alone. Until she took that nap she would pretend she didn’t need, but always made her feel refreshed.
But Ranieri had discovered something he never would have known without her. That delayed gratification only made it better.
“I am all right,” he assured her. “In every possible way.”
Annika threw him a look, but she didn’t comment further. Then again, she didn’t have to. The longer they stayed together, the more they simply knew each other. Better and better by the day.
He couldn’t wait to see what that looked like twenty years from now. Thirty.
And perhaps later, when they were alone in their bed and the children were safely tucked away in theirs, he would tell her what it was like to see his parents again as they had today. To see them the way he did these days. To feel nothing but pity.
He had vowed to Annika in a conference room in New York that he would love her forever, and he would. He did.
But what he never could have guessed—what seeing his diminished parents only made clear—was that love, deep and sure and not afraid of what life might throw at them, with vulnerability in place of pride, was pure joy.
She came past him on one of her bustling loops, and he stopped her with his free arm, pulling her face to his to kiss her, deep and long, while their baby chortled with delight.
When he pulled away, her eyes were dreamy and still that glorious green. And her smile made him start imagining all the things he planned to do to her later. In detail.
“What was that for?” she asked softly.
“For you,” he said. He kissed her again. And only pulled back when the baby started squawking. “Always for you,mi amore. Light of my life, I cannot thank you enough.”
“You never need to thank me,” she whispered. “You don’t need to do anything but love me, Ranieri. Always.”
“I will,” he promised her, the way he did at least twice a day. “Forever.”
And then, after they put all their babies to bed, he stretched out with her in that bed in the back of the house that they had made a home, not a hiding place, and he showed her.
Again and again, because forever took the best kind of work.
And he was just the man for the job.
