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CHAPTER FIVE
ALESSIO
I can hardly believe this feeling.
This woman.
How is it that I just met her, but we…fit? We fit together, not just our bodies, but our wants. Our attitudes, our joys, our love for family, our delight in our surroundings, our longing for home.
“Home is home,” Maren says sleepily against my chest. “I think a person can have more than one home. It isn’t so much a place as it is people.”
“I agree, to some extent. I would miss this place,” I explain. “I did miss this place, when I was in England. I hated being away.”
“Some places matter more, maybe,” she says. And then she sleeps. Like an angel, against my chest.
I have never felt like this for any woman. She is mine, and I am hers, and I want to tell her this but I know I need to wait.
Her body she says is too curvy, not toned enough, but I tell her it is perfect. It is. It is perfectly feminine; it is perfect because it is hers. It is perfect because it fits my body perfectly.
I love the taste of her nipples, and the taste of her secret womanly places, the tight pink nub of pleasure at the apex of her folds. I love the taste of her opening, and even her little rosebud, which makes her gasp in shock and exclaim that she’s never had anyone pay attention to her there. I’ve never done it before either, but I can’t stop touching her, tasting her, exploring her.
And when I am inside her deep walls, it feels like paradise.
I wake her early, with coffee and toasted bread, so that I can take her back to the hotel in time for a shower and fresh clothes. I nearly don’t let her out of bed—but this conference is professional for her, and I don’t want her to feel rushed or embarrassed. I don’t care who knows that I am falling for her so hard I can’t help myself, but I want her to control that information.
It is hard to leave her at her hotel and go on to work, but I do it. I work through the morning, and then I tell my secretary I’m leaving the office. Her eyebrows raise. I shrug, smiling. “Aha,” Silvia says, and then she smiles. “I hope she is nice.”
“She is—everything,” I say. And then I go to meet the conference tour bus.
Today’s excursion is to Calypso’s cave, and then to the winery, and then to the salt pans at the beach at Marsalforn.
I have a word with Uncle Leo, and I get on the bus. I sit with Maren. We talk all afternoon; we hold hands. We speak with other people. Hanna seems to have become philosophical about my being with Maren—I’m sure it’s all over my face how I feel.
I don’t care.
No, I do. I want everyone to know.
“Your intentions?” Uncle Leo asks me, at a time when Maren is buying Gozo salt to send to her mother.
“I want her to stay, Uncle.”
He looks concerned. “There aren’t any jobs at the university just now. Probably not for several years. What would she do?”
I don’t know. “I’ll find something,” I say in desperation.
I don’t say that to her.
Instead, over dinner at her hotel, where she’s said she’ll pack a small overnight bag before we leave, I ask her what she wants to do. Does she love teaching? Could she bear to leave it?
I hold my breath.
“I want to write,” she confesses. “I want to write romance.”
I want her to live romance.
And I make love to her again that night. She is in my blood like a fever—like Carnival fever, and I hope I never recover.
I am hers.
