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“But there’s only one thing I want,” she said, there against his mouth, scarcely daring to hope, scarcely daring to believe.
“Name it,” he urged her.
And so she did. She tipped back her head and she lifted her hand to hold his face. His beloved, beautiful face.
“You,” she whispered. “I want you, Ago. Only and ever you.”
“But don’t you see?” he murmured. “I have always been yours. Since the moment we met. And every moment after.”
And only the fact that they were in a hospital room that anyone could enter at any time kept them from offering each other some proof, then and there.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AFEWDAYSLATER, Victoria celebrated the New Year wrapped up in her love in the villa, where Ago read her the tabloid reports of their scandalous relationship, and they laughed together. As if they were nothing more than fairy tales.
“Just a story,mia amore,” Ago said one day when Victoria was cross about how they were being talked about in certain papers. “Remember, we know the real story.”
The truth was, the real story was better. In every respect.
And it was theirs.
After giving them such a scare, their son entered the world late and loud. Cristiano Domenico Accardi was a menace from his very first breath.
They were smitten.
But that was when the true work began.
Things were not always easy. Neither one of them, when it came down to it, knew much of anything about love. Or the kind of healthy relationships it seemed some people knew how to have.
“Perhaps you can write in your diary for future generations,” he growled at her after one unfortunate evening. “‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’”
“That would be quitting,” she retorted.
And when Ago took exception to that, they worked out the way they always did. With a whole lot of talking—after a whole lot of expressing their differences in bed.
He told her, with great ceremony, that she ought to travel the world she saw fit, reveling in her freedom. But the truth was, the world that Victoria wanted to see was the world she saw with Ago. And so they traveled together, spending the first year of Cristiano’s life going to every single place Victoria had been forbidden to explore on her own.
And even though they’d agreed that the next baby would be planned well in advance, nature had other ideas.
And so their second son, the deceptively cheerful Fabiano, was born only fifteen months after his older brother.
“I should tell you,” said Ago the second morning of little Fabiano’s life, as the baby suckled at her breast and Cristiano lay curled up at her side, his perfect cheeks flushed as he slept. “I have an enduring fantasy of you, ripe with our babies, again and again and again.”
And Victoria knew it wasn’t simply the rush of hormones, or the wild, mad love she felt for both of the little boys who clung to her then. She knew it wasn’t even the way Ago looked at her from where he lay, propped up on one arm at the foot of their bed, gazing upon her as if he had never beheld anything so beautiful in all his life.
Maybe it was all of those things. But beyond that, it was simply...right.
It was right. It was them.
It was their story to tell as they wished.
She smiled at him as if her heart might break from all of this love. “I am an Accardi wife,” she murmured. “It is my duty and my joy to obey.”
And the legacy they left was one of laughter, and tears. More joy than pain. Seven pairs of little feet, charging in and around that villa. The ancient pile and surrounding countryside had more than enough breathing room for six wild Accardi sons, and one Accardi daughter, the ferocious Luna, who was named for the moon and terrorized them all.
Each time she was pregnant, her husband would draw her, then paint her, and his portraits graced the walls, in and around all those dour Accardi ancestresses. With their pain and their isolation, their angry diaries, their broken hearts.
Meanwhile the current matriarch was overflowing with love and life, round and ripe and, best of all, happy.
