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As she had suspected they could be the moment they’d met in London, she and her sister-in-law Annie became fast friends. And over the years, Tiziano and Annie’s dangerously charming, gray-eyed children became more friends than cousins to Ago and Victoria’s blue-eyed brood.
Making the kind of family Victoria had read about, but had never believed she would have.
And because she was a woman, not a saint, she invited her father to visit as often as possible. Because Everard could not abide the noise, or the way she raised her children as—in his view—wild animals.
“I think he thinks he’s insulting me,” she told Ago after one such visit.
“Let him,” her husband murmured, his mouth at her neck.
Because the new baby was sleeping. And their need for each only grew. It only seemed to get brighter and hotter with age.
As if together, they created the perfect, dancing flame from all those sparks that had once marked them, and all those storms they’d learned how to dance in, together.
And for the rest of their days, they let it burn, and made sure that that was what they passed down to the children.
Not duty. Not sacrifice. But love, first and foremost.
Because nothing else mattered, unless there was love.
And in their house, there was so much love it made the walls shake a little. Loud and unruly, passionate and true.
So true that sometimes—only sometimes—her glorious husband let go of all his hard-won self-control and was as delightfully human as the rest of them.
Though only ever for her.
Just the way Victoria liked it.
