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“I need it. I need you.” My voice is broken, frantic, filled with lust and greed. I’m about to come undone.Make me forget everything but you.
He slams into me again. And again. His hips move faster with each thrust. Brutal. Violent. Just the way I like it. But only from him. Always from him.
“Eyes on me,” he growls, and I couldn’t disobey him if I wanted to. “Good fucking girl.”
Whatever monsters he’s chasing away, I want to chase them too. I arch into him, giving him everything I have, everything I am. There isn’t a single part of me that doesn’t belong to this man. His body tenses on top of me. He draws out a long “fuuuuck” through clenched teeth when he comes and the pure carnal sound of it sends my senses overboard.
He gently pulls out of me, then props up on an elbow. His eyes hold mine. So dark. So intense. So primal. “Are you okay?”
I trail my fingertip along his jaw. If I loved him any more, my heart would explode. “You can stop asking me that, you know.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
That’s my man. Always so serious. I suppose carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders will do that to a person.
“I’m fine. The baby is fine. We’re all fine.” I take his free hand and lay it over my stomach. “See?”
His thumb mindlessly traces an arc across my flesh as his large hand covers the barely-there baby bump. Then it moves down and sweeps across my wound, still sore, but better. I got my stitches out two weeks ago. My body is his. Violence and wickedness may have borrowed it for a moment, but it will always belong to him. I am his temple, and I trust him to take care of me.
He leans down and kisses me just below my belly button and I feel it all over every inch of my skin. Words I don’t understand but still find hypnotizingly beautiful spill from his lips before he brings himself back up and pulls me into his chest.
I curl into his warm body. “Are you going to teach him?”
“Teach him?”
“Italian.”
Sometimes I catch him speaking his native language when he’s alone in a room and I catch fragments as I walk past. He speaks beautiful words into the open air—words full of hope and love and sorrow and fear.
“Ti prometto che serai proteggata. Sempre.”
I know in those moments that he’s talking to his parents. I know he feels the pain and regret of their deaths with every breath he takes. He stopped blaming himself a long time ago but blame and forgiveness are two different things. I don’t know if he’ll ever forgive himself for not saving his mother. Just like I can’t forgive myself for not saving Reid. And we will both always feel Carlos’s absence deep within our souls.
“What makes you so sure it’s ahim?”
“Because God help us and any man that falls in love with her if it’s aher. Either way, I want our child to know where he—” I stop myself and smile. “Or she… came from. I want them to know everything about you. Because I know nothing about me. My father left and my mother never cared enough to show me. And here you are with this rich, fascinating culture running through your veins and I want you to share that with him—to share it with me.”
“You know how I feel about this.”
I do. The minute he found out I was pregnant, Callisto vowed to shield our child from the darkness, from the world he’d had no choice but to live in. He knew first-hand what it was like growing up as a mafia boss’s son. He knew the expectations and the sacrifice. And he swore—more to himself than to me—that our child would live free of those pressures, exempt from that pain.
“I’m not asking you to give him a gun and send him to mobster boot camp. I’m asking you to teach him Italian and show him where he came from.”
He laughs and it sounds like a thousand angels singing. God, I love that sound.
His lips press against the top of my head, lingering there. “Okay,” he says, finally.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” he repeats and my heart sings.
“So, what did you tell him?” I ask, and Callisto clears his throat. “Or her,” I add with a grin.
I hope it’s ahe, and I hope he’s everything Callisto is. I hope he’s exactly like his father.
He repeats the words in Italian and every syllable rolls across my skin like a hot kiss. He pauses to take a breath. “I promise to keep you safe. Always.”
49
