Chapter Eighteen What the Body Knows
Their marriage found its rhythm in the weeks that followed — dinners that no longer sat in silence, mornings where Dante lingered past when his business required him to leave, nights that stretched longer and grew more honest with every passing week.
He was, Elena discovered, an attentive lover in every sense of the word — deliberate, patient, endlessly curious about what made her gasp and what made her laugh and what made her arch beneath him, chasing her reactions the way he chased every other detail of her he'd collected since before they'd even met.
He learned the exact spot below her ear that made her shiver.
He learned that she liked to be held afterward, tucked against his chest, until her heartbeat slowed to match his own.
"You're different in here," she told him one night, tracing the line of his jaw in the dark, both of them tangled in sheets and unhurried silence. "Softer."
"I'm not soft anywhere, tesoro."
"You know what I mean." She propped herself up on one elbow, studying him. "Out there, you're all edges. In here, you look at me like—"
"Like you're the only good thing I've ever been allowed to keep.
" He said it simply, without artifice, his hand coming up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Because you are. I built an empire out of not needing anyone, Elena.
And then you walked down a staircase and told me no, and every wall I'd built around myself for fifteen years started coming down, one conversation at a time.
" His thumb traced her cheekbone. "I don't know how to be soft in daylight.
I'm not sure I ever will. But here, in the dark, with no one watching — I don't have to pretend I don't need you.
And I do. More than I know what to do with. "
Elena's chest ached with something too large for the room to hold. "I didn't want to fall for you," she whispered. "I promised myself I wouldn't. Not after how this started."
"And now?"
"Now I think I fell for you somewhere around the second week, when you told me about your mother, and I've just been too stubborn to admit it since." She pressed her lips to his jaw, feeling him go still beneath her. "I love you, Dante. God help me, I do."
For a moment, he didn't move at all — and when he finally exhaled, it shuddered out of him like something he'd been holding for weeks. "Say it again," he murmured, voice raw.
"I love you."
He rolled her beneath him with a reverence that hadn't been there their first night together, replaced now with something steadier, something that felt less like hunger and more like coming home.
"I have loved you since a photograph of you laughing on a sidewalk," he said against her mouth, "and I will spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret giving that back to me.
" And then he showed her, slow and thorough and unhurried, exactly how much he meant it, until neither of them had breath left for anything but each other's names.