Chapter Eleven #2
But as he’d told those reporters months ago, instant gratification had always taken too long as far as Giaco was concerned.
He had never felt that so keenly as he did now.
“I must go,” he told his friend abruptly. Then he left Pau staring after him as he stood up and left the office. He had already called for his plane before he got on the elevator. The flight was interminable, and his people were waiting on the ground.
It was not until he was being driven back into the Eternal City that it occurred to him to wonder if she would even be there. He had left her, after all. Given her no instruction or invitations to do anything. For all he knew she could be…anywhere.
The notion did not sit well with him.
He stormed into his house and glared at Gabriele, who always endeavored to meet him when he returned. And Gabriele, who was well used to Giaco’s moods, stared right back.
“Where is my wife?” Giaco demanded.
“She’s here, of course,” Gabriele said, with exaggerated and rather pointed calmness. “She got back yesterday.”
“Got back from where? Capri?” Something in him turned over uncomfortably at the thought of her on that island. Their island, as far as he was concerned, but by herself.
He didn’t like that, either.
“My understanding is that she was in London and then sojourned a while in France,” Gabriele said lazily. Then he lifted a brow. “But you will have to ask her yourself.”
Giaco laughed, and clapped his assistant on the shoulder. “I believe I’ll do that. Why don’t you take the week off. Or the rest of the month.”
“Is that a possibility?” Gabriele asked dryly. “Will your antics permit me to take a holiday of even the next quarter of an hour?”
“I suppose we’ll find out,” Giaco tossed back at him.
He started to walk past his assistant, but Gabriele stopped him. “Incidentally,” the other man said, “the housekeeper wanted me to inform you that Saint Ivy has moved all of her things into your room. Herself.”
The two men gazed at each other, and Giaco reminded himself that Pau was not his only friend. Gabriele was, too. And the approval in his friend’s gaze meant more to him than he could express—particularly as Gabriele’s blessing on anything at all was hard to come by.
But clearly his best and most trusted assistant—and friend—was delighted at Ivy’s return, too. And Ivy herself, it seemed.
It wasn’t that Giaco needed approval, but the truth was, he had lived a long time with only its opposite. Tonight he took it in and let it seem to fill him up, like a tuning fork deep inside.
He didn’t say another word. He inclined his head at his friend, then he simply turned and headed for his bedroom.
For Ivy, at last.
He bounded up the stairs and took the long hallway that led to the suite of rooms that sprawled over the back of the house. The suite that he’d had built for himself, never imagining that he would share that space with anyone. Now he couldn’t think of anything he’d like more.
There were already fantasies drip-feeding into his head. Ivy waking up with him every morning. Ivy coming out of the shower. Ivy reading her books and taking her calls and leaving that scent of hers everywhere. Always.
He was so hard it hurt.
He charged into the suite and threw open the bedroom door, and there she was.
At last, there she was.
That joy he’d been chasing flooded him then, vast and hot.
Ivy sat up quickly when he threw open that door, her blond hair cascading all around her and drawing his attention to the silken chemise she liked to sleep in—a detail that had plagued him this last two weeks—and then they were staring at each other.
He looked deep into all of that impossible blue, and now he had something to compare it to. The beautiful blue waters off Capri, turquoise and green, and still her eyes were more beautiful.
There was no contest.
“Ivy—” he began.
“I figured it all out,” she said quickly. Ivy moved in the bed, kneeling up as if she wanted to run to him but didn’t dare. He couldn’t quite process that. “I don’t think that Capri has to be a dream we had. I don’t think things have to change.”
“They absolutely have to change,” he thundered at her. “You have no idea—”
“Here’s the thing,” she said in that same urgent way, and she sounded something like frantic.
“I can love you enough for both of us. I don’t need you to love me back.
I can love you however you need to be loved.
Wherever you go, whatever you do. I’m not saying it won’t hurt, but I’ll love you anyway, Giaco. ”
He stared back at her, something like awed and humbled at once.
And also furious.
She pulled in a breath. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think I would have agreed to this arrangement if it was anyone else but you. Don’t you see? I’m already used to loving you even when it makes no sense.”
“Who taught you this?” he asked, not sure he could speak until the words came out of his mouth.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I have no desire to be loved like that,” he said—except it sounded as if he was shouting.
Maybe he was. He wasn’t sure he cared. He wasn’t acting with her and that felt a lot like jumping off a very tall building.
But he didn’t want to stop. “I don’t want someone to love me even though it hurts them.
I don’t want to be loved despite the fact I’m apparently so broken that I could betray the person I’ve made promises to without a second thought.
I don’t want to be loved because I am broken. ”
She frowned at him. “I don’t understand. I think it could be beautiful.”
He moved toward her then, coming so that he was on the bed too and leaning over her, his fists on either side of her folded legs. Directly in her lovely face.
“I want to be loved fiercely and possessively,” he growled out at her.
“I want to be loved with expectations. Of fidelity. Of trust. Of intimacy and honesty. I want to be loved so much that a single lifetime cannot contain it and anyone who happens to venture near it cannot help but bask in it, too. I want to be loved so hard that my own children admire it. That’s the kind of love I want, Ivy.
And I warn you, I won’t settle for anything less. ”
“But…” She shook her head, and he could see that there were tears in her eyes. They made his heart hurt. “I can love you as best I can, but—”
“I want that love, Ivy,” he said, leaning in close to cut her off, “because that is how I love you. That is how I will continue to love you for the rest of our lives. I just spent over a decade convincing the world that I’m useless so that I could take revenge on a man who could not, for the life of him, love my mother enough to make her want to live.
” He moved closer still. “I don’t want any part of that kind of love.
I want you. I want us. I want everything we had in Capri, every day, always. ”
He reached out with one hand and touched her, and everything was immediately better with her cheek in his hand.
The heat of her seeping into his skin. “I don’t want any half-assed, sacrificial martyr shit, my little saint.
The only crosses I ever want to see you climb on in this marriage will be for fun, not self-flagellation. Do you understand me?”
“Giaco…” she whispered, and the tears were flowing from her eyes then. He could feel them on his hand. “You took revenge? This was all revenge?”
“You have never been anything to me but light,” he told her urgently. “Even in the midst of darkness. I swear it.”
“I don’t think you understand,” she replied, and then changed the whole world again with a smile. “Am I to assume that it worked?”
He took in her smile and found his own mouth curving in response. “It was a triumph in every regard.”
“And here I thought I could not possibly love you more,” she whispered, her eyes damp. Lest he forget that Umberto had not loved Ivy’s mother, either. That they shared this very specific burden. That she, too, had every reason to celebrate this win.
It made him feel a whole lot more like celebrating than he had before.
“All you have to do is trust me,” he promised her now, in a low voice. “That’s it, and I acknowledge that most would laugh at the idea. But I swear to you, Ivy—I swear that I will do everything in my power to be worthy of that trust.”
She blew out a breath. He thought he saw her shiver. Then she was moving closer herself, and putting her hands on him, too.
“I love you more fiercely than you could possibly imagine and I have no intention of letting go,” she told him, with notes of that ferocity in her voice.
He could feel it in him, too. More of that joy, and far better because none of it was tainted with the years of revenge.
This was all his. And she wasn’t finished.
“I want our children to be happier than we ever were, Giaco. I want to raise them to know, always, that joy is an option worth fighting for. But most of all, I just want you.”
“You’re in luck,” he told her, allowing his smile to take him over, and all of it was real. Because this was real, and true, and theirs. “You already have me. We’re already married. And the only thing we have left to do is make sure that everything that comes after is steeped in joy.”
That was exactly what they did, tucked up in his bed, with the future all around them like moonlight, making them glow on into forever.