Chapter Eleven #2
He leans forward then, his hands moving to hold my legs as he crouches there. “Look how successful she is. Do you doubt her power? It took her two conversations to convince you that you should leave me. For my good. What will be next?”
“She had nothing to do with it.” I belt that out, because it stings.
“I’ve seen your life here. You might have tried to hide me away, but I can tell what it’s like all the same.
Running a place like this requires a head for all those details, but it also requires you to be the face of it.
Someone steady and calm to while the years away, one generation to the next.
That would be a great deal easier to do if you did not have an American wife who everyone will assume is an embarrassment without my having to do anything. ”
“I’m not the least bit embarrassed by my American wife,” Taio tells me gruffly. “And I would very much like anyone who feels differently to take that up with me directly. I look forward to it, in fact.”
“Taio.” And my heart is pounding so hard again that I feel almost dizzy. It hurts. I hurt. This hurts. “We come from two different worlds.”
“That’s not the issue here, I think.”
He moves back and then he pulls me up to my feet so he can hold me in his arms. Then he looks down at me, and there are no masks between us. There is only that heat. That glory.
This, I think. Us.
“You don’t believe that anyone could love you,” Taio says.
And then stands there, looking down at me with a kind of intense patience all over his beautiful face.
When what he’s done is blow me to smithereens.
“…what?” I manage to get out, though my throat is tight. My chest is constricted. I feel as if I’m about to break, and that’s before I can feel the wetness on my cheeks.
I do nothing to stop it. I can’t seem to move.
“You’re not the only one who is good at looking into other people’s lives,” he tells me, very quietly. Very intently. “Your father should have loved you better, Annagret. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”
I hear a sound, but it makes no sense. It reminds me of some kind of wounded animal, and then he’s holding me closer, my face is tipped into his chest, and I realize it’s me.
But it can’t be me, because I don’t cry, give or take a tear or two. I don’t cry like this— hard, howling sobs.
It takes me a long while to hear the things he’s murmuring, but they seem to hang in the air as he holds me. As he rocks me, slightly, side to side. As his hand smooths down over my hair.
All I can do is sob. Again and again.
“The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that he loved your mother so much that her loss destroyed him,” Taio says.
Maybe he has said it before, but this time I hear it.
“That doesn’t excuse him. It only offers some kind of explanation.
Maybe he simply gave his heart away once and couldn’t again. I don’t know.”
Still I sob.
“Look at me.”
He tilts my chin up as he looks down at me, and I watch those dark eyes of his soften. He makes a low noise and then his thumbs are brushing away the moisture beneath my eyes.
Then he kisses me. One cheek and then the other. My forehead. The tip of my nose.
I’m used to wildfires and explosions, but this soft, tender heat is new. It moves through me like warmth. Like sweetness.
It’s beautiful.
“You have dedicated your entire adult life to solving problems, answering questions, telling truths.” Again his thumbs move beneath my eyes. “And there is no doubt that you are the best.”
I make a snuffling sound that would embarrass me at any other point. But somehow, it doesn’t now. Not with him.
“As long as I’m the best,” I say. “I like that to be acknowledged.”
And he smiles, this man who has been with me far longer than I imagined. Isn’t it funny how his confession makes me love him more? Because it isn’t a momentary lapse of reason. It isn’t a flash in the pan.
When he says he loves me, I think then, he means it.
And I feel something deep inside shiver, but this time, as if it’s finding its way into settling. Clicking softly into place.
“But I can’t help but notice that the way you do this thing that you’re so good at, the very best at,” he adds, his eyes glinting, “means you must always play a part. You must always be alone. You dig around in human relationships, yet have few of your own.”
“I think the same could be said for the Eighteenth Marquess of Patrias,” I point out. “Long may he prosper, etcetera.”
“It absolutely could be said,” he agrees at once. “I have often said it. You investigated me, did you not?” Because he’s smiling, I nod. “One might even call that…stalking, yes?”
And somehow, even though I feel as if I might still like to sob a bit more, I smile. Maybe because with him, I don’t have to be one thing or another. I can be…whatever I am.
Whatever that looks like.
“I’m actually a licensed private investigator,” I tell him loftily. “So, no. Not a stalker.”
“You and I are the same,” he tells me, and he is serious.
I can see it all over him. “And I do not understand how this can be so, but it is. I love you, Annagret. I have been in love with you for years, though the version of you I made up in my head is a cardboard cutout in comparison to who you really are. The mother of my child. The lover of my fantasies. Everything I have ever wanted in a woman, a partner, a wife. A marchioness.” He slides his hand around to cup the nape of my neck, giving me his heat.
“I feel as if I tricked you into marrying me, and yet I can’t even claim that I’m sorry for it. ”
“If it’s a trick, it’s a good one,” I tell him, and that thing inside me clicks again, like this is the lock.
Like he is the key. “I tried so hard to keep from losing myself on our wedding day. When really that was all I wanted. The way you kissed me. The way you held my hands. Taio, I love you. I have been yours from the start.”
He moans a little at that, or maybe I do, and our lips touch.
And it’s a kiss but it feels like magic. Like a new beginning.
Like us made fresh and new.
“Cosita,” he murmurs. “ Te amo tanto. Eres mi sol, mi luna y todas mis estrellas . You are my sun and moon and all my stars. I love you so much.”
He puts his arms around me and I slide mine around his neck, and then we hold each other there, almost like we’re dancing.
But the only music is the way our hearts beat for each other.
Together. As one.
“You always call me that,” I say. “Cosita . I don’t know what it means.”
He shifts back, slightly, and his eyes are almost golden now, bright with luck. With hope. With us.
“Little thing,” he says. “That’s what it means.”
“But I’m not little. I’m six feet and some consider me a Valkyrie, which does not exactly imply sweet and soft and feminine—”
Taio kisses me soundly, then smiles down at me when I sigh.
“First,” he says sternly, “you are littler than me. Second, there is not one square centimeter on your entire, perfect body that is not feminine and alluring, and I know, because I have tasted every bit of you.” He kisses me again, deeper this time.
“And third, cosita mia, anyone who has ever told you that Valkyries are not attractive is weak. Foolish. And, frankly, unworthy of such a woman in the first place. Remember that.”
“Bold words for a man who has been icy in the extreme all day every day,” I say, my head tipped back as I look up at him. “Almost as if he’s embarrassed—”
I don’t realize that I’m not joking, that there is some little kernel of shame inside me, until his eyes widen at that.
“Embarrassed?”
And he laughs. For the first time in as long as I’ve known him, Taio de Luz throws back his beautiful head and laughs until he has to wipe at his own eyes.
Then he fixes me with a look that has everything inside me…shimmering.
“My beautiful wife,” he says, laughter threaded into his voice, his smile, his eyes, “I did not wish to scare you off. If it were up to me, we would never get out of bed at all. I could not be less embarrassed by you, for there is not one part of you I do not love. Not one. Not ever.”
And then, as if he wants to prove exactly how tiny I am to him, how feminine, how electric, he picks me up, carries me to the bed, and kisses me silly.
Until movement in my belly makes us stop.
We look at each other, both of us filled with wonder.
“Is that…?” he asks, hushed.
“I think it must be,” I say, and as I guide his hand to my belly there’s another kick.
And I know.
“Taio,” I whisper his name like a prayer as he bends to kiss the little soul who kicks at him, like the baby already knows its father. “We’re going to be a family.”
“My only love,” he replies, kissing his way up the length of my body so our eyes can shine together, and our smiles can match. “We already are.”