Chapter 47
A REAL LIFE
Caitríona
The countryside has settled on us the way a shawl does.
It’s warm and a little scratchy, smelling of peat, soap and hay, but wonderful all the same.
After nearly two weeks at Noreen’s, my pulse finally remembers how to walk instead of run.
Livia wakes with the goats, naps like a cat in the sun, and drifts to sleep with daisies still tangled in her hair.
I could live inside the sound of her laugh.
It's been a dream, absolute bliss. And I’m terrified for it to end.
After tea, the evening folds itself into the small rituals that have already become routine. Livia rinses her hands at the back step, splashing as much on her wellies as the basin, and then clambers onto the couch between Matteo and me with her book of choice clutched like a treasure.
“Papà reads tonight,” she decrees.
“I am honored by Her Majesty,” Matteo murmurs with mock gravity, scooping her into the crook of his arm. She fits herself there like she always belonged.
It’s a thin picture book about a girl who builds a cardboard castle with a suspiciously familiar moat.
Matteo clears his throat, finds the Italian on the page—he bought a bilingual copy from the village—and starts soft.
By the second page his voice hits that low, steady register that melts every raw edge I have.
“Una volta c’era una bambina…,” he reads, and Livia follows the pictures with a fingertip, occasionally correcting his pronunciation with a dead-serious, “No, it’s like Nonno says it,” even though she’s never met a nonno in her life.
I don’t know much about Matteo’s father besides the rumors I’ve heard about the brutal Gemini capo. Would he make a decent grandfather to our daughter? Anyone would be better than my own shite father, that’s for certain.
Matteo grins and tries again, kissing her temple when he gets the pronunciation right.
I watch them in the lamplight, the way his mouth shapes careful vowels and her lashes shadow her cheeks, and I press my fingers to the locket at my throat. I used to believe secrets were armor. Now they feel like thieves that stole years we can’t get back.
He finishes the last page with a flourish. “E vissero felici… per sempre.” They lived happily ever after. Then he closes the book with a reverent little pat like he’s sealing a wish inside. Livia yawns so wide I can count her back teeth.
“Story again?” She’s already sliding down his chest.
“Tomorrow,” I whisper, tucking the blanket to her chin.
“Tomorrow,” she echoes, that impossible word.
It breaks me sweetly every single time. We carry her to bed, well Matteo does.
His long body is careful in the narrow hall, Noreen already pretending not to be misty-eyed in the kitchen, and I hum while we smooth down the covers.
Livia insists on sleeping sideways so she can keep a hand on her stuffed goat’s ear. We let her.
“’Night, Mammy. ’Night, Papà.”
We stand in the doorway until she falls asleep, enjoying every second we missed out on.
“I think she’s finally out,” Matteo whispers minutes later, nudging me in the side.
I nod, sneak one final peek at the sleeping angel and follow him back to the kitchen. My phone lies face-down on the table. Matteo’s buzzes instead. He glances at the screen, then lifts the cell to his ear and leans against the counter.
“Leo,” he says quietly.
I rinse cups and listen without listening, reading his mouth as much as his words.
“Capito… yes, tomorrow morning is fine… notarized by noon? … I’ll come into town early.” His gaze flicks to me, checking. “No, just me. You stay with them. Bring the papers. And, Leo, grazie.”
He ends the call and rubs the back of his neck. “Gemini Corp business,” he admits, grimacing. “They need signatures and a notary stamp on a few filings to lock down the New York dockside restoration Ale is coordinating. Leo’s driving out at first light to take me into town for an hour or two.”
My spine prickles at the word Gemini like it always will, but the country life has taught me to count to three before I answer. “It’s fine.” I mean it, mostly. At least this is part of the legitimate side of the business. “We need that stamp.”
“We do,” he agrees, then his mouth curves. “And we need bedtime.”
Noreen appears again, then shoos us with a flap of her dish towel, eyes soft, but voice sharp.
“Off with you. The walls in this house are older than both of you put together but they’ve survived worse.
” The dish towel points at him. “Dawn for you, Mr. Rossi. I’ll have scones waiting so you don’t faint from starvation on your drive into town. ”
The woman may be nearing eighty, but she has ears like a bat.
“Yes, ma’am,” Matteo replies, mock-solemn, before kissing her cheek. She harrumphs and pretends not to like it.
Our room at the front of the cottage is small, square and perfect, the window cracked to the sound of rain walking across the fields. When the door clicks shut, quiet swells. Matteo comes to me like a tide coming home.
“Hi.” He grins at me like we didn’t spend the entire day within arm’s reach.
“Hi,” I reply, like I didn’t count the minutes to this moment.
He touches my cheek as if he’s asking permission, and when I lean into his palm, all the fight leaks out of both of us.
His lips meet mine, soft and gentle before his tongue sweeps in.
The kiss is not the kind pulled out of storms and fear.
It’s a careful thing, slow as honey. Now, he tastes like tea and the word forever.
Then he backs me toward the bed and holds my hand before stretching me across it. He undresses me slowly, leisurely, as if we have all the time in the world. A devious smile parts his lips as that heated gaze rakes over me once I’m bare before him.
“I want to worship you tonight, amore.”
My heart skips a beat at the word. My love.
He drops to his knees, hands clutching my thighs and spreads my legs.
Fiery heat races through my veins as he pulls my panties aside and dips his mouth to my throbbing core, those emerald eyes fixed on me.
His tongue darts across my clit, and my entire body lights up, a moan squeezing past my lips.
“Mmm,” he murmurs against the swollen bundle of nerves. My back arches against him. “You taste like sweet lemons and sunshine, Kitty Cat.” He licks his lips, savoring me. “Just like I remembered, just like home.”
His tongue slips through my wet folds, sucking, nibbling, until the world narrows to him, to his mouth, to this moment. “Matteo,” I groan, eyes squeezed tight as the heat builds, each sweep of his tongue already pushing me closer to the precipice.
“Look at me, Kitty Cat,” he whispers against my pulsing flesh.
I force my eyes to meet his over the smattering of auburn curls at my apex. The depth of emotion surging beneath the jeweled green steals my breath.
“I’m here, amore. It’s me. It’ll always be me from now on.” Then his tongue continues its lavishing, but his eyes never deviate from mine. Every devastating stroke is a promise, a vow.
“I’m going to come…” I rasp out before long, reaching for his hair, burying my fingers in the soft waves.
“Come for me, Cat, only for me, amore.” The vibrations of his tongue against my sensitive skin send me tumbling over the edge. Raw pleasure rushes through every inch of my being, my entire body trembling in pleasure. He rides out every tremor, hot mouth drawing out the spine-tingling aftershocks.
I’m weightless, panting and smiling like I never forgot how.
He climbs over me, his clothes already shed and a wicked grin on his handsome face. “I could feast on your pussy, Kitty Cat, for the rest of my life and never have enough.”
Warmth floods my cheeks, and I swat at his shoulder.
Then his mouth is on mine again. There are no frantic edges now, just patient hands and little sounds when fingertips memorize old terrain.
He lifts me higher up the bed and cups my knee, my hip, his mouth mapping a devotion I don’t know how to hold without trembling.
“I love you,” he whispers into my skin, a quiet litany as he travels over my shoulder, down my throat, and to the center of my chest where the blossom lives. “I love you. I love you.” He presses a kiss over Livia’s name like a vow.
I thread my fingers in his hair and pull him up until our foreheads rest together.
It would be so easy to deflect with a joke, to put steel where softness belongs, but I don’t.
Not tonight. “I love you too,” I murmur, and it’s both a surrender and a homecoming.
His eyes spark, green going luminous, and something inside me eases that’s been clenched since I was eighteen and stupid.
He worships me like he’s learning a prayer with his mouth. It’s tender and wrecking. He slows when my breath snags, he smiles into the kiss when I tug him closer, and his palm finds mine above my head and laces our fingers like a promise.
His cock is heavy against my thigh, and I can almost feel the desire raging through him. Still, he goes slowly, savoring every moment. The need begins to build again, pooling hot and wet between my legs.
“Matteo,” I murmur against his mouth. “I want you inside me.”
“Then who am I to deny you?” He smirks and settles his hips between my thighs. Like always, we just fit.
When he finally slides into me, it’s a relief that feels like a release. There’s no violence in it, no apology. Just us. We move together unhurried, the old rhythm softened by the new truth. He keeps my gaze and I allow it, because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be found.
We move together, each thrust pushing me toward that elusive high. He helps me find it again and again. Once we’re both sated and floating on the lingering sensations, he gathers me like I might drift away. My ear finds his heartbeat, steady and stunned. The rain hushes the window.
His voice is rough at the edges when he finally speaks.
“I want this for the rest of my life.” It’s almost shy, which breaks me all over again.
“Us. Livia. A home that doesn’t have bars in the windows unless you’re counting goat pens.
Manhattan if you’ll have it, a real family in the sunlight.
Or—” He cuts himself off because he must have felt me stiffen.
I tilt his jaw so he has to see my face when I answer.
“I love that you want that for us.” The truth is warm and heavy in my mouth.
“And maybe, one day, I’ll take you up on it.
But I need time, Matteo. Livia needs time.
I kept her hidden to keep her away from our world.
I can’t drag her into a different danger because my heart is greedy.
I have to make sure the life we choose is the kind that doesn’t ask her to pay the price. ”
“Then I give it up. All of it. We go to Sicily and live by the sea. I’ll break every tie to Gemini, walk away from everything with my name on it. I’ll ride a Vespa and learn how to make bread like a man with nothing but time. Just say how you want it to look, Cat, and I’ll build that life for us.”
I nod. “I know you will.”
His head dips, jaw softening. “We go slow. We make a plan that passes the Livia test. School runs and soccer Saturdays. You set the pace, and I’ll match it.
We’ll do whatever you say.” He kisses my knuckles, one by one.
“But know this, whether it’s in a high-rise in Manhattan or in a shack by the sea in Sicily, I’m in either way.
I don’t need the crown to be yours or to be her papà. I just need the two of you. Forever.”
Emotion tightens my throat. “Okay,” I breathe, and the word feels like a door opening. “We’ll decide together.”
“Together,” he repeats, burying his smile in my hair.
We fall asleep tangled, the kind of tangle that says stay.
In the blue before dawn a car hums up the lane and a goat complains.
Matteo kisses my shoulder and slips out of bed, dressing in the quiet like a man who finally knows what he’s walking toward.
At the door he looks back, softer than morning.
I lift the covers once, an invitation and a promise.
“Come back to me,” I whisper.
“Always.” And for once the word doesn’t scare me. It sounds like a real life.