Chapter 32
VIOLET
"The doctor said overnight observation."
"The doctor doesn’t know the danger you’re in. There'll be a physician at the loft by seven a.m."
"That's not how it works, Gianni.”
"It is now.”
He carries me out of the elevator and into the vast interior of the penthouse. Part of me still feels like this place is a gilded cage. But the greater part of me, a part that grows a little bit every day, feels like this is home. My apartment in Sunnyside is becoming a memory.
The loft is quiet. Down the hall, Patrick's door is cracked open, the glow of a nightlight spilling across the hardwood. Nina moved in three days ago, taking the room next to Patrick’s.
She'd been doing such good work and spending so many hours here that Gianni suggested she go full-time and live-in, and she accepted with the pragmatic enthusiasm of a twenty-four-year-old who just traded a shared apartment in Bushwick for a room in a Tribeca penthouse with a view of the river.
Patrick adores her and she adores him. And right now, knowing that my son is asleep and safe with someone I trust in the room next to his is the only thing keeping me from dissolving entirely.
Gianni sets me down in the master bedroom, the sheets of the bed soft and white and inviting. The city glows through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He stands in front of me and takes my face in both hands gently, carefully, his thumbs tracing the lines of my cheekbones.
"How's the shoulder?"
"Hurts."
"How's the rest of you?"
"Terrified."
He doesn’t flinch at my comment. He presses his forehead against mine. His steadiness, his nearness makes him feel less like a man and more like a wall between me and everything outside of these windows.
"I'm going to keep you safe," he says. "You and Patrick and this baby.”
"You can't know that."
"I can. Because I've spent my entire life making sure the people I protect stay protected. And I have never—" His voice catches. Barely. A crack so small most people would miss it. I don't miss it. "I have never had this much reason to."
I close my eyes. His hands are warm on my face.
His breath is warm on my lips. And underneath the fear and the exhaustion and the ache in my shoulder and the impossible, terrifying, microscopic life growing inside me, there is something else.
Something that feels like the ground after an earthquake.
Shaken, cracked, but still there. Still holding.
"I need you," I whisper. "It’s scary to say and I don't care. I need you tonight."
"You have me."
"No." I open my eyes and look directly into his. "I need you. All of you. I need to feel like I'm alive and not just surviving. I need you to make me forget everything except this. Can you do that?"
The tenderness in his eyes doesn't leave, it deepens, darkens, blends with something hungrier and more primal.
"Yes," he says. "I can do that."
He kisses me. Not gently. Not the way you kiss a pregnant woman with a bruised shoulder in a dark bedroom. He kisses me like I asked—like I'm alive, like there’s nothing in the world but us.
I pull at his shirt. The buttons resist, so I yank and something tears and then my hands are on his bare chest, the hard planes of muscle, the warmth of his skin.
He shrugs the ruined shirt off his shoulders and reaches for the zipper of my gown and pulls it down slowly, his knuckles tracing the length of my spine, and the velvet falls to the floor in a pool of dark green.
I'm standing in front of him in nothing but underwear and the fading adrenaline of the worst night of my life.
His eyes move over me. My breasts and my hips and my stomach—flat still, unchanged, no evidence yet of the secret it's carrying. He looks at me like I'm something he can't believe is real.
"You're beautiful," he says.
"You're overdressed."
He smiles. The rest of his clothes come off, and then we're skin to skin and his hands are everywhere—my waist, my thighs, the curve of my ass, careful around the shoulder but not careful anywhere else.
He lifts me, and I wrap my legs around him, and he carries me to the bed and lays me down with a control that makes my pussy clench.
He starts at my throat. Mouth open, tongue dragging, teeth grazing the tendon in my neck. I arch into him, my hands in his hair, my hips rising off the mattress to meet him.
"Tell me if it hurts," he murmurs against my collarbone.
"It doesn't hurt."
"The shoulder."
"Don’t worry about the shoulder."
His mouth moves lower. Across my chest, between my breasts, down the center of my stomach. He pauses there just for a moment, his lips pressed against the skin below my navel. The way he kisses me, the tenderness of it, makes my throat clench.
Gianni moves lower and lower until he’s peeling my panties down, kissing my bare thighs from the outside moving in. I shiver because I’m so goddamn sensitive, focusing on each slow press of his lips to my skin. Then he reaches my lips and teases me with his tongue.
“Oh God,” I moan, even though he hasn’t really even begun.
When he finally puts his mouth on me, he does it with the same devastating focus he brings to everything—methodical, relentless, reading every shudder and shift of my hips.
His hands pin my thighs open, and I grip the sheets and try to hold on and fail completely. He spreads me open, dragging his tongue along my lips before pressing it against my clit, making me cry out from the intensity of the pleasure.
“Gianni please!”
I force my eyes open so I can watch him, watch his tongue make slow, lazy circles around my clit. I want him inside me so much, but he denies me. I get his tongue and his lips and nothing else.
“More… I need more…”
The orgasm builds from somewhere deep and low and breaks through me in waves that make me cry out loud enough that I press my own hand over my mouth.
He pulls it away. "Don't. I want to hear you."
"Patrick—"
"Is asleep. And Nina's door is closed." He slides two fingers inside me, curls them, and the sound I make is beyond modesty. "Let go, Violet."
I let go. I come with his name on my lips and his fingers inside me and it isn't just physical—it's the release of everything I've been holding onto since the gala, since the attack, since the doctor told me I was pregnant.
Gianni doesn't give me time to recover. He moves up my body, and I feel him hard against my thigh, and the need pulsing through me is so intense it borders on painful.
"I want you inside me," I say. "Now. Please."
He flashes me a slight grin, a cocky look that makes me want to slap him and kiss him all at once, a look that makes it clear he’s got me right where he wants me.
Gianni takes his dick by the base and enters me slowly, filling me with one long, deep stroke that makes us both exhale, and then he's fully inside me and his forehead is pressed against mine and our eyes are open.
I kiss him without thinking, driven purely by instinct and want, the kiss hungry and open-mouthed.
I place my hands on his perfect, sculpted ass and guide him.
He starts to move. Deep, slow, a rhythm that builds like something musical—unhurried at first, then more insistent, his hips driving into mine with a deliberate intensity that makes the headboard groan and my vision blur.
I wrap my legs around his waist, pull him deeper, and the angle shifts and I gasp, and he groans against my neck, and we're climbing together now, synchronized, two bodies speaking the same urgent, desperate language.
"Look at me," he says.
Pleasure coils tighter, then snaps. I come hard, clenching around his cock, waves rolling through me so intensely my toes curl and my nails bite into his back.
His control fractures. His hips stutter, thrusts turning erratic and deep as he lets go completely, surrendering every last thread of restraint to me.
He spills inside me with a broken groan, body shuddering, face buried in my hair. I hold him through it, arms locked around his neck, our mingled sounds raw and wordless.
The silence afterward is the gentlest thing I've ever felt.
He rolls to his side, pulling me against his chest, his arm wrapped around me, his hand resting deliberately, possessively, tenderly on my stomach.
"We figure it out together," he murmurs into my hair. "All of it."
"All of it," I repeat.
Outside the windows, the city glows. Down the hall, my son sleeps with a rubber dinosaur and a nanny who loves him and a man on the other side of the penthouse who would burn the world to keep him safe.
I press my hand over Gianni's hand on my stomach.
Then I close my eyes, and I sleep.