Chapter 48
VIOLET
"Slow," I whisper. "I want this slow."
"Whatever you want."
He peels my shirt over my head and I take his off too, then we’re skin to skin in the dim light with the city glowing though the windows.
His mouth is soon on my throat and my hands are in his hair and I’m so full of love and relief that I can’t even stand it.
“This body,” he says. “There’s nothing like it.”
He places his hands on the softness of my hips and squeezes. No one makes me feel like him, makes me feel the way he makes me feel with just a few words. All I can do is kiss him back.
He lays me down on the bed and kneels over me, his weight braced on his arms. He gazes down at me with those gorgeous, dark eyes. I recognize the look—it’s the same one from the first night in his office when he critiqued my writing.
But it’s different now—less predatory and more reverent. It’s not the look of a man who sees something he wants to take, but the look of a man who’s worshipping what he’s finally earned.
He starts at my mouth. Kisses me until my lips are swollen and my hips are lifting off the mattress.
Then lower—my jaw, my throat, the spot behind my ear that makes me gasp every time and he knows it.
His hands work my jeans open, slide them down, and his mouth follows—across my collarbone, between my breasts, down the center of my stomach.
He pauses there. Presses his lips to the small, barely visible curve just beginning to show. Time has passed, and the evidence is starting to arrive.
"Hi," he murmurs against my skin. To the baby. Talking to the baby.
Something inside me breaks open in the best possible way.
His mouth continues down and he peels my underwear along my thighs, and the fabric comes off like a whisper against my skin.
Then his mouth is on me and I moan. His tongue traces a slow, broad stroke though my folds, circling my clit with the perfect precision only he’s capable of.
He licks me and I stop thinking about anything other than the feeling of his tongue and his hands and the low, encouraging sounds he makes as my back arches off the bed.
“Gianni… God, you do that so good…”
I open my eyes wide enough to glance down and see him flashing me a smirk.
Then he goes back to it, spreading my lips and kissing me, licking me.
I moan more, and the low, approving sounds he makes vibrate against me.
They’re deep and hungry and encouraging, my back arching even further off the bed.
One of his hands grips my hip, pinning me right where he wants me. The other slides two fingers inside of me, curling just right, stroking that sensitive spot while his tongue flicks faster.
I come hard on his mouth, crying out his name, but he doesn’t stop. Gianni works me through every shuddering wave, licking and sucking until my thighs quake and my fingers twist desperately in his hair.
"Come here," I breathe. "I need you. Please."
He rises over me, powerful and dark-eyed. I feel the thick, heavy length of his cock against my soaking wet entrance. I reach down and wrap my hand around his dick, and he’s hot and hard, dripping already for me just like he always is.
I guide him in.
Gianni pushes forward in one long, smooth thrust, stretching me open until he’s buried to the root. We share a groan of relief and surrender all at the same time. We’re two people, finally home.
Gianni’s movements are slow at first, giving me deep, rolling strokes that drag every thick, delicious inch against my walls.
My toes curl into the sheets. He leans down, resting his forehead against mine, our breaths mingling in the small space between our mouths.
He takes my hip again and tilts me just enough that each thrust hits that perfect spot.
"There," I gasp. "Right there—fuck."
"I know," he murmurs. "I always know what you need."
He really does. Gianni reads me with attention and patience and certainly, like I’m the most important and interesting subject in the world.
He builds his rhythm, and I watch his thickness plunge into me over and over, the pace steady and relentless. The second orgasm bursts through me in slow motion, and I cry out as he takes me over the edge.
The pleasure ripples through my body, and he slows his pace, letting me work through the intensity.
Then he hooks my leg higher over his hip and drives in deeper, the new angle making my eyes widen.
All I can do is wrap both arms around his neck, clinging to him as he pounds me with perfect, devastating control.
I savor the fullness, the stretch only he can give me.
"I love you," I say against his mouth, the words finally free.
"I love you," he replies. Then he kisses me fiercely. “I love you, and only you.”
I’m his and he’s mine, and he handed himself over willingly.
The third time, we come together. His thrusts are erratic, deep, and urgent.
I meet every stroke, legs locked around his waist, heels digging into his back.
Pleasure tightens and snaps—my body seizing around him as I cry out, clenching hard.
He groans my name into my neck again, hips stuttering as he spills inside me, hot and deep, pulse after pulse of warmth flooding me while his body shudders against mine.
We stay locked together—his face buried in my neck, my fingers tangled in his hair, hearts hammering in perfect sync. No space. No distance. Just us.
In the quiet that follows, his hand settles over my stomach, protective and possessive all at once.
"Violet," he says quietly.
"Mm."
"Or should I say Jessica?"
I open my eyes. He's propped on one elbow, looking down at me with an expression that's half-serious, half-something else. Something I can't quite read.
"I've been thinking about it," he says. "Which name is yours? The one you were born with, or the one you built?"
I consider this. It's a question I've been carrying for a while—longer than the pregnancy, longer than the cabin, maybe since the day Kylie sat in her Brooklyn apartment and asked me what I wanted to be called.
"Jessica was someone else," I say. "She was a girl from a broken home who married a monster because she didn't know she deserved better. She was scared and small and she let a man convince her that scared and small was all she'd ever be."
I reach up and trace the line of his jaw, the stubble, the scar above his eyebrow.
"Violet is the woman who survived. Who built a life out of nothing.
Who wrote a book and raised a son and fell in love with the most impossible man in New York City.
" I smile. "Violet is who I chose to be. And I want to keep choosing her."
"Violet," he says. Testing it. As if hearing it fresh.
"Violet."
Something shifts in his expression. The half-serious gives way to the something-else, and now I can read it—nervousness.
Actual nervousness. On the face of a man who stared down the FBI without blinking.
He reaches toward the nightstand. Opens the drawer.
Takes something out—small, held in his closed fist.
"In that case," he says, "Violet Wolfe—"
He opens his hand. A ring. White gold, simple, elegant—a single emerald flanked by two small diamonds. Green, like my eyes. Like he chose it because it reminded him of the first thing he noticed about me, the thing he couldn't stop looking at across a conference room eleven months ago.
"—will you marry me?"
I stare at the ring. I stare at him. I stare at the ring again.
"You had that in the nightstand," I say. "This whole time. You had a ring in the nightstand."
"Two weeks. I've been carrying it for two weeks and waiting for the right moment."
"The right moment is naked in bed after sex?"
"The right moment is whenever I can't wait anymore." He holds the ring between his thumb and forefinger. "Is that a yes?"
I take his face in both hands. Kiss him. Hard, deep, with everything I have. "Yes," I say against his mouth. "Yes, it's a yes, it's always been a yes."
He slides the ring onto my finger. It fits perfectly, because this man who notice everything, reads me like a manuscript, learned my ring size without asking because he's Gianni Russo and details are how he loves.
I hold my hand up in the lamplight. The emerald catches the glow and throws green sparks across the ceiling.
"It's green," I say.
"It's you."
I curl against his chest and he wraps his arms around me, his hand on my stomach and the ring glinting on my finger in the dim light. I think about Patrick, curled up asleep on the other side of the city, finally safe from dangers he couldn’t even begin to understand.
We’re safe. We’re safe and we’re free and I’m in love.
"Violet Russo," I whisper, trying it on.
His arm tightens around me.
"Yeah," he says. "That's the one."