Chapter Forty-Three Ordinary Mornings
With Salvatore gone and the threat finally, truly lifted, Elena discovered something she hadn't expected: that the quiet, ordinary days of a marriage were somehow more intimate than any of the danger that had come before them.
She learned Dante hummed, tunelessly and without realizing it, while he made coffee — the same instinct his mother had passed down, she suspected, though he'd never admit the connection aloud.
She learned he read the newspaper back to front, business section first, and complained about it every single morning as though the order of pages personally offended him.
She learned that he could not, under any circumstances, be trusted near a stovetop, and had nearly set the kitchen alight twice attempting to cook her breakfast as a surprise, refusing both times to admit defeat until she'd gently taken the spatula from his hand.
"I run an empire," he grumbled, watching her rescue the eggs he'd scrambled into something closer to rubber. "I should be able to make breakfast."
"You run an empire," she agreed, sliding properly cooked eggs onto his plate with a barely suppressed smile, "and yet here we are."
"Don't laugh at me."
"I would never." She was absolutely laughing at him. He caught her around the waist before she could retreat to her own side of the table, pulling her into his lap with an ease that still, some mornings, stole her breath entirely.
"You laugh at me constantly," he murmured against her temple, "and somehow I've decided I like it. That should concern me more than it does."
"Everything about us should probably concern you more than it does." She turned in his lap to face him properly, looping her arms around his neck. "You married a woman to settle a debt and somehow ended up burning eggs for her every Sunday."
"I ended up in love with her," he corrected, quiet and certain, his hand coming up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear with a tenderness that never failed to undo her, months into this now, the way it had the very first time. "The eggs were an unplanned casualty of that particular disaster."
She kissed him then, unhurried, tasting coffee and the particular contentment of a Sunday morning that belonged to no one but them, and thought, not for the first time, that she would relive the terror of her father's study a thousand times over if it meant arriving, eventually, here.