Chapter Fifty-One Small Confessions
On their last morning at the lake, Elena woke before Dante, and lay for a long while simply watching him sleep — the rare, unguarded stillness of his face, all the careful control of his waking hours smoothed away into something almost boyish.
She traced the line of his jaw with one finger, feather-light, and watched him wake slowly beneath her touch, his eyes opening to find her propped on one elbow beside him.
"You're staring," he murmured, echoing, deliberately, the words she'd once used on him.
"I am." She smiled, unrepentant. "I like watching you when you don't know you're being watched. You look like someone entirely different. Softer."
"I feel entirely different, here. With you.
" He caught her hand, pressed a kiss to her palm.
"I think, for most of my life, I believed love was a transaction — something you extracted or extended based on usefulness.
My father taught me that, without ever meaning to teach me anything at all.
And then you walked into my life as a debt to be settled, and somehow became the only thing I've ever wanted simply because I wanted it, with no calculation attached at all. "
"That's not a small confession."
"I have smaller ones, if you'd prefer." His mouth curved.
"I hate opera, despite pretending to enjoy it for the sake of family events.
I've read your favorite book four times since we married, entirely so I'd have something to discuss with you.
I cried, the night after our wedding, once you'd fallen asleep — not from sadness.
From the sheer disbelief that I'd been allowed to keep something so good. "
Elena's chest ached with a tenderness so complete it nearly hurt.
"I love you," she whispered. "Not the Don.
Not the danger. Just you, Dante — the man who cries from happiness and can't cook and plays guitar badly and kept his mother's piano in tune for six years waiting for someone he trusted enough to hear it. "
"I love you," he answered, simply, entirely, "more than I have ever loved anything, including the life I built to convince myself I didn't need anyone at all.
" He drew her down into a kiss unhurried and complete, the morning light gold across the lake beyond the window, and for a long while, neither of them said anything else at all, content simply to exist in the quiet certainty of having found, against every likelihood, exactly the right person.