20. Ursula #2
“I named a ship after his mistress once, out of pure spite,” I finally manage, laughing and crying at the same time. “The least the universe owes me is a man who names one after me.”
“The best the universe owes you,” he corrects, and kisses me. “And it paid up.”
***
The wedding night is everything.
We stumble into the lighthouse bedroom, laughing and crying and kissing each other everywhere we can reach. He unzips my dress with trembling fingers. I undo his tie with clumsy, impatient fingers.
“I can’t believe you’re my wife.”
“I can’t believe you’re my husband.”
“Say it again.”
“Husband.”
“Again.”
“Husband, husband, husband.”
He lifts me onto the bed, and the laughter fades into something else. Something tender and reverent and holy.
“I love you,” he says, and it’s not just words anymore.
It’s his hands on my skin, learning me again like it’s the first time.
He kisses down my body slow, my throat, my breasts, the soft plane of my belly he has no idea is keeping a secret, and lower, until his mouth is on me and his arms are hooked under my thighs to hold me open, and he takes me apart gently, patiently, like we have the entire rest of our lives, which, tonight, we finally do.
I come against his tongue with my fingers in his hair and his name breaking apart in my mouth.
“I love you too.” I’m still shaking when I pull him up to me. “Come here. I want you inside me when I say it again.”
He settles between my thighs and eases home, and I feel all of him at once, the stretch and the heat and the impossible rightness of it.
He laces his fingers through mine and presses our joined hands into the pillow beside my head, and he moves in me like he’s memorizing it, deep and unhurried, his forehead against mine, his breath ragged.
“I’m going to show you every day for the rest of my life,” he says against my mouth.
“I’m going to let you.”
He starts slow and reverent, like he has something to prove about how gently he can love his wife. I let him, for about a minute. Then I hook my heels behind his thighs and drag him in hard.
“It’s our wedding night,” I tell my husband. “You can worship me tomorrow. Tonight I want you to fuck me like you mean it.”
He goes still. Then he laughs, low and dark, and something behind his eyes comes loose. “Yes, ma’am.”
He gives me exactly what I asked for, driving into me hard enough to shove me up the mattress, one hand fisting in my hair, filthy things spilling out of him between kisses about how tight I am, how wet, how long he has wanted to wreck me exactly like this.
I come embarrassingly fast, clenching around him, and he swears and digs his fingers into my hip hard enough to leave marks, holding himself back by what looks like sheer spite.
“Show-off,” I gasp.
“You started it.”
Later, we slow down and make love the other way, unhurried and savoring, and I think about the life growing inside me.
Matteo doesn’t know yet. He’s worshipping my body without knowing what it’s becoming, without knowing there are three of us in this bed now.
I wrap my legs around his back and take him deeper and he groans my name like it’s the only word left in any language.
“You’re mine,” he murmurs against my throat. “All of you. Finally, completely mine.”
“Yours.” I roll my hips up to meet his, chasing the tightening low in my belly. “Say it again while you’re inside me. Tell me you love me.”
“I love you.” He drives into me, slow and sure, one hand slipping between us to circle where I need him. “I love you, I love you, I have loved you for thirteen years and I will love you for the rest of them.”
When we come together, it’s not fireworks or earthquakes. It’s sunrise. He follows me the second I clench around him, spilling into me with my name on his lips, slow and golden and inevitable, the way the light changes everything without anyone noticing until it’s done.
I cry when I finish. Tears of joy, of relief, of a happiness so big it can’t be contained.
“Are you okay?” He brushes the tears from my cheeks.
“I’m perfect. I’m so perfect I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Then don’t do anything. Just be here. With me.”
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Afterward, we wrap ourselves in a blanket and go out to the gallery deck. The lighthouse beam turns slow circles above us. The stars are scattered across the sky like diamonds on black velvet. The sea whispers against the rocks below.
“I have something to tell you.” My voice is steady, even though my heart is pounding.
“That sounds serious.”
“It’s not serious. Well, it is. But it’s good. It’s very, very good.”
“Ursula.” He turns to face me, and I see worry creeping into his eyes. “What is it?”
I take his hand. Place it on my belly. Hold it there.
“We’re having a baby.”
He goes still.
The lighthouse beam turns. The stars wheel overhead. The waves crash below. And Matteo Salazar, the self-made billionaire who has never been speechless in his life, doesn’t say a word.
“Matteo?” Now I’m worried. “Say something.”
“We’re...” He swallows. “We’re having a baby?”
“Yes.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“Right now? There’s a baby in there right now?”
“Very small. But yes.”
His face does something I’ve never seen before. It crumbles and rebuilds itself, cycles through shock and fear and wonder and joy, until what’s left is something that looks like revelation.
“We’re having a baby.”
“We’re having a baby.”
He’s crying. The man who faced down my husband on a yacht, who chased a kidnapping boat across the Atlantic, who rebuilt this lighthouse with his own hands, is crying into my hair and holding me like I’m made of glass and laughing all at once.
“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much. I love you, I love you, I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“We’re going to be parents.”
“We are.”
“I don’t know how to be a parent.”
“Neither do I.”
“We’re going to figure it out together.”
“We are.”
He pulls back, looks at my belly like he can see through skin and muscle to the tiny life beneath. His hand is still there, warm and trembling, cradling something neither of us can feel yet but both of us know is real.
“Hello,” he whispers to my stomach. “I’m your dad. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m going to love you so much. I’m going to give you everything I didn’t have. A home, a family, two parents who chose each other. You’re going to be so loved, little one. So incredibly loved.”
I’m crying again. I don’t think I’ve ever cried this much in my life. But these tears feel different from all the others. They feel like release. Like relief. Like the beginning of something instead of the end.
“We’re going to need a bigger lighthouse,” I say.
He laughs. “We’ll build an addition. More rooms, a nursery, whatever you want.”
“I want this.” I gesture at the sea, the stars, the man in front of me. “I want exactly this. Forever.”
“You have it.” He kisses me softly. “You have me. You have everything.”
The lighthouse beam keeps turning. The stars keep shining. Somewhere below us, in the room where we fell in love, my mother’s diary sits next to our marriage certificate, two documents that tell the story of who I was and who I’ve become.
I came to this lighthouse as a woman in pieces. A woman betrayed, humiliated, frozen. A woman who had forgotten how to feel, how to trust, how to love.
I leave it whole.
The ice queen’s happily ever after comes with a crew of three.
And for the first time in my life, I’m not cold at all.
THE END