Chapter 14 Lily
It’s been three days since I’ve seen Noah and I miss him so painfully. Every morning he leaves a note at my doorstep:
Miss you, princess.
We need to talk.
I love them and it makes my heart soft, but I wonder why he is doing this? Does he love me like I do him?
I need a break from my thoughts about Noah. It does no good to think about him because I’m going to cry again. It’s stupid but his words made my heart flutter every time I get his notes.
I decide to see what he wants. I agreed to see him. We ended up choosing a local café.
“How are you, Lily?” he asks, smiling with a cup of coffee already in his hands. He’s so handsome and sexy.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. Let me get you a coffee.” I nod. I huff
“What do you want?” I question.
“Didn’t you read my notes?”
It’s our turn before I can answer. “I did, but I don’t understand,” I say.
“Yeah, you do. I’m sorry that you found out that way. I was going to tell you but you know what happened.”
“How can you say that? I hope you didn’t come all this way to tell me that.” Anger reflecting my voice
“I know I was wrong princess but at that time I felt that was the best decision.” I could hear the remorse in his voice. I wasn’t letting him off the hook so easily.
I huff.
“Princess. I need you to come back to me.” There’s a vulnerability in his voice that does something to my heart, but it’s not enough. I can’t go back to a loveless relationship.
“I’m sorry Noah but I can’t.”
“Why not? Is there something wrong? Is there another man?” The jealousy in his voice surprises me.
“No, but I just can’t be with you”
“Call me crazy, but I couldn’t let you get away.
I had to have a reason to have you by my side.
” I’m trying to stop myself from falling for his lines.
True or not, I hardly know him, but he looks so lost. “I knew if I told you that I’d fallen madly in love with you, you’d think I was nuts or that I’m a player.
I’m neither of those. Well, I’ve felt insane since I met you, but I’m not a player.
In fact, well…. I haven’t been with any for five years. “
“If you felt like that why didn’t you say anything? Why did you let me go?”
“I tried to give you time. I tried to be the better man after you walked away. I knew I’d been a dick that day, but that’s because even I wanted to give you a choice.
I didn’t want you to think I was keeping you from leaving if you wanted to.
So I’m here now to show you how much we are perfect for each other.
I love you.” He caresses my cheek, brushing his fingers over me.
“There’s something else,” I say before I can stop myself. “You looked into me. Had someone digging into my life before I even told you anything. You let me sit across from you at breakfast asking questions like you didn’t already have the answers.”
His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t look away.
“I did. I won’t lie to you about that, not again.
The second you showed up bleeding on my porch, I had Matteo pulling everything he could find by morning.
I told myself it was to keep you safe. Some of it probably was.
But I also wanted to know everything about you before you were ready to give it to me, and that wasn’t fair to you. ”
“You don’t get to just say sorry and expect that to fix it.”
“I also need you to know something else,” he continues, before I can respond, like he’s been rehearsing this part.
“That night I went after the men who took you, I didn’t just scare them off.
I made sure they’d never be a problem for you or your mother again.
Permanently. I need you to understand what that means before you decide if you can still love me. ”
The bluntness of it steals my breath. I’d suspected, of course, the way he’d come home with something dark and coiled behind his eyes, the two men I never saw again, the way my mother flinched every time his name came up afterward.
But hearing it laid out plain, no softening, no euphemism, hits different than suspecting ever did.
“You killed them,” I say, needing to hear myself say it out loud.
“Yes.” No hesitation. No excuse offered up to make it easier to swallow. “I’d do it again tomorrow if it meant keeping you safe. I won’t apologize for that part, even if I’m sorry for the way I went about everything else.”
I should be horrified. Some small, rational part of me knows I should be packing a bag right now, calling Priya, putting as much distance between myself and this house as I can manage.
Instead I just feel strangely, terribly calm, like a piece I hadn’t realized was missing has finally clicked into place.
Maybe that says something troubling about me.
Maybe it says something about what love actually looks like once you strip away all the fairy tale coating people paint over it.
“Okay,” I say finally.
“Okay?” He looks almost disbelieving, like he’d braced himself for a different word entirely.
“Okay,” I repeat, steadier this time. “I’m not going to pretend I understand that part of you completely. But I trust that you did it for me, and for what it’s worth, I’m not sorry those men can’t hurt anyone else either.”
“I’m not expecting anything,” he says quietly. “I’m telling you because you deserve the truth, even the parts that make me look like a bastard. If you walk out of here after I say it, that’s on me, not you. But I’m done keeping things from you, Lily. All of it. Ask me anything.”
The anger in my chest doesn’t vanish, not completely, but it loosens enough for me to breathe around it. Maybe that’s what matters more than perfect. He’s not pretending he did nothing wrong. He’s just here, owning it, waiting to see if that’s enough.
“There’s one more thing,” I say, and he goes still, bracing again. “If you ever lie to me by omission again, even to protect me, I walk. I mean it, Noah. I need a partner, not a bodyguard who decides what I’m allowed to know.”
“Understood,” he says, and something in the way he says it, quick and certain, tells me he means to actually keep that promise, not just placate me in the moment.
“Then finish it,” I say. “I already know what you are, Noah. You told me that first night. What I don’t know is the rest, the parts you’ve been managing around me since. Who Sorrentino is. What he wants. Whether this is actually over or you’ve just been letting me believe that so I’d sleep easier.”
So he does, right there in the booth with our coffee going cold, filling in the pieces I’d only had the outline of until now, the name behind the men who came for me, the truce that used to hold between his father and Sorrentino’s, the reason that truce died the same year his father did.
He tells me it might not be over. He tells me some wars end quietly, with a phone call and an understanding, and some don’t end until somebody stops breathing.
“And you’re asking me to just live with that,” I say slowly. “Not knowing which kind of war we’re in until it’s already happened.”
“I’m asking you to decide if you can live with me,” he says, and there’s no charm in it, no practiced smoothness, just a man laying his whole ugly truth out on a table and waiting to see if I run.
“Because the man you fell for and the man who makes problems disappear, they’re not two different people, Lily.
I wish they were. I’ve spent ten years wishing they were. ”
I think about the version of my life where I say this is too much and walk out that door, back to a mother who steals my things and a town that never once made me feel safe even before any of this started.
I think about the version where I stay, and love a man whose hands have done terrible things in the name of protecting people, myself now apparently included.
It isn’t really a choice at all, not when I look at it honestly. I made this choice the night I ran through a forest and ended up bleeding on his porch instead of anywhere else on earth.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him finally, reaching across the table for his hand.
“Sorrentino, the family business, all of it. I’m choosing this.
I’m choosing you.” His whole face changes when I say it, some tension I hadn’t even clocked draining out of his shoulders all at once, like he genuinely thought there was a version of this conversation where I walked.
“I love you,” he says, low and rough, the words sounding like they cost him something to hand over so plainly.
“You do?” I stammer out.
“Could you ever love me?”
“I’m already there, Noah. I’ve fallen in love with your old and growly sexy ass long before we officially met.”
“Thank God.” He pulls me to him and proceeds to kiss the daylight out of me. The whole cafe probably sees, but I can’t bring myself to care, not with his hands cradling my face like I’m something worth being careful with.
He throws some money on the table and then ushers me out the door to his truck. Within minutes we are home. That word makes me giddy inside. Home, it has a nice ring to it.
“No running now, sweet princess.”
“No.” I find myself anticipating his touch.
His mouth comes down on mine, kissing me until my panties are soaked and I’m panting wildly for air. Noah roughly pulls back as if he had to force himself to release my mouth. With a smirk, he shoves me onto my stomach on the bed.
“Oh no. What are you going to do to me?” I ask, my voice shaking with need. This man sends me into a frenzy with just a look. He really loves me. I clench my pussy to the rapid beating of my heart.
He climbs over me, his legs straddling mine. Leaning in, he huskily whispers, “I’m going to fuck you, roughly and make sure I fuck a baby into you and then I’ll whisk you away to get married. You’ll be shackled to me for life.”
He grinds his hard cock against my pussy. I grind my pussy on his cock, wanting to feel more of him, but he backs off for a moment. I want to whine until he yanks down my panties and then spanks my ass. I yelp and then moan. He spanks the other cheek and I scream.
“Sweet girl, you’re enjoying this,” he grunts as I hear his belt being undone. The sound of the leather being pulled forcefully through the loops sends another gush of liquid out of me.
I can’t help but tease my sexy man because I’ve missed him so much. “I’ve missed your big cock deep inside of me, pounding me apart like a possessive beast.”
“Fuck, you’re killing me, princess.” Suddenly he thrusts two fingers into my pussy.
“You’re drenched for me.” His mouth comes down on my neck then slowly skims down to my tits and over to my pussy.
Once he gets to my pussy lips, he parts them and stuffs his tongue into my slit.
I can’t contain the pleasure and cry out, coming on his tongue and fingers.
As I come down, he shoves his cock deep into me and I’m on the verge of coming again.
“Oh my God. I’m so full.”
“That you are and soon you’ll be full of every fucking drop of come.
You’re mine to do whatever I want with.” He bites my neck and then sucks the same spot, marking me as he works me out, stretching my pussy with his thick cock.
I thrust my pussy up as he pulls out and slams back in.
He curls my hair around his fist, gripping it tight while driving deep into me.
“Noah. Yes. I love you,” I cry out, creaming on him.
“I love you, Lily,” he bellows throughout the room as he floods my womb with his seed. “Marry me.”
“Yes, Noah.”
He pulls out and wraps his arms around me as we lay on the bed. “Just know that you’re mine, forever.”
“I like that.” I moan, cuddling into his chest and his still hard cock and fall asleep.
I wake sometime before dawn to find him already awake beside me, staring at the ceiling with the particular stillness he gets when he’s working through a problem he hasn’t decided how to explain yet.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, voice thick with sleep.
“Nothing’s wrong.” He turns his head, and in the gray pre dawn light his expression softens into something almost boyish.
“Just thinking about logistics. If we’re doing this, doing it properly, there are things to consider.
Security for the wedding. A guest list that has to be handled carefully, because some of the people I’d want there aren’t people you introduce to a wedding planner.
Whether we tell your mother the truth about what she’s marrying her daughter into, or whether we let her keep believing I’m just a mechanic with a nice house. ”
“That’s a lot of logistics for a Tuesday morning.”
“Welcome to my brain,” he says, and there’s real warmth in it, self deprecating in a way I don’t get to see from him often.
“I want to give you a normal wedding. I want you to have the version of this that doesn’t come with metal detectors and men in dark suits scanning the parking lot.
I don’t know if that’s actually possible for someone like me. ”
I prop myself up on one elbow, studying him. “Then we figure out what normal looks like for us instead of chasing someone else’s version of it. Small guest list. People we actually trust. If that means Matteo walks the perimeter in a suit instead of a tux, I can live with that.”
Something eases in his face, like he’d been braced for me to ask for something he couldn’t give. “You make it sound simple.”
“It is simple,” I tell him, settling back against his chest. “You’re the one who keeps making it complicated.”
He laughs, real and unguarded, the sound of it filling up the whole quiet room.
“Fair enough.” He presses a kiss to my temple, then another to my jaw, his hands finding their familiar place at my hips.
“Small guest list. Trusted people. Matteo in a suit instead of a tux.” A pause, thoughtful.
“He’s going to complain about the suit the entire time, you know. ”
“I can live with that too,” I tell him, and mean it, already smiling at the thought.
“There’s one more thing,” he says, hesitant in a way that’s rare for him. “My mother’s brooch. It’s the only thing I have left of hers, and I know it’s not really your style, but I’d like you to wear it. If you want to.”
I didn’t expect that, and something in my chest goes soft and warm at the thought of it, this dangerous, careful man offering up the one fragile piece of his own history he has left. “I’d love to wear it,” I tell him, and I mean every word.
He kisses me again, slower this time, like he’s got nowhere else in the world to be, which, for tonight at least, he doesn’t.
For once, neither of us is thinking about Sorrentino, or debts, or the careful architecture of danger that shapes every other hour of our days.
Just this booth, this coffee gone cold, this man who chose me back even after I saw every part of what he is.
Some nights, that’s enough. Tonight, it’s everything.
* * *