29. Cat #2
“I’m asking properly this time. Not because of a treaty or our fathers or anything political. Because I love you. Because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Because I want to spend the rest of my life being the man you deserve.”
“Max-”
“Say yes. Please.”
The porch conversation. Papà and Max talking for an hour. My traditional, old-fashioned father who believes in doing things properly.
“You asked my father’s permission.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you were talking about all that time?”
“Part of it. He also had things to say about what happens if I hurt you again.”
“What did he say?”
“That he’d take my leg to match his.”
“And you still want to marry me?”
“I would marry you if your entire family showed up armed for war. I would marry you in a burning building. I would marry you on the moon if that’s what it took. Say yes, Cat.”
My throat closes. He means it, every ridiculous word of it, and the knowing undoes something I’ve been holding shut for months.
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, I’ll marry you again. Yes, this time on purpose. Yes to everything.”
A shriek erupts from the kitchen window, Mamma, watching the whole thing with zero shame, applauding like she’s at the opera.
“Did you know she was watching?” I ask, laughing.
“I assumed. Your mother doesn’t strike me as the type to miss a moment like this.”
“She’s not.”
“I don’t care.” He slides the ring onto my finger and pulls me into a kiss. “Let her watch. Let everyone watch. I want the whole world to know I’m marrying you again.”
We say goodnight to my parents like teenagers.
“Sleep well,” Papà says, shaking Max’s hand with something that might be approval.
“You too, sir.”
“And Massimo? Remember what we discussed.”
“Every word, sir.”
Mamma hugs me at the bottom of the stairs, whispering in Italian that she’s proud of me, that she loves me, that she expects grandchildren updates first thing in the morning.
“Mamma, you’re literally going to see me at breakfast.”
“I know, but still. First thing.”
We climb the stairs together, and the moment the bedroom door closes, Max’s mouth finds mine.
“My parents are here,” I gasp.
“I know.”
“Right down the hall.”
“I’m aware.”
“We should probably-”
“Be quiet?” His hands are gentle on my waist. “Yes. We should definitely be quiet.”
“Max, I’m serious-”
“So am I. Very serious about being very quiet.”
He’s backing me toward the bed, kissing my jaw, my throat, the sensitive spot below my ear that makes me gasp.
“If my mother hears us, I will never recover.”
“Then we’ll have to be creative about keeping you quiet.”
“That’s not helping.”
“It’s helping me.”
He presses me back against the pillows, adjusting for the belly the way he always does, careful, aware, treating both of us like something precious.
The ring is back on my finger; it catches the low lamp light when I fist the sheets.
Proposal night. Parents down the hall. My self-preservation instincts are screaming in Italian and English simultaneously.
“I love you,” he murmurs.
“I love you too. But if you make any noise-”
“I’ll be silent as the grave.”
“That’s a terrible expression to use in bed.”
“Fine. Silent as a very happy, very satisfied grave.”
“That’s worse.”
He grins against my throat. “Then stop me talking.”
I do, kissing him hard enough that words become irrelevant, swallowing his next smart remark before it can exist. His hands skim my sides, rucking my dress up with excruciating patience.
Every rustle of fabric sounds like a gunshot in the quiet house.
Somewhere down the hall, a floorboard settles.
We both go still, caught out, then dissolve into silent shaking laughter against each other’s mouths.
“Creative,” I mouth.
He nods, eyes bright, and reaches for a pillow. Before I can ask, he offers it to me, an invitation and a muffler. I take it. He kisses his way down my body with exaggerated stealth, pausing to listen toward the hallway.
“Classified activity,” he whispers so softly I almost miss it. “Your mother gets no report.”
I shove his head lower, biting my lip to kill a laugh.
He tugs my underwear down and off, folds them with absurd neatness onto the nightstand, because even mid-sneaky-sex he’s Massimo Moretti, and then settles between my thighs on his stomach, angled so his shoulders don’t press the belly.
The first lick is barely there. The second makes my hips jerk.
I slam the pillow over my own face and moan into feathers.
He works me open with quiet, devastating focus, tongue, then one finger, then two, building me so carefully the bed frame doesn’t even creak.
When he sucks my clit I nearly lose the plot entirely; my free hand fists his hair and holds him there while I come into the pillow in shuddering silence, thighs quaking around his ears.
He surfaces looking smug and wrecked. I drag him up by the shoulders and kiss my taste off his mouth, then point at his pants with a silent order.
He strips with theatrical care, folding each piece, until he’s bare and hard and ridiculous.
I scoot sideways on the mattress, pregnant logistics, always, and he spoons behind me without being told, lifting my top knee, sliding a supporting forearm under the belly.
“Yes?” he breathes against my neck, the head of his cock nudging where I’m soaked.
I nod into the pillow. He pushes in slow, inch by inch, and the fullness is so good I have to bite down on cotton to stay quiet. When he’s seated deep he goes still, letting me adjust, hand warm at my hip. I reach back and dig my nails into his hip: move.
He moves. Tiny shallow thrusts at first, more grind than slam, keeping the mattress from announcing us to the entire bloodline.
It’s somehow filthier than being loud: every wet sound between us audible in the hush, every hitched breath a negotiation with the walls.
His fingers slip between us and press hard against my clit.
I shove the pillow harder against my mouth.
“Okay?” he checks, almost inaudible.
I nod frantically. He picks up the pace as much as stealth allows, rocking into me with a control that must be costing him everything.
Sweat slicks where our skin meets. The ring scrapes faintly against the pillowcase when my hand flexes.
Down the hall, someone coughs once in their sleep, Mamma, probably, and Max goes completely motionless inside me until the house settles again.
The restraint of that, the absurdity of it, makes me clench around him so hard he bites my shoulder to stay silent.
“Evil,” he mouths against my skin.
“Yours,” I mouth back.
He resumes with shorter, deeper strokes that drag against the place inside me that makes stars burst behind my eyelids.
I come again with almost no sound, just a full-body shudder and the pillow absorbing whatever noise escapes, and the way I flutter around him pulls him over the edge.
He buries his face in my neck and comes in absolute silence, shaking, flooding me while his arm stays gentle and sure across my belly.
The only tell is the stutter of his hips and the hot rush inside me.
We stay locked together, listening to the house, to our hearts, to the last floorboard settling in the hall.
Eventually he eases out; I feel the mess of us on my thighs and don’t care.
He tugs the blankets over our cooling bodies with the same stealth he used to undo me, and neither of us bothers about the mess.
I turn my head on the pillow and find his mouth for a quiet kiss that tastes like laughter and relief and the particular triumph of not waking the in-laws.
The ring sits heavy and right on my finger.
His hand covers it, then slides back to the belly, as if he needs to touch every proof that we survived long enough to have to be quiet about happiness.
Later, tangled together in the dark, his hand rests on my belly where the baby is shifting.
“I can’t believe you kept the ring all those months.”
“I couldn’t let it go. It was all I had left of you.”
“And now it’s back where it belongs.”
“Now it stays.”
I turn my hand, watching the gold catch the moonlight through the window. “We should do something small. For the renewal. Maybe here, at the farm.”
“Whatever you want.” He presses a kiss to my shoulder. “I just want to marry you again. The rest is details.”
“Good details, though.”
“Details I intend to get right.”
The baby kicks, and Max’s hand follows the movement. Somewhere down the hall, my parents are sleeping in what used to be Nonna’s room.
Tomorrow there will be plans to make, logistics to figure out, the complicated reality of two families and a baby and everything else.
But that can wait for daylight. His hand stays on the baby, the ring sits where it belongs, and I fall asleep smiling.