Chapter Five
CHELSEA WOKE TO THE press of her husband's mouth against the curve of her neck, and for one disoriented breath she thought she was still dreaming.
Because that was what this first week had been.
A dream inside a dream inside a life so extravagantly unlike her actual one that her brain had stopped trying to categorize it and had simply given in to the impossibility, the way you gave in to a current that was stronger than you and warmer than you expected and going somewhere you couldn't see.
To wake up every morning in this house, in this bed, in Olivio Cannizzaro's arms. To have his breathing change the moment he knew she was surfacing, slower, watchful, as if he'd been waiting for her to cross back from wherever sleep had taken her and was only now allowing himself to be present.
And to have him still so wanting of her, his desire growing fiercer with each passing day instead of diminishing, as if every night they spent together only deepened a hunger that no amount of having her could sate.
That was the part her mind simply could not hold.
"Good morning, wife."
Low. Warm. His accent thicker in the mornings, as if sleep stripped away whatever it was he spent his waking hours keeping in place.
Oh.
His mouth moved from her neck to the hollow behind her ear, and Chelsea's body was already answering before her mind had fully arrived, a softening, an opening, a warmth that started somewhere beneath her ribs and went all the way down.
She had spent her first days as his wife trying to find words for what this man did to her, reaching for language the way she reached for her highlighters, certain that if she could just name it she could understand it.
But there were no words.
There was only this: his hands finding her in the half-dark, and her body rising to meet them with an eagerness that would have mortified her if she'd had any capacity left for mortification, which she did not, because the moment Olivio's mouth claimed hers and his weight settled over her, she was already gone.
Every morning. The same devastation. The same collapse that wasn't really collapse because collapse implied resistance, and Chelsea had none.
Not anymore. Not since the conference room, not since their first night in this bed, not since she'd learned what it was to be wanted by a man who wanted the way other people breathed, completely, without apology, as if his need for her was simply a fact of his biology rather than a choice.
She came apart for him so quickly it was embarrassing.
That was the mortifying truth of it. No matter how many mornings, no matter how many times his body covered hers and his hands found the places that undid her and his mouth did things that she would need several more months of Bible study to adequately repent for, she was always so quick.
So easy. As if her body had been waiting three years for exactly this man and now that it had him, it refused to waste a single second pretending it didn't need what it needed.
And every time, in the aftermath, while she lay trembling beneath him with her breathing wrecked and her fingers still gripping his shoulders, he would press his forehead to hers and his eyes would be open, watching her, and the expression in them was something she had no name for.
Something that looked, if she were brave enough to call it what it was, like a man who had just discovered a room in his own house he didn't know existed and was standing in the doorway trying to decide whether to walk in.
And then, because this too had become part of the rhythm of their mornings, he carried her to the bath.
Chelsea's pulse did its usual acrobatics as he lowered her into the water, and then he was settling behind her, his thighs bracketing hers, her back drawn against his chest. The sheer scale of him still startled her every time, the breadth of his body surrounding hers, the way his arms could wrap around her with room to spare.
She had the proportions of a teaspoon relative to this man, and the awareness of that made her want to laugh and also never move again.
His hands moved into her hair, and her head tipped back against his shoulder.
He shampooed her hair the way he did everything: with a thoroughness that bordered on the unreasonable.
His fingers kneaded her scalp in slow, devastating circles, and Chelsea's toes curled underwater, and she thought, for approximately the forty-seventh time this week, that she needed to write a strongly worded letter to whoever had written the rehabilitation pamphlet titled "Adjusting to Life After Extended Hospitalization," because at no point in its twelve laminated pages had it mentioned this.
Not once. Not a single bullet point addressing the possibility that one might wake from a three-year coma and find oneself married to a man who washed one's hair like it was his vocation and calling in life.
She would have appreciated a heads-up.
She'd been embarrassed the first time he had done this for her. Had tried to protest, tried to tell him she could manage, tried to explain that she had spent three years being bathed by other people and she didn't need—-
But Olivio had simply kissed away her protests.
Literally. Every time she'd opened her mouth to object, his had covered it, and by the time he'd lifted his head, she'd forgotten what she was objecting to, and his hands were already in her hair, and a sound was escaping her that she would later categorize, during a very stern internal review, as entirely unnecessary and deeply incriminating.
He had kept kissing her, kept touching her, gentle and relentless in that way of his that left no room for argument, until she had gradually given up and accepted that this was just how mornings worked now.
Eight mornings in, she craved it.
His hands moved lower, from her hair to her shoulders, kneading the tension there, and then lower still, beneath the water, to the place on her left thigh where the muscle knotted after long days.
She hadn't told him about it. She hadn't told anyone except her physiotherapist, who found it with clinical fingers and worked it out with clinical pressure and asked her to rate the improvement on a scale of one to ten.
Olivio's fingers found the same place, and he worked the knot with the same thoroughness he'd given her hair, and Chelsea had to press her lips together very hard because the sound that wanted to come out wasn't pain.
It was the opposite of pain. It was the sound of a body that had spent three years being handled by professionals finally being touched by someone who wasn't wearing gloves, wasn't timing the session, wasn't going to hand her a feedback form afterward.
Her eyes stung.
She blinked it away before he could see. But his arms tightened around her, just slightly, as if he'd noticed anyway and was choosing not to mention it, and that was worse, that was so much worse, because it meant he was paying attention to parts of her that she hadn't even shown him yet.
His hands moved lower still, and the memories came with them, arriving the way they did in warm water, loose and weightless and out of order.
Their first night together in this house, in this bed.
How he had reached for her again and again, each time with a different quality, urgent, then slow, then desperate and almost tender in a way that had wrenched sounds from her she hadn't known she was capable of making, until she had lost count entirely.
She had passed out in his arms, her body simply giving out before his hunger did.
On the second night, he had oh-so-casually informed her that his family and friends were coming over.
They will love you, tesoro. Trust me.
Chelsea had panicked. She could laugh about it now, barely, but at the time, her reaction had been immediate and total, and Olivio had only chuckled, pulling her close and kissing her forehead with the amused patience of a man who found her panic endearing rather than inconvenient, which only made her panic worse, because how was she supposed to calm down when he was being that?
But to her surprise and wonder, what he said turned out to be true.
Miguel and Selena healed something in her that she hadn't realized was still bleeding.
She couldn't explain it any other way. Miguel had the eyes of a man who had walked through fire and come out the other side with more gentleness than he'd gone in with, and Selena looked at Chelsea with such warm recognition that the wound in Chelsea's heart, the one that had never stopped hurting since losing her parents, the one she had thought was as healed as it was ever going to get, eased.
Just a little. Just enough for her to breathe differently.
And the others. Aivan and Sienah, so beautiful together that it was impossible to imagine they had almost ended their marriage.
Adriano and Shayla, who could have entire conversations with just their eyes, their gazes meeting across the room and communicating things that words would only have gotten in the way of.
Please, God. Let us have what they have.
On the morning of the third day, Chelsea had her scheduled appointment at Stanhope Medical Center, and she was fully prepared to go on her own. Edgar had always taken her before, and she didn't want to bother Olivio with something so routine—-
But when she stepped out of the bedroom, he was already waiting.
Dressed. Coffee in hand. Keys in the other.
"D-Don't you have a meeting?"
"You and your godfather are remarkably similar in the way you wound me with your preconceptions," he mocked. "Am I really such a monster in your eyes that you would think I'd prioritize business over your well-being?"
"I just didn't want to—-"
A finger over her lips.
The touch short-circuited everything she'd been about to say, and all she could do was stare up at him while her heart did something that would've had the smartwatch flashing warnings if she'd remembered to put it on.
"It is my most cherished duty to look after you, but your refusal to depend on me will make me think that you have no confidence in my capacity—-"
The words had her so horrified that she was already shaking her head. "No, no, it's not that at all!"
"Then will you promise to depend on me from now on?"
"Absolutely, I swear!"
Olivio knew that if he had simply told her to depend on him, she would've been too shy to do so. But if he were to frame it in such a way that her independence would end up hurting him?
He pulled her into his arms and hid his smile against her hair. How wonderfully predictable his beautiful wife was.
All eyes were on them at Stanhope Medical Center, and Chelsea was stunned anew when her husband turned out to be personally acquainted with her doctor.
“Kazeyuki is a good friend of mine, tesoro. But he’s also a little too handsome for this job, so I think it’s best I’m by your side at every appointment. ”
“You and I both know I am not the type to hit on my patients,” Kazeyuki interjected mildly.
“We both know you don’t have to.”
Kazeyuki turned to her, asking, “Is he always this jealous?”
“I’m not jealous. I’m simply protecting what’s mine.”
“Ah, my mistake. I stand corrected.” Kazeyuki’s too-solemn tone had color staining Olivio’s high-boned cheeks while Chelsea couldn’t even bear to meet either man’s gaze.
Her embarrassment only grew afterwards, with Chelsea feeling flustered and struggling to calm her racing heartbeat as her doctor instructed Olivio to assist her in her exercises.
His hands were on her leg, her hip, her lower back, following her doctor’s instructions with the same focus he brought to everything, and the female trainees and nurses had long since stopped pretending to work.
Chelsea couldn't blame them. How he took care of her, how he put her above everything—-it was the kind of thing that only happened in movies, wasn't it?
And yet here he was, this man who ran an empire, kneeling on a therapy mat and holding her ankle with the concentration of someone performing surgery.
This can't be real.
But it was. The warmth of his hands on her skin was real. The way he looked up at her when the physiotherapist said she was making excellent progress, as if he were the one who'd just received good news—-that was real too.
On the days that followed, Chelsea's time was mostly consumed by learning the ropes of what it meant to be Mrs. Olivio Cannizzaro.
The art of smiling and making small talk while attending to whatever task Olivio's PR department needed her for.
Sometimes it involved studying background files on dinner guests.
Other times it involved attending charity functions where she was expected to remember names and navigate conversations with people who looked at her as if she were an equation they couldn't solve and were mildly offended by.
Kelly, a woman from the PR team who'd been assigned to manage Chelsea's schedule, had taken on this task with the grim dedication of someone who'd been given an impossible job and intended to do it anyway. Chelsea adored her instantly, which Kelly clearly did not know what to do with.
The work was ever-changing and endless, but she was stunned to find herself actually thriving, and it was mostly because of Olivio himself. He was like the most dashing guardian angel, the hottest professor, and the most chivalrous supporter all rolled into one.
The coffee he made to her exact order without being told.
She had mentioned it once, in passing, on their second morning, and every morning since, it was there.
Waiting. As if the information had entered him and simply become part of how he operated, the way her three-step rhythm had become part of hers.
It terrified her, how he had become her world in just one week.
She knew what it was to lose a world. She'd lost her parents.
She'd lost three years. She'd lost the version of herself that could walk without a limp and live without a smartwatch and trust that the ground beneath her would stay solid.
But it was because of God alone that she wasn't consumed by the terror.
What God had joined together, no man shall put asunder.
This was the verse she used to build her courage. The truth she held fast to as she prayed for the right moment to tell Olivio what she knew she could no longer keep to herself.
She was so, so in love with him.
And she was hoping, praying, that once she found the courage to admit it, he would admit to being in love with her, too.