Chapter Eleven
CHELSEA CURLED HERSELF into a ball and just breathed. She had been here for hours. The tears on her cheeks had already dried, but her heart had yet to stop breaking.
It hurts so, so much, God.
His scent was all around her, and this...made sense. This was his room, after all.
But what didn't make sense at all?
The fact that she'd come to this room in the first place.
I feel so pathetic, God.
Her body curled up in an even smaller ball at the thought, almost like it was trying to shrink into nothing. Shame was eating her alive. All the memories that used to make her smile and feel loved—-everything now felt so terribly, humiliatingly fake.
What do You want me to do now?
Her love for God prevented her from being the first to seek divorce, but...could she simply walk away instead? Just...just ask for space so she would never see him again?
Because if she did, oh God...
The thought alone had her jerking up.
No no no.
She couldn't bear it. But the speed in which she rose and scrambled off the bed—-
It completely backfired, and she ended up falling, excruciating pain shooting up her injured leg—-
It almost felt like punishment for being so stupid...until she heard the door outside open, and she realized it was actually God preventing her from crashing into the last person she wanted to see.
Olivio.
Her hands flew to her mouth, and it was all she could do not to cry as she listened to him speak. The sound of his voice alone hurt. Everything just hurt so, so much that at first, she couldn't understand anything.
Please.
Oh God.
Please.
The tears finally fell, silently and endlessly, and as sobs racked her body, it was then God answered her prayer, and his words gradually pierced the haze of her heartbreak.
"Is she with you?"
He...was looking for her?
"Don't lie to me."
"I made a mistake."
"She thinks I stayed married to her to close a deal."
Chelsea covered her ears.
No, no, no.
She didn't want to hear anything else.
Was so terrified of being hurt anew that she wished she could just stop making her ears work—-
"I love her, Father."
But of course that was impossible.
"I love her."
And God, oh God, to hear Olivio's voice break right after saying the words—-
I'm scared, God.
She was so, so scared to believe what she was hearing...even as his words reminded her of what love truly meant.
Love, a pastor had once described, was an unconditional commitment between two imperfect people.
Chelsea's leg was still hurting as she pushed herself up—-
Love was how God forgave everyone over and over.
Taking it one shaky step at a time until she eventually made it to the door—-
And love...was also this.
If God could so lovingly forgive her that He makes all her scarlet sins white as snow, how could she not at least try to be the same?
Chelsea opening the door in the same way she was opening the door to her heart—-
And what she saw on the other side undid the last of her resistance.
Olivio on the couch, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and the posture of a man who had run out of ways to hold himself together. He looked nothing like the man she'd married nine days ago. He looked like what was left when everything that man had built was taken away.
She must have made a sound, or the door did, because his head jerked up, and his eyes found hers, and the expression on his face—-
She'd been afraid she would never see anything real in his eyes again.
But this was real. This was the most real thing she had ever seen.
"Olivio?"
Her voice came out small and rough with tears, and she watched his body move before his mind caught up. He was on his feet with a speed that nearly cost him his balance, and disbelief locked every joint rigid.
"You..." The word came out strangled. "Have you been sleeping?"
"I..." Her hand was gripping the doorframe, her knuckles pale against the dark wood. "I woke up to the sound of your voice."
She swallowed.
"I heard everything you said."
Her chin crumpled.
Oh God.
She started to run.
Not the way people ran in the corridors of this building, sharp, purposeful, directed.
She ran the way Chelsea moved through everything, slightly uneven, her left leg negotiating the distance with the fierce determination of a body that had learned to work with what it had, and it was the limp that broke him, the limp that shattered whatever was left of the thing he'd been holding together, because she was running to him on a leg that had every reason to carry her away, and it was carrying her forward instead.
It was only his reflexes, the same reflexes that had caught a woman in a blue-flowered dress when a journalist had shoved her in a lobby nine days ago, that had him catching her as she threw herself into his arms.
Barely.
Her body collided with his, and his arms closed around her with a force that had nothing to do with control and everything to do with the drowning man's grip on the thing that kept him above water, and she was shaking, her whole body trembling against his, and her face was buried in his neck and her fingers were clutching the back of his shirt and she was saying it—-
"I love you."
His eyes closed.
"I love you so much."
The words were the last thing he deserved. They were grace, actual grace, the kind the book talked about, the kind his wife lived inside like a house she'd built with her own hands, and they fell on him like rain on ground that had been dry so long it had forgotten what water was.
"I'm sorry." The words gritted out of him, raw and wrecked and nothing like the voice of the man who'd sat in boardrooms and controlled every room he entered. "I'm sorry I—-"
She drew back.
Not away. Just enough to see his face. Her tears were running freely now, and she was looking up at him with an expression that held no fury, no accusation, no demand for explanation. Just a question. One question. The only one that had ever mattered.
"Tell me," she said shakily.
Because she knew he knew what she wanted to hear. It was there in the way the color drained from his face, in the way his throat worked as he swallowed hard, and then finally—-
His mouth covered hers.
Not the way he'd kissed her before, not the consuming kiss of the conference room, not the slow learning kiss of their first afternoon, not the fierce claiming kisses that had marked every night since.
This kiss was something else entirely. It was a man pouring into a woman's mouth every word he'd ever refused to say, every wall he'd ever built, every year he'd spent telling himself that control was more important than surrender.
His arms tightened around her, and he was lifting her, and her legs wrapped around his waist as he carried her through the doorway she'd come from, back to the bedroom, back to the bed where she'd fallen asleep with her tears still drying and her faith still intact, and his lips never left hers, the kiss deepening with a savage intensity that was new, that was different, that was the kiss of a man who'd stopped performing and started simply breaking open.
He laid her on the bed, and it was only when he settled over her, and the familiar weight of him pressed her into the sheets, that Chelsea understood what was different.
His hands.
They were shaking.
In nine days of marriage, through every night of fierce possession and every morning of wanting her, Olivio Cannizzaro's hands had never once shaken.
They'd commanded. They'd consumed. They'd moved over her body with the absolute certainty of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he wanted.
But now his fingers trembled against her jaw as he tilted her face up to his, and the trembling told her more than any word could.
He drove into her, and a sound escaped him that she'd never heard, low and raw and torn from somewhere so deep that she understood, in the marrow of her bones, that the man inside her right now was not the man she'd married nine days ago.
That man had used her body as refuge. This man was offering his.
I love you.
The words moved through her like a pulse, like a second heartbeat, and she could only sob, not from pain, not from the overwhelming fullness of him, but from the knowledge that what was happening between them right now was not what had happened before.
Before, he had taken. Before, she had given.
Now he was giving back, and the giving was costing him everything, and it was there in the tremor that rocked his body each time he moved, the way his breath caught against her mouth, the way his forehead pressed to hers and his eyes, his eyes were open, and he was looking at her, and there was nothing in his gaze that was hidden.
I love you.
Her nails dug into his back as he moved, and the pleasure was building with a different quality than it ever had, slower, deeper, tangled so completely with the emotion underneath it that she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
I love you.
His hand found hers on the pillow above her head. His fingers laced through hers and held. And the holding, the simple act of a man holding his wife's hand while his body moved inside hers—-
Her body arched up against his in release, and the cry that left her was not the startled, overwhelmed sound he'd learned to draw from her every morning.
It was deeper. It came from the place where his love had landed, and it carried the weight of nine days of hope and one afternoon of devastation and this moment, this impossible, grace-soaked moment, of being put back together by the same hands that had taken her apart.
Her dazed eyes locked with his.
And she saw it.
Not in his jaw, not in his control, not in the careful composure he'd worn like a second skin for thirty-one years. She saw it in the wreckage of all those things. In the bare, undefended openness of a face that had never been this naked in front of another human being.
"I love you, wife."
She couldn't help it. The hoarseness of his voice, so rough, so broken, so entirely unlike anything she'd ever heard from this man who spoke in complete sentences and controlled the pace of every room he entered, it undid her completely, and she started crying again, her hand tightening around his, her body still trembling beneath him, and the tears were not sadness.
They were the sound of a door opening that had been closed for thirty-one years.
"And I always will."