“Maybe two. Big ones. Especially when we have children. If you want to have kids, Taviano, then we’re going to have dogs trained to protect them.”
“You know we have personal bodyguards.”
She shrugged. “I want dogs. They’ll alert us if someone comes near the house.”
“You felt the energy in the house when Eloisa entered. If you hone that ability, you’ll always feel an enemy—or even a friend—approaching.”
Her expression turned stubborn and she lifted her chin. He had the crazy desire to kiss the look right off her face. Someday he was going to take a little bite of that chin when she did that to him. Right now, he contented himself with nuzzling her belly again and kissing his way up to the underside of her left breast. He nipped her there, and when she yelped, he used his tongue to ease the sting.
She tugged at his hair in retaliation, but not very hard. “I still want dogs.”
Nicoletta sounded just as stubborn as her expression had been, and that made him smile. He kissed his way back down to her belly.
“If you come to rely on dogs to warn you, you won’t rely on your abilities. You need to know your gifts won’t fail you. You have to teach those same things to our children. I know you want dogs, tesoro, and I want to give you everything you want, but it is necessary to be able to feel a presence before an animal alerts us. Once you’re capable of doing that, we can rethink the idea of guard dogs.”
She studied his face for a long time. “I can’t tell if you mean that.”
“I don’t lie to you. If you want guard dogs and they make you feel safer, then we’ll get them. We have to compromise, because it is really necessary for you to feel the energy of danger entering our home. Of anyone entering, but the differences in the energy. You need to be able to teach our children. We both have to do that. Once we know we can, the dogs will add an additional layer of protection.”
She was silent for so long; he lifted his head to look at her directly. “Nicoletta?”
“What if I can’t have children? What if any of the wives can’t have children? Francesca lost so many. She barely carried Crispino. Stefano doesn’t want her to try for another. Mariko hasn’t gotten pregnant and they aren’t using anything to prevent pregnancy.”
He hadn’t known that. Women talked, but Ricco hadn’t confided in the others. Neither had Stefano. “Sasha? Grace? What do you know about them?”
“Sasha and Giovanni are going to try. They haven’t been. They liked being together and wanted to spend some time alone. Vittorio and Grace are the same. He wants her to himself for a while, and since her shoulder is still very fragile from that terrible infection she got, he definitely doesn’t want her lifting babies and trying to take care of them. So they’re waiting. I know Vittorio wouldn’t care if Grace couldn’t have children, but what about you? It’s so important to the riders, so much so that they have to agree to an arranged marriage. If their wife doesn’t produce, is there a set amount of time and then she’s booted to the curb?”
“Booted to the curb?” He tightened his arm around her waist, holding her to him. “I can see why you’d think that. I wonder if Sasha and Francesca think that way, or Grace. I should warn my brothers. Mariko should know better, but it’s possible, with her horrendous background, that she wouldn’t know, either, so I’ll just mention casually to Ricco to tell her, but we don’t kick our women to the curb, Nicoletta. I married you.”
“Yes, with the idea that I can produce riders. But if I can’t, is another woman found that can produce riders? Do you take a mistress? Do you sever the shadows between us and get another woman pregnant so the rider lineage can continue?”
He caught the underlying anxiety in her voice. No matter what he said, the voices in Nicoletta’s head were strong, and they told her she wasn’t good enough for him. His mother had added to those voices. If she found she couldn’t have children, she would be anxious that he would want to rid himself of her to find another woman who could give him what he wanted.
Taviano sat up and pulled Nicoletta into a sitting position as well. He framed her face with his hands. “I need you to hear me, tesoro. I call you treasure because, for me, you have always been that. My treasure. My love. The Ferraro family are riders, yes. We might want children to carry on that legacy, we might even need them, but in the end, Stefano, not Eloisa, raised us. And maybe that was Eloisa’s gift to us. Stefano didn’t drill it into us, as Eloisa’s parents did to her, that we had to produce children no matter the cost to us.”