saved us. I knew how powerful that love was.
I cursed my trembling lips, still needing to hear it. “So, you can stay?”
Daniello scrunched his nose. “A green card? Boring.”
I straddled his hips, elated tears running down my cheeks. “And boring vacations?”
Daniello cupped my neck and pulled me down to his lips. “The only thing I want now is to be boring with you, Taylor Ellison.”
I grinned through the inch between our ready mouths, unable to resist. “Bored.”
Daniello narrowed his eyes and fisted my hair. “And now you will suck my cock with no reward.”
Eight months later
Boring. The man thought we would be bored. I smiled at my fiancé as he ordered Joseph to bed with a gentle tongue. His mother was in labor at the hospital with another son. Cedric was there as well, but I had a feeling it was more for the nurse he’d taken up residence with in the last year. He seemed happy but kept his distance when Daniello came back into my life. I knew I’d hurt him, but it was never intentional, and he seemed to become more accepting as the months passed and found a love of his own.
Daniello lay in Joseph’s twin bed, his feet hanging off the edge as he gathered him into his arms.
“Seuss,” Joseph squeaked.
“I do not like the Seuss books,” Daniello deadpanned to Joseph and waved a palm in the air.
I cleared my throat in the doorway. My beautiful man stared back at me with menace. “I don’t like the Seuss books, Joseph.”
I chuckled as he rolled his eyes. He still had so far to go. As Daniello slaughtered One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, Joseph giggled, dwarfed in his massive arms. For a brief moment, I saw a flash of Laz as he looked up at his future uncle curiously. I twisted my heavy new ring on my finger and admired it before I closed the door with a swollen chest and called to check on my sister. Aaron’s elevated voice told me enough as he briefly updated me and hung up. Amber had gone through a risky pregnancy with the damage from the bullet she took. Her newest son was a miracle baby. But I believed in miracles.
I had no choice.
My life had made me a believer against all odds.
Behind his bedroom door, Joseph laughed hysterically, and I heard the deep rumble of Daniello’s echoed chuckle as I made my way out onto my sister’s patio. The crash of the waves pulled a day’s worth of Joseph’s demands from my shoulders. I felt at peace for the first time in my life. And it had everything to do with the two men who lay on the other side of that door.
Daniello and I had nothing but each other to look forward to. My dark knight had gone legitimate. It turned out his plans for a “different life” had shifted into the one he was living. He’d set up shop on the second floor of the building we lived in, hired the best architects in Charleston to mentor him in plans to start a design firm, and then sank a majority of his fortune into local real estate, mostly undeveloped land. I could see his excitement and feel it roll off him when his drafting table was delivered. His idea of boring was building an empire of his own. Mutts were in our future, of that I had no doubt, but I was still far too satisfied with my corporate life and with a man who was anything but boring.
Daniello often visited his family in Italy while I stayed stateside. It was the one sacrifice of our union. I wouldn’t for any reason put my family in harm’s way. Besides Tula, Italy and the rest of the Di Giovanni family knew nothing of his life in the States or the second family Daniello had, and never would. It was what we agreed was best. The locals of Barga most likely assumed he was the same wanderer he had always been.
But I knew better.
The hard-edged man I fell in love with was still demanding and infuriating, but his unleashed love opened me in more ways than I ever thought possible.
I still fought daily against my life’s conditioning, but I was winning the war. I still believed in order and excellence. I still drove fast cars and dodged days of shopping with my sister to have kinky sex with the dark-eyed man who maxed out my body.
I still believed that the world was a scary place.
And I no longer wanted any more guarantees in life. It was meant to be lived, not feared.
And I had a life, one that I could never have imagined for myself, one that didn’t keep me in the shackles of fear or harden me to the point of being void of emotion. I was a woman of flesh and blood. Freeing myself, I’d become capable, just as capable as Daniello of loving and being loved, of being hurt, of being human.
It wasn’t fear that got me to where I was anymore, and it was love that kept me bulletproof.
THE END