Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 143870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 480(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 480(@300wpm)
I nearly melt into the counter, and naturally, my lip starts to get all wobbly. I want to tell him I feel the same, but I can’t even get the words out.
“I never want you to doubt what this is to me.” He caresses my face. “When you trust me, I understand how much of a gift that is, and I won’t take it for granted.”
“Okay, now I’m really going to cry,” I blubber.
He smiles and wipes the tears that leak from my eyes.
“I want to give you everything, Chantel, and I need it to be something you choose.”
I’m not sure what he means until he lets out a rough breath and slips his hand into his pocket. When he removes a velvet ring box, all the air in my lungs seems to dissipate.
“I don’t want you to answer right now.”
He slides it onto the counter beside me without opening it. Then he pauses for a beat to make sure I’m not going to faint—or worse, sprint out of here like I might have done just a few months ago.
“When you’re ready, there’s more I’d like to say,” he tells me. “But for now, I just want you to think about it. I won’t mention it again until you bring it up yourself.”
“Okay.” My throat works.
Some of the tension in his body dissolves, and part of me hates how hard he’s had to work to penetrate my armor. It’s exhausting to live this way, and I’m pretty sure the amount of patience this man has had with me qualifies him for sainthood. No matter how many times I tried to push him away or give him an out, he was always there—even when I didn’t know it.
When I look at him, I can’t deny that I’m in love with him.
Maddeningly, deeply, wholeheartedly in love.
I want this life with him more than I’ve ever wanted anything, and I could say yes right now. But I know it isn’t as easy as living on a hope and a prayer that everything will just work out somehow.
Love is rarely enough when it comes to Mafia politics. There are so many complexities involved in this relationship, and it would be unrealistic to think otherwise. What he chooses will affect his family. It will involve conversations with the Greeks, and the very real consequences that could come from that.
I’m not foolish enough to believe that Ares won’t try to leverage this to his benefit. It’s what men in his position have always done. But marrying Cristian without revealing all the facts would only make him resent me more than he probably already will.
I owe it to him to be honest about who I really am before I accept. He’s giving me the right to choose, and it wouldn’t be fair to him if I didn’t do the same. As much as his rejection might hurt, I would rather face that reality than one where I cling to something that can no longer exist. But I’m not quite ready to face that reality right now.
Just a little longer.
Then I’ll have no choice but to implode this happiness—and potentially ruin everything.
36
CHANTEL
“Is he not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” Abella observes me with the small bundle in my arms. “Apart from Nella, of course.”
“You say that at least once a day,” Valentina teases her.
“She can say it every day because it’s true,” Mariella points out.
I smile down at baby Niccolo, humming the melody of a familiar lullaby as I rock him back to sleep.
He came into this world on a Tuesday, with what Abella lovingly described as his father’s temper. Baby Nico wasn’t happy about being evicted from his mother’s womb, but at four weeks, he’s fully embraced his broody disposition. It is, notoriously, a Vitale trait.
“What song is that you’re humming?” Lucia asks. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.”
“It’s something my mother used to sing to me when I was a child,” I confess, leaving out the part that it’s Greek.
Silence settles over the table, and when I glance up, all the girls are watching me.
I know it’s because I don’t talk about my mother. There have been times over the years when someone in our friend group quietly slipped a question about her into the conversation, but I’ve always shut it down.
It hurt too much to talk about her, so I avoided it. But pregnancy has changed my relationship with that grief.
Before, when I thought about my mother, every memory was overshadowed by the trauma of her death.
I witnessed something no child should ever have to carry, and I was trapped inside that horror for so long, I’d almost forgotten all the good. Now, I’m starting to remember the things I thought I’d lost, and I’m realizing they still exist in me.
What she gave me, nobody can ever take away. The songs she used to sing. The stories she used to read. Her smile, her laugh, and the way I felt whenever she was with me. It’s only because of her that I knew what love was, and as brief as it may have been, her love will live on through me.