Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
He wanted it for her. To have that.
He’d known it back then. He’d known he loved her then.
And it just killed him.
“Rina?” Sal called in, using a nickname he rarely did anymore. It had been popular in her youth, but it stemmed from the lights and glamor of her survival. He still held it inside, fondly, only bringing it out when the two needed to meld what used to be and what was now together. It always hurt doing it.
She’d been a different woman back then. Not even she knew how much but so had he. He’d been so different, too, and neither of them could be a fraction of who they were now without the other. A far harder truth to settle the score between them when it also meant facing a much bigger picture they’d been painting together for years.
He called again to nothing, but Salvatore headed deeper into the room. Sissy said Carina had been here not long ago, readying for tomorrow’s events.
Stella didn’t cross the threshold.
“Now you stop,” he muttered back at the cat.
She yawned, canines showing prominently, and totally unbothered. Damn thing.
He eventually found Carina in the bottom floor of her closet; low jazz curled around the room from the many built-in speakers overhead. As she laid a second silk gown onto the Calcutta marble island, pink in color, next to the soft blue one, both with matching capes, he didn’t wonder anymore why she hadn’t heard him.
Carina stood back, surveying the two and the coordinating accessories, including shoes and jewelry.
Salvatore tried to make his steps heard as he walked in as not to startle her, saying, “Hey, could we talk?”
“Music off,” she ordered the smart system.
The jazz stopped.
She didn’t even flinch at his unexpected arrival. In fact, she tossed him a small shrug over her shoulder before going right back to her previous task as if he hadn’t bothered her in the first place. “Do you think gold or white gold jewelry for both, or do you think she can have the gold, and I’ll take the white? I mean, with the blue for me...”
“I guess I didn’t have to worry about scaring you, huh?”
Her brow dipped as she faced him again. “What?”
“Your mind is elsewhere, that’s all.”
Carina shook her head. “You were trying not to scare me by what, walking up behind me like an elephant?”
“You didn’t know I was there; it’s nothing.”
Her face said it was something.
Salvatore chuckled. “I know you like the white gold, Rina. And gold is better for pink, which you’ve said a thousand times before. I’m going to go with what you’ve taught me. I will always choose what I know you really want just to make you happy. Let’s not pretend differently.”
“No babe, today?” she asked him. “Darling, even?”
He sighed. “I can’t win with you, can I?”
She said nothing.
“It’s fine,” he told her, “I deserve that and more. I do, so let me have it. Just keep throwing it at me all day, every day, and I’ll stand here and fucking take it like I should.”
The two stared one another down for a good while. Neither said a word, their gazes locked with three feet of space between them and whole world of hurt pulsating there like a living, breathing thing.
Then, her Gucci heel hit the floor in a stomp. “You are literally—literally, literally, literally,” she said firmer each time, her palm smacking the top of the marble island to match, “the only man in my life, ever, who can walk up behind me and say boo, and it wouldn’t affect me a bit. Do you know that?”
He blinked. “I—”
“Just you,” she stated, turning on him fully, a tear tracking down her cheek. “You, Salvatore, are the only man I have felt safe with. I have never, not once, thought you would hurt me. In any way. Ever. Not really.”
“We’ve done a lot of hurting between us, Carina. Don’t change history now.”
“What, the fighting? How awful I was to a child that only needed love? The name calling? Or maybe you mean the handful of other men I let fuck me over the years? I bet you none of that, and all of it put together, didn’t hurt either of us the way you hurt me in our kitchen while I stood there pregnant with your baby. Tell me those things hurt you more! Please, tell me.”
He couldn’t.
She nodded, waving at him. “Exactly. And whatever that felt like for you, magnify it by a thousand and stuff it all inside of me along with everything else that’s already killing me here. And I believed our whole marriage that you would never do to me what other people have. I believed it the moment you met me at the end of the alter.”
He rubbed at his cheek, still watching her.