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)
“I only ever saw you,” he interjected so she wouldn’t say that terrible, wrong word about herself again while feeling her grip on his shirt tighten. “I see you.”
Salvatore pulled Carina back with a hand at her jaw so that she couldn’t look away. Nothing else existed as emeralds met dark earth in their stares.
“But it didn’t feel—”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. None of that will ever matter from this moment forward. I love you.”
Her words silenced instantly. The trembling stopped. Little breaths burst like pants from between her parted lips, and she never looked away.
“You’ve never said that and meant it. You don’t mean that,” she whispered brokenly.
His tears started falling, too.
One. And then another.
Never had he cried in front of this woman. Years spent crying alone on shower floors and in dark, empty beds before she came along and long after killed the ability to feel just like pills numbed the pain.
“I do love you,” he mumbled through quivering lips. “And I’m really fucking sorry that I couldn’t be the man you needed me to be ten years ago and tell you it then. I had to build you a twenty-million-dollar closet and let you scream at me every time we were in a room together just so you wouldn’t run away from me again instead. I’m sorry that I am fucking scared of what it means to love yet another person that God could take away from me. But I do love you, and I am not sorry for that.”
Carina blinked; another tear fell. Her chest heaved hard on a hiccup.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated again, “for a lot. But not that.”
It took another ten seconds.
Her swallow was audible.
“Okay,” she eventually said.
“W-what?” he stammered.
She literally grabbed his arm to use the sleeve of his shirt to wipe her face. Blinking up at him after while he eyed damp silk, confused, she cleared her throat.
Carina kissed the soft spot under his ear, saying at the same time, “You are the most beautiful man I have ever known, and I love you, too.”
As she stepped back, he tried to make sense of her returning right back to the island to continue the perusal of the set up for tomorrow.
“That’s it?” he asked, almost amused.
“You knew I loved you every day from the moment I said I do. And you know why, too. I’ve already told you.”
You saved me. Her voice, slightly younger then, still echoed in his memories.
“The appointment went well,” she added, shooting him a small smile over her shoulder. “Seven weeks tomorrow. I saw the flutter. Like the heart, you know?”
He immediately found a chair.
And sat right down.
“The appointment,” he echoed.
He’d really thought...
He didn’t ask—
Carina turned slowly, her arms folding. He looked up at her and knew without her needing to say it that she understood their miscommunication regarding the pregnancy. The only communication they had about it since he found out.
“I’d have never done that to you,” she told him then.
Salvatore clasped his hands together, chewing on his bottom lip until he could speak. “I wasn’t gonna do to you what he did, Carina. I wasn’t gonna tell you a fucking thing, but I—”
“You wanted me to keep it.”
He nodded once.
Hell, she asked.
“I can’t even fucking imagine what life is going to look like when I’m a seventy-year-old father to a sixteen-year-old, but I think about them everyday. Whoever they’re going to be; I thought about them. But I was not going to say a thing unless you did.”
“And whatever my choice was mine, regardless,” she finished for him.
“I am not him.”
“I know, baby.”
Salvatore chewed again, tasting blood. “So, seven weeks?”
“I already know the names, boy and girl. You will not change them, for the record.”
“Girl?” he asked.
Her eyes glittered. “Dove.”
She’d always loved that name.
“And a boy?”
“SJ, but you know what for. You’re not really freaked out about the age thing, are you?” she asked. “Although, to be fair, I cried today when they called it a geriatric pregnancy. I’m thirty-seven and a half. Please. So, there’s that. Fun.”
He laughed.
It felt crazy good.
“They also said, straight up, it’ll be a caesarean. You know why. You’re not really worried about your age, seriously?”
“Yeah, I am worried about what the road looks like in twenty years, for everybody,” he eventually said knowing she wouldn’t let it go.
She cocked her head sideways, rolling pretty eyes that had cleared of tears. “Samuel L. Jackson, and Liam Neeson. Mmm, who else? Oh, George. You know what watching him always does to me.”
Sal smirked. “Clooney? Woman, I’ll have almost ten years on—”
“Fine wine, husband. That’s what you are. And if you’re dead before I start looking like rotten fruit, that’ll be a cold day in hell. Because guess what, you’re keeping me until I’m at least eighty.”
He couldn’t even do the math on that one, he laughed so hard.