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“Rosalie.”

I am a little embarrassed. After that touching proposal, we should share a sweet moment, but this ache is more than physical. Maybe I’m not over today’s events like I thought I was.

“You’ve been hit. You’ve been terrified. You need rest. I should have proposed another day.”

“I need you. And that was the most beautiful proposal I have ever seen. Better than I ever imagined my own proposal to be like. It was perfect timing.” My voice has gone soft. “You filled my heart. Now, I need you inside me. I need to feel every part of my body joined with you.”

He closes his eyes for a second.

“Dio.”

“Please.”

He opens his eyes. Puts his mother’s ring, mine now, on the bedside table, eyes on me the whole time.

His hand touches my cheek, slides down the side of my throat, over my shoulder, down my arm, laces our fingers.

“I will go slow.”

I nod.

“If I touch anything that hurts, we stop.”

He kisses me.

Softly. His mouth avoiding the small cut inside my lip, his beard against my jaw.

I lift my hands to the buttons on his shirt. My fingers are a little clumsy, but I undo them, one by one, while he kisses me. He strips it off his shoulders and drops it on the floor, and he is bare from the waist up above me, and the sight of him — scars, ink, breadth, the heavy weight of twenty-nine years of surviving on his skin — fills me with relief.

The man that he became came for me and saved my life.

“I love you, Vince.”

“Ti amo, amore mio.”

I lift the hem of my sleep shirt. He takes it off me carefully, lifting the sleeves one at a time, mindful of my shoulders. Drops it beside his shirt. Takes a long breath at the sight of me.

“Bella.”

He puts his palm, flat and warm, against the center of my chest. Over my racing heart.

“I have you.”

“I know.”

He strips off the rest of his clothes. Comes back to the bed. Settles his weight above me on his forearms. His cock, hard and heavy, lies against my inner thigh, and I shift my hips a fraction to press against it. He groans low into my neck.

“Rosalie. Not fast. Not tonight.”

“Okay.”

He kisses my throat. The hollow of my collarbone. The soft spot at the top of my sternum. Down between my breasts. Over the swell of my belly.

He slides a finger between my thighs.

His breath goes ragged against my hip.

“You’re dripping wet.”