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I take his face in my hands. Pull him up my body. Press my forehead to his.

He glides into me.

Fills me tight, hot, and full. His forehead stays on mine. His breath goes in and out against my mouth.

I wrap my arms around his shoulders. Hook my ankles behind his thighs. Pull him down flush against me. There is not a single part of my body that is not touching some part of his, and the ache in me, when he finally starts to move, is less about pleasure and more about the fact that I am in my man’s bed, under his weight, with his cock inside me and his breath on my mouth.

Earlier in the day, I did not think I was going to do any of those things ever again.

He drives into me again and again with impossibly lazy strokes.

His voice low in my ear, he talks to me the whole time.

In English. In Italian. In guttural sounds that leave me in no doubt that he wants me in every way possible.

My hand finds the back of his neck. I thrust my fingers into the short hair at his nape. Slide my other hand on his shoulder blade where I can feel every one of his muscles working under his skin to hold himself off me.

My body winds up slowly. He finds the right angle and rhythm. His pelvis grinds against my clit on every stroke, and I am climbing toward something I have never felt before in my life.

“Vince.”

“Yes, tesoro.”

“Don’t stop.”

“I am not stopping.” Each word is punctuated by a thrust.

My eyes are on his. I don’t let them close, even as the sweet hot fires building in my pussy grow.

I shatter around him.

My whole body clenches around him on a long shuddering wave and tears stream down the sides of my face into the pillow. His name — just his name — in my mouth.

He follows a beat later, with a growl against the hollow of my throat, his hips ramming uncontrollably.

My eyes are already closing as he comes.

Somewhere near my ear, his mouth shapes one word.

“Rosalie.”

That is the last thing I hear.

Somewhere on the far side of sleep, I sense him pulling the sheet up over both of us and his hand splaying, warm, wide and protective, over my stomach.

10

Epilogue

Vincenzo

Five years later

The deck over the water is the quietest place I have ever stood.

I am sitting in a low wooden chair with my feet up on the rail, a book open on my knee. My one-year-old boy Sandro is asleep on my chest with his cheek against the thin cotton of my shirt and the back of his hand curled against my sternum. The deck is built out over the shallows of a private island two hours from the Mexican coast. The water underneath it goes from turquoise to deep blue about thirty feet out. The sun is high. The air smells of salt and coconut sunscreen and something faintly sweet from a flowering tree at the edge of the sand.

Rosalie is knee-deep in the shallows with our four-year-old twins, Enzo and Mabel.