Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
She woke briefly when he lifted her. Just a slow surfacing, like coming up through warm water, and she was in his arms, one under her knees, the other at her back, and he was carrying her somewhere, and the silk of the black dress was cool against her skin and his chest was warm through his shirt and she could hear his heartbeat, solid and sure, the kind of sound a person could organize their whole life around if they weren't careful.
"Go back to sleep," he murmured, and his accent had thickened again, the way it did when he stopped performing and started simply being, and Chelsea thought, Oh, I am in so much trouble, and then she thought nothing at all.
She was asleep before they reached the car.
Olivio could not stop staring at his wife.
She was against his shoulder in the backseat, one hand curled in her lap and the other resting on his thigh in a gesture so trusting it made his jaw tighten in a way that was becoming, frankly, inconvenient. The city slid past outside the tinted windows, all glass and distance, the kind of city that looked best when you were moving through it fast enough that the geometry was all that remained.
He knew this city. He'd built parts of it, reshaped others, could read its skyline the way other men read stock tickers. It was his. He understood it. It operated according to principles he had mastered.
The woman sleeping against him operated according to no principles he had ever encountered.
During his stay in Sicily, he had caught Miguel watching Selena with the expression of a man still faintly astonished, after fifteen years, that the woman sitting across from him had chosen to stay. And Aivan with Sienah, unable to enter a room his wife occupied without finding her first with his eyes, as if she were the fixed point against which he oriented himself.
Olivio had observed both with the clinical interest of a man watching a phenomenon he understood theoretically but did not plan to replicate.
That's not what this is, he told himself now, watching Chelsea's lashes cast small shadows on her cheeks. This is the Marquez deal. A convenient arrangement with certain...additional dimensions.
The Marquez family did business with family men. He now had a wife. The timing was useful. Chelsea got protection from Francine. He got access to the Vancouver property. Clean lines. Clear incentives. The kind of deal he understood.
That she was also soft, and brave, and earnest in a way that made his cynicism feel like a language he was suddenly struggling to speak, that she had come to his building in a cotton dress and carrying a Bible and not knowing what he looked like, that she had given herself to him with a trust so absolute it bordered on the kind of faith he'd never had in anything—-
Incidental.
Chelsea shifted in her sleep, her fingers curling tighter against his thigh, and Olivio's hand moved of its own accord to cover hers.
He looked at their hands. His, large and dark against the pale silk. Hers, small, the fingers slightly ink-stained from her highlighters.
He had watched what love did to the men in his family. Had watched Miguel become a ghost for a decade after Paulette, and Aivan turn himself to stone for twenty-three years. The person who left was the only one who stopped hurting. Everyone else just kept going, carrying the weight of an absence that never got lighter, it just became the shape your spine learned to hold.
Control was the only thing that couldn't walk out the door.
Chelsea murmured something in her sleep that sounded like it might have been his name.
His thumb traced a line across her knuckles, back and forth, back and forth, and the city blurred past, and he told himself this was nothing. A deal.
The tightness in his chest did not ease.
He told himself it would.
Chapter Five
CHELSEA WOKE TO THE press of her husband's mouth against the curve of her neck, and for one disoriented breath she thought she was still dreaming.
Because that was what this first week had been. A dream inside a dream inside a life so extravagantly unlike her actual one that her brain had stopped trying to categorize it and had simply given in to the impossibility, the way you gave in to a current that was stronger than you and warmer than you expected and going somewhere you couldn't see.
To wake up every morning in this house, in this bed, in Olivio Cannizzaro's arms. To have his breathing change the moment he knew she was surfacing, slower, watchful, as if he'd been waiting for her to cross back from wherever sleep had taken her and was only now allowing himself to be present.
And to have him still so wanting of her, his desire growing fiercer with each passing day instead of diminishing, as if every night they spent together only deepened a hunger that no amount of having her could sate.