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It only made her cry harder. “She’s my sister and she hates me now and she thinks I’ve betrayed her and…”
Finally, he took her hands in his and raised them to his mouth. “I am sorry that she hurt you like this. I’m sorry that I cannot change this for you.” His throat moved up and down in a hard swallow. When he looked up, his eyes were bleak. “Fabi said she urged you to run away with her? That she said I threatened her and that I intended to separate you two all along… I interfered, yes, Nyra. I only did it because I knew how much you wanted to talk to her. All I told her was that the sooner she got better, the sooner she would get to see you. That just speaking to her regularly would cheer you up. She asked to come here without finishing the rehab and I said no. That in your current condition, it was not good for you or her. I never intended to keep her away from you forever, Nyra. Never.”
He raised such anguished eyes to her that Nyra’s tears stopped. In the face of his pain, hers felt like nothing.
She quickly wiped her hands over her cheeks.
“Of course, I know you didn’t threaten her. She is very sick, Adriano. You tried to tell me that and I didn’t listen. She is not the sister I knew as a child. Nadia was bright, rational, kind. The woman who came to see me is someone else. You cannot think for one second that I believed any of that?”
“When Fabi told me what happened,” he said, “I couldn’t breathe. All I could think of was you, Nyra, and the babies and…us. I realized how foolish it was that I didn’t tell you.”
Her heart stuttered in her chest. “What? What didn’t you tell me?”
“How much I adore you, my sweet wife. How much I love you. How much…” Again he took her hands in his and kissed her knuckles gently. “You are my world, my stars, my sun, my entire universe, Nyra. You and these babies and our family… I cannot imagine my life without you. And I feared that I would not know how to love you. That I would not deserve your generous…”
She pressed her palm to his mouth. “There is no deserving in love, Adriano. That’s what you have taught me. Even after I came back to you, even after I made my vow to you, I still kept thinking that I had to earn your love. A place in your heart. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? Even without admitting it to yourself or saying it to me, you have loved me, in the way you know, from the beginning. I just didn’t see it because, like you, I didn’t know it. And seeing Nadia again, in the condition she is in, I realized how foolish my fears were. I realized how stupid it was to pass even a single day without telling you how much I adore you. I loved you from that first minute when I leaned toward you and breathed in your scent, Adriano. You are the storm and the shelter for me.”
He jumped onto the chase longue while Nyra giggled, pulled her into his lap and pressed fervent kisses over her face and her jaw and her temple and her neck. His arms were tied around her and his breath came in rough pants.
“You want to know what your punishment is, wife?”
“What?” she whispered, drowning in the scent and feel of him.
“Since you have shaved ten years off my life, I will not leave your side for a moment for the next two months.”
“Oh, really? Because sitting on my ass all day is boring.”
He laughed then, and with wonder in her heart, Nyra traced the lines that laughter drew around his mouth. With love shining in his eyes, he was even more gorgeous. “It’s punishment,bella. You’re supposed to not like it.”
She shrugged. “You could teach me about the finance world and I could teach you how to paint. And together, we could learn how to knit some booties for the babies.”
He groaned and caught her mouth for a fast, hard, breath-stealing kiss. “I was hoping we could front load all the good stuff before they get here.”
Nyra laughed and stole another kiss right back, her heart jumping with joy. “I love you, Adriano.”
“Say it again,” he demanded.
And she did, over and over again, while he paid the tithe for it in kisses and languid caresses that turned the gloomy rainy afternoon into something altogether hot and bright.
Epilogue
Two and a half months later
MayaandMiaCavaliericame into the world two months later, nearly tearing down the walls of the private hospital with their screams.
For all that she’d been advised bed rest—which her hawklike husband instituted as if he was a military commander going to war—fortunately, the birth itself had been a relatively easy one.
“Relativebeing the operative word,” Adriano had said drily, when Nyra had said it. “Seeing you in labor pains is not an experience I’m looking forward to ever again,cara,” he had said, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
“Oh, really,” Nyra had said with a scoff. He, on the other hand, was busily wiping her temples with a wet washcloth while the nurses bathed her daughters. “I braced myself for at least two more.”
He frowned, his own face streaked with sweat. “I know you didn’t enjoy the pregnancy enough to want to go over all of that again. Especially the last two months.”
“No, but I’m not the one who gets all worked up about doing it bare.”
To her utter amazement, as if the bounty she’d already been handed wasn’t abundant, her husband blushed. Dark red streaks painted his high cheekbones.
Nyra smiled.