I couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning in bed where I’d had countless dreams of a certain dark-haired handsome man, hugging him, staring at sunsets, and eating cotton candy. I thought about this for a few days and was determined that this was the best course of action.
I shifted to get more comfortable and stared at my bracelet, fiddling with the new chain.
Seeing Matteo at the charity, I was angry at first. I thought he was doing it just to be bossy. To take over and not trust me to handle what I did with his money. Then I was ashamed when I realized exactly what he was doing. It wasn’t for me directly, but for his relationship with Renz as well. That was something I, as his wife, should have seen immediately. There was so much more I needed to unpack about my husband. But wasn’t that what marriages of convenience were all about?
We could learn about each other in time while we’re married, but I recognized my husband’s impatience. Then he went and threw me a curveball when he gave me back the one most precious object in my life. I sat up in bed, and switched on the lights, and stared at the coin. Made of bronze, it was scratched, and it had been polished to a newish shine again. But the value was not in its monetary worth, but in how it encompassed the meaning of my life.
Matteo gave it back to me and then I handed him divorce papers.
My marriage didn’t even last five weeks. I couldn’t bear to tell Luca. Matteo was filing immediately.
A thump sounded by my door. My heart pounded. I hadn’t put the chair underneath it for a few days, and I wondered if Matteo thought our divorce gave him a clean slate to start a sexual relationship with me.
Well, if that was what he thought, he was sadly mistaken. I waited a few more seconds, maybe it was a minute or two, but I did not hear that sound again.
But I was thirsty and I had forgotten to get my glass of water. To avoid running into my husband in the hallway, I’d been stocking up things in my room the past few days. I felt like a hoarder or a prepper. I thought of getting a small fridge, but I didn’t want to feel imprisoned. Would it still make sense to live here if I were divorced from him? We hadn’t discussed the details since he had to run back to the charity. I was painfully aware that we’d been living separate lives these past three weeks. I missed him so much, my conflicted emotions were killing me.
I loved him.
I hated him.
I wished I had never married him.
Then I’d dream of our happier times, and I’d convinced myself that the feeling was too beautiful not to fight for. And I was afraid I would never experience that level of love with another man. Yet, I was more afraid I could not bring myself to trust him again.
Clean slate.
The nightstand clock told me it was two thirty a.m. Hot milk always helped my sleepless nights, but I’d been having too much of the bacon and egg brioche. Sometimes I would have it two times a day and now several of my jeans’ top buttons wouldn’t close. Apparently when my heart was broken, I was one who turned to food.
Deciding I didn’t want to be a zombie in the morning, I threw back my blanket, crossed the room, and opened the door.
A body fell into the room.
A male voice cursed.
I shrieked.
“Matteo? What the hell are you doing outside my door?”
He pushed up from the floor but crawled to the wall inside my room and sat against it. “The divorce is fucking me up.”
“You’re the one who wanted it,” I whispered, kneeling in front of him. I caught a whiff of scotch and saw the tipped tumbler on the floor. “Have you been drinking?”
“No,” he growled.
“I can smell it on you, don’t lie.”
“Drinking means I’m drunk. I just had two fingers…maybe four.” He held out his hand. “Come here, baby, don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad. I just don’t want you to regress.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Woman, come sit beside me.”
“Shouldn’t we move to somewhere more comfortable?”
“No, I like it here.” He breathed out a chuckle. “Makes me look more pathetic. I am a pathetic bastard, aren’t I, baby?”
“No sex.”
He grumbled. “I’d die for just a kiss. Just saying.”
He was trying to be cute.
So, I sat beside him. He linked our fingers and kissed my knuckles before holding it against his chest. Rapid beats pulsed against the back of my hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I was certain it wasn’t about sitting beside him. I didn’t say anything.
“Because of you I came to understand Renz more,” he continued. “Scratch that. I completely see where he was coming from and I’m ashamed of what I had told him at that time.”
I stilled. He was opening up about his relationship with his brother.
“We had a long chat while I helped him winterize his rooftop garden.” He chuckled. “I’d been wearing a suit.”
“Aw…” I said. “Bet you looked hot with rolled-up sleeves and grimed up.”
He cast me a side-long glance. “Noted.”
“Go on.” I squeezed our joined fingers.
“I apologized to Liz today,” he said quietly. “Five years after I’d been a dick to her, I finally said the words.”
I paused. “She never seemed to resent you.”
“Because she’s the sweetest, most forgiving soul,” he said. “I was a selfish, arrogant prick and I accused her of being a gold digger.”
“Oh, Matteo.”
“I was a twenty-three-year-old asshole. She was barely eighteen. You wanted to know if I was a bossy know-it-all, I was.”
“You were concerned for Renz,” I said. “But that’s a really harsh thing to say about the woman he loves.”
“I wanted him to go to college,” I said. “I should have respected what he wanted.”
“But they’re together now.”
“It hasn’t been easy. That wasn’t the worst of it.” His hand gripped mine tighter as if what he was going to say next was going to make me pull away. “What is it?”
After an eternity, he said, “Renz was hurt and pissed. Even when Dad and Mom told him the family supported him, I was still an ass. Even when my parents told me to stay out of it, I made my disapproval known.”
I kept my mouth shut, but my heart was palpitating, knowing I was on the verge of finding out his demons.
“I was an ass,” he repeated, more to himself than to me. My heart was breaking for the damage to their relationship.
“I’d been such a dick, Renz moved in with Liz. It was in a part of town where the De Luccis didn’t have much sway.”
“Oh no.”
“My brother was being reckless and emotional and he knew it. He and Liz were going to find somewhere else to stay. He refused help from the family. And as you can tell, living in Manhattan isn’t cheap.”
He inhaled raggedly, clearly tormented. “It was in the middle of a war between the Caruso and De Lucci crime families.”
“Oh, Matteo.”
He cast me a brief glance, but he couldn’t meet my eyes. This was shame he still felt unto this day. “The Caruso crew got to Liz. She was pregnant with twins. Some asshole beat her and broke her leg.”
A distressed sound echoed in the room. It came from me.
“Go on,” I croaked, wanting Matteo to get it all out.
“We found the house where they were keeping her. It wasn’t pretty, but we got her back.”
“Did they…”
“No. They didn’t rape her.”
“Thank God.”
“But she lost one of the twins. We thought she lost both. Still, it was a long road before Renz was able to talk to me again…I wasn’t sure I’d forgiven myself until we had it out a few days ago.”
“You didn’t tell him to leave,” I said gently.
“I didn’t make it easy for him to stay either,” he said. “When Samantha was born, we decided to call a truce. Renz and I agreed we were a couple of idiots and let our hotheads get the best of us.”
“But your chat the other day is more than a truce, right?”
“I finally said the words.”
“What words?”
“I apologized.”
My mouth fell open. “Matteo!”
“It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to. There was no real opportunity. We were just in each other’s lives and were never close again after that. We meet at family gatherings, but Renz is all about the coffee shop and his family. Nico and I were all about the business and carrying on with the De Lucci legacy.” He snorted softly in amusement. “I wondered if my parents’ extended vacation was to let us boys bond or something.”
“What?”
“My sister, Bianca? She’s tight with Renz. I was jealous of that too.”
I rolled my eyes.
“She’s my baby sister.”
“Let me guess, you thought Renz would be a bad influence on her.”
His nonanswer told me everything.
“It seems we need to work on your desire to boss everyone around.”
“I’m working on it,” he muttered.
“Liz is too nice,” I quipped.
“Hey, you’re supposed to be on my side,” he chided. “But she forgave me a long time ago.”
“She’s definitely the angel of the family,” I said.
“You’re mine, Seraphina,” he murmured. “You like saving people. Maybe it’s time to save me.”
“Maybe,” I whispered back.
We looked at each other. His face inched closer. He searched my eyes as if gauging my reaction.
I wasn’t ready to go to bed with him or to engage in something I wasn’t ready to give. We were at a better place, learning more about each other’s demons.
This was huge, but even if I was hesitant to jump in, I couldn’t help moving closer. I cupped his jaw and pressed my lips against his.
A deep groan rumbled in his chest, as if he finally got what he wanted after an eternity of waiting.
But before he could prolong the kiss, I pulled away and said, “Thank you for telling me. You don’t know how much this means to me that you trusted me with your past.”
He smiled wryly. “You deserved to know. It was time.”
“And it’s time for us to sleep,” I announced, standing up and dragging him up with me.
He grabbed the tumbler from the floor. “Where were you going?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I admitted. “I was going for the old remedy of warm milk.”
He kissed the top of my forehead. “I’ll get it for you.”
“Matteo…”
“Baby, we may be heading for divorce, but in my mind, you’re still my wife. Mine to cherish and that means making sure you get your warm milk no matter what damn time of the night it is.”
Bossy Matteo was back, but I was finding I was thrilled with this type of bossiness.
I smiled. “Okay.”
“Consider this part of my courtship.” He grinned before he turned around and left the room.
Ten minutes later he returned and handed me my warm milk.
Without another word, he turned around and closed the door.
I slept peacefully after.
Another week went by following the night he unburdened his past. Something shifted in our relationship. I wondered if my distrust had been there all along because he hadn’t shared the demons that haunted him, and his and Daniel’s bullshit plan only revealed the fragility of our bond.
We’d started to hang out after dinner. I no longer hid in my room to avoid him. On the nights Ava and Cesar stayed home, I joined them in the family room to chat or watch movies. On the nights his parents were out, and Matteo and I spent time together, we discussed anything and everything.
We only exchanged chaste kisses. I think we were both afraid of jumping in too soon and ruining our progress. But each night that passed, it was getting harder and harder to keep our hands off each other.
Last night, he asked me into his study to help him figure out what to do with Mancini Winery. His IT department created an account for me so I could access their servers. Together we pored over financials and business processes. It was an overview of the state of the winery. It was in a bad way. I’d heard about the reputation of the developer that Matteo was going to sell the winery to and despite the top dollars that company was going to pay, it would give them a right to tear the winery apart, destroy the beautiful structure, and commercialize the land, destroying its beauty.
After spending two hours poring over data, we called it a night.
“Well, this is me,” I said as though we were in a hotel going back to our rooms. “I’ll look it over some more tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow,” he said, edging closer until my back was against my door. He towered over me. “We have to discuss something with Renz.”
The words out of his mouth didn’t match the heat in his eyes. Warmth bloomed in my cheeks. Matteo could still make me blush with a look. More so with this simmering tension between us. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
His mouth curved. “Because I want to kiss you and it’s not a good idea.”
“Why?”
He dropped his forehead to mine. “Baby, it’s killing me how I can’t kiss you the way I want to.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“I don’t want to fuck things up again,” he growled. “I wrongly assumed we had all the time in the world to get to know each other, and when one lie came to light, your trust in me crumbled.” He breathed heavily. “If I took the time to understand your hopes and dreams, made you more secure in my love for you, I think you would have forgiven me sooner.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I love you,” he said with a conviction that burned into my heart. “I fucking love you, Sera.”
His mouth was millimeters from mine.
“Matteo…” I said his name with an ache in my soul.
His mouth touched mine and an inferno exploded between us. For the first time in weeks, we kissed. Really kissed. I opened to him, and his tongue slipped between and tangled fiercely with my own. His body crushed my breasts, our hunger for each other sparking scorching flames that consumed us. But he kept his hands on either side of the door, and somehow the tension within him cascaded into me and the desperation with which he ground me against the wooden barrier signaled he was at the end of his control.
He lowered one arm, and I heard a click.
He delved one more time for a deep kiss before he pulled away. “Soon, baby,” he whispered. Then he opened the door.
“Now, get inside before I do filthy things to you right in the hallway.”
I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed. As usual, Matteo inspired so many reactions in me. All I knew was when I was on the opposite side of the door and leaning against it, my whole body was on fire and alive.
And as I walked into the bathroom, I started to hum. I stared at my ravaged mouth, swollen with his kisses, and smiled.
I was giddy.
And I was pretty sure I was still in love with my ex-husband.
