Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76545 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76545 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“And I love you,” I tell her, right there in front of everyone. I say it again, loud and clear, for everyone to hear. “I love you, Rosa Rossi. Will you marry me?”
She grins at me and swipes impatiently at her eyes. “Stop making me cry and the answer is yes!”
We cheer and clink glasses again. I hold her to me.
“I lost you once,” I whisper to her. She fits in my arms like she was meant to be here. “I lost you once, and I won’t lose you again.”
“You are going to be an insufferable husband,” she says with affection. I love the way she bites her full lip.
“Baby,” I whisper in her ear. “You have No. Idea.”
A glass shatters on the floor, and silence quickly descends in the room. All eyes go to Elise, who stands in a puddle of water. She grimaces and clutches her belly. “Guess what,” she pants, her eyes wide. “I—I think all this drama broke my water.”
Tavi gasps. “Santo, can I take your—goddamn it, you sold all of them?”
“Tavi, honey, we probably have lots of time,” Elise says patiently. Then she turns to me. “Did you really sell all of them?”
“I ain’t takin’ his money,” Romeo says, “so he can buy whatever his pretty little heart desires.”
“Doesn’t help us get to the hospital,” Tavi mutters.
I grin at Romeo. “Good to have you home, brother,” I mutter.
Romeo grins. “Will be even better to make you part of this crazy clan in more ways than one.”
“Ooooh,” Marialena says, wiping at her eyes. “It’s all so beautiful,” she sniffs.
Nonna bustles around, plying us with food and pleas to, “Mangia, mangia!”
“Santo,” Rosa says softly. “I… I feel bad about what I said yesterday. Everything about… about letting you go.”
“Shh,” I tell her softly. “I understand.”
“I just… wanted to protect you in whatever way I could,” she says, shaking her head.
“I know. That’s behind us, baby.”
I think of the road ahead of us. It might be rocky, and there will be twists and turns like any other. But it will be our story that we’ll write, our story that we’ll tell. And after everything we’ve been through, I can only see, for the first time in my entire life, a happy ending ahead of us.
EPILOGUE
SANTO
Six months later
Rosa
I don’t want a big wedding at The Castle. I don’t want to be married with every member of my ridiculously large family looking on.
I want to wear Santo’s ring and bear his children. I want to wake up every day beside him and go to bed every night curled up to his side. I want to laugh with him, fight with him, make sweet love to him, and be dominated, spanked, and taken hard.
I want to live with him. Breathe with him. Love with him.
Because I love him, and when I’m with Santo, my world no longer tilts on its axis. My world is right again. Santo was always mine, and I was always his.
We just had to fight to get there.
But fight we did, and we won’t stop now.
Cousin Sergio’s wildly amused by our decision to marry in Tuscany.
“What,” he says on a shit-eating grin. “Don’t want any more gossip, Rosa?” The cousins and aunts and uncles have been talking about Santo since he got here, and it’s no secret that he wasn’t included in my grandfather’s will.
I roll my eyes at him. “I don’t give a shit about gossip,” I tell him truthfully. When you’re raised in the mob like me, you learn to drown out the buzz of chatter over everything you say and do. “I don’t want anything. No pomp and circumstance. No big to-do. No flowers or bridesmaids or anything.”
“We’ll save it up for me,” Marialena says, sucking on a lollipop the size of my fist. “I want all the pomp and circumstance on steroids with glitter and satin bows.”
“Did you win that at a carnival?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “I have a stash.”
“Your lips are blue,” Sergio says grinning. She sticks out her blue tongue at him.
So Tuscany it is for the wedding. We stay at one of our villas, the rolling green hills in full bloom behind us. Only Mama, Marialena, Romeo, and Natalia come with us. That’s all we want. Marialena and Romeo are our witnesses, and I couldn’t deny my only sister a place by my side when I marry Santo.
Everyone else doesn’t give us as much grief as we expected they would for not attending our wedding, but they’re pretty occupied with Elise and Tavi’s new baby girl, sweet Gia, a chubby little baby with pale blue eyes and round cheeks, who’s got every made man in the family wrapped around her chubby little fingers.
Natalia, of course, is on cloud nine. “I have a new cousin and Uncle Santo!” she says over and over, before she frowns. “Can I still call him Uncle Santo? Anything else is weird for me.”