“I let the housekeeper go tonight,” came a voice from behind him. “She has her own family to decorate for.”
Pascal turned, slowly. Because he was sure he was imagining it.
But she was there, walking toward him from the hall that led to Dante’s suite.
“I just put Dante to bed,” Cecilia said quietly when she came to a stop before him, still dressed in the same clothes he’d seen on her—and off her—earlier. “You’re shouting loud enough to wake the dead. One small boy will wake a whole lot more easily.”
She was still here.
For a moment that was all that he could think about. It was all that mattered.
And as her words penetrated the mad, howling thing inside him, he realized that she clearly wasn’t going anywhere—not tonight anyway—if she’d put Dante down to sleep.
He moved toward her, and he felt as if he had the weight of a thousand worlds clinging to each of his limbs as he moved. The world he’d grown up in. The world he’d made.
The world he’d left behind him tonight.
When he reached her, he put his hands on her shoulders as if he needed to assure himself that she was real.
Because he needed her to be real. He needed it more than air.
“Cecilia,” he said, because her name was like a song and he’d been trying to get that particular tune out of his head for far too long.
Tonight he’d stopped trying.
And it was time to start singing it instead.
“Pascal,” she whispered back, her wide violet eyes solemn.
And then, finally, while the storm raged inside him and his bones ached with the effort, Pascal Furlani sang the only song that mattered.
He surrendered.
He sank down on his knees, took her hands in his and begged.
“Please don’t leave me,” he said, urgent and low. “I know I’ve given you no reason to stay, no reason to do anything but hate me. But Cecilia, I can’t live without you. I’ve tried.”
She shifted as if she would say something—
But he cut her off, because he couldn’t stop now.
“I love you,” he told her. “I built empires in your absence, but all I saw was your ghost. You have haunted me since the moment I woke up in pieces and saw you there, smiling. You taught me how to live. To love. To imagine that I could be the kind of man who could do either when I’d never thought I was much of anything but another man’s dirt. I don’t deserve you. I never will.”
“Pascal—”
“Cecilia,” he said, a song and a vow, and her—always her, “I need you to stay here. I need to become the man I imagined I was when I was smashed into a million pieces and you alone made me whole. I need to become that man so I can be the husband you deserve. The father Dante deserves. And I am very much afraid that only you can teach me how.”
There were tears in the corners of her lovely eyes, and they chased each other down her cheeks as she sank down on her knees so she could be there with him in the sparkling light of so many Christmas trees.
“Pascal,” she whispered. “Don’t you understand? It’s already done. I am your wife. That means you help me. And I help you. And we love each other, forever. That was what we promised.”
“I know how to make money,” he told her, the intensity in his voice inside him, too. “But what I want is to make you happy. To make our son happy. To make more babies, and make them happy, too.”
“I want all of those things,” she said. “And I want you happy, too. Pascal, you deserve to be happy.”
“I don’t deserve you,” he managed to say. “I know that much.”
Her hands smoothed over his face then. She traced his scars and she held his gaze, and the light he saw in her eyes humbled him. Exalted him.