Manhattan's Most Scandalous Reunion by Dani Collins, Caitlin Crews

CHAPTER TWELVE

CENZOPRESENTEDHIMSELFat the Christie estate in Pennsylvania the next morning. He had expected the door to be opened by staff, but instead it was Archibald himself who peered out into the November early morning gloom.

And did not smile.

“It appears you have already made my daughter unhappy,” the older man said, though he still stepped back and beckoned Cenzo within.

“I intend to make it up to Josselyn,” Cenzo said stiffly, “but I must also apologize—”

Archibald stopped him, there in the grand foyer where Cenzo had given Josselyn the Sicilian Sky long ago. “You forget that I chose you for my daughter. And I’m well aware that you thought me a fool. But I’m not one. You remind me of your father.”

Cenzo’s chest was too tight. His throat felt thick. What would have happened if he’d allowed this man to speak with him the way he’d wished to do before the wedding? Instead of steering the conversation away from his father every time? “Thank you.”

“I have never known a finer man,” Archibald said. His dark eyes gleamed with compassion, and something else. “It’s not only Josselyn that I wish to see happy in this marriage, son. I know that your father would expect me to do this. To make sure, as he could not, that you find the peace he never could.”

Two months ago, Cenzo would not have recognized the sensation that washed through him, then. But he knew it now.

“You humble me,” he managed to say. And then, “I will not let you down again.”

And old Archibald Christie smiled, cannily. “See that you don’t, son. See that you don’t.”

He led Cenzo through the house, in and out of rooms gleaming with the kind of quiet elegance he associated with his wife. Then out into the back, where a covered walkway led to a fogged-up greenhouse.

Archibald inclined his head, then left Cenzo to it.

He pushed his way inside, the humidity enveloping him instantly. There was music playing, a female singer crooning something heartbreakingly wry. He moved between the rows of plants, then stopped dead when he saw her.

His Josselyn. At last.

She had piled her hair up on the top of her head and was wearing a kind of smock over her usual uniform. Jeans and a T-shirt, both simple and sophisticated at once. Like her.

The very sight of her walloped him. She hadn’t even turned around to note his presence, and still, he felt as if she’d sucker punched him.

And again, his memories did him no favors. Because all he could remember now was her. Not his plans before he hit his head. Not his certainty in himself after. All of that and then none of it, because all there was in the center, holding up the world, was Josselyn.

She glanced over her shoulder, then froze, taking her time to turn around and meet his gaze.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. But it wasn’t the grave way she regarded him now.

“You told me you would come. In your note.”

He had forgotten he’d written a note. “I did.”

“I thought it would be a while. Years, perhaps.” She studied him. “I assumed public humiliations would play a part.”

He thought of the way she’d sobbed in his arms as she’d taken her pleasure, again and again. The look on her face when he had told her he lost his memory. Cenzo had spent this whole month since he’d last seen her replaying every single thing that had ever happened between them. Over and over again.

And he did not want her gravity.

“You told me you wanted this marriage to work, Josselyn.” He lifted a brow. “That you thought we were lucky because we did not start off muddled by romantic notions.”

She looked away for a moment, and when she looked back at him she looked more sad than grave. It was not an improvement.

“You don’t have to mock me,” she said with quiet dignity. “If there was something I could do to take back what happened, I would do it. But I can’t.”

His jaw felt like granite. “Which part of what happened?”

Josselyn took a visible breath, as if gathering herself. “Making you my servant. It was petty. I regretted it almost immediately, but I couldn’t take it back. I apologize.”

Cenzo hadn’t anticipated an apology. Not to him.

“You regretted it, yet you had me cleaning windows and scrubbing floors,” he said dryly. “It seems to me that you owe me.”

And then he had to bite back a smile. Because he had become adept at reading each and every one of her expressions while serving her. He knew that flush on her cheeks. He knew that particular shine in her eyes.

He was Cenzo Falcone, as close to a king as a man could be without a crown. And once a humble manservant.

In both lives, he had always gotten what he wanted.

He did not intend for that to change now that he was both men. Now that he had learned both lessons.

“Cenzo,” Josselyn said then, sounding...breathless. “Can we just...start over?”

And he moved closer to her, so he was directly in front of her. Close enough that he could have swept her into his arms. He could have kissed her silly, as every part of him longed to do.

But instead, he held her gaze.

And then, heeding the urge of the man he hoped he would become, not the versions he’d been, he dropped to one knee before her.

“I don’t want to start over,” he told her, every truth he’d discovered along the way in his voice. His gaze. “I don’t want to forget a single moment, Josselyn. I want to remember them all. From the moment you came into that room in a cottage in Maine and upended everything. I took you to a ruined castle and thought that I would turn you into rubble, but you are the one who leveled me.”

Her beautiful eyes widened. “Cenzo...” she whispered.

But he kept on. “How can I condemn you for the trick you played on me when what I planned to do to you was worse? Some would call it karma. But I call it a miracle.” He reached over and took her hands in his, that stone that had cursed so many before him reminding him of what mattered. The sea and the sky and the place they were one. And this woman, who made all of them shine. “Because whether I remembered myself or not, there was you. And I am not too proud to use the debt you feel to keep you with me. To prove to you that despite everything I have done to you, and wanted to do to you, you are the one who won after all.”

She looked fierce, even as that shine in her eyes spilled over into tears. “I don’t want to win. I don’t want either one of us to win, because that means someone has to lose. And what kind of life is that?”

“Josselyn—” he began.

But she silenced him by tugging her hands free and pressing her palms to his cheeks. Bringing her face to his as he still knelt there before her.

“I lost my mother and my brother in an instant. An afternoon storm and that was it. They were gone.” Her voice was urgent and low. Her gaze was intense. “Life is so fleeting, Cenzo, and it can end so quickly. You could have died in that fall. And if all you think about is winning and losing, taking revenge and plotting against your enemies, don’t you see? You’re going to miss the whole thing.”

He did see. He saw her, and nothing else had made sense since. Not until he’d found his way back to her.

“I have been two men for you,” he told her then. “And I have spent this last month desperately trying to pretend that at least one of them was a lie, but I keep coming back to a single, inescapable truth. I wanted to bind you to me. I wanted to make you unfit for anything at all but my bed. And instead it is I who might as well be rubble beneath your shoe, Josselyn. You humbled me, and yet I think you saved me. Because had you not, I would never know.” He lifted a hand and held hers, there where it still lay against his cheek. “Had you not toppled me from the height of my arrogance, I could never have known how much I loved you. How much I will always love you. And whether this life is long or short, none of it will matter at all unless I keep on loving you. Forever.”

She whispered his name as if it was a prayer. “Do you know, all the while I was making you clean and cook and serve me, all I really wanted was you. Not the you I’d already met and married, but the one you showed me every night. Not twisted, but real. Fascinating and beautiful, commanding and breathtaking, and that was when you thought you were a humble man with a humble life. I wanted you then.” Josselyn blew out a shaky breath. “And if I’m honest, I wanted you before. My father wanted me to marry a man of his choosing, it’s true. But if it hadn’t been you, there’s no way I would have gone through with it. It was always you, Cenzo. Whatever version of you. It was still you.”

“I love you,” Cenzo told her, gazing up at her. “I want you to marry me, again. Just you and me, the sky and the sea, and who knows what we can do?”

“I will,” she whispered. “I will marry you, again. I love you too. Because I have seen both sides of you, dark and light. Cruel and caring. And I have loved them both.”

“I cannot promise that I won’t revert to form.” He took the hand that wore his ring and pressed his fingers to the blue stone that proclaimed her a Falcone. And forever his. “I can only promise that going forward, it will not take a knock on the head to put me right again. All it will take is you, my beautiful wife. My only love. Believe in me and I promise, I will be the man you deserve.”

“And I will be the wife that you need,” she promised him. “No pettiness or poison, Cenzo. Only this. Only us.”

Tears still slid down her cheeks as she bent to him and kissed him at last. First a sweet seal on these vows they’d made today, but then the roar of his dragon rose up, becoming part of that fire that burned between them.

Passion, not poison.

Bright, hot, and theirs, forever.

And then she was in his arms, or perhaps he was in hers, and everything was that heat, that need, that impossible, glorious greed—and all of that was love. Every touch, every whisper, every sigh.

All of it was love, and he knew, then, that it would be like that forever.

They rolled this way and that, there in all that humidity, the air thick and perfumed with growing things.

It felt like a new beginning. It felt like spring, here in a dark November.

Because Josselyn’s eyes were bright and her smile was beautiful, and she looked at him as if all she saw was the man he vowed, there and then, he would always be for her.

Always.

She settled herself astride him, still smiling as she looked down at him. His hands found her waist, and they both sighed a little, fully clothed as they still were, as the hardest part of him found that soft sweetness that was only his. Only and ever his.

“I love you,” he told her, in every language he knew.

But her eyes lit up in the same way they had when she’d told him he was a servant.

“I promise you this, husband,” Josselyn said, mischief in her voice and forever in her eyes. “You will never know a moment’s peace. Your life with me will be a delicious agony. I will make you an addict for my touch, my gaze, the barest possibility of my approval.”

His own words said back to him were electrifying. They made his heart pound. They made him hunger to taste her again. He wondered if they’d had the same effect on her, back then.

Josselyn leaned closer. “You will live for it. For me.”

“This does not sound like a threat, my little wife.”

She placed her fingers over his mouth and he nipped at them, making her laugh. “And I will do the same. We will be riotously happy. We will make each other feel safe, you and I. We will not be junkies, Cenzo, because we will know joy. We will raise our children swathed in it. And we will live, as long as we can, loving each other more. And more. And always still more.”

“More,” he agreed.

Because he was Cenzo Falcone. He would see to it.

And then he started as he meant to go on, there on the floor of her father’s greenhouse, making both of them laugh, then groan.

Until, at last, they made each other whole.

And kept right on doing it for the rest of their lives.