Page 7 of Pucking Them
I don’t break away until my lungs are burning for air.
Breathing hard, we stare at each other.
“I love you, Jude.” I kiss him again, tenderly.
“I love you, cara mia.” D’Angelo looks vulnerable at my use ofJudein a way that he rarely does.
I clasp his hand in mine.
My heart swells with joy, when the rings that I am wearing, which each of my men gave me, touch the platinum signet ring with a spinning puck on D’Angelo’s finger. I gifted him the signet ring like the sealing of a deal.
He’s stuck with me.
I squirm happily on his lap.
D’Angelo wraps his arm around my waist. “Comfortable?”
“I am now.”
“Hmm.” He arches his brow. “And in our forever home…” He finally looks away from the soccer game and over the mansion instead. “…do you see kids?”
Surprised, I study D’Angelo’s face carefully and realize that he is keeping his expression just as carefully blank.
Yet there is an unmistakablehopein his blue eyes, which he can’t entirely hide.
It wrenches my heart.
“I already have a husband,” I whisper.
D’Angelo closes his eyes for a long moment. His black eyelashes feather across his cheeks.
Then he opens his eyes again, coldly possessive. “Wife.”
He kisses me, as if we are the only two people in the world.
When he releases me, however, panting and dazed, his gaze shoots to Shay. “But do you think that the twins would want to adopt like they once were? After everything that they’ve been through, is it too much to expect?”
“What about everythingyou’vebeen through?”
“My family disowned me. They chose to beat and abandon me, sending me to that Discipline School just because they found me kissing a boy. From that moment, I was dead to them because I wasn’t theperfect childthat they’d imagined in their heads. You know, my family had a Sunday ritual too: Church, followed by traditional family Italian Sunday lunch together. I would help to fetch the vegetables from the garden for the meal. I never felt unloved, until the moment that my brother…” He breaks off, taking a steadying breath. “It’s hard to hold those two realities together at the same time. But I’ve realized it’s possible tothinkyou love someone, only it’s conditional. The moment that someone doesn’t behave withinyourmorals, you reveal how little you truly loved them. It wouldn’t be like that if I was a dad. We could give a kid a home who needs it — someone who needs to be unconditionally loved because they weren’t the first time around just like me or the twins. Or do you want a child with one of us?”
My heart aches.
I take a deep breath. “I am happy just as we are. Our relationship works. I’m not… I don’t need a child right now tofixanything, you know? But if you, Shay, or Eden want to discuss that in the future, then I’m open to it. I love that we have the type of relationship where we can talk about things and explore them. I didn’t have that before in my marriage. In fact, I didn’t know relationships could work like that. Wilder just did what he wanted, and I had to accept it or be gaslit into feeling guilty. I never had a voice.”
“Wilder is an abusive asshole. You’re always going to have a voice in this family.” D’Angelo tightens his hold around me. “How about we start with rescuing a cat together at the end of the season?”
“Eden will think thatishis baby.”
D’Angelo chuckles. “At our last home, he already adopted a squirrel.”
This time, Eden scores and celebrates with some kind of complicated knee slide.
My gaze lands on the Guide, which has fallen open on the rug.
I surprise D’Angelo by throwing myself off his lap to grab the book, before he can stop me.
I swing the Guide above my head like a sport trophy. “Ah ha! What do we have here? What great work of art have you been working on?”
