Page 95 of Ruthless Claim

When I open my eyes, Cillian is staring up at me like he’s witnessed magic for the first time. He cups my face with a hot hand and strokes my damp cheek. “Beautiful.”

I laugh in pure elation, falling onto my back beside him.

Still hard, Cillian wedges his knee between my legs, encouraging them to open again.

Knowing he still needs release, I open my legs wider, even though I’m not sure I can handle any more pain or pleasure or anything in between, yet eager to watch him come too.

Holding up my thighs, Cillian positions himself at my entrance again and slips into me one last time.

All my senses flare and the intrusion makes me near-delirious with sensation.

Too many feelings, nerve-endings fried, muscles sore, but Cillian needs only that one last thrust before his eyes roll back, his chin pointing up at the ceiling, Adam’s apple sticking out as he gasps my name.

And then he collapses on top of me, coated in sweat, deliciously heavy and warm. I close my eyes, basking in his presence and the clean soapy smell of his skin, now smelling like sweat and arousal, and me.

“Look at me,” he says, softly.

I open my eyes. He’s watching me with such an open expression that it makes my heart catch. “I love you,” he says again, like he needs me to hear it and he needs to hear himself saying it. “You and this baby. You’re my whole world now.”

My eyes fill and I don’t even try to stop it. “I love you too,” I tell him.

Something in these words sounds more like a promise than the ones we made on our wedding day.

Those words were the performance of two people trying to survive an arrangement.

Those were the words we were required to say. This is the one we’re choosing.

He pulls me into his arms and I rest my head on his chest, listening to the sounds of his frantic heartbeat. I trace his muscles and let myself believe it. All of it. The baby and the marriage and the love and the completely improbable, impossible, ridiculous fact that Valentina Santoro Brennan is lying here, right now, in the truest version of her own life that she has ever occupied.

Cillian breathes against my temple and his hand rests on me and I close my eyes. Maybe everything is going to be okay.

No. Not maybe. I think for the first time in a long time it already is.

10

VALENTINA

The thing about happiness is that I’ve never fully trusted it.

I’ve known it for a long time, the way you know things about yourself that you’d rather not.

I hold good things at a slight distance, turning them over, looking for the crack, waiting for the part where it stops being good.

My therapist calls it anticipatory grief. I call it being a Santoro, because everyone I grew up around understood that things can be taken and usually are.

The best things are the most fragile, and loving something too openly is basically an invitation for the universe to notice and intervene.

For two weeks after I tell Cillian I’m pregnant, I forget to do that.

For two whole weeks, I stop holding it at a distance. I stop waiting for the crack.

I let myself just have it.

The ginger tea in the mornings and his hand on my stomach at night and the pregnancy book open on his nightstand that he reads whenever he has a chance.

I let myself have the arguments about what to do with the second bedroom and the conversation about names that went nowhere except hilarious.

“Fergus,” he said seriously over breakfast two days after I told him I was pregnant.