Page 69 of The Italian's Pregnant Enemy (A Diamond in the Rough)

She made him want everything. And when he slid into her tight body, he felt himself coming home.

It was not wrong. It never could be. It was not an apartment at the top of the world.

Home, very quickly, had become this year, and that felt like a very dangerous thing.

But he couldn’t turn away from it, not now. He was a slave to it. To her. He could do nothing but ride them both to the end. To completion.

But carry them both away on a cloud of desire. Because this was where it made sense. And this was where he could show her. It was where he would be able to manage this, because outside of this moment, outside of her body, it felt like a terrible thing. Great and awful, and like four walls and a home in Rome that he never wanted to revisit. Like a name he couldn’t say, like a heart he could never allow to beat again. No. It had to be this. It could only ever be this. Always and forever.

“Dario,” she said, shuddering out her pleasure as he found his own. As he shouted out his completion.

They clung to each other. And in the aftermath, he could hear only the sound of their hearts, and the waves.

“Dario,” she said softly, looking up at him, those familiar blue eyes an integral part of the story of his life.

“I love you.”

And the world shattered.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LYSSIAKNEWTHATit would be the harder road. She did. But she hadn’t been able to hold back. Not anymore. Because the truth was, she loved him. And the truth was, she was certain that the only way forward was to allow herself to love him. Fully and openly. Because the only way she was ever going to reach him. The only way she was ever going to change him, was through that love.

She knew it as much as she knew that the ocean was out there, fathomless and blue. She knew it as much as she knew anything.

She had needed it to be said. Because she needed to let herself feel it. Without reservation. There was fear. But she had spent all of her life holding herself back. Out of fear. Out of the fear that she would find herself alone again, unloved.

She wasn’t going to hold back, not anymore.

Never again.

There was no scope for fear.

Not when she loved him like she did. Not when she felt a burning desire to not simply be changed by him, but to change him in return.

He was, and had been, the most incredible influence on her life these past months. And even before that. He had made her feel a spirit of competition, and while she had resented that at times, she couldn’t deny that it had driven her.

He had, without even meaning to, created a better version of Lyssia.

She wanted to make a better version of Dario.

What he had lost in his life, it was love. That was the thing that had felt tenuous to him. It was the thing that had felt conditional. The thing that had felt like a betrayal, and she had to make it steady. She had to make it real. She had to take the love and make it enduring. And it was terrifying, of course it was. Because she understood how random the world could be, she understood loss. She knew what it was like to feel like everything was fine one moment then have it be wrenched away the next, but she couldn’t live in that space. Because they were going to have a child. And she had to love that child completely and wholly. With all of herself.

She had to find it within her to give that child love unreservedly, and it began here. Her father had loved her mother, so much. And even though he had been grief stricken in the years since he had lost her, she also knew that he wouldn’t change a thing. She didn’t even have to ask that. He was, now and ever, abundantly clear on what that love had meant to him. On how impacting it had been.

Love was not the enemy. It was fear.

Plain and simple. It was what had destroyed Dario’s childhood. And it was what would continue to destroy him if she wasn’t the brave one.

And she would be. At the expense of everything.

He said nothing. Because of course that was quintessentially Dario. To just ignore her, to pretend it hadn’t happened. Rather than rounding on her or being cruel.

“I said that I love you,” she said, drawing her knees up to her chest.

“I heard you,” he said, his voice hard.

“Yes, well, you didn’t acknowledge it, and many people might find that grounds for assuming they had been unheard.” It was warm outside. As hot now as it had been cold at the chalet. When they had sat by the fireplace and shared sausages. When things had felt simpler.

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