Then there are his eyes. Dark and brilliant and soft, even with tears in them. They take me in with so much love until I feel I might burst, then I remember that we don’t contain our love, our love contains us.
And now, finally, it contains us together.
Forever.
It feels like I’m in his arms for ages, holding on like I can’t let go.
Eventually he lowers me to the ground and kisses me again. This kiss I feel rush through my veins like a tonic, making my stomach flip. God, I love how he still has the power to do that. If anything, I think he’s gotten even better at kissing me.
“Shall I take you home?” he asks me, cupping my face, running his thumbs over my tears on my cheeks.
“Per favor,” I tell him. “Obrigada.”
“Oh,” he says, raising his brows as he grabs my bag. “You’ve learned Portuguese in the last day or so?”
I give him a playful shove. “Shut up.”
You see, he’s been trying to teach me Portuguese over the phone. He even got me to download the Rosetta Stone software so I could learn it that way, and let me just say, I don’t think there’s enough room in my head for another language. My Finnish is still really good because I talk to Elena once a week, but poor Luciano has had nothing but an uphill battle.
“It’s a complicated language,” I add in protest, as he throws my suitcase in the bed of the truck. I take a moment to admire his strength, his muscles popping under his grey t-shirt. Even though he’s retired, he’s still in fantastic shape. I know he works out every day, still kicks the ball around, and now he has those lean ropey muscles that hard labor produces. Running a ranch is no joke, and lifting sheep and hay bales seems to have made him stronger than anything else.
“You’ll be speaking it in no time,” he says to me as he goes around to the driver’s side. “Otherwise I’ll forever be your translator.”
“Not a bad gig. You’re retired, what else are you going to do?”
I flash him a cheeky grin as I get in the passenger side, buckling my seat belt.
“You’re going to get a spanking for that,” he warns, heat simmering in his gaze.
Fuck. Me.
I forgot what his eyes feel like in person when they do that thing, heavy-lidded, dark and intense. I feel it all the way to my core, making me grow hot, my skin flush.
“Promise?”
He bites his lip. “How was your flight?” he asks, as if he didn’t just fuck me with his eyes.
“Eh, I had a nice old lady next to me that really hated my tattoo.”
“That’s right,” he says, realizing. He picks up my hand and peers at it, smiling openly. “There it is.”
Technically, I guess Luciano and I aren’t really engaged. I mean, he asked me to marry him as we were crying on the floor of his apartment and I said yes. But there was no ring exchanged, and we decided to keep our decision a secret from everyone else. We thought that it might make people, aka customs and immigration, suspicious that we were just doing it for residency or something like that, especially as it happened as I was being deported.
I didn’t mind having it a secret.
Okay, so I told Elena about it.
But, I mean, I had to talk to someone about all my pining and yearning.
“How was Marco?” he asks. He pulls the truck on a highway, turning away from the cobalt blue Atlantic and heading inland along red-roofed towns nestled in valleys beneath towering mountains.
I stare at the scenery, my jet lag making my brain slow down a little. “He was good. Really good. He seems great, looks great. He’s happy. We had coffee, and what he considered the best pastéis de nata in Lisbon. I think I ate my weight’s worth of them.”
“He’s called me twice already to talk about you,” he says with a laugh. “Really enjoyed letting me know that he saw you before I did.”
I smile. “I figured as much.”
“I’m glad you got a chance to see him, though,” he says warmly. “Really. Although you’ll see him in a month or so. He’s coming to visit. Then Alejo and Thalia. As we head into winter, suddenly everyone in Europe thinks they’re your best friend.”
I laugh. “That makes sense, because Elena said she and her family want to come down too. I think there will be an onslaught of sun-starved Finns.” I pause, thinking back to Marco. “You know, when I was talking to your brother, I didn’t realize that he doesn’t talk to your stepfather anymore. I mean, I know you had told me they’d had a falling out after what happened. But from what he told me, it sounded like Marco completely disowned him.”
Luciano presses his lips together into a hard line. “Yes. He has. I know he spoke to him after our mother died, but that was about the will and the funeral arrangements.” He glances at me. “He barely spoke to him at the funeral. As you know, I didn’t talk to him at all.”
The funeral was held here on Madeira. I wish I could have gone to give Luciano some comfort, but that wasn’t possible.
“Do you ever feel…like it’s all our fault?” I ask him, something I’ve always felt, something I’ve kept buried out of shame.
He glances at me thoughtfully, frowning. “Sometimes.” He sighs, adjusting his hands on the steering wheel. “If you want to get technical, yes. But there was always something in my stepfather, from the very beginning. This need to just…hurt people. We just made it easier for him.”
“Too easy. God, sometimes I wish I could just rewind time and make all the changes. Save ourselves from all of this.”
“But this is life, Ruby girl,”
