Chapter 4 Surprising Affection

ILARIA

What feels like hours later, I become aware of how the pins from my updo are digging into my head, but I don't want to move.

This closeness with Sal is unlike anything I've ever felt before. Like I truly belong for the first time in my life.

Inevitably, Sal withdraws from my body and I have to stop myself grabbing for him to keep him close.

Wetness gushes from me and I wince.

"What's wrong?" he asks. "Do you hurt? I took you pretty hard at the end."

He really, really did. But I'm not complaining. "It's messy and there's going to be a wet spot."

"I'll have the sheets changed while we're bathing."

"What? No. You can't."

But I learn that Sal isn't affected by embarrassment like normal people. He can and does call for a maid to come in and change the sheets before carrying me into the bathroom.

Sitting me on the toilet, he orders me to pee.

"Excuse me?" I could not have heard him correctly. "Did you just tell me to go pee?"

"Yes."

"I'm not a child, Sal."

"No, you are my wife and it is my job to take care of you. Peeing after we fuck will decrease your chances of getting a bladder infection, but I want you to drink cranberry juice for breakfast every morning too."

"What the heck? Do you think you're my doctor?"

"I know I'm your husband."

"That doesn't make you the boss of me." In the mafia, it kind of does but I don't want that kind of marriage.

"You like me telling you what to do when we fuck."

"And I like you using that word with me in private, but if you do it in front of other people, I'll put soap in your spaghetti."

He grins. "Noted. I won't boss you around in public unless it has to do with your safety."

That's such a huge concession, it leaves me breathless. "If you mean that, I'll do my best never to argue with you in public either."

As a well trained mafia wife, that should be a given, but I don't care.

He nods, like it's a done deal and the melting place in my heart is the size of a lake right now.

"Now, pee," he orders again.

"Do married people really do that? Pee in front of each other?" I ask, unable to imagine my mother allowing my father into the bathroom with her while she puts her makeup on, much less empties her bladder.

And that thought right there is what makes me release my bladder. I don't want a marriage anything like my parents.

After I pee and use the bidet, I stand in front of the mirror, feigning a nonchalance I do not feel, and start pulling the bobby pins from my hair.

"Stop," Sal demands. "I'll do it."

"You'll do it?" He wants to take out my hairpins?

Sal nods and reaches for my head, his fingers gentle as he removes each pin. Long tresses, sweaty from our lovemaking fall around my face in messy waves.

I grimace.

"Did I hurt you?" he asks.

"I'm a mess." Nothing like the put together woman I was raised to project.

Sal runs his fingers through my hair making sure there are no snarls. I have to blink away tears at the tender care he takes with me. No one has been this gentle with me since I was a little girl.

Mamma has always been from the old school of mafia women who don't show emotion and expect their daughters to do the same. But until her father and brother were brought up on RICO charges, she loved me. She says women have to learn to live with the hard knocks in life gracefully.

What she really means is stoically.

I was born the year the RICO Act passed and a child when so many of our men went to prison. Everything was chaos. We were all scared, but Mamma and the other women in la famiglia reacted with courage and stoicism, bringing calm to the chaos.

Only, for her and a lot of her peers, that stoicism leaked over into their family lives. Some of us were born to loving mammas that turned into the keepers of tradition and mafia life as one man after another went to prison. She withheld warmth and softness in the name of teaching strength.

I may have lost mamma's love as a little girl, but I don't want to live my adult life without tenderness. And the way Sal is treating me says I don't have to.

He may not love me, but he's not afraid of showing me the affection my thirsty heart is aching for. At least behind the closed door of our bedroom.

"You're beautiful." After Sal's finished detangling my hair, he massages my scalp.

I would argue with him about being beautiful when I look like such a mess, but I'm too busy moaning with pleasure. His strong fingers rub away the tension from my wedding day and the weeks leading up to it.

"You like that?" he asks in a tone that says he already knows the answer.

I'm not about to give him everything on a platter. "I don't hate it."

Sal DeLuca may be a god in the bedroom, but he is going to have to work for it with me. Because I want a marriage, where he makes an effort, not just me.

"Faint praise from a woman practically in a puddle from how much she likes what I'm doing," the mafioso teases me.

I wink at him in the mirror. Me. I wink. Like flirting isn't something I've tried for the first time on my wedding night. "Got to keep you on your toes, Mr. De Luca."

"Call me husband."

"You're pretty possessive for a guy who didn't even court me, marito."

His eyes flare with approval when I call him husband like he wants. "I'll court you now that we're married. Your father and mother gave me no access to you in the last year."

"I didn't know that." They kept us apart? "Why would they do that?"

"Probably because your father saw the way I looked at you and knew there would be no bloody sheets the morning after our wedding if we had time alone."

"That's pretty presumptuous of you." But a thrill of desire zaps me.

He wanted me. Not just for the contract so he could become capo one day, but me. Ilaria, the woman.

"After what just happened, are you denying it?"

I shrug. "This is our wedding night."

"It is." Sal turns me so I'm looking into his handsome face directly. "Our marriage may be the result of a mafia merger, but that does not mean we weren't created for each other. You were destined to be mine."

"Are you religious?" I am a good Catholic girl.

I took my catechism classes. I memorized all the things I'm supposed to. But do I believe all of the church's teachings?

No.

There are too many things that do not make sense to me. Like women having to submit to men, even when they're being physically abused. That feels like something men made up and put into the Bible if you ask me.

Mamma would have heart attack if I said something out loud like that, but I have a feeling Sal might even agree with me.