Page 174 of Phantom Mine

“I didn’t—”

“I can’t look away from you when you’re in the room. Ever since the first time I touched your hair, nothing else has felt quite right to my touch. I made you laugh again and I want to keep making you laugh. I want more of thosearepasyou made. I want a home with you. I want to come hometoyou. Everything I can imagine wanting or needing in this life revolves entirely around you,” he confesses, the words tumbling out progressively quicker as he comes ever closer. “How’s that for reasons why I want to marry you?” he asks, voice low.

“BeingDonis everything you’ve ever wanted, Matteo,” I urge.

“It was what I wanted. Dreams change and mine have.”

He says it like it’s so simple, but itisn’t. This is too monumental a decision for him to make just for me.

“I—” I croak, my voice dry. I search for the words, as painful as they are. I don’t want to push him away, but I can’t have him sacrificing what he’s spent his whole life wanting just for me. “You can’t, you’ll resent me.”

My back bumps up against the altar. There’s nowhere left to go, and Matteo makes sure I don’t run. He closes the distance between us, pressing me into the marble edge.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you’re giving up too much! It’s–it’s,” I search wildly for what to say, landing on, “it’scrazy.”

Matteo smiles softly, his eyes turning heavy on mine, not at all turned off by my panic. He cups my face in his hands, his thumbs rubbing comfortingly at my cheeks.

“I gave it all up for a very simple reason, and it’s not because I don’t want anyone else to have you, although I certainly was never going to let that happen. It’s because if it’s between you or the Mafia, that isn’t a choice.” His gaze rakes over my features like he’s appreciating every single line, spot, and freckle on my face. “I want you more. Period. End of story. I want you every day, every which way, and any possible way. Happy, sad, confused, frustrated, and everything in between. Every feeling, every thought, every loss, every triumph,everything. I want it all with you.”

“You can’t know that! What if in a year—”

“I already know what it is to go a year without you, Leni, and I wanted you every single one of the days that I didn’t have you.” He pulls me to him and presses a heated kiss to my lips. I whimper and hold onto him for dear life. “You don’t need to worry about whether I’ll regret my decision. I won’t. And you never had to ask me to choose—the one thing I’m not willing to lose, the one thing I could never sacrifice or part with, is you.”

I reach my hands around his neck and melt into his chest. The doors to the enclosure around my heart go flying open and the organ flutters up into my throat, searching for contact with its new owner.

Matteo closes one hand loosely around my throat and uses the other on my lower back to press me into him. His lips find my mouth, my cheeks, my nose, my eyes, my forehead. I close my eyes and lean into it, smiling as he kisses every part of me, passionately, desperately, like he’s afraid I’m nothing more than a memory that’s going to fade away.

“I love you,” he breathes, swallowing my gasp in a kiss.

My eyes fly open and find his hovering mere inches from mine with the most devastatingly intense look in them. That same cocky smirk I love so much dances across his mouth.

“I love you,” he repeats and I whimper. “Fuck, every time I say it, your pupils dilate wide enough to house entire galaxies.I love you.” He hums approvingly, possessively, tracking my biological response to words I never thought I’d hear him say. “I don’t question how it’s possible I fell in love with you at first glance, I know exactly why I did. What I do wonder is how it’s possible that people look at you anddon’tfall immediately in love. Thank fuck they don’t, by the way, but I have no clue how they can resist the inexorable pull to love you. It’s a pulsing, living thing in my head, in my heart, in my blood, in my verybones, a song that chants your name and your name only. I’m sorry if I ever made you doubt that for even a single second because my commitment to you is unwavering.”

“Have you ever asked yourself why I call you ‘cara mia’?” he asks, his grip turning territorial. “Because you’re mine. Because you healed a part of me that I thought would be broken forever. Because you’re stamped on every single one of my heart beats. Because you’ve given me not only something to live for, but something to die for. You belong to me, you have from the day I met you. I earned your soft looks and your smiles and your trust painstakingly over months. They’re mine, just like every other part of you is mine, and that’s why the only person who’s ever going to call you their wife isme.”

A dam teeters on the verge of collapse in my eyes, threatening to spill tears everywhere. I hang onto him, to his words, with every fiber of my being.

“I’m going to get down on one knee and ask you the question I should have asked a long time ago, but before I do, I need to know.” It’s only because I know him so well that I can tell there’sa slight shake in his hand as he brushes my hair back from my face. He’s unsure, anxious. “You’ve never listened to a single order I’ve given you, you’ve never done a single thing I’ve asked you to. You’re stubborn and reckless and impulsive and so I’m asking you—no, I’mbeggingyou—to tell me that you also chose to stubbornly, recklessly, and impulsively ignore the command I gave you when I told you not to fall in love with me.” His eyes turn vulnerable and raw as he whispers, “Tell me you didn’t decide to do what I asked for the first time in your life. Tell me you ignored my order, tell me you also broke the rules,tell me,” he stutters on the ragged words and rips in a shallow breath. “Tell me you love me too.”

The thick emotion in his voice tugs at my heartstrings. If only he knew the tone and cadence of his voice controls how slowly or quickly my heart beats, he wouldn’t even need to ask the question.

I shake my head and he winces. My arms tighten around his neck in response.

“I fell in love with you a long time ago, Matteo.” Blazing heat unfurls like a fireball in his eyes. “I couldn’t have done what you asked, I couldn’t havenotloved you, you made sure that was impossible. When you paid for a kiss, when you called me Leni, when you wiped my tears. When you saved me, when you listened about Adriana, when you put your desires aside to help me find her, and when you found the person I used to be deep inside and brought her back to life. Who wouldn’t love you after all that? Who could possibly resist?”

“I don’t know exactly how long I’ve loved you because I kept those feelings buried under my grief, but one day it pierced through and it was unignorable. It was like having a second heartbeat pounding in my chest, demanding my attention. There was you and nothing was more significant than that. Except you weren’t mine and you couldn’t be. You healed and broke myheart at the same time, because you gave me the antidote to my pain–you–and yet I knew that it would be taken from me one day. That we had an expiration date. I didn’t fight as hard as I could have and should have against the engagement because if I couldn’t have you, then I didn’t care what happened to me.”

“Because we were temporary, I never allowed myself to even dream that I’d ever hear you say that you love me, that you want to marry me, even though I desperately,desperatelywanted to hear those words. More than anything.” I lift onto my toes and kiss him like he kissed me, with all the love in the world. “You have no idea what hearing them does to me, Matteo, but you could also never imagine how much I love being able to say them back to you. I love youso much. So much. I’m going to spend every day of the rest of my life showing you exactly how much.”

Matteo scoops me up into his arms and slams his mouth down on mine. There’s everything in his kiss, love, passion, joy, but mostly I taste our joint relief. We fall into each other like two magnets unchained after being kept apart for far too long. I cling desperately to him and he holds me like I’m a part of his body.

I think I’m crying or laughing, or maybe the two, as he lets me go and slides slowly down to one knee. He stares back up at me with gleaming eyes that never once blink or waver, full of a breathtaking intensity like I’m the answer to every question he’s ever had.

“You blind me, Leni,” he declares, voice shaking with emotion as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a diamond ring. The stone is so massive, I doubt it would have fit into any conventional box, so he holds it up to me between two fingers. “Just so we’re clear, thisisa marriage proposal.” He grins. “You blind me to everything and everyone that isn’t you. I can’t spend another second without the assurance that I won’teverhave to live another day without you as my wife. I love you more than life itself, and I need you more than the breath in my lungs. You’rethe missing piece of my soul and I’ve lived a half life without it. Put me out of my misery and make me whole,cara—will you marry me?”

I’m nodding feverishly long before he’s even started asking. “Yes! I never thought you’d ask but I always had an answer ready. A thousand times yes.”

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