Mafia's Final Play (Mafia's Obsession #3) - Summer Cooper Page 0,18

with her that night feeling like everything would be okay, for a little while longer.

They cuddled up close together, the air outside was cold, even for the local average from what he’d seen. There’d been a forecast for snow, but they had food for a couple of weeks, plenty of wood, and enough guns in the place to fight off a small army. They’d make do.

He held Marie tightly that night, once she’d fallen asleep, and even when she made to turn over, he followed her with his own body. He needed her heat, her presence, to be able to breathe like a normal human being. She moaned in her sleep, her arm reached for him, and that need for him made his heart swell with pride and with something that he could only describe as adoration.

How had she come to be so important to him? He could admit now that he’d kidded himself when he asked her to marry him, that part where he told them both that he was only doing it to save her. The first time he’d made her come, had that been it?

He could still remember the way she’d clung to him in the pool, soaking wet and completely his. He’d never had anything, or anyone, that had been so completely his. She’d given herself up to him, even if she had no clue who he really was. Maybe because of it.

That was one of the amazing things about Marie, though, her ability to forgive, to adapt, and move on. She wasn’t like the other women he knew, always looking for the next big thing, always on the prowl for more. She was happy with what she had, and she let him know it every day with her smile.

Even now, so far from everything they knew, she was adapting already. The palm of his hand slid over the soft flannel of her pajamas to the silky skin beneath it. He wasn’t trying to wake her up, all he wanted to do was feel her skin, steal some of her warmth, because even in this cold, she warmed him up. It wasn’t desire, though he had plenty of that for her. No, what he felt now was something he remembered feeling a very long time ago, before Celeste, before the word “mafia” was a term he knew. Back when his mother helped him open his Christmas presents and sat his birthday cake in front of him, brightly lit with candles.

The thing Marie brought to him was comfort, and that was something he couldn’t let go of. He’d known from the first date with her when they’d only shared coffee at that tiny little café in Louisiana that she could make him smile. She’d brought out something protective in him, that was a given, but she’d also given him a gift he hadn’t known he needed. The sensation of being a human that mattered to someone else.

Her eyes had taken him in eagerly, so he’d known there was a sexual attraction there. But the things she asked him, like how he was, if he was doing alright, those were things nobody ever asked him, not even Penelope most of the time. Certainly not Celeste.

For a brief moment, he thought about his mother and her descent into alcoholism. That was Celeste’s fault. She’d taken him away from his mother, left her with nothing, and didn’t even apologize for it. Not that he knew of anyway. She’d taken away her delightful little boy, the one with the smile that made everyone’s heart melt and turned him into a somber, sad little boy that made people look away.

Those that had known him before couldn’t stand to look at what Celeste had done to him. The saddest part was not a single one of them had protested, not even his mother. They’d all done what they were told, so long as their accounts were topped up with their monthly allowances. What was one little boy’s happiness compared to their desire for wealth and all that came with it?

He’d been abandoned a long time ago, but when Marie came along, he’d finally belonged to someone. That hit him in the gut with a hard punch that nearly made his heart stop. He’d assumed that he’d grow bored with her, but he hadn’t, because she showed him what it was to have someone to care for and to be cared for by. He was hers now, not Celeste’s, or even his mother’s. He