Elisa and Lia were both flower girls, in fluffy, white and silver gowns, because Lia had wanted to wear a pretty dress, too. They walked down the aisle with Teddy, Rosa and Eli’s oldest, between them.
Rosa herself wasn’t there; she’d given birth to a healthy baby girl, Rita, the week before. Eli had brought Teddy on his own.
Bev came down the aisle behind the children, looking gorgeous in a blue dress that made her eyes seem to beam out into the sanctuary. John found Nick in the pews and smiled. Don Pagano had ice for blood, but Nick Pagano’s love for his wife was naked heat.
Though they were all Paganos and related by blood, it was Bev who’d made Nick part of the family. John thought it was Bev and their children who kept Nick human at all.
He didn’t want Trey to follow Nick’s path, but he hadn’t figured out what to do with the information Nick had given him that night. He wanted to tell Carlo, but sharing a confidence of Nick’s was a tricky thing. There was a reason Nick hadn’t told Carlo himself. John wasn’t sure he understood completely, and now he wasn’t sure what to do next. But he would keep an eye on Trey and make sure that his nephew knew he could talk to him. For now, he was pressing Carlo as much as he could to let up and let Trey work with Pagano & Sons next summer. Better Pagano & Sons than the Pagano Brothers.
A couple of months had passed since that shitty night in Boston. John sometimes still woke in the middle of the night, his head filled with the sights and smells of that room. Katrynn didn’t think he needed to carry guilt for Calhoun’s death, but he disagreed.
There was a strange comfort in the guilt, though. He didn’t want to be the kind of man who could be party to something like that and not feel it.
He didn’t believe that Calhoun deserved what he’d gotten, but even so, he couldn’t say he hadn’t felt a bit of dark pleasure in the reaction to his death. It hadn’t made big news, but the attention he had gotten had been critical. It turned out that Calhoun had made a lot of enemies, and those enemies danced on the man’s grave.
The music changed, and the guests stood, and John threw thoughts of Calhoun out of his mind and watched the end of the aisle, where Katrynn stood, in a stunning dress, her arm hooked around her father’s. Crazy Bill cleaned up pretty well.
Joey elbowed him, and John turned and found his little brother crying. Not tears of happiness, either. He was freaking out.
“Dude, what’s wrong?” he muttered, turning back to watch Katrynn come down the long aisle. He didn’t want to miss his bride walking toward him.
“I can’t…c-can’t…” Joey gasped—and then stepped away from the altar and went to the pews.
“Joe!” John hissed, shocked. He saw Katrynn lose a step as Joey bolted. Their wedding party was small, only a best man and a matron of honor. Katrynn hadn’t wanted more. Now John had no one standing up for him. “Goddammit!”
At his side, Father Mike cleared his throat pointedly.
At the front pew, Carlo and Luca were standing, talking in quick, hushed tones with Joey. Then Carlo nodded, took something—Katrynn’s wedding ring, John guessed—from their little brother, and stepped out of the pew, genuflecting quickly a few feet ahead of Katrynn and her father, who had stopped in confusion. John met his bride’s eyes and saw her panic. He mouthed an apology to her, and she returned a brave smile.
Carlo trotted up to the altar, half-genuflecting again before he came up the steps. He showed John that he had the ring. “I’ll have to do, bro.”
“I’m going to fucking kill him.”
Father Mike didn’t protest against that language. He was a Jesuit.
“Shake it off,” Carlo advised quietly. “Focus on her.”
Carlo was right. This was their wedding, and he would not have it ruined. He smiled and held out his hand, and Katrynn and her father finished their walk.
John was going to beat Joey to a pulp. Not today, but soon.
~oOo~
Katrynn gaped at Adele’s retreating, sequined back and then down at the white satin pouch John’s stepmother had given her.
“You have got to be shitting me,” she grumbled. “Absolutely not.”
John grinned and tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear. She was done up in a sleek, pretty bun thing, and instead of a veil, she was wearing a diamond, or fake diamond, headband. The pendant he’d given her for her birthday lay at the base of her throat. She was absolutely gorgeous, and he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. He wasn’t keen on what was going to happen next, either. All those old Italian hands on her.
“It’s a thing, baby. Carmen didn’t do it, and you would not believe the scandal. People were really offended. Like Carm thought she was too good for it.”
She pointed to the gift table, which was groaning under a mountain of shiny packages. “But everybody brought a gift. That’s not enough? We need more?”
“It’s not about need. Nick and Bev did it, too. Don’t you remember? It’s about tradition. You don’t have to, but people will talk.”
“A money dance. I’m supposed to dance with all these men while they stuff money in here.” She flicked at the satin purse. “Should I take my clothes off, too?”
“Okay.” He took the purse from her hands and set it on the table. “No money dance.”
She sighed unhappily and looked around the room. They’d booked one of the beachfront hotels for their reception, and for the wedding night. The ballroom sparkled with blue glass balls, silver snowflakes, and glittery trees. “I’m sorry. I just can’t do it.”
“You don’t have to. This is our wedding, so it goes our way. We can handle some scandalized old farts.”
“Thank you.”
At her relieved smile, he leaned in. Suddenly, the room rang with the sound of silverware on glass. She blushed hard, but didn’t resist at all when he made a show of the kiss.
Some traditions, she obviously didn’t mind.
~oOo~
Katrynn stood at the window, looking out over the dark ocean. “I’m worried about Joey.”
“Fuck Joey.” John stood behind her and kissed her bare shoulder. They were mostly undressed. He’d worked his way through a long trail of tiny buttons to free her from her dress, and then a long trail of hooks to liberate her from a corset, and before he could get his hands on her creamy skin, she’d skittered from his reach and into the bathroom. Now she wore a silky white swish of a nightgown. He was down to the slacks from his suit.
She’d taken her headband out and undone the twist of her hair; he brushed the gold silk of it aside and kissed his way to her ear. “I don’t want to talk about that jerk right now,” he murmured.
Joey had bolted straight out of the church before the wedding Mass, and he hadn’t shown up at the reception. Carlo had called not long ago to report that they’d found their little brother at home, in sweats, playing video games. Fuck him. On this night, of all nights, for once in his life, John didn’t give a shit what his father wanted. He’d care later. For now, fuck Joey.
He turned Katrynn’s head so he could see her eyes. “I only want to think about us.”
“Okay,” she sighed, and turned in his arms. “I love you.”
Smoothing his hands over the silk of her gown, he buried his face against her neck. God, her scent. It made him calm, and it made him hard. Sometimes, he’d find a scarf or something lying on her dresser, and he’d stop and put it to his face and breathe deep, getting a hit of her while she was away from him. “No more condoms, right? We start now.”
“Oh, yes.” She fed her fingers into his hair and held him close. “I want to have your baby.”
With a step back, he took her hands and led her to the bed. She eased onto it, her gown shimmering softly in the low light of the room. John followed her, settling at her side and leaning over her. As he brought his mouth to hers and claimed it, he reached down and drew the silk over her beautiful legs. His hands, his mouth, his whole body tingled at the feel of her skin against his. Even after months of intimacy, touching
her had not become routine. Every day, she seemed a little different, a little more his. Every day, he knew her a little better. He hoped that would be the case for every day of their lives.
He thought it would; he thought maybe that was what love really was: a long journey taken together, always moving forward, always together, never in the same place twice. A leap that never ended.
As his hand moved up her thigh, she moaned and let her legs open. She wasn’t wearing underwear, and John let his hand trail up until it was full of the trim gold of her mound. She moaned again and arched her back as he slid two fingers into her. Wet and hot, tight and soft. He groaned and deepened their kiss, roughened it.
When her hands went to his head and pushed, John grinned and backed out of the kiss. “What do you want, baby?” She was getting pretty good at telling him, though she was still shy about it.
“Suck me?” she asked and plumped one of her breasts, offering it to him. John’s cock throbbed almost painfully at the pure sex of that bashful request, and he grunted.
“Your wish is my command, Mrs. Pagano.”
“Oh, say that again.”
He slid down, taking the strap of her gown with him, and pressed a light kiss to her nipple. It shrank to a perfect, hard bud against his lips. “Mrs. Pagano.” He kissed her again and flexed his fingers inside her. “Katrynn Pagano. My wife.” He sucked hard, drawing all of her nipple tightly into his mouth, and she arched her back with a loud, long, gorgeous gasp.
He made her come with his fingers and his mouth before he even bothered to take off his pants. By the time he was inside her, she was sweating and gasping, and his own need had him on the edge of madness. But there was calm in the soft hold of her as he slid in, and in the way her eyes flared and her neck arched as he filled her and pushed deep until he found her limit, and for a moment, all he wanted to do was be there. Right there—inside her, atop her, surrounded by her, staring down into her beautiful face, seeing her love and her trust in him, her faith and her belief in them. It was the only place he ever wanted to be.
“You’re my home, Katrynn.”
Her eyes filled with tears. Smiling and nodding, she pulled herself up, binding herself to him with her arms tight around his neck.
Together, they began to move.
Epilogue
A bowling ball landed on his stomach, and he woke with a groan to a room with about a hundred times the light any earthbound room should have.
Maybe Katrynn was right, and they needed to put some kind of shade over the loft window. Or maybe he should just fucking stop drinking his weight on New Year’s Eve.
He cracked open his eyes and shoved Lennie off his belly. “Sorry, bud, but this is not the morning for cuddling.”
Not with a cat, anyway. He hated to get up on any morning without a little snuggle with the missus. Even hung over—though maybe just a snuggle this morning.
He rolled carefully to his side. Katrynn’s side of the bed was empty. She was a naturally late sleeper, and he was a lifelong early riser—a side effect of a construction career—so he almost never woke up alone.
Sitting up, as he waited for the room to settle, the irony of waking up alone on New Year’s Day, one year after he’d bailed on Katrynn and set a whole avalanche of events in motion, hit him, and he chuckled. And then decided it wasn’t all that funny. Plus, laughing hurt his head.
“Baby? You around?”
No answer. John worked his way to his feet, grabbed a pair of sweats off the floor and managed to get them on without landing on his ass, and headed downstairs. He was halfway down the spiral staircase when he heard her. Retching in the bathroom. Hangover forgotten, he hurried down and around the corner.
The door was ajar; the boys yowled when they were closed out of the bathroom, so they had taken to leaving the door open when the other of them was sleeping. John knocked and went in.
Katrynn was leaning on the ring, with her forehead resting on her arms.
“Hey, baby.” He crouched next to her and gathered her hair into his hand. “Pretty bad this morning?”
She moaned and retched again—dry. “I can’t do this. I changed my mind.” Her voice echoed against the inside of the toilet.
They’d hit the jackpot either on the wedding night or right after it; Katrynn had missed her very next period. John was holding out a small hope that Pop would meet his next grandchild, who was due in August.
But pregnancy had hit Katrynn like a runaway semi.
He kissed her clammy shoulder. “You can do this. I’m here. I’ll do everything I can. I’ll take care of you.”
She sat back, and he let go of her hair and handed her a tissue.
“How can we have a baby in this house? The teensy washer and dryer are in the bathroom! The only place for the litter boxes is the room we want to make a nursery! There’s already too many of us here!” She waved at the open door, where all the cats were clustered, watching with interest. “I can’t even puke without an audience!”
“Pretty sure that’s the case with kids even if we lived in a mansion. But I have a solution to the rest of it.”
“What?” She blew her nose and threw the tissue in the bowl. John flushed. Some things about marital intimacy were less obviously sexy than others.
“The Society building rules are a little laxer on the shore. We’ve just got to stay consistent with the style of the existing house. I asked Carlo to draw up some plans—we can blow out a side wall and build on a couple more rooms. Say two bedrooms and another bathroom. One of the bedrooms can be a music room.”
Some color had returned to Katrynn’s face. “And a laundry room.”
“And a laundry room. It’ll be a lot of mess, living here during the build, though. A lot of upheaval. Can you deal with that?”
“If it gets to be too much, can we go stay at the house?”
“I guarantee we can. And that would be great. I like fucking you in my old room.”
That made her grin. “Perv. You look like shit, by the way.”
He laughed. “Seen a mirror lately, baby?”
She made to throw a punch at him, and then she got that look that people got right before they puked. He held her hair back while she heaved exactly nothing into the toilet.
“Okay. I think I’m done,” she finally gasped.
He helped her to her feet. “C’mon. I’ll set you up on the sofa with your purple blanket, and I’ll get you some saltines and tea. We can watch the Twilight Zone marathon.”
“You’re my hero.”
“Yep.”
When he had her tucked in and handed her the remote, she grabbed his hand. “Thank you.”
He smiled and brought her hand to his lips. “Sure. You’re making us a baby. I can make you tea.”
“No. Thank you. For giving me a home.”
John knelt on the floor at her side. The past year had been like nothing he’d ever experienced before—his lowest lows and his highest highs. Those and all the points between, every one of them, had had to do with Katrynn, or had her strong influence on his understanding of them.
At the end of it, he was still the same man, but his understanding of himself was fundamentally changed. In all the years before, he’d felt bound to his life, trapped by responsibility and expectation, unhappy and dissatisfied in some nebulous way he’d never been able to grasp. He’d felt like he was missing something, had lost something he’d never had.
Now, he saw his life, his family, his work, his town not as the things that kept him from himself but as things that made him who he was. He wasn’t trapped, and he never had been.
He was home.
Katrynn had shown him that. Her crisis with her own family, the way she saw his family, the way she’d learned to trust him—she’d taken him along on her journey and shown him that he’d had all along what she’d so desperately needed.
“We made a home together, baby. Anything I’ve given you, you’ve given me. Thank you for jumping and believing I would catch
you.”
THE END
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed John & Katrynn’s story.
Joey’s story, the final book in the Pagano Family Series, is coming soon.
Susan Fanetti is a Midwestern native transplanted to Northern California, where she lives with her husband, youngest son, and cats.
She is a proud member of the Freak Circle Press.
Prayer (The Pagano Family Book 5) Page 34