“Nothing happened, not really. I’m okay,” I repeated, meaning it.
Christopher had violated me again but for the last time, I was sure of it. I had evidence of his stalker tendencies and witnesses to collaborate his sexual abuse. The law would deal with him and if they didn’t, I knew Sinclair would find a way to.
“Sinclair,” I said again, “I’m still yours.”
A vicious shudder wracked his frame before he allowed himself to sag forward, resting his forehead against mine.
“Thought he took you,” he whispered brokenly.
My heart stuttered. “Oh Sin, he didn’t. I’m okay.”
“The baby?”
I had no pain in my womb and he hadn’t hurt me. “Just as fine as his or her Mama.”
“He is your nightmare,” he said, his eyes closed. “Worse than that fucker in Mexico. He is your nightmare.”
“Elena and I beat him.”
His eyes flashed open, blazing so blue, and he pressed a soft kiss to my lips. “I’m taking you away from here.”
“Okay,” I whispered, because I wanted to leave and because he needed us to.
“Now.”
“Yes, okay.”
“Brenna?” he said, and my friend appeared over his shoulder. “Take care of her for a second.”
My grip on his hand tightened in panic. “Please don’t leave me.”
His face gentled and I knew he was remembering how he had left me to Candy so he could beat the man who had assaulted me in Cabo.
“You aren’t allowed out in society without me, siren, d’accord? Or I’ll need to hire a full time body guard.”
My lips twitched because even though it was funny, he was being very serious. “Okay.”
“I’m not leaving you. I just need to talk to the police when they arrive and check on Elena. I want Brenna to sit with you but I’ll be right over there.” He pointed to just outside the supply room doors where Sebastian was keeping most of the guests away.
I nodded. “Can you bring Elena over here to sit with me while we wait?”
He stared hard at me for a moment, his thumb running back and forth over my cheek. “I owe her a debt I will never be able to pay for saving you from him.”
My throat closed up.
“So, yes, of course, but only after I thank her myself.”
He pressed a kiss to my forehead before straightening and walking off into the crowd. I leaned into Brenna when who wrapped an arm around my upper chest in silent support.
Together, we watched Sinclair crouch in front of Elena. I could tell from his profile that those glacial features were thawed with gratitude as he thanked her. She flinched against Cage’s hold but didn’t take her eyes off him. Pain and lingering anger contorted her features but when Sin reached out to tuck her hair behind her ear, leaning close to press his forehead to hers and cup the back of her head to him, she closed her eyes and sagged into him.
I felt no jealousy witnessing the intimate moment because I knew Sinclair was mine as much as my name was my name and my hair was red. After all this time and all these trials, his love for me was just that irrefutable. So, I felt only warmth watching Sinclair reach out to my wronged sister, only happy that he offered her thanks and comfort because she deserved it.
“And I thought my family was complicated,” Brenna murmured into my hair.
I laughed softly and leaned back into her. “The Lombardi clan has cornered the market on complicated, I think.”
“You’re pregnant?”
I froze against her as panic seized me. People knew, our Mexico crew, the Paulsons and the Percys, but not Mama and not the general populous. There was no way I was going to throw that grenade into the already volatile situation.
“I won’t tell anyone, Elle. You’re my person, my best friend. Besides, I’m well-versed in secret keeping,” she finished in a soft, sad voice.
“I’m pregnant,” I confirmed.
Her arm gave me a hard squeeze. “Good, I’ve always wanted to be an Auntie.”
Tears tickled the backs of my eyes. I let out a deep breath to curb the impulse to cry and watched Sinclair kiss Elena’s cheek before he moved to the newly arrived police officers crowding the doorframe.
“Are you okay?” Brenna asked.
I was.
In fact, in a bizarre way, I felt better than I ever had. The threat of Christopher, his stalking presence throughout the entirety of my life, had been brought to an end. I felt good that I had figured out a way to avoid his rape. Yes, I’d still been sexually assaulted but as long as I could wash my hands with industrial strength soup for the next hour and a half, I knew that I could recover from it because I had recovered from worse. Sinclair had taught me to move past the memories. He had moved me through each sexual act that had been taken from me by Christopher and reclaimed it as our own. I knew he would do the same thing now. And even though I had him to help with this, I also knew that he had given me the tools to do it on my own and that was somehow even more precious.
“Honestly, I am,” I said, and meant it.
Chapter Twenty Three.
“I’m fine,” I reassured Sinclair for the thirtieth time.
“I still think we should have gone to the hospital,” he repeated for the thirty-first time.
“The paramedics on site said that I would be fine, the baby is fine, and there is no lasting damage. I told you, Christopher didn’t beat me.”
We were in the back of Sinclair’s town car. I was wrapped in a blanket Eddie had unearthed from somewhere in the gallery and cuddled up against Sinclair’s side. My adrenaline had burned off so I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open but I didn’t want to fall asleep with my Frenchman still so riled beside me.
“I wish it had been me to beat the bastard,” Sinclair muttered.
I curled closer to him. “Elena needed that more than you did. I think it was closure for her.”
We had sat beside each other while the police took our statements, close but not touching. At one point, she leaned close enough to press her shoulder to me as we watched Christopher be taken away on a stretcher in handcuffs but she didn’t say a word to me until after the police had left and the guests had been ordered to leave for the night.
“Sorry about your show,” she had said, surprisingly.
I shrugged. “Things happen.”
“Don’t we know it,” she muttered.
I snorted, startled, before sliding her a sidelong glance. Her face was soft, softer than I had seen it in years. Our friends and family kept looking at us, waiting for a breakdown, but I knew that she and I felt the same. It hadn’t been traumatic as much as it was cathartic to hurt and overcome our very own boogey man.
“Thank you.”
She tipped her head back against the wall and brought her knees to her chest. “No one deserves to be raped.”
Not even you.
I nodded.
She sighed into the quiet after a few minutes. “It felt good.”
“Yeah.”
“Glad you’re okay,” she whispered, so quietly that I thought I imagined it.
Before I could question it, she had sprung to her feet and stalked off, tagging Sebastian to take her home as she went. My brother shot me a concerned look over her shoulder but I nodded at him, she needed him more than I did.
As if to prove my point, Sinclair had returned to me and swung me up into his arms.
Now, we were in the car on our way home and Sinclair was vibrating with fury.
“I’m happy, Sin. It’s over. He ruined my childhood, forced me to leave Paris and took a bunch of things from me that I never offered. It sucks.” He growled at my understatement so I amended, “Okay, it’s horrible. But it is over. Now, I can forget the fear and the past and focus entirely on the love of my life.”
He looked down at me so I could watch the ice in his eyes thaw and turn into liquid love. “He ruined a night that you’ve been working towards for months.”
“True, b
ut he isn’t going to ruin anything else ever again, so I’ll accept that.”
The police had assured us that he would be deported and Elena was filing a restraining order for me in the morning.
“I didn’t protect you from him,” Sin muttered, staring into my face like he might never see it again.
I pressed my hand to his cheek. “You did. You gave me the tools to face him unafraid. You taught me how to love myself, how to be strong and survive. He wanted to abduct me, he had a gun, and still, we beat him. When I was a teenager, he wouldn’t have needed the gun. I would have been on my knees because he loved me and perverted me and I would have thought obeying him was right. Instead, I outsmarted him and I won.”
His eyes flashed.
“I need you to let this go and focus on everything good in our lives. I need you to do this because I’m living my dream and I don’t want to live it alone or it’s no dream at all.”
“Elle,” he breathed on a heavy exhale. “You are so exquisite. I don’t deserve you.”
“I don’t deserve you which is good, because I’ll never take you for granted.”
“I’m falling in love with you,” he said, strangely.
I moved back a little to search his face but he was very serious. “Um, I was kind of under the impression that you loved me already.”
I watched laughter eat away at the anger in his eyes. “It’s still happening. I fall further and further into you every day.”
Okay, wow.
“You are so romantic.”
His lips twitched. “I’m just being nice.”
I laughed. “You don’t have time to be nice, remember?”
He smiled gently and cupped my cheek. “For you, I can find the time.”
Swoon.
I snuggled deeper into him.
“I know you have just been through an ordeal but I had this planned before everything went to hell. If you want to just go home and rest, I completely understand.”
“What are you talking about?”
His eyes danced. “How would you feel about a little celebratory vacation?”
“Sin! Are you going to make it a habit to whisk me away on a moment’s notice?” I teased, but I definitely wasn’t complaining.
“Yes, absolutely.”
I laughed again. “Where are we going this time?”
“Cabo.”
He watched me clap my hands and jump up and down in my seat, filled with childish delight and unashamed to show it. I smacked a loud kiss on his cheek.
“You spoil me.”
“It’s much more selfish than that, I like nothing more than to see you happy.”
“Sin,” I said, overwhelmed by him, by my life and my luck.
“You’re up for it? Because we’re on the way to the airport right now and Candy packed a suitcase for you, it’s in the trunk.”
“Where it all began,” I murmured, pressing my mouth close to his. “Of course, I want to go.”
“Good, because no wasn’t really an option.”
I rolled my eyes.
Chapter Twenty Four.
The soft, fragrant breeze wove through the open French doors to the balcony and wafted across the sweat cooling on my skin. Sinclair and I had finally ended up in the bedroom, the blankets pooled on the floor and the sheet twisted around my torso, his legs, like some kind of toga. The air smelled of sex and lavender and that indefinable tropical scent that was a combination of ocean brine, hibiscus and almost metallic heat. My head rested on the mattress facing Sinclair so that my hair pooled in bloody tendrils over the white sheets where he could draw his finger lazily through the curls and I could watch the way the pulse jumped in his brown throat.
I could have stayed exactly like that for eternity.
We had arrived at the Westin just after noon the day before and immediately proceeded to the very same suite Sinclair had stayed in all those months ago. There was champagne chilling on the bar, rose petals laid out over the huge canopied bed and acoustic Spanish music filtered through the room from hidden speakers. I only had a moment to take it all in before Sinclair had me pushed up against the wall, his hands all over every inch of my body. There was passion in his haste but also a need for reassurance. Christopher had tried to claim and my Sin seeking to eradicate even the notion of such a thing.
He didn’t have to work very hard to do it but I appreciated the effort to brand himself on me against the door, then again that evening on the couch and after a delicious room service meal of aguachile and chicken mole, on the padded lounge chairs on the balcony.
Now, the morning after, my mind was so saturated with pleasure, with such a deep seated contentment that I found the demons Christopher had plagued me with my entire life were laid eternally to rest.
“I have never been so happy,” I told Sin, because it was true and because it was all because of him.
Sin didn’t open his eyes but he hummed his approval and said, “Mission accomplished.”
I laughed. “You are awfully smug.”
He shrugged one shoulder in that French way of his and even though he was lying down, his big body spread inelegantly across the breadth of the bed, the movement was somehow graceful. “I am a successful business man with a gorgeous woman who is carrying my baby lying beside me after a pretty fucking amazing bout of sex. I think my smugness is justifiable.”
I smiled so wide that it cut into my cheeks. He opened his eyes as if he could sense my expression and they warmed until they were as blue and bright as the Pacific ocean outside our window.
“You have that glow of a pregnant woman,” he said, traveling his fingers through my hair until they brushed against my cheek. “Every time I look at you, I cannot believe that you are mine.”
“If you weren’t so dignified, I think would have your name tattooed on my lower back so everyone would know it,” I joked.
His eyes darkened, his tone grew serious. “I do not have to do that for everyone to know that you belong to me. It is written in this tilt of your beautiful mouth,” his thumb pressed to the smiling corner of my mouth, “in the way your eyes turn to liquid silver when I’m near. It’s in how you turn yourself into my body whether you are standing beside me or across the room, like your body is a compass and I am your true north. And as you grow bigger,” his calloused fingers swept down my side until they came to rest over my slightly swollen abdomen, “they will see what belonging to me has done to you.”
Tears pricked at the backs of my eyes. I didn’t think I would ever get used to the poeticism that lived inside my normally stoic and reticent Frenchman. Crying was a hazard of pregnancy, I knew, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment with tears so instead, I said, “What? That it makes me fat?”
His lips thinned in mock severity before he shifted, quick as a flash, to move fully on top of me, pressing my body, still pliant from his earlier caresses, into the bed. One hand plunged into the hair at the nape of my neck, holding me fast as he dipped down to speak against my lips.
“That it makes you wanton, incapable of keeping your legs closed against my virile charms.”
I laughed into his face but his lips closed over my smiling mouth, eating away the humor until I was writhing beneath him. I moaned in protest when he pulled away.
“I take my virility very seriously, Elle. It’s nothing to joke about.”
“No, of course not.” I nodded, my eyes wide with faux sincerity and my lips compressed against the monumental urge to laugh at him again.
His eyes narrowed further as he tried to read my solemnity but there was my favorite kind of smile in his eyes as he nodded and pressed a kiss to the tip of my nose.
“I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. Now, get up and get moving,” he said as he rolled off me and walked into the bathroom.
I spoke loudly over the rush of the shower as he turned it on. “Can’t we just spend the rest of the day in bed?”
His head ducked back out of the bathroom, his face creased with boyish excitement
. “I have a surprise for you. Now, be a good girl and get your gorgeous self in the shower before I loose control and take you again.”
I stretched languorously across the bed, rolling my spine up so that my breasts rounded and presented themselves to him. His face tightened with desire as I got up and slowly sauntered over to him, my hips swaying like a pendulum, hypnotizing him. When I finally reached him, his eyes were dark as midnight and still trained down my body, taking in the heavy slopes of my breast, swollen even more with the pregnancy, and the faint tilt of my belly as it arrowed into my bare sex. I was sure that it was the swell of my belly that turned him on the most. The caveman.
I reached out to wrap my fingers around the base of his once more hard cock and gave it a firm tug. He shuddered and ground his back teeth together. With my other hand, I cupped the underside of my breast, weighing it in my palm before flicking my hard nipple with my thumb.
“Fuck, look at you,” he groaned. “You are trying to make me loose my mind.”
I grinned slyly. “Is it working?”
“Desolé, did you say something?”
My laugh was breathy. “Come shower with me.”
“We really do have somewhere to be.” He caught my wrist as I moved it over his dick. “It’s important, Elle.”
I paused because there was an urgency in his voice and he wouldn’t turn down sex for just anything.
“Okay… We’ll make it quick.” I launched myself at him, forcing him to catch me as he stumbled back into the bathroom.
“Elle…”
“Quit stalling, we have places to be, Frenchman. On y va!”
He laughed as he placed us both under the hot stream of water and he was still laughing against my lips when I took him inside me again.
Later, after we finally emerged from the shower skin wrinkled and satiated, I followed Sinclair into the back of a town car with no idea of our destination. I watched him as we drove, how his jaw clenched and unclenched rhythmically and his eyes tracked the blurred landscape flowing out the car window. He held my hand stiffly but whenever he noticed he was doing so, he made a conscious effort to relax his fingers and throw me a small, inauthentic smile.
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