A girl dressed in a glittery gown with an enormous wig and a ton of stage makeup handed them a flyer as she passed by. At first, Tori gripped it in her hand, then used it to fan herself, and finally, when a sliver of calm and sense took over, she looked at her husband and offered a shaky smile.
“I’m sorry.” Searching for a cutesy way to cut the tension, she tried smirking, “PMS?”
“Sure. Why the hell not?”
His voice had softened somewhat, but his expression remained turbulent. He was driving her crazy. Or maybe it was her driving him insane. A rush of self-doubt crashed into her system. Were they turning into that couple who were always on different wavelengths?
No, no, no. She loved this complicated man. Loved him with her whole heart. They’d always been off-kilter from the moment they met, but the strength of their love had been the bridge between two very different people. Were they losing that? Was the reality of being husband and wife too much for their unusual relationship?
The flyer she held caught Tori’s attention. It was an advertisement for a flash contest at someplace called Triple Threat. They were giving away a two-thousand-dollar grand prize in an impromptu karaoke competition.
She sighed and looked around at the teeming crowd. Wait. What did the flyer say? A karaoke contest? Where?
Shoving her purse back into Draegyn’s hands, she slid the flyer into the inside pocket of his sports coat, grabbed his arm, and said, “Come on.”
“Where’re we going?”
“I know just what we need.” She chuckled. A couple of minutes later, they were waiting on an Über car as a parade of Michael Jackson impersonators strolled by. Well, actually strolled wasn’t quite right. A couple of them strolled, but an equal number were moonwalking and “Thriller” dancing along the sidewalk.
Out of nowhere, double-oh-trouble at her side broke into a sidesplitting approximation of what he imagined passed as moonwalking. She almost burst apart with delight. One or two bystanders laughed, and the next thing she knew, two or three other guys joined in. They all looked like her husband. A bit exasperated, weighed down like a packhorse, and accompanied by a laughing female who applauded their antics.
Their Über pulled up and Draegyn St. John, Mister Cool-Under-Pressure, I will break your face if you touch my woman, goofed for the crowd and Billy Jean’d her into the waiting car.
At the karaoke club, she went into hyper drive with excitement. Signing in and paying a twenty-dollar performance fee, she scrolled through a thousand songs, found the perfect one, and went to confer with the two guys running the show.
Confident in her choice, she cracked a couple of jokes and then went to find her husband. As usual, he’d managed a table near the front, probably just by glaring at the previous occupants.
“What do you want to drink?” he asked when she sat down. “I’m feeling like a martini. Will go good with these lovely pretzels.” He chuckled.
“Those aren’t just pretzels,” she teased. “That’s Chex Mix.” She grabbed a handful a tossed it into her mouth. “Um. Yum.”
“Can I ask you a question without you jumping down my throat?”
She stopped and looked into his face. Extraordinary eyes colored blue and gray with shards of silver gazed at her. Rebellious emotions, the ones tearing her apart, reared up with alarm. Was that what she did? Jumped down his throat?
Oh, Victoria, her conscience groaned. What are you doing?
The crunchy munchie stuffed in her mouth tasted like cardboard as a ball of thick emotion lodged in her throat. She knew with certainty at that moment that what Lacey tried to point out was all too true. She was a mess. Worse than a hormonal mess. In the span of thirty seconds, she swung from happy to horrified. And not just once. This kind of crap happened all day, every day. Over and over.
Melancholy took hold. She was pushing and pulling at the same time. No wonder she was exhausted and on edge.
“Is that what I do?” she asked. “Jump down your throat?” Tori watched him warily, afraid of his response.
He hesitated for a moment, like he was measuring her up, and despair tore her in half. This wasn’t right.
The old Draegyn—the one who sought her out at every opportunity, the one who followed her every move and word with adoring eyes, put an arm on the back of her seat and caressed her shoulder with the lightest of touches.
“Wrong word choice, baby. Said it but didn’t mean it the way you took it.” He leaned in and brushed his nose in her hair. “Sometimes I like when you act like a stern brat.”
Tori didn’t move. His breath so close to her ear gave her a thrill. So did the scent of his cologne and the way it blended effortlessly with his masculine vibe. Go ahead, she thought. I’m listening.
Placing her hand on his thigh, she gave him a tactile signal and held her breath.
“Is there a message in the song you chose?”
She gasped slightly. He knew her so well. Without thinking about it, she had indeed chosen something very much associated with their current predicament.
Feeling trapped by her stubborn foolishness, she squeezed his thigh and laid her forehead against his chin.
“Are you tired of me, Draegyn? Is my craziness driving you away?”
“Honey,” he ground out. She looked up at him through her lashes. “You are not crazy, and I will never be tired of you. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, and we really need to get this shit sorted out, but I swear to you, I’m not going anywhere. We made a promise to each other. Remember?”
She nodded and chewed on her bottom lip.
“We’re in this together. For the long haul. You can trust me, Victoria. Don’t ever doubt for a second that everything I do, I do with you and Daniel in mind.”
“Please don’t give up on me.”
She didn’t know where those words came from, and hearing them—the way her voice faded at the end to a hushed stillness—shook Tori up. She was speaking one of her greatest fears.
“Tell you what,” he murmured with a husky growl. “You get up on that stage and show ‘em how it’s done. Want me to record it so Boots and Ass can critique Sass when she’s solo?”
Boots, Ass, and Sass. Oh, my god.
She giggled quietly. “Don’t forget Desert Angel. She’s a tyrant, that one. Oh! And my mom. Nothing like a pageant coordinator judging the talent competition. And Heather! Her too. Holy cow. Now, I’m nervous.”
The next couple of amateurs took the stage and performed with groan-worthy horror. Some people should never attempt karaoke. She and Draegyn laughed, rocked along, and plowed through a couple of drinks and a huge platter of loaded baked potato skins before a Beyoncé clone took the spotlight.
Forty seconds into a tone-deaf rendition of “Single Ladies,” complete with some truly awful dance moves, her husband turned to her and said, “Please tell me you’ve got this.”
Oh, she had it all right. “Don’t worry, shugah,” she drawled. Fluffing her hair and applying some lip-gloss she pulled from her purse, Tori snickered and arched an eyebrow. “I’m bringing it Justice Style.”
When it was her turn and she stood up, her husband in all his alpha glory patted her on the behind and said, “You have a very talented mouth, Mrs. St. John. Go show these good people what’s what.”
Overcome with glee, she marched confidently into the spotlight, cracked a few jokes with the emcee, and got the crowd laughing. After a quick check with the sound guy, she glanced at the karaoke screen for her cue, got into position, and found her husband’s pointed gaze. He was looking at her with unabashed pride and joy.
When the song started, she took a deep breath and spent the next four or five minutes doing a better Madonna than half the drag queens in Vegas.
DRAE COULDN’T HELP the shit-eating grin. “Express Yourself”? His feisty wife might be interested to know he had more than a minor league grasp of the song having seen it performed countless times during the overseas leg of the pop queen’s MDNA tour a few years ago.
On second thought, maybe telling her he’d been involved with tour security wasn’t the smartest of ideas. It was bad enough that some people, Parker Sullivan in particular, the wheezing fucknut, liked to insist they were sure he’d slept with half the celebrities in the world—her Madgesty included.
It was bullshit, of course. The Madonna part—not the sleeping with celebrities part.
The crowd was enthusiastically clapping in rhythm as his adorable wife knocked their socks off. Not only did she have a killer voice and a professional stage presence, she knew how to rock out with every classic Madonna move in the book. It was fucking impressive.
Because he knew the song so well, it was easy to pick apart the lyrics. He didn’t pretend not to understand the message she was trying to convey. Their physical connection was great, but she needed more. Being inside her head had been easy in the beginning, but he’d lost the thread somewhere along the line. And now—well, now things were such a freefalling shitshow, he wasn’t even sure where the thread was anymore.
She brought the house down. Of course, she did. Victoria was hard to ignore when she was in her element. People loved her enthusiasm and her infectious, albeit snarky, humor.
They drank and ate some more as people kept stopping by their table to sing his wife’s praises. He was overcome with pride, and she basked in his approval. He wanted to keep the momentum going. This was who they were. Open. Fun-loving. Joined at the hip.
Was it a surprise that she won the grand prize? Not in the least. The raucous karaoke celebration was recorded for publicity, and he vaguely remembered posing for pictures. By then, they were pretty hammered and feeling no pain.
Out on the Strip, Victoria danced along, twirling as he held her fingertips and stopped every so often to hop up and down with pure delight.
All of a sudden, she grabbed him by the lapels, plastered her body to his, and purred in his face. “We need to get naked.”
“Right here?” he asked with a husky chuckle. “Now, you know I’d have to unholster my weapon and take out any guy seeing you in your birthday suit.”
“Unholster your weapon!” She shrieked with laughter. “You mean like wielding a lightsaber? You alphas and your phallic imagery!”
Her giggles made his dick hard, turned his brain to mush, and transformed his insides to molten lava.
Not long after, they were in the back of a car, heading to their hotel with him desperately trying to make his wife behave. She was incorrigible and had naughty hands. Staring straight ahead from the backseat, she had her hand between his legs and was rather vigorously massaging his manhood. There wasn’t a lot he could do. Not with a driver three feet away. And a woman driver, at that.
So he stretched his arm out behind her shoulders and made a lame attempt to grip the back of her neck. As if that was going to stop her. Never!
It was the longest twenty minutes of his life, and by the time they stepped from the car, she was breathing heavily, and her lips were puffy and red from chewing on them. And him? Well, shit. There was absolutely no disguising the enormous bulge in his pants, so he didn’t even try.
Taking her hand, he led her through the brightly lit lobby and into the elevator. As the doors shut, he drawled, “I will fuck you where you stand if you move so much as a muscle.”
Victoria’s shocked but pleased laughter rang out and filled the small space.
She behaved in the elevator. Sort of. Although keeping still, she squeezed his hand and simpered, “Would you? Fuck me where I stand?”
“Don’t tempt me, baby.”
Her face lit up with a happy smile. When the doors opened again on their floor, she flounced out ahead of him and made straight for their room. He had the key card, so she waited for him, striking quite a provocative pose as he sauntered toward her.
As he opened the door, Drae felt her hand move and then her fingers were tracing the outline of his ear. “I hear these rooms have very nice beds.”
He arched a brow and looked at her. “Is that so?” They’d been having loads of sex since they arrived and never once had it involved the bed. Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. There was that time he bent her over the side of the bed and brought them to a mutual orgasm in record-breaking time.
Inside their suite, he dropped the load of crap he was carrying on a table and without missing a beat started to undress.
She was dancing around like a whirling dervish and laughing at his eagerness. “Oh,” she purred. “Is that how it is?”
He flung the sports coat over the back of a chair and began on the buttons of his shirt, starting at the cuffs.
“That’s how it is, wife. And I suggest if you want to keep your clothes in one piece that you start taking ‘em off.”
She laughed. The sound was warm, low, and sexy. Kicking off her shoes, she twirled a long curl around her finger and gave him an innocent pout that he reacted to instantly.
“I was very bad earlier. Are you going to spank me?”
Drae tossed the shirt aside and went for the buckle on his belt. Giving her a meaningful leer, he slowly removed the belt from his pants and held it in a big loop.
“Will spanking your ass mean you’ll watch your mouth?”
“No,” she sassed. “That’s a lost cause, I’m afraid.”
She eyed the belt, and a deep blush shot into her face. He’d never use the belt on her. Ever. He wouldn’t cross that line, but he wouldn’t mind experimenting with some alternatives. He knew right then he’d be making a couple of paddles out in his woodshop. Swatting her pretty little ass while she squirmed and dripped with need was all kinds of hot.
He dropped the belt. It landed on the marble floor with a thud, and she flinched at the sound. Her body language was a study in arousal. Eyes dilated. Nostrils flaring as her breathing got heavy. Her fists were clenched, and there was no mistaking Victoria’s delectable nipples as they bloomed to life. Girl could be wearing a fucking shroud, and he’d still be able to make out the outline of her sweet puckering nubs.
When he pulled the zipper down on his pants, she looked at him wide-eyed and then took off at a fairly fast clip as she headed for the bedroom.
“You have five minutes,” he growled. Toeing off his shoes, he quickly rid himself of the rest of his clothing.
Drae liked being naked. Liked the freedom and the way the air felt on his skin. In a way, nudity was a knee jerk to the years he spent weighed down in military gear. Not a lot of opportunity to be butt-ass naked in a war zone. Not if you wanted to stay alive. Something about being on alert around the clock altered his view of what relaxing could be and that included clothing.
Grabbing a bottle of Cîroc from the bar, he quickly mixed up a batch of Kamikaze shots, strained out the ice after a vigorous shake, grabbed two shot glasses, and went after his wife with his unwavering hard-on pointing the way.
Oh.
Oh, my.
Oh, my god.
Her head felt like it was going to explode. Groaning, Tori fumbled around until her hand managed to navigate up to her forehead where it flopped palm up as another rumbling groan rose from her chest.
She licked her lips as she pried open her mouth. Eww. Why did it feel like they were glued shut? Rolling to her side, she opened one eye and quickly closed it. The room was dancing with sunlight. What she needed was her sunglasses.
Gotta pee, her brain complained sharply. Shit. That would require moving. Huffing, puffing, groaning, and sighing, she managed to sit upright but made sure to keep her eyes closed. With numb hands moving awkwardly to push a tangled mass of hair off her face, Tori swayed from the effort and struggled not to crumple into a heap on the floor.
Slowly and carefully inching down off the high mattress, she prayed for her foot to connect with the floor. When it finally did, she found her footing while her butt rested against the bed, and she experimented with opening her eyes again.
A telltale rumble in her belly made her jolt with alarm. Moving forward, she managed t
wo steps before her feet tangled and she went down on her knees.
What the?
Searching for the problem, she felt a second jolt when she found her bra wrapped around an ankle. Why the hell was her bra tied around … Oh. Right, right. At some point the previous night, she’d had her ankles tied together.
Plopping onto her butt, she struggled to remove the damn thing and ended up winded and exhausted from the effort. The rumbling in her stomach suggested a sort of urgency. Where the hell was the bathroom?
Crawling toward the doorway, she managed to stumble to her feet in time to make it safely to the toilet before all hell broke loose.
Finally empty from both ends, she gave up the struggle once the embarrassing episode passed. She was never drinking again. Remembering the several ice-cold Kamikazes putting her over the edge, she shuddered with revulsion.
Moving to the sink, she turned on a slow stream of water and gave half a glance in the mirror. That half glance gave way to a triple take.
She looked like shit.
Naked and her hair a complete disaster, she was devoid of makeup but clearly sporting evidence of some filthy activities. Looking more closely, she moaned with dismay and not just a little twinge of excitement. He’d come on her face. And her chest too, judging by the look of things.
“Victoria,” she muttered out loud. “You slut.”
Both breasts bore other evidence. It appeared as though her wickedly oral husband had all but tattooed a pattern on both tits.
It all came rushing back with skin-prickling clarity. After an initial round of naked Kamikaze shots, he’d spanked her but good and fingered her to a mega climax that left her shaking all over.
She reached around and put both hands on her bottom. Ouch. Oh, that smarted.
He’d also feasted on her pussy until she was sure she’d died and gone to heaven, praising her smell, her taste, and how turned on he was by her bare lips.
The first time he took her was a glorious slow motion mating. Primal but loving. She was his puppet. He said grind and she did. When her legs were over his shoulders, and he stroked her deep and hard, Tori remembered her eyes rolling back in her head and a low keening wail she had no power to silence.
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