by Chloe Cox
Kane laughed again, only this time he didn’t stop for a bit. Whatever it was, it must be funny as fuck.
“You think we could have stopped her?” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. “You dumb Dom. You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
Conor snarled, chafing against the constraints of his injury. If he hopped out the bed he could rupture the sutures, end up right back in the OR or dead. He wasn’t dumb.
And he knew exactly what he had. Knew enough to hope he still had it.
More memories were coming back to him in a trickle. Sierra learning about Mikey. The way her face had fallen, the hurt here. Conor had to own his part of it. He’d lied to her, and he’d hurt her, and he was going to have to find a way to make that up to his sub.
If she was still his sub.
And right then, the door opened.
Sierra stood in the fluorescent light from the hall, in a blue dress that was sexy as hell even though it had rust dark blood stains on it, and her mouth open. There were two coffee cups in her hand. And then there were two coffee cups on the floor.
Conor didn’t even have a chance to say a damn thing. Sierra rushed to the bed and climbed right up on it, curling up against him, burrowing under his arm and burying her face in his neck. Somewhere there was the sound of a door gently closing, and Conor knew they were alone.
A beat.
He might be drugged to hell, but Conor was still a Dom. And he knew to let this ride. To feel it out. There was all the time in the world to apologize. Let her get out what she needs to get out.
And what Sierra needed was breathe deeply up against him, her hands touching everything they could reach, like a blind woman checking to see that he was real.
Conor stroked her hair, kissed her forehead until he could feel her breathing calm down. Feel her start to settle.
And then he couldn’t help it.
With a smile, he said, “Guess you’re not too mad.”
She swatted at his chest. He allowed it.
“I’m furious,” she said into his neck. “But I’ll get over being furious. I wouldn’t get over losing you.”
Conor took a deep breath, winced as it filled out his ribcage, made his leg throb. His leg was going to hurt like a bitch. Didn’t matter. For the first time in his entire life, Conor Kelly knew nothing could take this love away from him. She was his. And he’d keep her safe.
“I’m sorry, Princess,” he said, because he was honest. “I should have told you.”
She sniffled, still into his neck. It tickled slightly. He’d never admit it.
“Just don’t lie to me again,” she said.
“Never again.”
“Hmmm,” Sierra said, unburying her face from his neck and propping it up on her hand. Conor smiled as he got to look at her face again. “Maybe I’ll have to make you work for it a little more than that.”
Conor might be injured, but he was still stronger than most healthy men. He threaded one hand into her hair and held her where she was, then reached over with the other and toyed with her breast, tweaking the nipple. She inhaled, shocked. Conor grinned as he let her go, letting that hand fall squarely on her ass, which he grabbed like he owned it. Because he did.
“Careful, Princess,” he said. “I’m not always going to be injured.”
“No,” she breathed.
“And I’ll keep tracking of every single infraction in the meantime.”
Sierra couldn’t suppress a smile as she nestled against his chest, her fingers digging into his chest.
“Promise?” she said.
Epilogue
Sierra peeked her head out into the hall, checked both directions, then darted across to the Club Volare Boston bathroom that was absolutely furthest from the party-related goings-on on the first two floors. It was her birthday party—the first since her own brother had tried to kill her, and Conor had taken a bullet for her—but that wasn’t her problem.
Sierra locked the door behind her, leaned her head against the heavy paneled wood, and closed her eyes. No, that was definitely not her problem. She fished the little cardboard box out of her clutch and started to tear at the packaging.
This was her problem.
Well, no. Not a problem. But maybe a great big flashing Life Milestone that she didn’t know if Conor would be enthused about. Or, no. Not… It wasn’t like she thought he would be a jerk about it, if anything the opposite, but she still…
She was a mess. A freaking mess who had no idea how to even begin to be ready for something like this.
Well, life is what happens when you’re making other plans, right?
The past year had been ample proof of that little maxim. It had been what Conor referred to as a ‘wild ride.’ The man had a gift for understatement that tickled her. And well—he had a lot of other characteristics that did a lot of things for her, when you got down to it.
She smiled, and set the now used test stick up on the little ledge under the bathroom window. Nothing to do now but wait.
Wait, and think.
After that night, the press had gone absolutely bananas crazypants nutburgers over Conor and Sierra. They’d gone all in on the whole “star-crossed tragic lovers with a happy ending” thing, and considering that Conor literally, deliberately, ran into live fire for her, Sierra couldn’t really blame them. She was pretty bananas crazypants nutburgers about the man, too.
Plus, the publicity had been good for business. The makeup line had taken off like a rocket. Sierra didn’t feel totally comfortable with that, so she was trying to figure out what to do with all the money that would do the most good. Tiffany—who was doing so well Sierra could cry, and who was working on a project of her own—thought she was crazy, but, well. She had a few ideas. And in the meantime, she was keeping a low profile. She was done, for the moment, with performing for the world, or thinking the real her wasn’t good enough. Instead she was taking the time to find out who she really wanted to be.
Her Dom had something to do with that.
Come to think of it, he had a whole lot to do with that stick on the windowsill, too.
She still couldn’t get over how lucky she was. The past year had been nuts, but she’d gotten through it all with Conor by her side. And her by his side. And in his cuffs. That part had featured heavily.
But the point was that he’d kept her sane. She’d thought the worst was over when Conor finally got out of the hospital, but he’d known better. He’d waited, and watched her carefully, and pretty soon he was right: Sierra started to lose her freaking mind.
It was like all the stress, everything she’d been blocking out, descended on her all at once. Sierra had no idea what she would have done without Conor. She had exactly zero clue what was happening to her when it hit; she wasn’t used to random mood swings, to jumping at every little sound, to crying for no reason at all.
Slowly, she’d come to see the magnitude of the recovery work ahead of her. It turned out that growing up with a terrifying brother who eventually killed your father and tried to kill you was perhaps a tad traumatizing, and Sierra might have come down with some light PTSD.
She’d felt ridiculous, and more than a little ashamed — Conor was the one who got shot, and Sierra got PTSD, for crying out loud? — but Conor wouldn’t hear about it. Just worked with her. Was patient with her. Waited for her. And he held her, every time Jared made the news.
Because of course Jared wasn’t taking a plea deal. Even though the list of crimes they got him for was as long as a freaking receipt from Target, even though they had those journals, Jared was going to go down lashing out. Sierra had, as much as possible, checked out, and whenever she found herself thinking that maybe if she’d tried harder, if she’d been a better sister, maybe Jared could have been redeemed, she just had to think about those journals. The truth was that Jared had enjoyed the things he’d done, and Sierra had never understood him at all.
So, she reminded herself about those journals. And then she’d
find Conor.
Only this time, she couldn’t go find Conor. And she wasn’t sure she was freaking out. The body sensations were similar — her heart was beating pretty freaking fast for a woman who was sitting on a bathroom floor, staring intently at a tiny little stick on a windowsill — but she wasn’t…she didn’t know what she was. Excited? Nervous? Crazy?
“Hey, crazypants.”
Even through the thick wooden door at her back, that voice was unmistakable. Her Dom. Conor.
“How did you know I was in here?” Sierra said.
“It was the last bathroom left,” he said. “Open up.”
Sierra bit her lip, and eyed the little stick on the windowsill. She’d set a timer. It hadn’t gone off yet.
This was not how she’d planned it. Or how she would have planned it, if she’d planned any of this.
“Princess,” came the now-familiar growl. “That was an order.”
Sierra suppressed the equally-familiar shiver that automatically shot through her body whenever she heard that growl and scrambled to her feet.
She cracked open the door.
Conor cocked his head. “I said open up.”
Sierra sighed. There was no getting away from a perceptive Dom. She opened the door.
Every time she looked at him it was like the first time.
Six feet and change with broad shoulders, that blue-black hair, cheekbones for days, and those ice-blue eyes so bright she genuinely thought they glowed. And the way he moved. It had taken Sierra a while to figure out why she found just the way he stood to be panty-melting, but once she saw it, it was obvious. Conor inhabited his body completely, all the time. Effortlessly. He savored little movements, the power he knew he had, the grace. He moved like a particularly arrogant mountain lion, even when he wasn’t moving at all.
And damn did the man clean up well.
Tonight, for her first real birthday party, he was in a tailored black suit. Simple, classy, and, on Conor, utterly devastating. Sierra knew he could walk straight into any filthy rich and exclusive private club in the world looking like that, and people would fight to introduce themselves to him.
But it was the way he looked at her that undid her every time. Like he was always on the verge of taking her. Like she was all he could see.
Of course, there wasn’t much else to look at it in the fourth floor Club Volare bathroom. Except for that stick on the sill.
Oh right. And he didn’t just look at her. He saw right through her. Every. Freaking. Time.
“You gonna tell me what this is about, or am I going to figure it out for myself and then have to take you back downstairs and show you who’s really in charge?” Conor said with a grin. Then his eyes went soft. “Is the party bringing it all back up?”
“No!” she said. He’d been so worried about it, and she’d insisted on having the party. She had to learn to deal with it eventually, and it had weirdly been fine. “I promise, I would tell you the second that became an issue.”
Except for the whole stick-on-the-sill situation. She obviously had not planned for that.
Conor just looked at her, and raised an eyebrow.
Ok, now she was screwed.
He came in and closed the door behind him, pressed her up against the sink, and turned his eye on the bathroom itself. She knew that look. He wasn’t going to miss anything with that look. He called it “situational awareness.” In fact, the second his eye hit that windowsill…
Conor stopped as if frozen in time. Then, slowly, his head pivoted to look right at her.
His eyes said it all.
Sierra didn’t know what to say.
He looked at the stick on the sill again. Then back at her.
“Is that what I think it is?” he rasped.
“Yes,” she said.
And the timer went off.
Oh God.
Conor took a single step towards it. Sierra’s hand shot out, seemingly of its own volition, and grabbed his hand.
“Wait,” she said.
And in the next moment it was like her invisible third hand clamped down over her mouth.
Because what she’d been about to say, what she’d been feeling but not really letting herself think this whole time, was that she wanted to be married when she had kids. She didn’t care if it was old-fashioned. She wanted it. She wanted the family she never got for her kids.
And, well, that wasn’t the only way she wanted to have kids. And she hadn’t talked about any of that with her Dom.
And yet, suddenly, somehow, her lips started moving.
“Do you…ok, so before we know, would you want to maybe get…”
Sierra closed her eyes. Everything was happening too fast. She’d been too chicken to talk to Conor about the future in concrete terms, like in a real, specific way. She’d thought it was because she wasn’t ready, but that was just a coward’s excuse. The truth was that she’d been afraid. She wasn’t brave like that, and something about proposing to your Dom felt, you know, wrong, and now circumstances had just…
“Princess,” Conor’s voice interrupted her mental monologue. “Open your eyes.”
She did.
And saw Conor standing in front of her — not kneeling — with an open ring box in his hand.
“Where did that come from?” she whispered.
“It’s Granny’s ring. I’ve been carrying it around for six months, waiting for you to be ready,” Conor said with a smile. “You ready now?”
Sierra pressed her lips together and fanned her face, like maybe she could keep the tears at bay. It was a losing battle.
“Yes,” she said, eventually.
“Give me your hand, Princess,” he said.
The ring itself was antique, and small, and perfect. Conor took her hand in his, making it look tiny, the way he always did. Sierra felt the usual current of electricity from where his skin touched hers, running through her whole body.
This time, watching him slip his grandmother’s engagement ring on her finger, it set her on fire.
“You ready to look?” he said.
She couldn’t talk.
But she could nod.
Conor drew her close, and kissed her on the forehead. And then he reached over, and took the stick from its little stand.
“Negative,” Sierra said, and exhaled, long and slow.
Conor looked at her. To her surprise, he looked…crestfallen.
“You’re sad?” she said.
He nodded, carefully. “You’re relieved?”
“It’s not that,” she said, and the feelings inside her were only just beginning to come together into something coherent. “It’s just that…we have plenty of time, and I was thinking…”
She swallowed again. She didn’t know why this was so hard for her. Conor made it look so easy to be brave.
Well, she could do it too.
“I was thinking about maybe fostering first,” she said. “If you wanted to do that.”
As soon as she said it, she knew it was the right thing. And the look in Conor’s eyes was something she would never, ever forget.
He was, for the first time, completely open. She saw a whole life in those pale blue eyes. She saw Conor as he was as a messed up teenager, a lost little boy, a neglected baby — and she wanted to hug each and every one of them. Even more, she wanted to hug the lonely, scared little girl she’d been. She’d always wanted kids, but Conor had made her realize that she wanted more. She wanted to love the kids who’d been forgotten, or who’d fallen through the cracks, or who would never get the love they deserved any other way. She wanted to be who they’d both needed. She wanted to be some needy child’s good luck.
Because Conor was her good luck. Sierra just wanted to pay it forward.
He was still staring at her, his eyes open and vulnerable. And then in the next second he was on her.
His hands on the side of her face, his lips on hers. His kiss melted them together, set her on fire, made the boundaries between them evapo
rate in the heat. His taste, his smell, his tongue: all of it overwhelmed her, until she was whimpering into his mouth, her hands pulling at his lapels, scrabbling at his back.
After an endless moment, her let her go. Pulled back, that look still on his face. Only now with something else, something more. Heat.
“Is that a yes?” she breathed.
“Fuck yes it is,” he said. “I love you, Princess.”
For a while, they looked at each other. Sierra didn’t know how to speak what she was feeling, but she knew Conor was feeling it too. They breathed it in together.
And then Conor spoke.
“Dress up,” he said. “Around your waist.”
A shiver sped through her.
“The party,” she whispered. “They’ll know we’ve been gone.”
Part of their game. The token resistance.
Conor took her face in one hand, holding her in place, and pulled up her dress with the other. He growled when he saw she wasn’t wearing underwear. Still holding her still, he slipped a hand between her wet thighs and slid a finger inside her.
Her eyes lidded, her breath stopped. God, it felt so good. Every time he touched her, every time he was inside her. It felt like the only time she was truly alive.
And then, just as sudden, he removed it, and then sucked it clean.
“Ready,” he said.
Forcefully, he turned her around, her hips slamming up against the vanity in the tiny bathroom. He twisted her hair in his hand and bent her, slowly, over the vanity. Then he showed her what he held in his free hand.
It was a brand new butt plug and a single serving of lube.
“Where did that come from?” she said.
“Other pocket,” he said, and she could hear him grinning. Her Dom had been carrying around an engagement ring in one pocket and a butt plug in the other. Sounded just like him.
He put it on the vanity, right where she could see it, and slapped her ass, hard.
“You’re gonna wear this for the whole party,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re gonna go out and talk to all your friends, and all the people you don’t know yet, and I’m going to be inside you the whole time.”
Sierra’s breath hitched, and the pressure her between her legs grew. God, how did he know just what would make her crazy?