by Jessa Kane
“Don’t say those words out loud ever again.” I clasp the sides of her face in my hands. “I’m already hanging by a thread seeing that bandage on your arm and knowing I didn’t prevent it.”
“You couldn’t have. You can’t predict an accident.”
“Then I’ll learn.” The cords in my throat strain in my effort to make her understand I would stop the world from spinning for five minutes of her happiness. “I’ll learn whatever I need to know to make sure you never cry out my name in pain again. I can still hear it…it’s driving me madder than I already am—”
“I’m fine.” Her eyes are bright, reflecting the sky, as she presses a finger to my mouth. “You’re holding me in your arms after what I’ve done. How could I be anything other than fine?”
That remains to be seen, doesn’t it? We’re not out of the woods just yet. But no matter how she reacts to how I’ve spent my morning, I need her to know I forgive her. That I understand. “Veda, there are going to be people along the way that try to get to me through you. You’re my weakness, my strength, everything in between…and I suspect anyone who has seen me look at you knows it.” Even now, in the middle of this garden, I ache to devour her. There’s a pounding in my temples and my loins, urging me to find a place to lay her down flat and fill her cunt with my rigid flesh. It’s a need that never lessens, and it’s always only for Veda. “No more secrets between us. If you’re scared or cold or want something pretty or a man is making you uncomfortable…I’m the one who makes the bad go away. You only need to whisper it in my ear.”
“I know I should have told you Jack was pressuring me to steal.” Her voice is steady, but her hands tremble where they stroke down my chest. “But I was so worried you wouldn’t listen to an explanation. Or you wouldn’t believe that I’d tried to stop it after only one time.” She toys with the buttons of my shirt, and I know as soon as we’re finished in the gardens, I’m going to need her body. Badly. If for no other reason than to reassure myself she’s alive. “He told me I was already in too deep and he’d show you proof of what I’d done unless I continued. I didn’t know what else to do, but I want to find a way to pay you back. I need to. All those gifts…I’m going to return them and—”
“Like hell you will!” I roar, then immediately rein in my reaction with a deep breath. “You’ll do no such thing. If you do, I’ll only buy double of everything you return. Triple.”
“Ramsey…”
“Listen to me. I would have paid any price just to watch you run toward me on the path just now, through the flowers.” I press a hard kiss to her forehead. “And I don’t care if it makes me a sucker, angel, I would have allowed you to go on stealing from me until the end of time. As long as I had the privilege of waking up beside you every morning. You would have been my little thief, and I would have spent my days hoping you decided to stop, but never, on our worst day, would I have let you go.”
“I love you,” she breathes. “But I need you to know I would have found a way. Or told you. I just need you to know how much you mean to me.”
The man I was before would have hated the vulnerability that creeps along my neck, but in this moment, with my life standing in front of me, all I can do is embrace it. “On my worst day, will you let me go?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Never.”
I brace myself, pausing as a man in all black approaches to our right. A man I’ve been expecting. His arrival is an undeniable signal that I can’t put off the moment of truth any longer, however. “We won’t be visiting your father any more, Veda.” I feel the dirt beneath my fingertips, the roughened skin on my palms, courtesy of the shovel I used to help dig a shallow grave “It would be impossible to visit him ever again. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” She’s very still, but I watch understanding dawn in her gaze. Understanding, relief…and possibly a new awareness of the man into whose arms she so recently leapt. “I won’t tolerate people who come between us. Nod if you understand.”
The wind kicks up, blowing blonde hair across her cheeks and mouth, but she nods slowly. “I understand, Ramsey.”
Warmth melts like butter in my chest, a feeling of completion grabbing me by the neck. Thank God. She’s mine, despite the fact that I’m a madman. Thank God. “Then marry me, Veda. Leave this place as my wife and remain that way until my time on this earth is over.” Her head turns slightly, and I watch recognition of the moment float into her expression as she notices the minister. Tears coast down her face, and she laughs, the sound light and incredulous. And just like during our first few days together, I see that I’m not the only one with a touch of darkness inside them. A hint of storm that I’m going to make sure we celebrate instead of deny.
“Of course I’ll marry you,” Veda whispers with a flirtatious curve of her lips. “As long as you don’t mind picking your wife up from school.”
Without looking at the priest, I beckon him closer. “Angel, I prefer it.”
Epilogue
My fingers drum impatiently on the conference table.
The board meeting in which I’m sitting is running long, and Veda is due to arrive from school any moment. Normally, I wouldn’t mind if she waltzed in like she owned the place and perched her sweet backside right on my lap, that plaid skirt spreading across my thighs while everyone gawks. After all, that’s what she does most afternoons when my driver brings her into Manhattan, allowing her to complete the day distracting me or napping on one of my office couches.
She’s late, however. Only by two minutes, which could easily be accounted for by traffic, but I don’t want a rational explanation, I want my hands sliding up the insides of her thighs.
If you thought I was territorial before, you have no idea where I’ve landed since returning from Amsterdam. Our relationship has graduated to a level I never anticipated. Perhaps my new threshold of greed and possessiveness over Veda has something to do with how I eliminated the obstacle of Jack. Her father. But lately I’ve felt myself…filling his shoes in more and more ways. While I would never consider myself even one iota similar to the man, there’s no denying how much I covet his former role of provider, nurturer, most important male figure in Veda’s life.
So in addition to her lover, husband and hungry bastard who can’t get enough of her taste, I’ve taken on a position I never knew I craved. But now I wonder if I’ll ever get enough of it.
No. The answer is no. Impossible.
The members of my board are beginning to check their own watches, shifting nervously in their seats, as if they know their boss will self-destruct if his delicious wife doesn’t grace the room with her presence very fucking soon. And they’re right. There is about one minute left before I tear the city apart demanding the sight of her. The angel I haven’t beheld since she skipped off toward the front door this morning, blowing me kisses over her shoulder.
In the month since we came back from Amsterdam, Veda has blossomed into not just a young bride, but a woman with purpose. In her mother’s memory, she has created a charity for children of cancer victims who need monetary support, and of course, I have thrown my weight behind the project, supporting her in any way I can. As long as her schoolwork continues to be stellar, she can plan charity walks and cocktail parties to her heart’s content. I’ll be present at each and every one, wearing my pride like a badge of honor.
Thirty seconds left. Thankfully, I hear the elevator ding somewhere down the hall, signaling Veda’s arrival at the office. My dick is already solid and heavy behind my fly, ready to slide home between my wife’s incomparable thighs. Everyone around the table relaxes, and the person leading the presentation tries not to be obvious as he begins to wrap up the meeting.
Veda stands in the doorway a moment later, the leather satchel I bought her hanging on one shoulder. Shit. Every day she glows a little hotter, this girl. Blonde hair flows in waves all around her, curving over her tits and teasing her trim waist. Her skirt gets a little shorter, too, with each passing week. Somethin
I swallow a growl, but she writhes against the doorframe as if she heard it just the same. “Hi, Ramsey.” She pinky waves at the room in general. “Hi, everyone.”
“Hello, Veda,” comes the chorus of male voices, all muffled because their chins are tucked into their chests, each and every one of them knowing better than to show interest in the too young siren who sways into the room.
Wearing a rock on her finger that could sink a ship.
But she doesn’t come directly toward me, spinning on her tiptoes around my chair, her scent tempting my control. Tease. She’s still a tease, and I allow it, because I know she likes the chastisement I mete out. And Christ knows I love giving it.
As soon as the room clears, she scoots onto the table, throwing herself backwards across the center of the massive piece of furniture, arms up over her head, just out of my reach. “I missed you today.”
My heart goes into a tailspin, even as I grind my teeth. “Then I fail to see why you’re so far away right now.”
She turns onto her side, tucking both hands beneath her cheek. With the Manhattan skyline behind her in the oversized window, she looks like an angel floating down from the clouds. “Don’t you want to know why I was late?”
I swipe a hand out, attempting to snag her ankle, but she gets it out of my reach at the last second. “I assumed it was traffic,” I grit out, my hunger escalating. Playing hard to get, is she? “Am I incorrect?”
“Yes.” She twists onto her stomach, crossing her ankles in the air behind her, swaying them back and forth. “There was a reporter on the steps outside of school. He wanted to know all about my marriage to the powerful yet mysterious Ramsey Beckett.”
This story she’s weaving better be a joke, because I don’t pay Veda’s security guards six figures each to allow her to be accosted or even spoken to by people I haven’t formally approved unless I’m present. But she’s clearly in a playful mood, and that calls to the dark cloud inside of me, turning it ripe for storming. Those youthful sparks mean she wants to be treated like a girl today, not a woman. And my blood ripples in anticipation. “And what did you tell this tenacious reporter about your husband, angel?”
She goes up on her hands and knees in the center of the table and crawls toward me slowly, making me wish I had the benefit of both views—front and behind—although I could never decide which is most tempting. “I told her you like to give me baths,” she murmurs. “That you like to pick out my panties every morning and put them on me yourself.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “I also mentioned how good you are at helping with homework. How you like to reward me when I finish…”
“By finishing you with my mouth, right on top of your textbooks?” My tone is churned concrete as I reach out and twist a hand in her white blouse collar, groaning when her lips pop wide and she issues a wheezing sob. “Tell me right now if someone really had the bad judgment to come near my wife.”
“No, Ramsey. It was traffic.” Excitement, tempered by affection, makes the blue of her eyes vivid and hypnotic. “But if someone asked, I wouldn’t hide us. I wouldn’t hold back a single thing.”
Love and lust collide and erupt in my middle, my obsession swelling like a tide that never ebbs. My movement is unhurried as I unwind my hand from her collar and lean back in my chair, although urgency pounds in my temples, my gut, my heart.
“You don’t want to hold back a single thing?” I unzip my fly and growl as my cock is freed. “Then be a good girl and come tell daddy all about your day.”
-->