by Kira Graham
It takes literally five minutes from start to finish for the judge to pronounce us man and wife, and by the time that Zeus is shoving his tongue down my throat while people hoot and clap, I’m almost certain that I have no idea how all this happened.
In all fairness, I can’t rightly argue my own case and accuse him of being a sneaky, tricky, manipulative idiot because…I can’t quite figure out how I went from standing trial to proposing marriage to the man.
There’s no—
Jesus! What the hell just happened? I ask silently as I kiss him back with everything I’ve got. How did he do this?
“And that,” Chilli tells me after I pull away from Zeus to face the family, my brain still chugging through a thick river of confusion, “is what you call being stalked!”
And goddammit, I think, as I look up to see the satisfied smile on my husband’s face, I can’t argue with that.
Chapter Twelve
Zeus
Being married is everything that I ever thought it would be.
Case in point, I am now ducking behind a sofa, dodging missiles while Rosetta hurls priceless objects at me and screams at the top of her lungs. Dad once told me that being married to the woman of your dreams can hold as much nightmare as happiness, and I guess he’s right, again, because instead of making love to my wife and sealing the deal, I am now cowering behind a couch, listening to her rant at me.
“I can’t believe you played me!” she screams, picking up an artifact that I got in Papua New Guinea three years ago.
It’s nothing more than a clay statue of an ancient god, or what people think may once have been a god, and it holds no great monetary value other than the fact that I spent three weeks negotiating with a local to get him to sell it to me.
“Don’t throw that one! That one’s my favorite,” I bellow, peeking up over the lip of the couch with a desperate expression that would shame me—if I cared. “I said I was sorry.”
“You played me, and then roped them all in on your plans and made me look like a fool. Tee keeps texting me!” she yells, a muffled scream leaving her when her phone dings again with another text. “I am never going to live this down.”
“But Rosie! You proposed. I just made it happen,” I try to argue, even as I duck down again and raise a hand, catching the statue by some miracle as it sails over me, headed for the wall.
“You made me think that I wanted to propose! And it wasn’t even a proposal. I was trying to be all romantic and in touch with my feelings,” she hisses, blowing out a stream of air through her nose in rage when I peek back at her and pout dramatically.
“You said you love me. You can’t kill me while you’re in the middle of a murder trial, and besides, you’d miss me!” I charge, feeling more than a little annoyed that she’s seeing things this way.
I thought that it was off-the-charts romantic that my woman asked me to marry her—
“I did not! I so did not ask you to marry me, you delusional lunatic. I said that I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“That’s marriage,” I counter, wincing when her cheeks go from fiery red to a shade just above puce.
Shit. I’ve seen her turn that color only once, and it ended with Alex screaming like a pig and rushing to the emergency room to get five stitches in her knee. I’m hoping to calm her down at least a little before she gets close enough to me to use her teeth, because, fuck me, these Sweet females have an unhealthy penchant for using their teeth as weapons.
“No, it isn’t. Marriage is when you get married! Life can be many things—just ask Cleo!” she screams, destroying a fifth-century Chinese figurine that makes my eyes go wet with unshed tears.
“Cleo? Are we talking about the same woman who bought a truck full of rats, got Sin to drive it to the caterer at one in the morning, and then told Adonis that she couldn’t possibly find another caterer on such short notice? That Cleo? The one who probably won’t ever marry Adonis because she’s a fucking psycho with marriage phobias?” I roar, a whimper leaving me when I mistakenly pop up to my feet in high dudgeon and end up taking a snuffbox to my right eye.
“Don’t you say mean things about Cleo. She just needs time.”
“What she needs is a drugging, some booze, and a morning after in the Bahamas after Adonis forces the issue!” I yell, shaking my head frantically when she strokes a hand over the fragile ceramic cat that I acquired in France, said to have been a knickknack belonging to Marie Antoinette herself.
“You know what I realized after I said ‘I do,’ drank champagne, and went back to that trial?” my wife asks me, her eyes going so hard that they narrow to near-closed slits. “You’re not a stalker. No, that would be romantic! You’re a freaking lunatic. You planned all of this, Zeus, didn’t you?” she accuses, making me rethink the whole honesty thing that I was contemplating earlier.
She does not need to know about the slight, unintentional hand that I had in Donald’s firing her, and I am definitely never, ever telling her that I swapped out her birth control pills three weeks ago with vitamins that look just like them.
She’d kill me, and frankly, I would probably deserve it and should feel bad. But honestly speaking, I never said that I wouldn’t play dirty, and I meant it when I said that I would stoop to any level I had to in order to get her. I backed off for a bit and tried to play fair, but then things went into the shitter. Look at how things ended up when, instead of doing what I knew I should, I walked away. Rosetta ended up being framed for murder.
From now on, I am playing by my own rules, and in this war, rules are meant to be broken. What’s a little manipulation here and there when we both got what we wanted? I’m married to my dream woman, and Rosetta gets to tell our kids that their dad was obsessed with her. In her book, that’s like romantic fucking gold!
“Not all of it! Christ! That hurt,” I groan when a shoe hits me in the crotch, doubling me over so that I take a dive over the back of the couch and land face first in the cushions, clutching my nuts.
If any woman needs a description of what it feels like for a man to be hit in the sack, I’ll tell you. Think about how it feels when you slam a hammer onto your thumbnail, and everything seems to go white-hot with pain. Take that feeling, add in a complete cessation of mental functions, and then add another twenty strikes to that same thumb, and then maybe, and I am saying maybe, you’ll understand what it feels like.
I’ve heard it said that for women, getting punched in the boob is super painful, and I can believe that, but imagine what it’s like when that boob is protected by only a thin layer of skin that does nothing to hold all the working parts in place!
“It should. I want it to hurt, you vile, disgustingly smart nut! I can’t believe that you played me. Do you know what it feels like to me, to know that my mind, the one thing about me that is rock-solid and unshakable, has been hacked and taken over by you? Tee keeps making fun of me, Sin leaves me voice messages filled with nothing but cackling, and my own mother patted me on the cheek and said, ‘You were always the easiest to handle, Rose.’ Me! The smart, hardnosed lawyer with the mind like a steel trap,” she rages, falling down onto the couch, letting her ass hit my calves as she slumps and sulks, and throwing disgruntled looks my way. “The worst part is that I don’t even know how you did it!”
Technically, I used this technique that Pop taught me when we’d go hunting—and no, I am not arguing the moral right and wrong of killing animals, so if you’re a card-carrying PETA hard-ass, then you’ll just have to talk to my lawyer, ha ha. Pop told me very early on, that a hunter’s job isn’t just about stalking prey; it’s about reading the signs. You find some tracks, study them, and then figure out the doe’s trail. If you look closely enough, you can spot the areas that are frequented regularly, and sort of map out the paths that it probably takes. Knowing what it does, how it thinks, and how it will react, will help you in finding the exact spot to stay in while you lure it closer.
That’s all I did. I laid down some
groundwork, learned Rosetta’s routines, and brought her closer slowly but surely. Is that a crime? As far as I can see, it was a well-thought-out, tactically logical maneuver that worked out for both of us in the end. As my wife, once this trial is taken care of and everything is back to normal, she will be more than protected from any backlash. She’ll have a great job, her name will be restored, and we’ll start on that family that she’s always wanted. It’s a win-win situation. And I tell her so. Or whimper it. Christ. At this rate, she’d better pray that I’ve already knocked her up, because I don’t think that my balls are ever going to recover. Stupid ceramic is hardier than I would have thought. Fragile, my ass.
“It’s not the married part that pisses me off, idiot. It’s the part where you led me to it. Like a dog, Zeus. You freaking conditioned me like a dog, and then showed all your family—and mine—how I sit, roll over, and play dead!” she mutters, slapping at my hands when I roll over and try to pull her closer.
Though I angle my hips away, just in case.
“But I thought that it would be romantic. Remember when you sent Chilli those cooking lessons, because you wanted him to take you so that you could seduce him and make him fall for you?”
“Are you starting up with that whole Chilli conversation again? I freaking told you, I am not even a little bit in love with him. I know that now—”
“No,” I say. Shit, this is hard. “I mean, I—uh, well, I sort of thought…” I trail off, scrubbing at the back of my head, where my hair’s grown in a little long for my liking. “Maybe if I did the same kinda thing, you’d…ya know, think it was romantic,” I mutter, feeling a little stupid about it now that I think about how she’d feel.
So, okay, no one ever said that I was the master of romance, and admittedly, I’m a tactician who basically led her into doing what I wanted her to, but I also thought that it would possibly be a romantic gesture that she’d recognize, and, I dunno, think was cute.
Cut me some slack here, all right? I’ve spent the better part of numerous months stalking her, without her even knowing it, and then she gets arrested, and everything goes from zero to sixty in a matter of hours. All the plans I had for wooing her and seducing her went out the window, and I was suddenly faced with protecting her and finding answers to this mystery instead. It’s not like I had tons of time and opportunity to plan these great romantic dinners and trips, and, even if I did, I am not what anyone would call sappy, not in the least. I like to focus on the obvious thing, and, uh…I just thought that maybe, when she realized what I did, she’d find it funny and adorable and at least throw me a freaking blow job for my effort.
“Romantic? How is tricking me into marriage romantic, Zeus?”
“Ya know, because it’s…a thing that you would have done?” I ask hesitantly, closely watching her color for signs of impending attack.
When her lips twitch, I take a small, reluctant breath of relief, and when she starts to giggle, I deflate and let my own grin surface, loving the tinkling way that she snorts and falls back, laughing so hard that she clutches at her stomach.
“You suck at romance!”
“So do you!” I reply accusingly, mock-shoving at her shoulder. “You think that spy equipment and phone taps are akin to a bouquet of flowers.”
“Do not! It’s akin to sending a guy chocolate. Or, ya know, your underwear,” she grumbles sourly, her sigh turning begrudging when I pull her onto my chest and tilt her head up.
“You speak Rosetta, babe. This language that no one fully understands most of the time. I know that I’ve been a bit of a controlling ass, and I know that I do things my way and refuse to compromise, but I just…it’s not easy to learn a whole new language and then realize that your woman is a control freak with a safe full of guns. I guess that we’re going to have to learn to compromise about being in control,” I say, not knowing how great I can be about that.
I’m used to everything going how I want it to, to the exclusion of everyone else’s feelings. I don’t take orders well, rejection isn’t in my vocabulary, and I guess—
“Goddammit, I was wrong,” Rosetta curses, her face scrunching up with disgust when she meets my eyes and whispers the next few words in a voice filled with horror. “We’re not opposites.”
She really doesn’t have to look so sickened by the thought of our being alike, I think, slightly annoyed when she pouts and gives me a look filled with resignation.
However, and let’s always remember this, I’m going to count my blessings, ice down my balls, and live to fight with, trick, and make love to her another day.
I have a feeling that that’s the only way we’re going to survive this first year of marriage. Or, hell, the first month.
Rosetta
I’m feeling a little more positive as I finish making breakfast and pour two cups of coffee, my mood upbeat and great enough that I can’t stop humming, even if I’m annoyed that the song stuck in my head is AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Which, by the way, is totally the case. After I iced down my baby’s nut sack and kissed it better. Which led to a blowjob, but honestly, I kinda owed it to him, and to be fair, I enjoyed it about as much as he did, considering what his hands were doing while I was down there. Hint: it included my delicate parts, a pink vibrator, and his knowledge of my G-spot. ’Nuff said.
The reason for my upbeat mood, though, isn’t just that I got my socks blown off, both figuratively and literally—since I was wearing socks when we started making love, and still don’t know what happened to them by the time we passed out.
My money is on some weird theory of combustion, but I am not mentioning that to Z, because both his heads are already too swollen. No—my humming, happy mood came after we were woken by a call at four this morning, during which my sobbing dad and cackling mom told Zeus that the CIA had finally made their move and taken down Hilan. The man is now in custody and being charged with three counts of murder in the first, while agents collect the evidence they need from his home, the homes of the victims, and my home. It turns out that the blood Zeus took from me came back drugged, and lo and behold, they found the exact same stuff in Hilan’s apartment, along with a lot of photos of me, the duct tape that is a forensic match to that used on Donaldson, and a detailed plan in Hilan’s handwriting that relates a step-by-step murder plot that he intended to use to frame me.
What isn’t being said on the record, which is something that Director Messing told us personally, is that this Hilan looks to have been watching me for a while. Along with Sin and Alex. They haven’t found anything on Tee in his apartment, but to my mind, that’s enough already. The man has been following us around, basically stalking us, and as far as the agency is concerned, he framed me because he was either a lunatic or a stalker. Both sort of coincide, but hey, whatever they want to argue is fine by me, as long as I am off the hook, and Hilan gets his ass thrown into a federal prison.
There’s even talk of his being taken to a top secret facility, where Roach says the government stashes ex-military men who are of, shall we say, a much more…temperamental mental state. So, yeah. I’m totally as free as a bird, which isn’t to say that I’m completely okay, because, let’s be real here—I had the freaking mayor calling me a cold-blooded killer and basically encouraging people to lynch me.
That’s my next step, though. Yes, I am totally suing the city, and not because of the money, but because it’s the right thing to do. Messing even asked me to lean in that direction, a little favor that I am willing to do for him because apparently, the powers that be are still trying to remove a certain police chief, and this is the perfect way to do it. Nothing kills a man’s career like a black stain on his record, and according to the liberals who are even now shouting my innocence on television—Christ, the press are a bloodthirsty lot—the chief of police was as involved in this travesty of justice as the DA. Who, by the way, is not going to remain the DA for long.
“You sound happy, Mrs. Hart,” I hear as two strong arms enfold me, the w
armth and scent of Zeus’s recent shower sliding through me like liquid crack.
God, will I ever get tired of having this man hold me? I ask myself, leaning back with a sigh and tilting my head when he comes in for a kiss that makes my thighs quiver.
I don’t think so, especially not when he groans and twists me around, his hands going down to my ass so that he can pull me closer while kneading the two soft globes.
“I am happy,” I murmur into his mouth, our teeth clanging when we both smile but refuse to stop kissing long enough to talk or laugh properly. “Your strategic and utterly perfect plans have netted the bad guy, helped me to escape the public’s version of the electric chair—and just look at this rock,” I preen, pulling away to admire the ring that he finally put on me after he got inside me again.
Who am I to argue about the way he does things? And while he gave me a gold band yesterday, I got the rock only after he recreated the previous night and made me reenact it, complete with a rewrite of my refusal. I totally dug it, but of course I would, since I am a drama buff with close ties to pop-up theater moments. Meaning, there is always an opportunity to act; you just have to take it.
Although there was definitely no acting last night, when he made love to me and slipped on this ring, let me tell ya. Nothing says “love” to me like something big, sparkly, and worth more than some people’s houses.
“I do. All the time. I like the way it looks on you, babe. It’s where it belongs,” he murmurs, kissing me sweetly before pulling away to grin down at breakfast.
Okay, so technically, I didn’t make breakfast so much as have one of the security guys run down to Casimirs down the block to pick up an order. I don’t cook well; I think it’s genetic. But I can provide an awesome breakfast and at least take care of my guy the way I want to.
“This looks great, Rosie!” he chirps, pulling out my seat and helping me sit before he practically falls on the food.