by Wilde, Leah
I got stronger as the days passed. The nurse stopped coming by when I was able to get out of the bed and walk around on my own. Soon, life started to get back to normal. After about a week of getting up and walking around, fixing my own food, bathing myself, and doing all the normal daily things I hadn’t been able to do during those first few days, Gage came home from Kings of Hell HQ one day with news.
“Baby, let’s fire up the grill. We’ve got company coming over tonight,” he said as he walked into the kitchen with a bottle of champagne.
“Who are we having over?” I was already in the middle of chopping up vegetables for a salad. I had no idea when he was coming home, so I was planning on eating alone in front of Netflix on the TV.
“Chase, Juarez, and Ricky want to stop by for dinner tonight.”
“Babe,” I started to protest. I wasn’t ready to get mixed in with the Kings of Hell again, not yet. Maybe not ever.
“No, no, listen, these guys are family, baby, and I’ve promised to be completely open with you. If I’m going to completely open myself to you, I need you to accept my family. The Kings are my family. It’s the only family I’ve got.” He stepped up to me and slid an arm around my waist. He pulled me against him, and my body melted into his.
“Besides, they said that since I won’t bring you by HQ, they’re going to come by here.” His voice dripped with honey, thick and sweet. He kissed me, and my body screamed his name in my ear. Every inch of my lit up when our lips met.
He pulled back from the kiss and gave me his award-winning smile.
“Okay, I’ll go fire up the grill,” I told him. “But don’t touch my lettuce, or the next thing that knife is chopping is you.”
I fired up the grill for him, and he threw some thick, juicy steaks on while I prepared vegetables to be grilled. The guys showed up, and we had an amazing night drinking red wine, eating the delicious dinner we created together, and spending time with family. By the time the guys left for the night, I felt like he was right.
The Kings were family, and despite the work they did, the business they handled, they were good people for the most part. Gage’s three closest brothers were definitely good and genuine.
“I’d say tonight was a success,” Gage said as he came up behind me on the balcony after seeing them to the door. I was finishing clearing off the table and the grill. He put his arms around my waist and pulled me back to him, burying his face in my hair. He took a deep breath through his nose, breathing me in.
“Put those down,” he told me. “We’ll get the dishes later.”
I did as he requested, and one of his hands immediately reached up my shirt, cupping my breast while the other hand undid the front of my jeans, sliding gently down between my legs.
I shuddered and gasped. It had been entirely too long since he’d touched me. I tried to grab his arms, but I leaned forward as he spread me open with his fingers. I planted my hands on the table while he pressed the hardening shaft in his jeans against me and slid a thick finger inside me, running between my wet lips and into my opening.
I gasped. “Out here?”
“Why not?” he growled behind me.
You can have me wherever, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t make the words come out.
He squeezed my breast in the cup of my bra before moving his hand and sliding it underneath. He wrapped his fingers around the delicate skin and rubbed my nipple. He slid his wet finger up in front of my slit and found the ridge there. He started running it side to side across my clitoris, and my knees almost buckled from the intense wave of pleasure that rushed through me.
“Let me have you,” I told him. “I want you inside me, Gage. Fuck me…and…don’t stop.” Talking started getting difficult as each time he flicked my clit, it stole my breath away. My body jerked uncontrollably as he brought me to orgasm that fast. I felt my pleasure and desire combining to flood the delicate folds of skin between my legs.
I leaned further forward and felt his hands grab my jeans. He pulled them down, exposing me to him from behind. Then, I felt his head brush lightly against my lips.
“Please, Gage,” I begged him. “I need you inside me.” I did need him. My body wanted him to enter me so badly I could feel the ache in my bones.
He grabbed my hips and pulled me gently back against him, sliding himself into me slowly, deeply, penetrating every inch of me with his solid, massive manhood.
“You want me to fuck you out here, baby?” he asked.
“I don’t care where you take me, babe, just take me. I’m yours.” I pushed myself against him, driving him into me and driving home what I’d just told him. I was his. I didn’t belong to anyone else.
He filled me perfectly, and I could feel my muscles tightening around his shaft, fitting themselves to him as I slid back and forth along his length. I rolled my hips so that every time he pushed in, the ridge under his shaft ran across my g-spot.
As he plunged deep into me, Dimitri’s words came back to haunt me, taunting me with his idea of exploring my body and teaching me what we could really do.
“I want you to explore me,” I told Gage. “I want you to know every inch of my body.”
I felt him harden even more inside of me. “Before we’re done, Julia,” he said, “I will own every inch of your body. It will be my property.”
It turned me on insanely when he talked like that, when he talked about me as his property. I wanted to belong to him. I shoved my ass against his hips and held it there.
He grabbed me and pulled me as he pushed deeper into me. I felt his shaft straining inside of me, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I made my lover come for me.
He groaned as he pulled back and pushed into me again.
Then, he slid out and leaned over on top of me, running his shaft up the crack of my ass so I could feel his muscles jerk while he spilled himself on my back. All the while, he moaned in my ear.
The sound of his satisfaction was music to my ears. It finished me off right there, sending me back across the waves of ecstasy. It was a deeper ecstasy than before, though, because I wasn’t afraid anymore to let the emotions I felt mingle with the incredible physical pleasure he brought me.
Epilogue
It was a year after the day I woke up, and my life was so drastically different.
I sat behind my desk in my office at the university and sorted through reviews of my book The New Russian Underworld. It was the book inspired by the events that had occurred while I had worked with Dimitri for Gage. It included my experiences as well as analysis of news, police, and government reports on recent crime in Russia. It also included interviews with men who had worked for Ivan over the years.
A copy of the book sat on my desk, waiting for me to put it up on the bookshelf in my office. I put a hand on the cover, opened it, and just took a moment to flip through the pages. I did this a couple of times a day, just to remind myself that it was all real.
A knock came at my door, and I looked up to see my young teaching assistant, Kylie, standing in the doorway.
“Yes?”
“There’s a man here to see you, Dr. Danvers. Says his name is Mr. Danvers?” She cocked an eyebrow.
“There’s no Mist…” I started to protest, but I stopped and smiled. “Send him in, Kylie.”
Gage walked in with a bouquet of roses. He wore a black suit that hid all signs of his biker lifestyle.
“Whoa! What’s this?” I asked as I rose from my seat and walked around my desk to greet him and take my roses.
“Well, today is the anniversary of what I think of as my second chance with you,” he said. “I know it’s not a ring, but I figured you wouldn’t say no to roses.”
I smiled and took the roses to an empty vase on the side of my desk. I turned around and walked back to him, embracing my love.
“And look at you,” I said, leaning back to take in the view. “You look amazing! What’s the occasion?”
“I just wanted to try it out,” he sa
id. “Oh, and I wanted to ask you out to dinner tonight.” A devious little smile spread across his face.
“You didn’t have to go through all of this just to ask me to dinner.” We ate together every night now, so it felt odd for him to go out of his way like this to make dinner something special.
I’d been trying to drop hints for a couple of months that I wanted him to buy me a ring and propose to me. I was ready for us to take our relationship to the next level. I’d never felt for anyone else what I felt for Gage. For so much of my life, I had taken pride in being able to stand on my own two feet. With Gage, I felt like I finally had a rock to stand on. And I felt like I could see so much farther from my new perch. I couldn’t imagine life without him anymore, but he always shied away from the topic. His little ring comment caught me off guard. At least he was hearing me.
“Well, I want to make tonight’s dinner special,” he said. “We never have special dinners. It’s always eating at home. We never go out, even though we can both afford it. We can do anything from fast food to the classiest restaurants in town. And tonight, I have reservations at an exclusive five-star hotel restaurant that you’re going to love.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What are you up to?” I asked.
He smirked.
“You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. But, yes, I’ll go to dinner with you.”
“Excellent. I will pick you up at seven, here at the university,” he said. He leaned in and gave me a sweet little kiss on my cheek. “Bring your appetite.” His voice lingered, as if there was something else he wanted to say but thought better of it at the last moment.
“Anything else?” I asked.
He winked. “I might have a surprise planned for you. Then again, I might not.”
He kissed me lightly on my lips.
“For now, I’ll let you get back to work,” he said, and with that, he turned and left my office, just like that. He was gone as quickly as he had come in.
I walked back around my desk and sat down, puzzled. He had a surprise for me? I wondered what kind of surprise he had for me and hoped it would turn out to be a ring.
Gage Noll had changed my life so much over the last year. He bought a house for us to move into together, and the Kings of Hell had helped me move my things into it. They even helped with the unpacking, especially the books.
He paid off my mother’s debts and had her moved to a state-of-the-art facility. He even took over payments so that I didn’t have to worry about her anymore. She was doing better with her new treatments. I didn’t feel guilty every time I visited her anymore. In fact, I visited her more often because we were both doing better.
He’d backed away from the MC, taking a less active role. He’d handed more power over to his inner circle, handing down decisions and plans through them instead of having such a physical presence. He was still there for events and those sorts of things, but he’d been more focused on our relationship.
Plus, the nature of the MC seemed to have shifted over the last year. They had become more successful and less violent as they spent more of their time and energy on their business interests instead of trying to take control from other organizations. I wasn’t really sure exactly what they were doing. Since I had told Gage that I didn’t want anything to do with the MC really, he kept me out of the loop.
Our life was filled with romance and passion. Our new home was a beautiful old Victorian house. The upstairs master bathroom had a claw-footed tub that stood off of the ground and sat deep enough that I could stretch out in a hot bubble bath whenever I wanted, and Gage often had one ready for me when I came home from the university.
In the place of the MC, he’d picked up cooking, and he would often have exotic foods waiting for me from all over the world. He knew I loved exotic foods, and he did what he could to create an impressive variety night after night. He was a damn good cook, too.
“It better be a damn ring,” I said aloud, closing my laptop. I grabbed it and headed to my next lecture on Russian history.
On my way back from my last class of the day, I found Gage sitting in my office chair with his feet propped up on my desk. He wore the same black suit with shiny, black dress shoes instead of his usual worn out boots.
“Well, hello, Dr. Noll,” I teased as I entered my office.
“Hello, Ms. Danvers. Are you here for extra credit?” he joked right back.
“Stop,” I hissed. I felt my face flushing. “And yes, I could use some extra credit. What do I have to do to get an A?”
He smiled. “You don’t want to know what you have to do to get an A.” He took his feet off the desk and sat forward in the chair.
“Mmmm, but what if I said I did want to know, Dr. Noll? What would you tell me?” I continued teasing. I liked this game, pretending he was the professor. It had been a year, and I felt like there were still things he could teach me about my body and about pleasure in general.
“I would tell you that you need to read my new book, Ms. Danvers,” he continued playing along.
“Really? What’s it about?” I asked him, noticing that his hand rested on the cover of the book on my desk.
“It’s about discovering pleasure by letting our guards down and enjoying our bodies,” he said. “I’ll be happy to autograph a copy for you.”
“Funny,” I said. I didn’t have anything else to say or anywhere else I could take the joke.
“I thought so. Hey, maybe you could help me write that book, actually,” he said.
“Maybe. We’ll see. So, are we going to dinner, or what?” I asked, leaning across my desk to him.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Hey, what do you think your surprise is?” he asked as he stood up and started around the desk.
“It’s a surprise,” I told him. He knew damn well what I wanted it to be. I wanted his surprise to be a damn ring, a nice, fat, juicy diamond ring that looked just as good as he did in that suit.
“It’s no fun when you don’t play along,” he teased.
He put an arm around my waist and walked me out of my office.
“Come with me, Dr. Danvers. Our chariot awaits.”
Downstairs, stepping out of the history building, I saw that he had a car waiting for me, complete with a driver. I didn’t want to ask where he’d gotten the money or which one of us was paying for it. Asking questions with Gage was sometimes like looking a gift horse in the mouth. Sometimes things were just too good to be true. Or legal. And I had learned the hard way that I was better off not knowing which was which.
The driver wore a tux and held the back door open for us to get in. I slid in first, sliding across to the driver’s side. Gage slid in beside me, and the driver closed the door.
Butterflies sprang up in my stomach. I’d been racking my brain all day trying to figure out what kind of surprise would require us going to a five-star restaurant and pulling out all the stops like he was. There was only one thing it could be, and if it turned out to be anything else, I’d already told myself I was going to stab him to death right there at the table. When they asked me why I did it, I would just tell them he drove me crazy, and that I was already hormonal because of a surprise I’d been keeping from him for about a month or so.
I had been waiting for the perfect time to tell him, and it never seemed to be right. There was always something else going on. Tonight, I told myself.
“What are you thinking about?” Gage asked, jerking me out of my thoughts. I realized I’d been staring out the window.
“Just thinking about what your surprise is going to be, thinking about what I want it to be,” I answered him, perhaps a little too honestly, but I’d been after him about it long enough now that I felt like it didn’t matter. I felt like he should have expected the comments and suggestions at this point.
“Well, I hope I don’t disappoint you tonight.” He turned and looked forward.
Then again, if it wasn’t a ring, my insistence on wanting a ring from him would probably just serve to
make him think I was disappointed when it turned out to be something else. I grabbed his arm and pulled myself close to him.
“I don’t care what it is, baby. You know I’ll be happy with whatever you get me, because it’s from you. I don’t want you to think that’s all I want, okay? I’m just messing with you.” I put a finger under his chin and turned his face to mine.