Sam stood in a candlelit bathroom that gleamed with cream-colored marble and polished gold. But she wasn’t admiring the grandeur around her. Her gaze was fixated on the glistening band nestled against the engagement ring Micah had given her months ago.
She was still blown away Micah had been able to pull all this off in only one week. The wedding. The reception. Her dress, the flowers, the cake and food and decorations. The glitter.
Her parents.
Saying good-bye to her mom and dad had been brutal, but they promised to come and visit. And Cordray had hinted that she wasn’t going to strip out everything Sam had told them. King Bain was allowing her parents to know of vampires’ existence as long as they kept the knowledge to themselves. According to Cordray, her parents would be regularly monitored, and if it was discovered they had told anyone else that vampires lived among them, their memories would immediately be stripped and they wouldn’t be able to visit Sam anymore.
Nothing motivated future grandparents more than threatening to take away their ability to see their grandchildren.
But Sam didn’t worry about her parents blabbing about all they’d learned tonight. They were like Micah. Vaults. They wouldn’t spill a single word.
With a contented sigh, she dropped her hand and swept her gaze around the bathroom.
Bathroom? More like a spa. Large oval tub that looked deep enough to drown in. A glass-encased walk-in shower with half a dozen showerheads sprouting from the ceiling and walls. Separate water closet. A changing room in the back. Heated towel racks next to the shower and tub.
The room was bigger than the studio apartment she’d lived in last year, post-Steve and pre-Micah. She’d barely scraped by back then. Now look at her, sitting in the lap of luxury. What a difference a year makes. If only she could shake loose Steve’s lasting grip on her mental state.
The home itself was a wedding gift from King Bain.
Talk about going overboard on the bridal registry! A home. The king had bought them a home. One bigger than Micah’s house in the suburbs, with twice as many bedrooms, but not quite as large as King Bain’s own crib. Then again, Sam doubted any house within five hundred miles was bigger than the king’s.
Her gaze swept all the shining, shimmering surfaces surrounding her. She could get used to living like this. Yep, she sure could.
Crossing from the door to the shower, she ran her fingers along the cool, smooth marble counter, then casually hung the garment bag she was holding on an ornate, brushed-bronze hook.
After the reception, Josie and Cordray had rushed her off to prepare her for her wedding night, so she no longer wore her wedding gown. Instead, she was garbed in a knee-length Chanel dress the color of champagne, a pair of Louboutin pumps, faux-fur stole with a jeweled button, and a felt-covered beanie with a delicate veil that fell over her face. The getup was circa 1950s, retro but classic.
She took off the beanie and riffled her fingers through her hair as she tossed it on counter next to a trio of white pedestal candles. Their flickering flames cast dancing shadows over every surface.
Sam stared at her reflection in the mirror over the sink.
This was her wedding night. The last wedding night she would ever experience. The only wedding night that mattered, and the first night she would share with her husband.
Husband. Micah wasn’t just her mate now, but her husband. She had the marriage certificate to prove it, even if they’d had to fudge certain details about Micah’s age.
She removed the stole, then leaned back and to the side so she could push off her Louboutins. She left them where they fell and reached over her shoulder to release the zipper at her nape.
Within seconds, she was out of her dress and slipping out of her undergarments. Then she unzipped the garment bag to reveal a simple lace-and-silk nightie. Cordray had told her Queen Cara had ordered the demure but subtly sexy garment personally from a boutique in Paris. They’d called in a few favors to get the precious lingerie there in time for the wedding, but it had been worth it. The slinky nightie was exquisite.
She plucked it from its hanger and eased it over her head. The silk fell over her body like melted butter.
When she turned toward the mirror, she smiled at the way her nipples barely showed through the delicate lace over the bodice. Micah was going to love it.
She took the small bottle of lilac perfume from the toiletry kit she’d set on the counter, spritzed one pump into the air in front of her, then walked into the dispersing cloud.
She was ready.
With the knowledge that she was about to sleep with her husband for the first time, she crossed the expanse of marble and quietly opened the door.
Micah stood beside a mountain of pillows piled against the opposite wall from the down-covered bed, facing a crackling fire in a giant stone fireplace.
His mouth fell open the moment he saw her.
“You’re beautiful.” His voice was like a heated breeze.
She stepped out of the bathroom. “So are you.”
He wore only white linen pants. Nothing underneath, given the shadow of his backlit, half-mast erection. No shirt. No shoes. The flickering fire cast a warm and alluring glow over his skin.
Everything about the setting was designed for romance. For sex. For bodies entwined and lost to everything but the wild rapture two people could create together.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare the home for them. No doubt the kitchen and pantry were fully stocked, too, which was good. Given the amount of sex she and Micah were bound to have over the next few days, they needed to have plenty of sustenance to keep up their strength.
Her gaze slid down his body as she approached. She was looking at the skin of her husband for the first time. His virility. His prowess. The way he commanded her awareness with only a look.
She’d seen it all before. She’d witnessed and experienced it countless times, but never as his wife. He’d done this for her. He’d given her a human wedding for no other reason than she’d wanted it. To him—a vampire—it meant nothing. Yet he’d married her anyway, simply to please her.
Out of nowhere, tears stung the backs of her eyes. Micah’s act of selflessness had moved her in ways she hadn’t expected. Her first husband had never been as kind, as thoughtful, as infinitely loving as Micah.
Forcing down her emotions, she raised her left hand and lightly skimmed her fingertips across his collarbone. The diamond on her ring finger sparkled as she stepped to the side, trailing her touch over his shoulder.
A low, lusty growl rumbled inside his chest, and he raised his arm as if to stop her.
But she wasn’t ready to be stopped. She wanted to admire her husband. Inspect every inch of his skin, every hard muscle.
“Don’t move.” She eased his arm back down to his side and then slid her palm up his biceps, which flexed under her touch. “Let me look at you.”
As she stepped behind him, her hand swept across the back of his shoulders before she ran both hands down his arms and back up. The hard contours of his flesh rippled beneath her touch.
“Do you like what you see?” He spoke over his shoulder, his low, provocative voice simmering with heat.
Her gaze danced over his back, his arms, his firm ass. “Mm, very much.”
She was a horse trainer admiring her prize stallion. She had committed to the purchase, now she would take a moment to appreciate the fine lines of sleek muscle along his back, the coiled potential of his hips, the unbridled strength of his legs.
Smoothing both palms down the center of his back, on either side of his spine, she absorbed his warmth and reveled in the way his muscles tensed under her touch.
His hands squeezed into fists as if it were taking an enormous amount of restraint to keep from moving. “What are you doing to me, female?”
She smiled, hesitated for only a moment, then pushed her hands beneath the elastic waist of his pants and over the firm, rounded globes of his ass, scraping the skin with her nails. Leaning forward, she pressed a sultry kiss against the back of his shoulder, then said, “I’m admiring what belongs to me now.”
His body contracted as he snarled like a vicious tiger ready to pounce. “What belongs to you?”
“That’s right.” Her teeth scraped his skin before she traced the curves of his muscles with her lips. “This is my body now.” She pressed veiled breasts to his back. “I own you, Micah Black.” She slid her hands around to the front, cupping his balls with one hand and stroking his erection with the other.
He fell still, dropping back his head.
“This belongs to me.” She stroked up to the head, swirled her palm, then slid her hand back down.
“Fuck, Sam.” His chest rose sharply as she stroked him again, then shivered as he exhaled.
Her lips pressed against the nape of his neck. “You’re my husband now, which means I get to do whatever I want to your body, whenever I want to.”
“Is that so?” He pulled away and turned around as he pushed down the waist of his pants to release his cock.
Biting her lip, she nodded. “It’s the law.”
“The law?” He took a step toward her.
She took a step back. “That’s right?”
He stalked her as she backed up toward the pillows stacked in thick piles on the floor. “Whose law? Human?”
She bit her lip but didn’t respond. The sensually predatory shadows in his eyes had stolen her voice. All she could manage was a lusty exhale.
He stopped, nostrils flaring as his gaze raked her from head to toe. “Do you want to know my law?” His hand whipped out and snatched her wrist with such speed, she couldn’t have evaded him if she’d wanted to.
Her pulse picked up speed, and her breath quickened. “Yes,” she said, her voice nothing but an aroused whisper.
As a wicked smile flitted across his face, he spun her around and drove her to the wall.
She cried out as he flung the skirt of her nightie up and gripped her ass. “This?” He spanked her, making her knees quake and her fingers curl against the brick as the wetness between her legs intensified. “And this?” His hand plunged down the front of her between her legs, his fingers slashing through her folds and flattening harshly against her clit. “All this is mine.” His voice came from right beside her, right next to her ear.
Her body was his. As his was hers.
He took a step back, and she turned to face him, holding up her nightie and spreading her legs to display her naked sex, waxed smooth. Hairless. Just like a vampire’s. His eyes narrowed, and his nostrils flared again as if he could smell how aroused she was. A sound that was something between pain and pleasure, admiration and confusion, greed and restraint, tore at his throat.
“This is yours, Micah.” She opened her legs wider and slid her fingers down, finding her clit and drawing full, wide circles around it. “No other man—no other male—will ever touch me again. Only you.”
Micah stared, lust-drunk, as her fingers teased her clit. His chest pumped so heavily his whole body rose and fell. He was a male split between desires: stand and watch, or act and participate.
Sam decided for him.
Pushing away from the wall, she shoved him hard enough to knock him over. He landed on the pile of pillows with a soft thump a moment before she straddled him, grabbed his hands, and shoved them to the plushness on either side of his head.
He sneered, eyes alive, full of fire. “She likes it rough on her wedding night.”
“With you, I like it rough anytime.”
He rocked his hips, making his erection slide between her slick labia. “Didn’t you say something earlier about wanting to fuck the hell out of me tonight?” Before she could respond, he lobbed her to the side, onto her back, and landed on top of her. Now he held her hands down. “I’m about to steal your thunder, baby.”
Her eager body squirmed, but there was no escaping him. And that served only to transform her arousal from a bonfire to an inferno. He knew how much she enjoyed being held down . . . how much it turned her on to fight him. There was something exhilarating about the fake fear that being held down awakened inside her. To lose a vital component of defense rendered her almost helpless, and while she trusted Micah not to hurt her, she couldn’t help the tremor of panic that caused her core to tense, her legs to tighten, and her throat to constrict around her empty breath.
She strained to free her arms, pulling, tugging. But it was no use. His hold was rock solid, his grip shackling her wrists like iron shackles. She tried to rock side to side to dislodge him, but he moved with her, teasing her with his cock pressed against her sex, using his legs to subdue hers, his body to pin hers, his hands to keep hers pressed against the pillows.
And he smiled. A playfully sinister smile. As if he were merely placating her desire to resist, toying with her. Which, of course, he was. He was ten times stronger than she was and could easily restrain her so that she couldn’t even flinch. But he liked when she pretended to fight too. It turned him on just as much as it did her.
Hidden in his dark smile was a promise that he would eventually give her what she wanted. After she worked for it, of course. After she had strained her arousal into a desperate frenzy. Then he would claim her, when her senses were heightened to a fever pitch.
She was already volcanic, breathing hard, ready to detonate from the exertion that had sent her hormone-flooded libido into the stratosphere.
Giving up escape, she settled forcefully into the pillows and searched his dark gaze. “Touch me,” she said, panting hard. She needed Micah’s touch tonight in a way she’d never needed it before. She needed its reassurance. Its safety. It’s freedom. “Kiss me.”
His black eyebrows flinched downward as if he didn’t understand the direction her thoughts had taken, but he didn’t make her wait for what she’d asked for. His lips found hers with the fury of a male possessed. A male determined to take what legally belonged to him now.
She lifted her head from the pillow, strengthening their connection, her tongue dancing with his in a storm of mutual domination, breaking away only long enough to say, “Fuck me. Fuck me hard.”
She needed him to be brutal. She needed to feel his force, his will, his strength. Only then could she be truly cleansed of the past, on this, the most important night of her life.
He released her hands long enough to shove her legs apart, then he plunged into her with a harsh grunt, all the way to his balls.
Yes! God, yes!
He gripped both her wrists inside one hand, held her down, and thrust into her hard and deep, to a severe rhythm bordering on ludicrous. His body bent like a bow as he ripped his mouth from hers and clamped down on her nipple, through her gown. He was so rough that one of his fangs ripped a hole in the lace, which he tore away with his teeth to reveal her bare breast.
Savage. Feral. He’d been stripped down to raw matter. Nothing remained of decorum, of etiquette. He was pure need. Pure lust. Pure unmitigated fervor and unadulterated desire.
And exactly what she needed.
Behind closed eyes, colored orbs danced and flashed. She dropped her head back, mouth open, gulping down vast draws of oxygen with every inhale and moaning like a banshee with every exhale. Lights flickered across her vision as the pleasure rose, unbidden, like an out-of-control train careening down the side of a mountain.
Before she could register what was happening, she forcibly climaxed, gritting her teeth and straining against the hold Micah had on her wrists. Still, he took her, relentlessly driving her to the edge of reason. Beyond reality. To the absolute limits of her senses.
Then something remarkable happened. Something that had never happened to her before. Her soul seemed to open, and she felt like she was falling, then floating, then simply suspended. Like she was inside a thick, warm cloud. Her past fell away, as did the shackles that had subdued her for years, since she met Steve.
At some level, she was aware of her body releasing again, of her voice saying yes over and over, of Micah plunging deep inside her as he came in a torrent of passion that layered her body like fiery blankets. But she wasn’t fully aware. Not so much that when Micah pushed up on his arms and said her name she heard him.
She was in a dream state, lost in subspace.
He hadn’t dominated her to get her there. Just been himself. His true self. Naked to his soul, authentic in his fearsomeness, as well as in his devotion.
Here, there was no past. No pain. Nothing to fear. Only joy. Only love.
Only her and Micah. Together. In love.
A united front against a common enemy: Steve.
And as she lay surrounded by Micah’s love, she knew what she had to do to finally be free of her past, once and for all.
_________
Micah brushed back his hair and stared down at Sam’s blissed, dazed eyes. He was still trying to catch his breath, his cock still twitching inside her.
“Sam?”
Her mind was nothing but a hazy fog, but he sensed that wherever her thoughts were, she was in euphoria.
Subspace.
He’d finally gotten her there, and he hadn’t even been trying.
In the past, he’d taken dozens of subs to subspace. He’d taken Trace there during their first session. But Sam wasn’t his sub. She liked to play, but he never got rough. Not with her. He spanked her, lightly flogged her, put her in bondage, but it was more fun and games than serious D/s action.
Never had she entered subspace. At least not like this. She was deep, so far inside her head he could barely see where she was or what she was thinking.
“Hey, baby . . .” He caressed her sweat-dampened hair off her forehead. “Sam . . .?”
She slowly blinked, her eyes drifting back into focus as the fog gently lifted from her thoughts. He caught a ghostly image just before it disappeared.
“He’s gone,” she said.
Steve. She was talking about Steve.
“I know.” That’s the image he’d seen. As she came out of subspace, she turned her back on him, and he disappeared.
“I’m free.”
“We both are.” He kissed her, long and slow, making love to her lips.
He still hungered for her, his body still hard inside hers. He’d fucked her, cleansing her, christening her to a new beginning that freed her from the past. And now that she was fully his, liberated from the last stubborn vestiges of Steve’s memory, he would make love to her, unencumbered by her old life.
He brought her to pleasure repeatedly, helped by her raging pregnancy hormones, and she gave him pleasure in kind. His desire for his bride—his lifemate—knew no bounds, and neither did her yearning for him. For hours, they lost themselves in each other, putting the mountain of pillows to good use until their bodies finally gave out.
She held him firmly against her, her breath panting in soft warm puffs against his neck and chest. Another orgasm faded within his body as he kissed her temple and pushed up onto his elbows, shifting her to lay beside him.
A chenille blanket rested over their legs in a twist of buttery warmth.
“You’re like a different person,” he murmured, caressing her face with the tips of his fingers.
She smiled and turned her face into his palm, kissing it. “I feel like a different person.”
He grinned affectionately. “Just as long as the Sam I fell in love with is still in there somewhere.”
“She is. She’s just a better version of herself now.”
“Why? Because she got married to the greatest dude ever to walk the earth?” He smirked and combed back her disheveled hair.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, wow. Such modesty.”
“Modesty’s my middle name, baby.”
She laughed. “Modest is not a word I would use to describe you, Micah.”
“How about sexy?”
“Duh.”
“Funny?”
“Sometimes, especially when you refer to yourself as modest.”
He snuggled closer and kissed the corner of her mouth. “How about husband?”
Her arms wound around his shoulders. “Definitely. Most definitely husband.”
Brushing back her hair again, he scanned the depths of her eyes. “Is that why you’re a better version of yourself? Because you’re my wife now?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“You saw. You felt it. I know you did.”
She was referring to her mental dismissal of Steve. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I saw.”
She blinked up at him and shifted closer. “He’s gone.” It was the same thing she’d said in the moment. “He can’t hurt me now.” Her eyes sparkled, alive with hope. “I can’t even feel him anymore.”
“Good. I don’t want you to feel him. I only want you to feel me.” He bent forward until his lips met hers in a long, steady kiss.
“I definitely feel you,” she said when their lips parted.
“And I feel you.” He kissed her again, then pulled back, pulled her left arm from around his back, and dropped his gaze to her joined engagement ring and wedding band as his thumb rubbed them. “Now we’re going to do this my way.” He brought her wedding band to his lips and kissed it.
“Your way?” She grinned tiredly and lay her head back down. “It seems we’ve done it every way to Sunday if you ask me.” She glanced around at the tousled pillows and the disheveled blankets strewn in every direction.
“I’m talking about mating vows,” he said, his tone serious.
“Oh.” She bit her bottom lip. “I see.”
He’d taken her vows, and now he wanted her to take his. Vampire to davala.
Taking mating vows did nothing to affect the way he felt about her, but he was leaving nothing to chance. They would be properly mated according to both their traditions.
He helped her sit up as he pulled his legs in and turned to face her.
“Repeat after me,” he said.
She nodded and nervously licked her lips.
“I love you, Micah Black.” He spoke quietly.
“I love you, Micah Black.” She waited for the next line.
“You are my lifemate, my lover, and my friend.”
She reverently repeated his words.
“Your life is my life, as mine is yours.”
Her eyes glistened as she said the line back to him.
“I will honor you forever.”
When she finished, a single tear trailed from her eye.
“My turn.”
“I love you, Samantha Black.” He emphasized her new last name, making her smile. “You are my lifemate”—he kissed her—”my lover”—another kiss—”and my friend. Your life is my life, as mine is yours.” He paused, kissed her wedding band again, then released her hand and brushed his fingers down her cheek to her chin. “I will honor you forever, until my dying day.” He stared deep into her eyes. “My heart only beats for you now, Sam. Only for you and our unborn children.”
Tears pooled on her eyelids as she nodded, unable to speak, and when she blinked, they spilled down her face.
Words weren’t needed to convey how she felt. He could see it in her thoughts. Theirs was a love to rival the greatest love stories throughout history. She had saved him from the tragedy of his past, and he had saved her from the pain of hers.
Now they were one in every way possible. She was his bride, his wife, his mate, and he was her husband, her lover, her protector.
The last ten days had brought a major shift into his life. One filled with exaltation and burden. She would help him shoulder the latter and celebrate the former. She took an equal share in all that happened to him now, as he did with her.
He was no longer a lone star in the night sky. He was a star among many. A star with a family. His father had returned to him. He had an uncle and a brother. He even had cousins.
And now he had a bride.
A bride who carried his twins.
A new age was dawning on earth. One filled with uncertainty and the threat of war, but also one signifying strength and solidarity.
And he was at the center of it all.
His enemies should be afraid. Very afraid. Because he had something to fight for now.
And fight he would.