I’LL HAVE TO SCRAPE THIS SMILE off my face when this is over. And if I have to sign one more autograph, my hand may just detach and walk off in protest. Sharing a space with Rhyson is unlike any other experience I’ve had. We had meet and greets after shows on Luke’s tour. We did mall appearances. Malcolm even arranged a showcase once for all of his artists, very similar to this one. Except this one features Rhyson Gray. And I’m witnessing the fervor of his fans up close.
So many celebrities pretend they don’t want the attention and just love the music. Rhyson actually lives that way with his disguises and practically hibernating in the studio. He wants to walk outside, to live his life and not be recognized, not be bothered. But this is the trade-off for his passion to perform and create, so he lives with it. As I watch the line of people waiting for hours just to get a moment with him, I know Rhyson would never choose this. Never seek this. Too much of it would be soul-eating for him.
I still don’t know what happened with him and Dub, but it couldn’t have been great for Rhyson to respond the way he did. Every once in a while, our eyes catch and hold. The tumultuous memories of the heated moments in that corridor spark between us before we each return to autographs and fans. A shiver writhes up my spine and I cross my legs to contain the fire he started in my panties. My imagination is inescapable, though. My memory of his fingers working inside me, of his eyes watching my body intently for signs of surrender—faultless.
“Everything okay over here?” Bristol comes to stand beside me, inspecting the mass of people still waiting to see Rhyson. “Looks like you’re done. So’s everyone else.”
“As you can see,” I say, tipping my head in the direction of his seemingly never-ending line. “He’s not.”
Rhyson stands to take a few pictures. A clump of people rush forward at once, disturbing the orderly flow of things. My heart cramps in my chest for the few moments I can’t see more of him than the top of his dark head.
“I think we need to shut this down, Bristol.” My words come out strained. Ever since Rhyson told me the story about the stalker standing in his kitchen with a knife, I’ve felt as fiercely protective of him as he must feel of me. Maybe we shouldn’t have come. I want to lock him away in our bedroom and not share any part of him with these people.
“I think you’re right.” Bristol walks over and whispers to Gep, who nods and signals one of his team members to move closer to Rhyson. I move too. The longer he’s standing in that crowd unprotected and vulnerable, the sweatier my palms become. I press my way through the knot of fans until I’m at his side. I casually hook my elbow through his. He looks down at me, smiles, and gives me a quick kiss.
When I look up, I encounter a set of blue eyes boiling with suppressed emotion. It’s directed at me. I know it. A frisson, some ancient sense, warns me about the girl standing a few feet away. It’s just an exchange we make with our eyes, but I’ve never felt more certain of danger. All the other faces are eager, starstruck. Hers is resentful, like I took something from her. She’s a few inches away when I see something shiny glint in her hand. I don’t think. I don’t rationalize. Fear and the need to protect Rhyson set me in motion before I can work out a plan or strategize. I press my back to his chest, inserting myself between him and that resentment, between him and the girl, and I shove my hand as hard as I can into her chest. She stumbles back and falls. All around I hear gasps, startled sounds at what I’ve done.
“Kai, what the hell?” Rhyson looks at me, confusion sparking in his grey eyes.
He reaches down to help the young woman to her feet. Even with all eyes on me, wondering what happened, I want to rip her hand from his. I want to urge him not to get too close. I look for the shiny item I saw her gripping. It’s a pen. A silver pen probably for an autograph. God, I’m being paranoid and feel like an idiot.
“So sorry about that.” Bristol rushes in for damage control. “Just an accident.”
“She pushed me.” The girl’s eyes run hot with anger in the pale, narrow face. It mottles her skin.
“She didn’t mean to.” Bristol aims a meaningful glance my way, silently compelling me to agree. “Right, Kai?”
“Um, yes. I’m so sorry,” I mumble. “It was an accident. I hope you’re okay. I apologize.”
“No, you pushed me.” The girl’s eyes never leave my face, and her voice doesn’t yield. She won’t be soothed. She and I both know it was no accident.
“No, I’m sure it was an accident.” Rhyson pats her shoulder and bends to her height so he can look right in her eyes, his effortless charm finally breaking through that resentment. Her expression softens until she’s smiling at him.
“Tell you what,” Rhyson says. “Do you have tickets for the showcase tomorrow?”
The girl shakes her head, eagerness replacing the resentment and anger.
“Bristol, let’s get her two tickets.” Rhyson widens his smile for her. “Just to show how sorry we are.”
He subtly elbows me in the ribs.
“Uh, yes,” I manage to say. “So sorry. My mistake for, um . . . stumbling into you.”
Her smile calcifies a little when our eyes meet.
“No problem,” she says. “I understand.”
“Everyone, thank you for being so patient.” Bristol raises her voice so as many people in the line as possible can hear. “But Rhyson has to rehearse. He’ll be available for a few minutes after tomorrow night’s showcase. Hope to see you then.”
Rhyson grasps my elbow firmly, catches Gep’s eyes, and jerks his head toward the penthouse elevator. We’re practically marching, and I’m tripping over my dignity trying to keep up with him.
“Slow down, Rhys,” I say weakly. I figure he’s thrown by the incident, but I’ll fall if he doesn’t let up.
As soon as the elevator doors close, I expect him to let loose whatever pulls his lips into a thin line and bunches his hands into fists by his side, but he’s silent, eyes trained on the ascending illuminated numbers. Impatience rolls off him, like he’d climb the elevator shaft himself if that would get us there faster. Once we reach the penthouse level, he recaptures my arm and drags me to our suite.
“Gep, we’re fine,” he flings over his shoulder. “You can go.”
“I’ll stay out here, if that’s okay.” Gep glances up and down the corridor.
“It’s not okay.” Rhyson breaks stride to face his security team lead, matching him frown for frown. “No one can even access this floor without a key. Go. I’ll call you if we decide to leave.”
Gep hesitates before turning to press the elevator button.
On the other side of our door, the opulence of the suite fades into oblivion. Diffusing this tension absorbs all my focus and energy.
“Rhys, I can explain.”
“You don’t have to explain.” His eyes slice into me. “You pushed her.”
“Yes.” I nod, unable and unwilling to lie to him. “But I thought—”
“That she was going to hurt me. I know. I could tell by how you shoved me aside like some bodyguard before you pushed the poor girl to the floor.”
My mouth slams closed over the defenses and excuses queued up in my throat.
“Well, yes, but I—”
“And you thought the thing to do if someone was threatening me was to put yourself in danger. To put our child in danger.” His false calm barely veneers the emotion fuming underneath. “That made sense to you, right?”
“I didn’t think,” I admit softly. I hadn’t. The baby didn’t even occur to me. My own life didn’t occur to me. Only protecting him.
“You’re damn right, you didn’t think.” His voice erupts into the empty room. “Fuck, Kai! Don’t ever do that again.”
Anxiety has left a film of perspiration over my skin. I’m stuck in a pot boiling over with his anger and frustration. I stride toward the kitchen to find escape and a bottle of water.
“Do not walk away from me.” His voice gains ground on me until he’s standing in the kitchen like a shadow. “This conversation isn’t over.”
“It is if you’re gonna ask me to do anything differently next time.” I address my words to the suite refrigerator. Residual panic still heats my face and shoulders. I stand in the open door and revel in the artificially cool air.
I turn, bottle of water in hand, to find him right there, blocking my path. His arms rise on either side of my head, trapping me against the stainless steel door.
“Rhys.”
His name leaves me on a breath. He’s so much bigger than I am. So close. An aura of desperation vibrates around him. I’m caught in it like a web, a silken trap I want to twist myself deeper into. I’m inappropriately turned on by the force of it. Any sane woman would be frightened by the intensity of the silvered eyes blaring his frustration. Of the corded forearms like bars imprisoning me against a major appliance. But I know he would never hurt me, and all I can think about is how all that raw emotion would feel exploding inside me. Unleashed on me. How he would ruin me from the inside out. How I would love every second of it.
“Did it ever occur to you that I thought she was a threat too?” The hot breath fueling his words singes my lips. Makes me burn brighter. “That in those few seconds where you were scared for me, I was scared out of my mind for you?”
I lift my eyes to his, stripping away the outer skin of his frustration, biting through the flesh of his anger, until there at the core, I see it. Fear. It’s a dark note we both hear, a dissonant chord connecting us.
“How would I live with myself if a knife, a bullet, any threat meant for me, hurt you?” His voice cracks, and he closes his eyes, shuttering that fear, but I still feel it. With his forehead dropped to mine, it seeps through my skin. Sinks into my cells. I absorb it, and wonder if he feels my fear too.
That first night, right after the incident, the verse my parents taught me reassured me. I believed it, but the longer we’ve gone with no leads, with no idea who was behind that stunt in the parking lot, the fainter that truth becomes. Since we arrived in Vegas, it has offered me little assurance. I don’t know if love actually does cast out fear, but I know I’ll do anything to preserve our future. If I didn’t know it before, the moment I thought that fan was a threat, it became real to me.
I cup his face between my hands, forcing his eyes to mine.
“I would do anything for you.” I inch up on my toes so my lips brush against his when I speak. “I wouldn’t even pause if I had to die for you, Rhyson.”
“No.” He clips it out, squeezing his eyes shut and rolling his forehead in a slow denial against mine. “Don’t say that. Baby, don’t ever say that. I couldn’t stay here without you.”
Tears rise in my throat. We haven’t talked much more about the shirt, about what it means, about someone being unhappy enough with our engagement they’d do something so awful. About what else they could try or be capable of. We dove into this showcase, probably as much to distract ourselves from the incident as to prepare for the event. It’s only now that I grasp how heavily it has weighed on both our minds. How we’ve both considered the sacrifices we’d make for the other if it came to that.
“You’d die for me wouldn’t you, Rhyson?” I whisper.
“Twice if I could,” he responds without hesitation, voice husky and eyes burning a hole through the last of my control.
I strain up, locking my elbows around his neck. He swoops in, delving into my mouth and palming the back of my head, crushing passion between our lips like a ripe fruit that bursts, that pops, and we sip its juices from one another. And all the things we haven’t said, the fears and the uncertainty, flow from me to him, from him to me, in a wordless dialogue of lips and tongue and teeth. He kneads my breast through my dress. He licks down my neck, his mouth open, hot and wet over my breast through the thin linen.
“Get this off.” His guttural words rumble against my nipple. “Get it fucking off.”
My fingers fumble with the little button at my neck he helped me with in the elevator hours ago. We’ve been building this fire ever since then—every touch, every breath. Even seeing Dub only poured gasoline on something simmering between us all day. The top finally falls to my waist, slumping around my hips, and I bare myself for him. He squats to draw one nipple into the hot cavern of his mouth while he squeezes and rolls the other.
He drops to his knees, reaches under my dress and rolls my panties over my legs and to my feet. I step out eagerly, already damp with anticipation. He pulls one leg over his shoulder and disappears beneath the hem of my dress. He knows where I want his mouth. I’m dripping for him. Begging for him, but he kisses inside my thigh, slowing to suck and lick, drawing on the flesh with such strength I know he’s marking me. It’s an eternity before his fingers spread me, forever before he sucks the button of flesh nestled there. He draws the lips into his mouth, groaning and gripping my butt, pressing me deeper into his hunger. Consumed, he sups between my legs. I slap one hand against the slick surface of the refrigerator behind me. The other grips his shoulder for balance, for purchase, for an anchor in the riptide. A kaleidoscope of sensations explodes through me, fanning out from my core and quaking through my heart.
“Rhys!” The orgasm demands his name from me on a sob. “Baby, yes. Please . . . sweet Jesus . . . please.”
I don’t think I’ve ever come so hard, so fast, but I’m like a keg primed to blow. It’s not even the physical touch of him in the most secret, vulnerable places of my body. It’s the way we touch one another in the secret, most vulnerable places of our souls. I grind against his mouth as I come down, limp and barely upright. His head emerges from beneath my dress, the dark hair rumpled and bronze-streaked. His lips glisten. He traces the words tattooed over my ribcage, his eyes and fingers venerate, worshipful.
“I love . . . I need . . .” The muscles of his throat work around the emotion darkening his eyes. He doesn’t have to say another word. I’m hollow inside without him. I need it too, tunneling my fingers into his hair and nodding frantically.
He lifts me at my waist, holding me above him, carrying me, kissing me, walking swiftly to the dining room table and shoving the elaborate centerpiece aside. He lays me out and crawls over me. I wiggle my way out of the dress altogether until my naked back and bottom touch the table’s cool mahogany wood. Eyes never leaving mine, he sheds his clothes, until he’s as naked as I am. My fingers burn with the need to trace the notes and lyrics decorating his lean chest. Smooth, golden skin stretches taut over the muscles of his arms and shoulders. His breaths grow heavier with every second, contracting the tightly stacked abdominal muscles. I reach between us and grab his cock. It pulses hot and hard in my fingers. My lips wrap around his nipple, and I suck and pull. Suck and pull. Suck and pull until he’s groaning, eyes shut tight from the sensual torture.
“Pep!” His voice booms in the quiet suite. “Dammit, yes.”
He shackles my wrists in one hand over my head, pressing one of my legs back, cracking me open. I hook the other leg over his hip, and he raids my body. The first thrust is so rough and deep the air expels from my chest, but I urge him on, pull him in closer. I can’t get him deep enough. I need him thrusting into my soul.
“More.” I refuse to let his eyes go. “It’s all yours, Rhyson.”
Whispering “fuck yes” into the hair fanning around my head and shoulders, he releases my wrists and hooks an arm under my knee. The cadence his body sets is bruising, frenetic, scooting me inches up the table every time he pulls back and plunges forward like a battering ram. I dig my heels into his ass, urging him deeper and deeper and harder and faster; begging him to rush past my limits and over my borders. I meet every thrust. We give and take, our hips engaged in a salacious call and response. I arch up my chest for him to ravage my nipples, sending him back and forth between them, one breast and the other, biting and licking and suckling unrelentingly. My breasts are so swollen and red and deliciously tender, even his breath panting over them pulls a trigger in me. A scream rends me in half, and my love and desperation and fear—they gush out all over him. He pounds into me, frenzied, bellowing, head flung back, neck strained with the release. And his love pours into me. Hot and liquid, it fills me.
He slows until he’s still. Our breath breaches the tiny space separating our lips. I inhale the smell of our bodies tangled. My essence and his, mingled. The scent of our souls communing, a plume of sweet smoke, is an opiate to the senses that intoxicates me. I’m high on us together.
He caresses my face, fingertips following the line of my eyebrows, my cheekbone, my lips. All the while, his eyes plumb mine, searching and finding the epicenter of this storm. We are both shaken, emotion trembling through our muscles and fusing our gaze. There’s nothing else in this world I want to see.
“Marry me,” he says hoarsely, propped on one hand, his stomach and thighs taut and tensed above me.
I blink up at him. Thrown and dazed and still lightheaded. I cup his chin and find a way, even in this torrent of emotion, to smile.
“I am.” I wiggle the finger weighted with my engagement ring.
He gives a swift shake of his head, his face set in familiar determined lines.
“No, tonight. Marry me tonight. I don’t want to wait.”
“Rhys, you don’t have to—”
“I have to. I want to.” He takes my lips sweetly, whispering against them. “Don’t make me wait. We’re in Vegas, the only place it can happen tonight.”
“Is this about Dub?”
He narrows his eyes and tenses into stone.
“You really think I’d let him dictate anything in our life?”
“No, but you have to admit the timing is odd.” I reach up to caress his jaw, wanting to loosen the tension Dub’s name introduced.
“I told you before I didn’t want to wait, Pep.”
“But I-I, well, I thought you wanted the ceremony,” I stutter. “The dress. Our family and friends. Our . . . all of it.”
“I do want all of that, and we’ll have it. Later. But the marriage, I want that to start tonight.” He feathers kisses over my face and down my neck. His mouth is a persuasion. His heart hammering into mine, an offer I can’t refuse. “Baby, say yes.”
“But, Rhys, if we—”
“I won’t be any more certain in a few months than I am right now. Than I am tonight,” he says. “We’ll work everything out later. All the plans and the schedules and the details. It’ll happen. I’ll give you the wedding of your dreams. I promise. But tonight, let’s just jump.”
He tips my chin up, eyes imploring.
“Leap for me, Kai.”
Everything heavy—the fear that has hung over me like a cloud since that night in the parking lot, the panic today thinking someone wanted to hurt him, everything that would hold me back, falls away at the love in his eyes. At the promise sketched in every line of his face. A smile, so wide and so irrepressibly sure, fights its way through the emotion swelling in my chest and settles on my face. And I don’t think before I speak.
I just leap.
“Yes.”