I am delirious with wedding joy.

I’ve soaked it all in—the fairy lights strung over the reception hall, the laughter of new friends and old friends enjoying each other, and Graham’s face in every camera flash—and they’ve combined like happiness punch to flood my veins with a champagne drunk that’s mostly in my head. I stopped drinking long before we left the reception hall so Graham wouldn’t have to carry me out.

He carried me into the Presidential Suite at the hotel anyway.

He carried me here, laid me on the bed as reverently as he would a queen, and lifted my dress like a wench in the barn, the plug hitting the carpet with a muffled thud.

Now his head dips between my legs, tongue hot and stroking over every inch of my folds.

I’m delirious with that, too.

Graham holds my legs apart with an iron grip. I’m writhing in that grip, my body wrung out from pleasure, and yet he’s still licking, fucking me with his tongue. We’re not done yet. We’re not done until he says we’re done.

He drives his tongue into me again and I arch back against the comforter.

Something did shift when we got married. It was not a performance, those promises, even if we’re still discovering what it means to be together.

Right now, it means that I am fearless in his hands. Belonging to Graham Blackpool is the most dangerous risk I’ve ever taken, but there’s safety in that belonging, too.

He bears down on my clit, sucking and swirling his tongue over the swollen flesh and I dissolve into the heat of release.

My hands slide down to his hair. “Fuck. Fuck.”

He lifts his head away from my pussy while I’m still coming down from the high. “Language, sweetness.”

“I’m not sorry.”

Graham circles my opening with two fingers, lazily, as if we have all the time in the world. “Would you like to be sorry?”

My heart flares. This is not a game we’ve ever discussed playing before. It’s not a game I’ve thought of playing before. I can sense immediately it would be contained within the circle of his arms, within the walls of our room—of all the rumors and whispers I’ve seen splashed across the papers about Graham, a full-on BDSM lifestyle is not one of them. He won’t have me crawling through the streets at his feet.

But in here?

“Yes. Make me sorry.”

* * *

He makes me sorry.

He strips off my wedding dress and bends me over his knee, and I brace for a spanking. I’m hot for a spanking. I know it the moment I feel his cock, hard like steel through his pants, against my side.

It never comes.

Instead, he commands me to keep my legs spread, wide, obscene, and bent over, he does things to me with his fingers that make my juices run down the insides of my legs.

“Look at you. Filthy,” he comments, as if he’s a million miles away, as if I am nothing to him. The falseness of it—I know I am not nothing, I am everything, or most of everything—makes me squirm in his lap.

He brings me to the edge of an orgasm, then takes his hand away.

Then another.

Then another.

Until I’m gripping his pants in both fists, teeth gritted, breath short and ragged. “Please.” I spit the word at his feet, less a prayer than a curse.

“Please what?”

“Please. Fuck me.”

“Ah,” Graham says, as if this is just one of many things he could do with his time. “On your back like a little queen or bent over the bed?”

Another gush of wetness. “Bent over. Like this—”

He scoops me up in one movement and takes me to the bed. The comforter is wedged against my hips and he bends me over, hand firm on my back, until my pussy is totally exposed to the air once again. I hear his zipper and a clink as his pants fall to the floor, and the whisper of his other clothes adding to the pile. His crown shoves up against my entrance.

“Your’e my wife now,” he says, his thumb rubbing over the small of my back.

“Please, husband.” I close my fists over the comforter. “Fuck me.”

“Show me how much you want it.”

I reach my hands back and spread myself for him.

He groans, low and animal, and thrusts forward.

God, I’ll never get sick of this—the way it always feels new, always feels like the first time, because he’s so big, because I have to open myself entirely for him. He’s unrelenting and I crave it, love it, shake and tremble around it all the way in and all the way back out.

We find our rhythm and I come again. I’ve come so much it hurts but in the center the pain blooms into pleasure. I realize it’s me who’s crying out, me who’s so loud that Graham puts a hand out to cover my mouth so that I call into his palm.

His release is epic, powerful, so hard it makes makes it hard to stand up, makes me weak in the knees, but he won’t let me fall.

When it’s over, I laugh.

I laugh with joy and relief and a certain sadness that this wasn’t all our doing but we’ve made it ours, and Graham lifts me onto the bed, collapsing beside me.

He runs a hand over my beautiful hairstyle, wrecked from our activities, and looks into my eyes, catching his breath. “If you think I could leave you, you’re crazy.”

“No. I couldn’t think that. It would destroy me.” My eyes flutter closed but his hand keeps moving over my hair, so gentle that I’m not sorry, I’m not sorry at all.

I sleep until it crashes into my consciousness—a knock on the door.