“I never thought it would be that amazing. Especially not the first time.”

“You were amazing,” Sam said, kissing me again before slowly pulling out of me. It was an odd sensation, and I felt the need to squeeze my pelvic floor the moment I was empty.

“Let me get something to help you clean up,” he offered.

As he hopped off the bed, I felt it, this warm seeping feeling of something coming out of me. I tried to squeeze harder but I could still feel it.

Oh no. Is that… blood? Did he actually tear me with that big cock of his, and now I’m bleeding everywhere?

I sat up suddenly, almost too afraid to look but forcing myself to assess the carnage so I’d know if I needed immediate help. What’s the emergency services number in the Cook Islands?

“What the…?” What I saw on the sheets wasn’t blood at all, but this milky-coloured gunk that was streaked with pink. Did that come from me? “Oh, yuck,” I muttered, looking around the room for tissues or something to clean it up. I had no idea if that was normal or not. Holland had always regaled me with detailed tales of her sexual encounters, but she’d never mentioned this. I wanted it gone before Sam saw it and never wanted to touch me again.

Too late.

“I don’t think you bled much,” he said when he re-entered the room with a washcloth in hand.

Desperate to hide the mess and having nothing to wipe it away with, I shifted to the side and covered it with my thigh.

“Is that normal?” I asked, trying to assume some sort of sexy-looking pose so I didn’t look like I’d just given birth to a glob. I went with my knees to the side and an arm over my head. It felt very ‘draw me like one of your French girls’.

Sam knelt on the bed, then tapped my top knee. “Open.”

A coy smile spread across my lips. “Why?”

He lifted the washcloth. “So I can clean you.”

My cheeks burned over the thought of letting him wash my private area. “Oh. No. I can do that.” I reached for the cloth but he held it out of my grasp.

“It would be my pleasure.” He pulled on my knee a little but I clamped my legs shut.

“Nah.” I wrinkled my nose and shook my head.

He laughed. “There’s no need to be embarrassed, peaches. It’s my mess too.”

When I took a moment to meet his eyes, I saw both determination and kindness in them. He obviously really wanted to do this.

“I can clean myself,” I said again.

“I know, but I want to take care if you. Can you let me do that?”

Taking a deep breath, I slowly lifted my knee, granting him access to the massacre between my thighs. Strangely, he didn’t even flinch. Maybe this is normal.

“You might want to lie back and press your knees together next time. You have semen all over your thigh.” He lifted my leg and wiped away the streaky goop.

Semen. That’s what it was. Of course. I felt so relieved.

“Why isn’t there a bunch of blood?” I asked as he was finishing up. “I thought I was supposed to bleed.”

“Not everyone does. There was a little, but it was mostly mixed in with that load I shot inside you.” He gave me a half grin and a wink.

“That’s really crass.” I giggled.

“Yeah but you like it.” He gently pinched my arse and I giggled again.

“You know, I think I like everything about you, Sam.”

He seemed surprised as he set the cloth aside and lay on the bed beside me, his eyebrows lifting as if he thought it was a strange thing to say.

“Should I not?” I asked as he tucked his hand behind his head.

“I don’t know. You just surprise me.”

“In what way?”

“In every way. You’ve taken all this extremely well.”

I flipped over to my stomach. “Worried you’ve married someone slightly insane? Think I might boil your bunny?” I was smiling as I said it, but his eyes found mine quickly. “I’m joking.” I laughed.

“I don’t think you’re insane. A little crazy maybe, but not insane.”

“That makes it so much better.” There was sarcasm in my tone, but I didn’t take any offence. I’d never claimed to be normal.

He turned his body to face mine and started running his fingers up and down my back. I closed my eyes.

“That feels really nice,” I said, happy to move on to other things, like sleeping for instance.

He kept his fingers moving soothingly, but it was like I could hear his brain thinking, so I knew we were going to keep talking. “I guess I just don’t understand why a girl as sweet and amazing as you could be interested in what I have to offer. I mean, I get that you weren’t given a hell of a lot of choice, but you’re just so… cool with it.”

I opened my eyes again. “Would you rather I hated you?”

He shook his head slowly, his expression telling me that the idea pained him.

“Would you rather I was scared and crying all the time?”

His expression remained the same as he shook his head again.

“Then what would you have me do?”

“I don’t know. But we barely know each other. I wonder if there will come a moment when you stop for a second and take a look around, only to realise that this isn’t what you want.”

“My whole life has been something I don’t want.”

“What do you mean?” His expression morphed into concern, and it took a moment for me to realise why he reacted that way.

“I don’t want my life over, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just that I’ve never really been given a choice. I’m the girl who does what she’s told. I’m the best friend’s sidekick. I’m the daughter who never complains. This marriage is probably the first real decision I’ve ever made for me. Granted, the alternative wasn’t the best option, but at least I had a choice. I even got to choose you.” When his expression grew curious, I elaborated. “Jasmine told me that if I wanted to live, I could marry Toby. I said no, that I wanted you. She agreed.”

“Huh.” His hand stopped moving and he rolled onto his back, raking his fingers through his hair.

I pushed up onto my elbows. “Does that bother you?”

He lowered his hands and rested one on the curve of my arse. “Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know how I feel about this entire situation. I mean, I like you. A lot. When you and Holland busted into our property, I thought you had a lot of spunk in you. I thought the way you fought Toby off was the most entertaining thing I’d seen in a long time. Then I liked you more as the evening went on. Did I want to sleep with you? Yes. But did I think I’d found my future wife? No. I’m thirty-five, and the thought of getting married has never crossed my mind. But Jasmine says jump and we say how high.”

“Is that the only reason you agreed to marry me? Because she told you to jump?”

He ran a single finger up the centre of my spine. “I agreed because I liked you and the alternative was….” He paused and frowned. “I didn’t want that to happen to you. You didn’t deserve that.”

“So you wanted me more than you wanted me dead?”

“That’s very blunt, but yes. I wanted you, and I didn’t want to be responsible for ending your life.”

“Have you ever killed someone before?”

“Never.” His response was so fast that I was sure killing would never be a part of his job description. I felt glad over that. I’d witnessed too many sorrow-filled loved ones at funerals over the years. The people who were taken suddenly and violently were always the worst.

“Have you ever seen a dead body before?”

“A couple of drownings at the beach but never close up. Nothing like you would’ve seen.”

“Do you find that odd about me?” I asked. My job had always been a fantastic man repellent.

“Well, I think we’ve already established that you’re a little odd.” He tapped me on the nose, then added, “In the best possible way.”

“You’re the one who married a stranger because your mum told you to. If I’m odd, then what does that make you?”

He smiled. “Completely mental. A little spontaneous.”

“You weren’t nervous about going through with it?”

“You couldn’t tell?”

I scrunched my nose. “You were kind of drunk.”

“A better man might apologise for that,” he said.

“But you’re a Cartwright so you won’t.”

He grinned. “You’re catching on quick. But yes, I was nervous and I hit the liquid courage a little too hard. Nate and I both did. It was a lot to take in. One day he’s playing a game of cat and mouse with a girl he was into, and the next everything blew up in our faces and we needed to marry that girl and her friend to save them. We might be criminals, but we have hearts.”

“What made Jasmine decide death or marriage was the only answer?”

“I don’t fucking know. Women’s logic, I guess.”

“That would mean I’d understand it.”

He chuckled and rolled onto his back, looking up at the ceiling. “I wasn’t part of the conversation, only the result. But from what I gathered, Nate was the one who brought up the marriage idea.”

“So it was a ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ kind of deal?”

“Maybe.” He didn’t seem convinced, and I had a moment where I felt that Sam was just as lost as I was, always going along with choices that weren’t his. Would he be the one who would look around one day and not want me anymore? Or would he always do what he was told out of loyalty? He seemed very loyal.

“Why don’t you tell me about your family,” he said after a moment of quiet, obviously tired of talking about his own.

I sighed. “There isn’t a whole lot to tell. There’s my dad—he’s a funeral director. He’s incredibly devout and believes that all lessons in life can be learned from scripture, and that as long as we have the Bible in our lives, we don’t need anything else. There’s my brother. He’s the golden child who married his high school sweetheart and followed my dad into the family business by becoming an embalmer. He has two perfect children on top of that. My mother, well, she’s a whole other story. Dad says I take after her. Possibly because I’ve always pushed boundaries as far as he was concerned. Mum left us when I was ten. I guess marriage and children weren’t for her, but opiates were, so at least she found her calling.” I gave him a broad smile, even though her leaving was something that pained me greatly. Because of her abandonment, my father became ten times stricter. I wasn’t allowed to go to parties, couldn’t talk to boys, or have any semblance of freedom. I had to sneak around and lie just to have even a snippet of fun. Holland was always my partner in crime, ready with the perfect cover story to feed my father. I’d have had no life growing up without her creativity.

“Your mum’s an addict?”

I nodded. “Didn’t guess that about me, did you? I’ve pretty much been under lock and key ever since she left. Dad is petrified that I’m going to do the same thing. He even chose my career path. I wanted to do beauty, so he organised a job for me at my uncle’s mortuary with them, doing make-up for open casket funerals. That way he could keep an eye on me.”

“I hear there’s quite an art to making them look peaceful.”

“There is. I basically have to recreate their expressions from photos, like a painting on an uneven surface. People look very different when their spark is gone.” I met his eyes, impressed that he even knew.

“I’ll bet you’re really good at it. I see you excelling at everything you try to do.”

The comment seemed honest enough, but it made me uncomfortable nonetheless. I didn’t think I had ever excelled at anything in my life. I wasn’t even second best at anything. I dropped my head and let my shoulder-length hair fall over my eyes. Then I took a breath and brushed it all back before looking at him again. The movement acted as a curtain being drawn and then pulled back to reset the scene—aka my emotions, my mask. Then I was smiling again.

“Why don’t you tell me more about your family?” I suggested.

“What’s there to say that you don’t already know? There are five of us. We’re all in our thirties, still act like we’re in our twenties. And we steal shit. Pretty much sums it up.”

“I doubt that’s all there is to it. For instance, how did you become thieves in the first place? Jasmine is your mother, but where’s your father? Is he still around? Do you all have the same father?”

“We have the same father. He’s currently serving a life sentence or two in the state’s maximum security facility.”

“A life sentence? Was that from stealing or doing something much worse?”

“A job went bad and people died. But he started out like us, got Jasmine into this life. As we grew, she got us into it. It’s the family business.”

The family business. Did that mean I’d have to become a thief too?

“Do you like it?”

“Stealing?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “It’s what I know, what I’m good at. Do you like putting make-up on dead people?”

I shrugged. “It’s what I know, what I’m good at.” He caught my gaze and we both smiled.

“Ever wish you could run away and start all over again?” he asked.

I considered him for a while before giving my answer. “I’m pretty sure I just did.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’ve just moved from one controlling family to another.”

Maybe.

“Ever wish you could run away and start again?”

He reached out and ran his fingers through my hair. “All the damn time.” His honesty made my heart stop.

“Can I ask you a favour?”

“What’s that?”

“If you do decide to run, will you take me with you? You can drop me off somewhere random, but just make sure you take me. I don’t want to be left behind to die.”

His eyes moved from left to right, studying me, while thoughts I could only guess at ran through his mind. Then he leaned closer and pressed a kiss to my shoulder. “Cartwrights don’t run, even when we feel like it. We also don’t leave people behind. I promise to protect you, Alesha. You’re mine now. That makes you one of us.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant to be one of them. It seemed like there were a lot of rules. But with Sam by my side, making me feel as amazing as he had already and offering me his loyalty, I figured I’d be just fine with the rules.

Lucky I was really good at doing what I was told.