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 Dima for Garrett. 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 Igor 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. Dunn. Says his name is Mr. Dunn?” She cocked an eyebrow.
“There’s no Mist…” I started to protest, but I stopped and smiled. “Send him in, Kylie.”
Garrett 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 said. “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 Garrett. For so much of my life, I had taken pride in being able to stand on my own two feet. With Garrett, 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.
Garrett Norton had changed my life so much over the last year. He bought a house for us to move into together, and the Crowns of Satan 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 Garrett 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 Garrett 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 Garrett 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. Norton,” I teased as I entered my office.
“Hello, Ms. Dunn. 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. Norton? 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. Dunn,” 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. Dunn. 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 Garrett 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. Garrett 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?” Garrett 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.
I kissed him in the backseat of the car. Our lips worked together passionately, and our mouths opened. I could taste his breath as his tongue probed into my mouth. I even tried to judge by the way he was kissing me if it was going to be a ring or not. His kiss was deeply passionate, the controlling way he kissed me when his desire was hard between his legs.
I took his passion as a good sign and kissed him back, answering his passion and desire with my own. I dug my hand into his hair. I squeezed my legs together in my tight little skirt, trying to contain the wet, aching desire growing between them.
I didn’t want to go to dinner anymore. I wanted him to tell the driver to pull over into a dark, abandoned parking lot so we could make love in the backseat of the car like a couple of horny teenagers after prom, eager to explore each other’s bodies and enjoy the love they felt for each other.
I just wanted him inside me again. It had been over a year, and every time I saw him, every time I kissed him, every time we touched, I wanted to fuck his brains out. I reached down between his legs and rubbed the hardening shaft behind the thin fabric.
He grabbed my thin wrist gently and pulled away from our kiss.
“Not yet, baby,” he said with a suggestive laugh. “You can’t have dessert before your dinner.”
“Oh, so that’s dessert?” I asked him. “So you must be pretty sure of this surprise of yours,” I teased.
It was a damn ring. I knew it. There was no way it could have been anything else. I felt myself throbbing for him now. I could feel my heart pulsing inside of me. He was going to propose to me at dinner. I knew it! I just had to play dumb until after he popped the question, or else I risked ruining his surprise. I wanted him to think I was really surprised.
Hell, I was already surprised that he was even thinking about it. I didn’t know he’d even been planning it, sneaky bastard. But that was okay. I was going to floor him with my own surprise after he asked me to marry him. Of course I was going to say yes. I was going to scream it in the restaurant and again all night in bed as he pumped me full of himself again and again to celebrate our engagement and our growing family.
Damn it. I didn’t want to go to dinner. I wanted to skip the restaurant and the food. I wanted to go home, let him propose to me under the night sky and then make sweet, passionate love all night with the love of my life.
The car slowed, and we pulled up to the curb in front of a brightly lit hotel underneath an old, prestigious hotel. The walls of the restaurant were all glass in front, and I could see the bright gold and white light and linens inside.
Yep, I thought, he’s about to propose to me, and then I’m going to whisper in his ear that we’re pregnant.
We walked up the steps to the restaurant arm in arm, and I couldn’t help but feel like we were walking into our future together.
THE END
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