My Wicked Devil (Club Wicked) (29 page)

Releasing her nipple with a
pop
, he reached down to where they were joined and stroked his fingers over her stretched labia, to her now postorgasmic, soft clit.

“Kiss me.”

Their lips met, and she practically devoured him. He could feel her desperation, her loneliness, her need for him in her frantic kiss. Keeping his hand busy stroking her little bud back to stiffness, he fisted his other hand in her hair hard enough to sting and slowed their kiss down, took possession of it. She struggled against his grip, then softened and allowed him access to her mouth with a sigh. Lovely, warm, and pliant, she filled his arms and his heart like a dream.

Once her clit was hard again beneath his fingertips, he gripped her hips and began to raise and lower her on his lap. Their gazes met and held. All the feelings he’d been bottling up, trying to keep contained, spilled out.

“I love you.”

She gasped and stilled, his cock deep within her. “I love you too. So very much.”

Not wanting any distance between them, he pulled her closer, and as they kissed, Bryan thought his heart might beat right out of his chest. Each stroke brought him closer to the edge until he shook with the effort of holding back.

He loved her.

“Come for me, my beautiful girl. Please your lord.”

Two hard thrusts later, she finally broke for him, moaning and crying out her release against his neck, her little teeth nipping his skin in a way that made cum boil in his balls. The first blast of pleasure wiped his mind clean of everything but the sensation of pouring his seed into her body, of filling her up with him, of reaffirming his bond with his submissive, his woman, and hopefully someday soon, his wife.

* * * *

Hand in hand, Bryan and Kira strolled through the rose garden of his estate, excited beyond belief at the news they’d received at the doctor’s office.

Pausing by a fading pink rose, Kira leaned down to smell it. Her long hair fell forward over her shoulder, a bright sheaf of red in the late afternoon sunlight. The pretty pale green sundress she wore made the freckles on her chest and shoulders stand out, and he wondered if she’d put on sunblock today and if he should get her a hat. Wisely, he decided not to mention it as she got rather snippy if she felt he was being overprotective with her…at least outside of the bedroom.

She glanced over at him and caught him staring. “What? Do I have a booger hanging out of my nose?”

Rolling his eyes, he brushed a strand of her hair back as she straightened. “Here I was, composing a poem about your beauty, and you, being the typical crude American that you are, think I’m checking out your snot.”

She giggled and rubbed her belly. “True. If I had so much as sniffled, you would have shoved a tissue up my nose by now and been on the phone with the hospital.”

Choosing to ignore that, he held her hand again, and they walked toward the surprise he had waiting for her on the other side of the garden. “Have you thought of any names?”

“Well, now that we know the bump is indeed a girl, I would like to do something that combines the names from our families. My mother sure hinted hard that she’d be delighted if we chose to follow the ‘grand family tradition’ of giving our daughter my mother’s name as a middle name.”

“Thank God her name is Diana. I’d hate to stick a baby girl with a name like Gertrude or Matilda.”

“Hey, I kinda like Matilda.”

Snorting, he gave her butt a pinch. “I’m sure you do.”

They slowed, and Kira stepped closer, then pulled his arms around her. There was more space between them now with her ever-expanding belly in the way, but he loved that solid proof of their union. He needed to get her to agree to an even more visible and permanent representation of their love.

“Kira?”

She looked away from a butterfly she’d been watching and smiled up at him. “Yes?”

“Marry me.”

He winced. Fuck, he’d had this huge speech planned about how wonderful their lives would be together, how much it made sense, and how much he loved her. But what came out sounded more like a command than a request.

She pulled back, confusion and yearning filling her expressive face, but also pain and sorrow. “Bryan, you know I love you, but I don’t know if I can marry you.”

“Why ever not?”

She swallowed hard. “Because I like how things are now.”

He took a step toward her, hurt not only by her rejection but by how she took an automatic step backward. “What are you talking about? I swear to you. You will never need or want for anything. I will keep you safe and provide you with the best life possible.”

“I know that, and that is part of the problem.”

“You don’t want to be happy?”

“No, no. Give me a second to try and say this right.”

She began to pace, and he backed off. The last thing he wanted to do right now was rouse her unpredictable temper, then deal with the tearful aftermath. Shit, if he survived her pregnancy without her killing him, he should go into hostage negotiations.

“Bryan, I love you, I really do, but I can’t live being kept in a gilded cage. I feel like you’d prevent me from taking any risks, from having any dangerous excitement in my life outside of the dungeon. Whenever I drive with you now, you always insist I ride in the passenger seat. I don’t want to ride. I want to drive.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to remain calm. “I’m so protective of you because I care about you. If anything happened to you, or our daughter, I would die.”

“I know, and that’s why I don’t think we can get married. If you’re this protective of me, what will you be like with our daughter? Will you try to keep her in a bubble as well? What if she has my taste for adventure? What if she wants to climb trees that she may fall out of, run through fields that may have holes she could twist an ankle in, or go off on her own adventures? I worry that you’ll force her to be a proper English lady. That she’ll have to live her life constantly being told what she can’t do and have to walk around on eggshells.”

His anger slipped his tight control a bit. “Are we talking about our daughter or you, Kira?”

“Both.” Her lower lip trembled.

“Is anything I say going to make a difference? Or are you already set in your opinion of who and what I am?” He gritted his teeth and took a deep breath. “If I loosened my hold a bit, would you marry me?”

Now she began to cry, and he pulled out the tissues he now carried with him everywhere and handed one to her. She took it and blew her nose. “I don’t know. I want to be with you, I really do. I want the fairy tale of marrying my handsome lord and living happily ever after, but this is the real world with real problems. How do I know if you’ll ever be able to really trust me again? How do I know you won’t go all overprotective crazy with our daughter?”

Suddenly, he realized he did have a way to show her how wrong she was. He smiled down at her, and she stared at him like he’d lost his mind.

“Bryan?”

“Follow me.”

He grabbed her hand and ignored her sputtering protests as he pulled her along. They passed through the edge of the garden and came to the grassy meadow that separated the house from the woods. There, gleaming in the sunlight, with the door freshly painted in tones of blue, purple, and yellow, sat the cottage. He’d wanted to save this surprise until the garden out front had been planted, but he hoped she liked it.

Kira stopped in her tracks. “What is that doing here?”

“Come on.”

Together they walked through the soft grass, accompanied by the sound of birds chattering around them. He could easily imagine spending more summers here, watching their children play, growing old and sharing that same joy with their grandchildren.

Fuck, he was becoming as soft as a girl himself.

They reached the cottage, and Kira paused to examine a potted pink geranium at the foot of the steps. It held a small balloon that said It’s a Girl on it in sparkly writing.

“When did you do this?”

“That must be from Lawrence. I had the cottage moved stone by stone while we went on that three-week tour of visiting your family all over the United States. I was just waiting until we knew if our baby was a boy or a girl. I wanted this to be my gift to you.”

“That is one of the sweetest things anyone has done for me, ever.”

He cleared his throat and pretended to examine the cottage, while in truth hoping she didn’t notice the way her words made his face flush. “Let me tell you. Keeping you away from this side of the house has been a right pain in the arse.”

She grinned at him. “I was wondering why you suddenly wanted to molest me every time I went near the laundry room. I thought maybe you had a laundry fetish in addition to all the other freaky shit you like.”

He laughed and rubbed her bottom. “I seem to recall you are rather fond of my ‘freaky shit’ as well.”

“Hmm, that is true.” She looked up at the door. “Is the bed still in there?”

“No. It’s in storage right now. I’m having it upgraded and then put down into our dungeon.”

Her golden-brown eyes went wide. “Upgraded? Oh God, now I’m scared.”

“Sure, the thought of jumping the Grand Canyon on a mule doesn’t scare you, but a sex toy built for your pleasure does.”

She giggled, a happy sound that helped to ease the hurt of her rejection of his proposal. “So what’s inside?”

He gestured to the door. “Open it up and see.”

She took the steps as quickly as she could, and he stayed behind her, ready to catch her if she slipped. Fairly bouncing with excitement, she opened the door and gasped.

“Oh, my sweet lord.”

Swallowing hard, he tried to still the knot of worry twisting his gut. “You don’t like it?”

Looking over her shoulder at him, with more tears filling her eyes, she shook her head and stepped into the room.

The walls had been painted a fresh, butter yellow with green, blue, purple, and still-wet pink butterflies gracing the border at the top. Lawrence must have run out here when Bryan called him after the ultrasound to tell him the sex of the baby. Where the bed had been now stood a massive, state-of-the-art baby jungle gym. There were slides, brightly colored and safety-plastic-coated rails, swings, and one wall had been transformed into a giant chalkboard with a bucket of pastel chalk nearby. The floor was covered with a soft, brightly colored foam mat that the salesman had assured him would keep his children safe. He’d even had a small ball pit installed despite his misgivings that it would be a place where germs could breed and potentially give his children the plague. The plastic used in the construction of the jungle gym was also supposedly germ proof and guaranteed not to give off toxic fumes or contain any chemicals that were known to cause cancer.

She slowly walked over to the slide, and her shoulders shook as she made a low keening noise. Alarmed, he moved quickly to her side.

“I’m sorry, love. If you don’t like it, I’ll—”

“No, no.” She turned in his arms, her face lit from within. “You don’t understand.”

Unsure if he should pretend he knew what the hell she was talking about, he shrugged.

Giggling, she covered his face with light kisses before pulling back. “I do.”

“Do what?”

She held up her hand and wiggled her ring finger. “I do.”

He took a step back, leaning against the side of the jungle gym. “Really? All I had to do was buy you a slide?”

“No, idiot. If you’re willing to let our daughter play on something like this, there may be hope for you yet.”

Before she could change her mind, he pulled the ring out, sucked her finger to get it wet, and slid it on.

Holding her hand out into a beam of sunlight streaming in through the cottage window, she gasped. Rainbows bounced off the walls as the four-carat, rose-cut diamond blazed like a falling star. The ring had been given to him by his paternal grandmother after she passed, and it had been in his family for four generations. It made him almost burst with pride to see it on Kira’s finger. She turned her hand this way and that, smiling the whole time. His heart seemed to double in size when she gave him her brilliant, amazing smile.

“It’s so pretty.”

“If you don’t like anything, we can change it.”

“No, it’s so sparkly.” She threw her arms around him and hugged him as tight as she could with the bump between them. “I love you so much.”

“You are everything I ever wanted, even when I didn’t know what that was.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry I make you worry so much. Mary Kate and I had a talk a few weeks ago, and I think I’m beginning to understand how much it sucks to worry about someone you love. I think about some of the dangerous things I’ve done, then try to imagine what it would be like if it was our baby doing those things, and I feel almost sick with dread. I know this sounds terribly selfish and immature, but I never really realized how horrible it feels to be worried about someone. I know I made you feel that way, and I’m so very sorry. I promise that in the future I’ll think before I act.”

Part of him wanted to lecture her on just how much her reckless actions had hurt him, but that was the past, and he didn’t want to spoil the moment. “That’s all I ask, love.”

SHE NIBBLED THE side of his neck, knowing how that was an instant turn-on for him. “So…is it naughty of me to wonder if you might tie me up to the jungle gym and have your wicked way with me?”

Laughing, he ran his hands up her bare arms to the straps holding her dress in place on her shoulders. “Yes. Very naughty. You know what we do to naughty girls around here.”

“What’s that?”

“We punish them and love them and then punish them some more until they have to be carried back to their house by their fiancé in a sweaty, exhausted, sexually satisfied heap.”

Giving him a seductive grin, she traced her fingertips over her nipples. “You’ll have to catch me first.”

He did indeed chase her, having fun stripping her bit by bit. Eventually he caught her and fulfilled his promise of leaving her exhausted, sweaty, and very, very well loved.