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We’ve weathered our first argument as a married couple. It won’t be our last—not on this subject or on a million others that will come our way through the years that have nothing to do with Brandon. But for now, it’s more than enough that we’re both here, we’re both together, and we’re both fighting to make it through the darkness to the light on the other side. Tomorrow is soon enough to worry about everything else.
Chapter 14
Chloe and I maintain a fragile peace for the next few days—due more to omission on my part and self-delusion on hers than on any compromises we’ve actually reached. But the longer I go without mentioning Brandon the more relaxed she gets, so that a week after we’ve gotten back from Vegas I feel comfortable bringing up another subject that’s been on my mind.
“I want to have a wedding reception,” I tell her over a breakfast of chocolate croissants from her favorite bakery on Prospect and a new strawberry almond-milk smoothie I got out of the cookbook Chloe gave me as a wedding gift.
She freezes, a bite of croissant halfway to her mouth, and gives me a look that’s half confusion and all horror. “I’m sorry? You want to have what?”
“A party.”
“You didn’t say a party. You said a wedding reception.”
“It’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Umm. No. Not really. Not so much. Not even a little bit, actually. Besides, I thought the whole brilliance of getting married in Vegas was that we didn’t have to have a reception. I mean, I was kind of fond of that aspect of the whole thing.”
“And here I thought you were fond of getting me as a husband.”
She raises a brow. “Let’s not let that ego of yours get too crazy now, huh?”
I laugh, because how can I not? I’ve hit the jackpot with this wife of mine—she’s sexy and sarcastic and so, so smart that sometimes it just blows me away. This morning is obviously going to be one of those times.
“Well, then I don’t want to have a reception,” I tell her. “I want to have a party celebrating the fact that I am married to the most wonderful woman in the entire world.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Laying it on a bit thick now, aren’t you?”
“Not if it helps me get my way. Then I’m laying it on just perfectly.” I give her my most charming smile, even as I reach across the table for her hand. I open up the fist she instinctively made and press a slow, lingering kiss right to the center of her palm.
If possible, she looks even more suspicious. “No fair clouding my brain with sex to get out of this conversation.”
“Not even really good sex?” I ask, licking my way along her lifeline until the end, where it curves just above her wrist. She gasps a little, then moans as I deliberately sink my teeth into her mound of Venus, the fleshy part of her hand right at the base of her thumb.
“That goes without saying, doesn’t it?” she says after a second, her voice huskier and her eyes blurrier than they were just a few moments ago. “All sex with you is either really, really good or completely phenomenal.”
“Why does ‘really, really good’ suddenly feel like an insult?” I ask, a little disgruntled. Probably because I would have described all our sex as phenomenal.
“Maybe because you’re a compulsive overachiever with a serious competitive streak—even against yourself?”
“Huh.” I turn the words over in my brain as I kiss my way over her wrist and up her inside forearm until I get to the bend in her elbow. “Yeah, that sounds about right,” I tell her, lapping at the sensitive skin on the inside of said elbow.
“You don’t play fair,” she complains, dropping any pretense of eating her croissant as she crawls from her chair onto my lap.
“I don’t believe I ever said I did,” I answer as my throat goes desert dry. She’s dressed in just a loosely knotted robe and it’s suddenly much more difficult to think as she straddles me, her lush wetness pressing against my cock. “But then, I’m pretty sure you don’t play fair, either.”
“I have to do something to stay ahead of the game.” She leans forward, drops a kiss on the corner of my mouth before licking her way across my bottom lip. “I am married to one of the most brilliant men in the world—at least according to Forbes, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.”
My laugh—and my voice—are strained when I reply, “You’ve been reading up on me again.”
“Like I said, I’ve got to stay a step ahead somehow.” She must decide we’ve talked enough, because she silences me by pulling my lower lip between her teeth and biting down softly. The little jolt of pain shoots straight to my already hard dick.
“How long before your car gets here?” she whispers before licking inside my mouth.
Like I can tell time when she’s kissing me like that, her hips lifting and lowering against my own? “Fifteen minutes, I think.”
Her hands go to work on my tie, pulling the knot apart even as she strokes her tongue over my teeth, along the roof of my mouth, against the desperate, greedy length of my own tongue. “We better hurry, then. Don’t want you to miss your flight.”
“Perk of being the boss,” I gasp out as she yanks my dress shirt out of my pants and slides her fingers under the silk. Her hands are cold against my overheated skin and they feel amazing as they stroke over my abs and up my ribs to my chest. “The plane won’t leave without me.”
