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Raiden shook his head, not really taking it all in. “You mean there’s no finishing touch?”
A beat passed, then he heard more groans.
“He didn’t even register that this was a prank,” Jakob lamented.
“Good for you, Raiden.” Rafael laughed. “You turned the tables on them without even meaning to.”
“Should have known there was no pranking a love zombie,” Ivan sniggered.
“God, that love malady is horrific.” He could hear the disgusted shudder in Jakob’s voice. “Bones, have you invented a vaccine for it yet? I’m willing to be your test subject.”
“There is a finishing touch,” Numair spoke up, ending his brothers’ to and fro. “And it was put in place before we gave you the go-ahead earlier today. The Yakuza would now kill themselves and their families before they came near your wife and child.”
After that, he could no longer hear anything. He didn’t even know when the conversation came to an end.
All he knew was that he could finally be reunited with Scarlett. And that Numair had said your wife and child.
His wife and child.
Scarlett and their miracle.
His, at last. As he’d always be theirs.
* * *
Fifteen hours later, he stood on Scarlett’s doorstep.
He’d spent hours of that time with her on the phone, telling her everything, now that it had all worked out. When he’d sent her away initially, he’d told her only that he was involved in a very delicate situation that he had to resolve with her out of the way. Finding out the details and magnitude of the averted danger had made her break down again.
She’d had frequent crises during the past two weeks. Though she no longer had any doubt that he was hers, she’d had so much terrible misfortune in her life, she believed something, anything, would happen, and prevent them from being together. No matter how he swore nothing would, the fear, their separation and pregnancy hormones played havoc with her moods and nerves.
Then she opened the door.
It felt as if his very heart, what had been ripped from his chest, stood across that threshold. The desolation of the time without him, the dread that fate would deal her another blow—this time a final one that wouldn’t be survivable—lined her face, streaked her cheeks, hunched her body. She looked as terrible as he did. And like the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She was the one thing he wanted to see, to savor and wonder at for the rest of his life.
Then they were fused, straining to get closer, kissing, moaning, smiling, shedding tears, tearing clothes, pleading for more, for now, for everything, always everything.
Then she was in his arms, taken, contained; then he found himself on top of her on a bed and they were almost fighting each other for a faster descent into oblivion. Then finally they were merged, cresting then crashing into ecstasy.
Their union was brief, ferocious and earth-shattering, releasing all their pent-up dreads and longings.
A long time afterward, from the deepest well of satiation, he heard her voice, raw with her episodes of weeping, and just now with her abandon.
“I never wanted this.”
He rose on his elbow, frowning down at her.
She elaborated. “I never wanted you to leave all your plans and dreams behind for me. With everything in me I hoped that you would reclaim your heritage and have a family, your family, again.”
He smiled his adoration and indulgence down at her. “You are my family. And you’re even giving me two family members at once. As for my heritage, I will have one. The one we’ll make together and pass on to our child.”
Her turbid eyes filled with the tears that now came so easily to her. “But there must have been a way to have both—your heritage and me. I would have been yours no matter what. I don’t need legalities to make me yours.”
“But I need to make you mine with legalities and with every other way there is or is still to be invented.” When she grimaced and buried her face in his chest, he pulled her back. “I want you as my wife, and I want to be your husband. I always wanted that, from the first moment I saw you. And I continued to want you against all odds, all through the years.” He suddenly huffed as a memory hit him. “Do you know that before I met you again and I thought I’d have to have heirs, I was resigned that I’d have to close my eyes and think of you so I could...perform?”
“God, Raiden, don’t—”
“If you can’t even stomach thinking of me in a hypothetical bed with a hypothetical woman—”
