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“Marry me.”
My pulse faltered at the rough plea before wings took flight inside me. Making me feel dizzy in the most incredible way. “I already said I planned to,” I reminded him, my voice soft and slightly shaky from the invigorating high still dancing through my body.
“Now.”
When I opened my eyes, he was intently watching me. Eyes burning with a love so profound that it rocked me. “Are you using your incredible orgasm-giving ability to coerce me into marrying you?”
His body shook with a hushed laugh. “If it works.”
I pressed my lips to his for an unhurried kiss, a moan sounding in the back of my throat when he removed his fingers from me. “I don’t know how things work in the mafia, but you haven’t even met my parents yet.”
Understanding rumbled in his chest, but he just studied me for a while. “That’ll be complicated,” he finally said. “Not often insiders are brought in...makes it even more difficult when they have a life on the outside. Not with teaching—that’s different.”
“With my family,” I said as a sliver of fear and dejection wove through me.
“Jentry and Aurora are here...right now,” he added in confirmation, “and they never should’ve been.”
I considered his words for a while before asking, “So, is that it? I have to say goodbye to my family?”
“No,” he said quickly, trying to assure me. “It’ll just be complicated. I’ll meet your parents, and we’ll see them whenever you want. But we have to be careful. Any wrong step, and we’ve made them targets.”
I nodded unsteadily as I remembered words Lachlan and Autumn had told me. “I think they already are,” I said after a moment. “Unless Lachlan hadn’t told anyone else about them. But he was using them against me.”
Diggs’ eyes briefly took on a faraway look, his head slowly dipping in a nod as he did. “We’ll take care of it. If you want, we can put people in Richmond to watch them. But weddings,” he went on, capturing my stare to make sure I understood the gravity of what he was about to tell me, “we usually keep them small and unexpected, if we have them at all. Otherwise, we’re giving too much to enemies. A party to crash. A chance to catch us off guard. People to put on lists.”
My head moved absentmindedly as I took in what he was saying and considered the options, but then I noticed his expression. The worry there. The acceptance. As if with each new thing he revealed about his life, he was sure that would be the thing that made me walk away.
“I can handle you,” I whispered firmly. “Not having an actual wedding is nothing compared to something truly terrible like, God, I don’t know...if you were in the mafia or something.” A laugh burst from me when he dug his fingers into my side, my words dancing from my lips when I teased, “Could you imagine?”
“Marry me,” he repeated as he banded his arm low on my back, somehow still being mindful of the wounds there, and pulled me close. Making me rock against his hardening length and forcing a stuttered whimper from me.
“You already know I will.”
“You haven’t said when.”
“And I won’t,” I breathed as I captured his lips. “Like you said...small and unexpected.”
A hushed laugh left him, doing wonderful things to my body due to the position we’d never moved from. “Not unexpected from the people getting married.”
“I like the way you find me, even though I’ve never once hidden from you,” I told him as my hips started another slow, steady rhythm. “One day, you’ll find me, and I’ll be in a dress. That’ll be the day.”
“That so?” Curling his hand around the back of my neck, he wove his fingers into my hair and pulled me close, giving me the best view of the longing in his eyes and the whisper of mischief at the edge of his mouth. “I’ve never been so eager to find someone...and I will find you.”
DIGGS
“You find him?”
“Yeah,” I muttered as I stepped out of my SUV, gaze skating over the house as I instinctively drew in deep breaths. Searching for anyone who shouldn’t be there, threatening the peace I’d found and refused to give up.
Dare exhaled slowly as if already knowing he wouldn’t like what I was about to tell him, but still said, “Don’t say Richmond.”
“Richmond,” I confirmed. “Watching their place like he was planning it all out.”
“Got it,” Dare said after a second. “I’ll let Conor know. Now, get back to Wake Forest.”
“Just got home,” I informed him before ending the call and starting toward the house Willow and I had moved into about a month before.
There was still a part of me that refused to believe it and the car in the driveway were mine because they meant things I’d always refused to take part in—meant putting people in danger. But the woman inside had made the decision to buy them easy, and she was patient as fuck with me while I continued working through those fears.
