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“Darling, you could stitch me up a thousand times and not come close to doing to my outsides what you did to my insides. You showed me that there was something soft in me. Something good. You showed me how to care about someone that wasn’t one of my brothers. And that was kind of a big deal. A revelation. And you really gave me someone to protect. I wanted to protect you, all the time. I guess I’m doing a pretty bad job of it now.”
There were things that needed to stay behind those stitches. Locked away tight. Ugliness that he’d never visit on her. There was love, and then there was...
He could still remember it. The way he’d heard his father crying after hitting his mother, accusing her of infidelity.
I just love you so much.
It made him want to vomit.
Never that. He would never feel that.
It was the same word. But it meant something else.
“What are you talking about? You only protected me from marrying the wrong man. Protected me from a life of not knowing what pleasure was. Protected me from being alone.”
“You were going to marry somebody else. You weren’t going to be alone.”
“No. I would’ve been alone. Because Byron and I had so much in common. But we didn’t complete anything in each other. We didn’t fix anything in each other, and you and I have been doing that for a long time now. We fix each other. We really do.”
“Yeah. We do.”
“Let’s keep on doing it.”
They danced under the stars without music and he twirled her again, dipped her and reveled in her laughter. He spun her around under that diamond-scattered sky and when he brought her back to him, he kissed her. Kissed her till they were both dizzy.
They went up the steps into the house. It felt different. Because she lived here now. Because it was hers. And so was he.
He led her down the hall, back to the bedroom that he had turned into their bedroom. And he looked at her, wrapped in that white wedding gown. His virgin bride. Well, she’d been a virgin until last week. And he’d been the one to take it, so it counted. It counted.
He lowered the zipper on her dress, letting it fall down to her waist. And his body roared in approval at the undergarments that were beneath the gown. A sheer, white lace corset, her breasts spilling over the top of it.
He couldn’t tear his eyes off her.
He put his hands on her hips and pushed the dress down the rest of the way and found that what he’d taken for a corset was actually one piece. See-through lace all the way down, the triangle between her thighs accentuated more than covered by the white lace.
She was still wearing the high heels she’d had on beneath the dress, and he felt like his world was caving in.
His sweet, beautiful friend. His wife.
Demure Charity. Standing in front of him inthat.
She turned around, and his blood pressure skyrocketed. The back was a thong, and it showed the perfect pale globes of her ass, and he could hardly take it. He’d seen her naked any number of times in the past week. But this deliberate provocation was something else altogether.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“If I liked it any more I would’ve died of a heart attack right here. I’m not kidding. I think my soul left my body.”
“Good.” She looked shy for a moment.
“I would like you in anything, and in nothing. Just because I didn’t act on this for all these years... It doesn’t mean it wasn’t a strong feeling. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”
“I used to go out of my way not to look at you,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s true. Remember before we went to the bar, just a couple weeks back, and you came in and took your shirt off...”
“Not really. I never thought about taking my shirt off in front of you.”
