Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
As I was about to redial and say just that, the door to the small room flew open. I expected it to be my grandmother. Amy. Lucy. Or Bex. Or Gwen. Or perhaps Mia. Or any of the crazy women who had befriended me throughout the courtship, who had been my rocks throughout the whole thing. I’d gained not only a soul mate through this but a whole girl posse.
It wasn’t my girl posse though.
It was the biker in question.
And fuck, did he look hot.
And deadly.
He was in black, head to toe. Suit—with his motorcycle boots on, obviously—tailored to perfection, black shirt underneath, open collar, his tattoos snaking up his chest, his hair fastened in a small but sleek ponytail and beard trimmed.
He paused for maybe a fraction of a second as he took me in much the same way I was him—with pure and unadulterated hunger.
Then, like always, he recovered and slammed the door shut, the brutal sound jarring me from my perusal.
“I can’t believe you hung up on me!” I shouted, narrowing my eyes at him, then looking down and remembering what day it was and how he was supposed to see this after we exchanged our vows.
“Wait! You can’t see me,” I screeched, covering his eyes as he crossed the room in two strides to snatch me into his arms. “It’s bad luck to see the bride on her wedding day,” I groaned.
His fingers bit into my hips and immediately moved to delve into my panties—which, of course, had been soaking wet since the second he’d appeared in the doorway.
Well, the second he’d growled at me on the phone, actually.
He entered me without warning and I gasped, my hands falling from his face to reveal his carnal gaze.
“We’ve had our fair share of bad luck,” he told me, right after he’d kissed me senseless and slammed me against the wardrobe, his fingers still coaxing me to climax. “We make our own, remember, baby?” he murmured against my mouth. “You’re my luck, my fate, my destiny. And I’ll be making sure my woman is walking down the aisle with my cum inside her and the memory of my cock in her pussy.”
And forty-five minutes later—when the ceremony was supposed to start twenty minutes earlier—I did just that.
Gage
Five Months Later
Gage was on his way out for Ben & Jerry’s.
For the second time that night.
That was because the first batch he’d bought “smelled weird.” He hadn’t even blinked, merely threw the full tub of ice cream in the trash—though it smelled just fine—kissed Lauren hard on the mouth, soft on the belly and then walked out the door for more ice cream.
He wasn’t skulking into the darkness for a fix, or to kill someone. No, he was searching for ice cream that didn’t smell weird for his pregnant wife.
His beautiful, magnificent, pregnant wife, who he’d thought already carried the whole world inside her before. Now she held the whole universe.
It wasn’t easy. Descending the stairs was pure pain, fucking leaving her for a handful of minutes to get ice cream torture. A dark shadow of his mind told him to abandon the ice cream, the utter pain and terror mixed with the joy at watching Lauren grow with their child, to chase nothing.
That voice would always be there.
He’d always battle against it.
But Lauren was worth it. Every fucking second of that battle.
So he was battling when he found Anna on the doorstep. She had been in Amber for the last three months “to watch Lauren get fat,” but Gage knew better. Because the woman was terrified just like him. Of how good things were.
And he fucking liked having the crazy woman around. You never knew what would come out of her mouth, what her day brought. She’d demanded Gage show her how to blow things up two days before. “I assume you know how,” she’d said with an arched brow.
He grinned. “Oh, I fucking know how.”
So he and his wife’s eighty-year-old grandmother blew shit up while his wife lay on a sun lounger—a very comfortable distance away—reading a book and tanning.
Yeah, that was his life.
He was surprised to find her out in the shadows, as she wasn’t a woman who was built for them. Not the physical ones, at least. She was chasing the spotlight because of the shadows chasing her. He was also surprised to see the ember flickering a few inches from her mouth, flaring with her inhale, dimming with the plume of smoke she blew into the night.
He was surprised, but of course he didn’t show it. Emotion was cloaked out of habit, survival. It was a hard thing to shake. He could only manage to shift his mask with Lauren. And he suspected it would stay that way forever. Because people could change, if they met the right—or the wrong—person. If that person was the fucking stars in the sky and the oxygen in their lungs, the pain in their soul.