Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
REYNOLDS
ANNALIESE
We stay up at the mountain for three days, every minute of our stay a fucking dream.
I didn’t realize how much I needed this. How much I needed him. For those three days, it was just, just me and Sebastien. No Order politics. No planning. No worrying about Eric or where Sebastien was. I knew exactly where my husband was: in bed with me, reminding me again and again that I’m his.
I’m so afraid that, when we return to Harmony Heights, everything will change again. In a way, I’m not wrong—but now in the way I was scared of. For the first time in two months, being married to him feels easy. It feels real.
Of course it does. According to Sebastien, it is real.
I slip from time to time. Old habits are hard to break, but when Sebastien lovingly gooses my side whenever I slip up, calling this ‘fake’, referring to it as a ‘marriage of convenience’, I’m slowly beginning to accept that he’s right.
Think about it. There isn’t a contract anymore; I have the remains of them hanging on my necklace.
All there is is a properly filed marriage license, my wedding band, and a blood oath.
In all ways, I’m his wife, and I’m so damn glad that—as his wife—I finally have the chance to give him something to show him how much I care.
I already had it set into motion before Alexandre’s party. After going up to the mountain and seeing Sebastien’s workshop first hand, I’m even more determined to show him my surprise.
It was easier than I thought it would be.
All I had to do was find one for sale, negotiate a down payment I could afford, and pay to change the name on the sign out front.
A week after we’re back in Harmony Heights, I get a phone call that the title’s been changed and the electrician finished installing the light-up sign on the front of the building.
Because I want to show it to my husband before he rides by it and sees it himself, I insist on the two of us taking a drive downtown after dinner.
There isn’t anything that I can ask him that he won’t give me. Is he curious? Of course he is. But when I direct him to park on a street two blocks away, he just smile at me, then does it.
Now we’re walking hand-in-hand down Main Street when I tug him toward the building on the corner. Squeezing his fingers, I keep on pulling him until we reach the garage bay door. It’s evening, the red lights gleaming over our head.
I tilt my face. “Look.”
Humoring me, Sebastien does—and then he drops his gaze to look down at me.
“Annaliese?”
I can barely hide my excitement. “Do you like it?” Please, please, please like it…
His lips part. He works his jaw. For a moment, he’s silent, and then he croaks out: “It say Reynolds Garage.”
I untangle our fingers, clutching the upper arm of his leather jacket instead. “It’s yours!”
“Mine?”
“I bought it for you,” I tell him.
He turns. His eyes—Jesus—his eyes are wide, stunned, bright with something I can’t quite name. “You… bought it. For me?”
“A down payment,” I amend quickly, suddenly feeling shy. Does he like it? “With the paycheck you gave me from Alexandre’s party. I—”
He shakes his head slowly, like he can’t process the words. “You bought me a garage.”
“You said it’s what you wanted. It was your dream.
But you thought the Order couldn’t let you have it.
” My throat tightens as I echo what he told me before we went to the mountain.
“‘The Order rules my life. It rules yours. Why do we let it?’ I’m not.
And neither are you. You’re an awesome mechanic, Sebastien.
Fuck what they think. You deserve this.” I trail my hand down his sleeve.
“And, this way, you don’t have to go all the way up to the mountains to work on your back.
You can work here, and I’ll always know where you are. ”
There. Another confession. Now that he wants me to be his wife, I’ll show him what being my husband means.
I’m jealous. I’m possessive. I hate not knowing where he is, or who he’s with, and if I thought I could get away with tracking him, I would… but even if I can’t, I can do this.
I can try to make him happy. After all, that’s what he’s done for me since the beginning…
I wait for him to answer me. To say something. To say anything.
And that’s when, suddenly, he turns on me, grabbing both sides of my face with his hands.
“Love,” he breathes. “Annaliese. What have you done to me?”
I laugh, breath shaky. “Hopefully something good.”
Ducking his head, my husband kisses me. Hard. I can taste the hunger, the desire, the absolute need in the stroke of his tongue against mine.
When he pulls away, he presses his forehead against mine. “No one’s ever given me such a thoughtful gift before. Not like they saw me. Shit… you see me.”
Maybe I do. But… “You gave me everything I wanted, Sebastien. I thought it was only fair that I did the same for you.”
“You did that, though,” he whispers. “Because, from the moment you walked into the Last Prayer and sat down on the stool next to my helmet, all I’ve wanted was you.”
A soft, helpless sound leaves me as I whisper his name.“Sebastien…” I swallow, fisting my hands in his shirt. “Babe. You have that, too.”
And when I initiate the next kiss on my own, I hope he can believe me.
I’ve never seen Sebastien so content.
Like Deirdre Dawes told Miranda more than two months ago, my husband is inherently sweet.
He’s a good man. He never thought he was, and so many of the things he’s done in his life before he met me were because he didn’t believe he could be a good guy.
But the foundation was always there. I saw it when we first met otherwise I never would’ve slipped my hand into his leather glove no matter how fucking gorgeous he is.
He has his dark side, too. It’s hot and it’s sexy, and it makes me melt every damn time.
I’m helpless to love him. And I know. I swore up and down that this would be a marriage of convenience, that, next March, we would go our separate ways…
but the idea of saying goodbye to Sebastien has my dark side coming out.
So that’s that. We’re a perfect match, and every time I reach up, rubbing my thumb over the pendant made from the ashes of our marriage agreement…
whenever I nuzzle the tattoo on his arm that he got to commemorate our wedding…
I wonder how I ever thought that I’d be able to keep things strictly professional between us.
Even before we started having sex regularly, I honestly believed I could play the part of an Order wife, laying flat on my back, letting my ‘husband’ fuck me, then let him roll off of me to find some Used to keep him company next.
Hilary Morgan helped me learn that lesson. I’m as possessive of Sebastien as he is of me, and while he promised he’d cut off the fingers of the next woman who touched him without his permission, I’m the one he gave his pocket knife to. So that pleasure will be all mine.
But watching him work in the garage—grease on his hands, rock music humming from the speakers, a motorcycle engine on the stand—it’s like seeing the weight fall off him piece by piece.
The cabin workshop helped, but building his shop here, in town where everyone can watch him do mechanical magic?
I don’t think I could’ve given a more thoughtful gift with his own money.
He already has plenty of ‘customers’. Nosy Order members who pretend they want a tune-up, but who just want to gawk at the Reynolds screw-up working for a living. He doesn’t care, and if he doesn’t, I don’t.
Not when his mother came barreling into the garage last week while I was hanging out with him, hugging him so hard the wrench he was holding fell out of his hand. Ambre Reynolds kissed both of his cheeks, then mine, before beaming at her son.
“This is what you were meant for, Sebastien. I’m so proud of you.”
His father followed behind his wife. While she dabbed her proud eyes with a handkerchief, Guy shook my hand and told me, “Thank you, Annaliese. My son couldn’t have chosen better.”
I cried in the manager’s office for ten minutes, so happy that his parents approve of me—and him.
I’m not being hidden anymore. I’m another member of Sebastien’s family, and after all those years with Eric…
it’s all I wanted. It doesn’t matter how our relationship began.
We’re together now… we’re happy now… and it’s even better that Eric has finally decided to back off.
For all of his threats about what he would do to the man who replaced him in my life, as soon as he confronted me only to have Sebastien confront him, he’s all but disappeared.
Well. No. Eric has disappeared from my life.
He hasn’t stopped plotting against the King just like he threatened that night at Alexandre’s party.
In fact, he keeps trying to gather enough of the old guard together to push Dallas out of office completely.
They’re trying to use a clause in the Order of the Owed manifest that says that the King isn’t exempt from the ‘get married by thirty’ rule.
If he doesn’t have a wife by next November, they’ll push to have him replaced.
Sebastien’s name has come up. He laughed, saying he’d rather slit his own throat than subject me to being the wife of the King, let alone take the position from his ‘bro’.
Especially since Dallas has taken the attempted coup to heart.
He doesn’t want to be King, but he doesn’t want the old guard screwing things up again, either.
So he’s picking an Offering out now—his own marriage of convenience—and my husband has somehow earned himself a seat on Dallas’s council, alongside Adrian and a few other Owed.
Alexandre is helping. So is their father; with Guy throwing his support behind Dallas, most of the Owed is staying out of the politics.
Sebastien is stubbornly doing what he has to because he wants to keep me safe.
Sure, he’s loyal to his friends, but he hates that Eric is the one working behind the scenes to overthrow Dallas.
He wants to gut him. I thought he was kidding.
He wasn’t.
And that’s how I discovered that, since he joined the council, he’s also taken over Dallas’s role as enforcer.
The second Eric does more than just run his mouth about betraying Dallas, he has the King’s permission to take the sleazy lawyer out of the picture.
For now, everything Eric and his compatriots are doing is technically legal, following the law, but the second it isn’t…
I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I never want to see Eric again. On the other, the idea of Sebastien being the one to eliminate him… my husband is a good man with a dark side. I’d hate to see it become even darker because of me.
The worst part is that I first thought Sebastien was kidding when he offered to take care of Eric for me. I’d laughed, told him I didn’t need protecting.
My husband didn’t laugh back. Instead, he kissed my temple before murmuring, “You have no idea how many men I would kill to keep what I have. I’m not letting anyone near you ever again.”
But Eric is leaving me alone. He stopped harassing Miranda, too, and we only have a little more than eight weeks until the Claiming ceremony when Colton will have his hand branded by fire, the mark of the Owed ruining his palm, before he tells everyone gathered that he intends to take Miranda Crawford as his wife.
In fact, Sebastien told me that Eric actually dared to show up to a council meeting with Cicely on his arm. They were presenting themselves as a unified front, and I really believed it was over. That Eric’s cruelty might be focused on Dallas, but it’s not me he’s after anymore.
Too bad I was wrong.