Epilogue
Daphne
“Happy New Year, Dr. Carter.”
“Happy Anniversary, Dr. Carter.”
We’d snuck away from the New Year’s Eve benefit to have this little moment to ourselves. To celebrate, just the two of us.
We raised our glasses without clinking them, which, I was informed, was not only uncouth, but bruised the crystal.
His parents had given us a fabulous set of vintage champagne coupes as an anniversary gift. They were horribly expensive, being that they were bought from Sotheby’s and came with the provenance that proved they’d once belonged to Marilyn Monroe, gifted to her by Lee Strasburg, of the famed Actor’s Studio, in celebration of her marriage to Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Arthur Miller. It was pretty well known that Lee was at least tangentially responsible for Marilyn’s emotional downfall. And her marriage to Miller was rocky, to say the least. But all that aside, I was thrilled to own a piece of history.
I sipped the champagne. It was a special bottle. A 1979 Krug Clos du Mesnil. That was the other half of our gift. The wine prickled with less effervescence than the one Marcia and I had chosen to serve the guests tonight—alongside the cilantro jelly and cream cheese wontons that everyone had been raving about—and I was told that was because it was cellared perfectly, the flavors naturally developed into something nuttier, richer, while the bubbles grew smaller.
“It’s good,” I said.
“Mm." Chris savored. "Nutty and biscuity, with well-developed dried fruit flavors.”
“Where did you read that?”
He smiled. “ Wine Spectator .”
I giggled and sipped again. I knew I was feeling more than the alcohol, since I’d only had a sip. I was buzzing with a different kind of high.
“Yeah. I can taste it. I’m getting notes of oatmeal cream pie, so I can see the comparison.”
“Give me that.” He lifted my coupe from my hand and set it down on the counter behind me. “Little Debbie.” He shook his head. “If anything, this wine had notes of Pepperidge Farm Chessman.”
“You’re even bougie about your junk food.”
“Of course.”
I still knew nothing about wine. Only what I liked. And apparently, I only liked the good stuff.
I was enjoying the perks of being rich a little too much.
But not ostentatious rich. Subtly rich. Old money rich.
Drinking champagne that cost thousands of dollars a bottle while hiding in my in-law’s butler’s pantry with my husband rich.
I always said if I ever won the lottery (the only way I could have ever conceived of becoming this wealthy a few years ago) I wouldn’t buy a McMansion. I’d buy a house from the nineteenth century with a fireplace in the kitchen and original wide plank floors. I’d plant a medicinal herb garden and hang bundles of flowers to dry from the beams of the low ceilings.
But I didn’t win the lottery. And we were still more than happy living next to Harish and Gita.
So, the colonial house would have to wait.
Besides, since I married an almost-billionaire, I was still pretty broke. Relatively speaking.
I’d turned down my financial aid money to be supported by Chris’s robber baron wealth. Actually, with the exception of an occasional gift he lavished on me, we lived off his income from his dean’s salary and some smaller investments. Besides taking the directorship—after Decca had turned it down flat—he’d pledged the next twenty years’ worth of his mind-bogglingly large dividend checks to help fund the new Forensic Anthropology Center, which was finally breaking ground this fall.
I’d been depositing my small teaching stipend into my dad’s account. I felt bad he didn’t have me there anymore to cover food and the little share of rent I’d been contributing since I turned eighteen.
I didn’t see him often. I was working through my issues with my parents in counseling, and the truth was, I was in a good enough place to help financially, whether or not he deserved it or not. Deserve wasn’t for me to decide anyway.
I saw my mom even less, and was okay with it. Now that my sisters were both at UT, we had a real relationship. With flaws. We talked about real struggles.
When Mom found out I was “married to money,” she started coming around more. Calling. Caring. She’d done a one-eighty and had immediately become a shaky, blurry facsimile of the mother I’d always wanted, while trying to gaslight me into thinking that was how it had always been. Which proved she could have been a real mother to me all along. Without Chris’s money.
And as eat the rich as I was, it was the rich who’d given me the love I’d always wanted. Not only from Chris.
To hear Marcia tell it, she and Brian had fallen in love with me as a daughter before they’d even gotten their bags off the luggage carousel when we’d picked them up from the airport four years ago.
Authenticity blanketed their shoulders like the softest, warmest cashmere. They had opinions, but they always shared them with kindness, and trusted Chris and I to make the right decisions for us. It had opened my eyes to just how much I needed to prioritize my healing.
But now, I was in a good place.
Too good of a place. Tonight, I was wearing a long black dress with a slit up to the top of my thigh and a neckline that plunged halfway down to my navel. It was sexy and elegant. And it could all too easily be pushed to one side or the other for easy access.
Because in our four years together, Chris and I were no less ravenous for each other.
And I had an important question to ask him.
Oh, but the way he was sucking on that spot under my ear... maybe it wasn’t so important after all.
I moaned and pressed against his mouth, needing more.
“This dress has been driving me out of my mind.” He said, kissing lower, bending me backward over the counter so he could reach my collarbones, the hollow between my clavicles—suprasternal notch, but that didn’t sound sexy. His tongue dipped in there before his teeth clamped just gently enough over my collarbone. He knew every plane and facet of my body that got me panting.
“Wait until you find out what’s underneath.”
He pulled back. “Yeah? You buy some sexy little things?”
“Maybe.” I smirked. “Or maybe it’s what I didn’t buy.”
He sucked in a breath and looked down at my plunging neckline. It wasn’t engineered all that well. Unlike some dresses that had illusion fabric or strategic boning to prevent embarrassing gaffes.
This was strapless. There was boning, but only in the waist, and only to hold up the cups that were cut to just barely cover my pierced nipples. My breasts had grown in the past few years. I’d put on weight while getting my doctorate. I was eating more and eating better. I wasn’t running in the mornings on an empty stomach only to “fast” all day because spending money on food felt like a luxury. I’d replaced my beloved Mountain Thunder with scented sparkling waters. Chris packed us lunches like salmon salads with sesame dressing and made brownies for dessert.
His eyes darkened as he ran a finger under the loose cup. He did the same thing to my right boob. Then he lifted my boobs clear out of the bodice of my dress.
“Has it been this easy for your tits to pop out this whole evening? Talking to Jeanette, and Dr. Davies, and the Coughlins?” He rolled the delicate platinum barbells between his fingers and his thumbs, eyeing me with a predatory gleam. “Have your nipples been this hard, Sweetheart? So big anyone might have seen them?”
“Uhn.” Was all I could say. My body had started its process. Turning off some functions to fuel more important ones. The wetter I got, the less cognition I could rouse.
“My slutty wife. You should have told me earlier how much you needed me.”
“I need you now.”
“I know, baby. I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.”
He dropped one hand to the opening of my skirt, gently peeling the front panel up and to the side until he saw my bare pussy. No doubt glistening proudly for him. “No panties, either. Darling.” He shook his head. “What am I going to do with you?
“Fuck me, please,” I whimpered.
He was already kicking my feet apart, crouching down and spreading my lips apart with his thumbs. “Oh, look at you. My gorgeous girl.”
I moaned. I was so full, so ready, it hurt to be so open. I longed to rub my legs together, for Chris to touch me.
“You want my tongue? Because I would love nothing more than to taste you for the rest of the night. To congratulate our biggest donors, and suck up to the ones who haven’t given enough, all while knowing your cum just wet my tongue and quenched my thirst.”
“Oh, God, yes. Please, lick me. I can’t—”
“You know what I want, baby. Say it and I’ll give you everything.”
“Daddy. Oh, God, Daddy.” I whined, writhing in my sky-high heels. But something...
Daddy...
Chris dove in with his tongue flat, rubbing his whole face into my pussy. Oh, fuck, he was soaked already and I hadn’t even come. His nose was nudging my clit as his tongue was hard against the place between my clit and my vagina.
He was everywhere. Hitting everything, but right where I wanted. And he knew. He knew and he did it this way to tease me. And I loved it even more.
My legs shook and he hooked his arms around my knees to keep them still.
“Talk to me, Sweetheart. Tell me what you need.”
“Just you, Daddy.”
Daddy... shit. That’s what it was.
“Pass me my glass.” His nose glistened when he came up for air. And a drink.
He sipped, letting the bubbles linger on his tongue as he slid it back into me. Very calmly, between little licks up my slit, he said, “I need you to come for me now, Daphne. I want it all. Don’t hold back.”
“What if I get you wet?”
“I’ll change.”
“But—”
“Do you want my fingers inside you, sweetheart?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Good. Now do as I told you.” He licked again, reaching up and spearing me on his long elegant fingers, stroking my clit from inside my vagina in the place that made me spurt like a fucking fountain. I didn’t know what he had in mind, but it was something, and knowing him, it was filthy. He always got quiet and cerebral when there was something up his sleeve.
I loved when he was like this. Calm and proper, with something feral about his eyes. Between his lips sweetly kissing my swollen clit and his fingers and thumb massaging the rest of my sloppy cunt, I was done for.
The pressure was building and building and oh, yeah it was right there and it was only lucky I could warn him in time to get out of the way.
“Fuck, it’s coming. Oh, it’s coming.” My legs shook as he pushed me back against the cabinet. My whole pelvis throbbed as torrential flashes of pleasure crashed over and over me.
But he didn’t get out of the way. He... oh sweet, merciful... he held his champagne coupe under my pussy, cupped over my lips as my cum rained into it, only a little splashing out the sides and down his hand as he continued to massage my clit, eking out the last drop of my pleasure with his thumb.
He stood. My boobs were still hanging out of the top of my dress, heaving with my breaths. His lust-drunk eyes pinned me down as he raised the glass up and up, touching it to his lips, tilting it back. His perfect hands, delicately holding the fine crystal as he poured my champagne-scented cum down his throat in one, two, three gulps.
Jesus.
I was dead. He’d killed me with his audacity. Who would have thought someone this aristocratic and gentle and refined and good could be so fucking filthy?
“Chris, I want you inside me.”
He kissed me sweetly for that, but I knew he was turning me down. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Oh!” Oh, yeah. That. “Um… I think my defense will go well at the end of the semester.”
His brows scrunched together in that quizzical expression. He was still so boyishly handsome, now with a few more gray hairs at his temples. More from the stress of this expansion than age alone. “I have no doubts about that.”
“So, I had that doctor’s appointment a few days ago. Remember how I didn’t feel well after. For a little bit.”
His face fell. “Daphne. What’s wrong?” He gripped the back of my neck in the way he always did when he thought he needed to protect me from something. “Sweetheart. What is—”
“I had him remove my IUD. So, if you want…”
His face froze. His whole body froze. I counted the seconds. …four… five… six… “Chris?” I lifted my hand to check for his pulse. He sucked in a breath and held my wrist, kissing my palm as his eyes closed.
When he opened them again, they were wet and glossy.
Finally, he inhaled a ragged breath. He licked his lips. “Turn around,” he whispered, as if his voice would crack if he said it any louder.
I felt lighter. My skirt was gone, he’d lifted the material aside and draped it over his forearm as he gripped the counter in front of me.
I watched from over my shoulder as he pulled himself free and stroked once before sliding into my wet cunt, moving gently, but wasting no time. Both of us moaned.
God, the sight of us joining… nothing was better. Him disappearing inside me, the way his eyelids always closed at that first stroke. “I love you, Daphne.” When he dragged himself out, dripping with my fluids, and said it again. “I love you. And I already love our baby.”
Oh, god, I wasn’t sure the way he’d reacted. Tears of relief streamed out of my eyes.
“Fuck me, Chris,” I sobbed with need.
“You want me to give you a baby, sweetheart?”
“Yes.”
He lifted my leg, opening me up, putting my knee on the counter, and from this angle—oh fuck, this angle—he was cleaving me in two. He jerked his hips into me again, harder, and I muffled my cry with my arm. “I can’t wait to see your belly all big and round. Your gorgeous tits filled with milk… leaking… fuck.”
“Chris.”
“Do it, sweetheart.” His hands were back on my pussy, my clit was such a rude little thing, sticking out so hard with my legs splayed wide, getting ready to splash on the marble tiles. “Come for me, darling.” My pussy was filling up. More and more. Oh shit, it was too much… and he was fucking me so deep and playing with my pussy just where I needed him.
“Oh, fuck, there it is, baby,” he said.
I was dribbling out onto his cock. “Oh, sweetheart.” His hips lost control of the rhythm I needed as he chased his own orgasm, spilling his seed deep into me as my legs wobbled on my heels.
“Fuck, yes, Daddy, fill me up.”
His hips jerked a final time and he collapsed onto my back. Panting and wrecked.
“Thank you, sweetheart.”
When he pulled out, the rest of our cum gushed onto the floor with an obscene noise. Him, me. “I fucking love you, Daphne.”
He pushed me forward onto the counter as he balanced on the balls of his feet and licked me clean. Then he grabbed a towel, and in his pristinely tailored tuxedo, he cleaned the floor of our mess.
When he stood, he turned me around and wrapped me in his arms and held me tight, watching me with a lazy smile.
“That might be my favorite holiday tradition.”
the end