Chapter 5
Wraith
I had to touch her.
It might make me a bastard, but I had to touch her creamy, pale skin. I had to run my fingertips over that soft flesh and feel how she vibrated and trembled beneath my hand.
Dinner finally gets set out and not a moment too fucking soon. Half the room is drunk, and the rest are headed that way. The food will definitely help.
Leena doesn’t move from the head table. She sits there alone while the rest of us, Gage, Wing, and her two sisters, help ourselves.
She looks so forlorn sitting all by herself, miserable and frightened, like a little bird fallen out of the nest, helpless and pathetic, that my chest squeezes.
It feels like someone just stomped me with a set of steel toed shit-kickers.
I push the strange sensation away. Pity, compassion, whatever. It’s not a feeling that I’m used to experiencing. Or that I can often afford.
I fill up two plates with a little of everything.
I have no idea what Leena likes. She could be a vegetarian or something for all I know.
I take the risk of offending her with a plate of meat, because it’s not like my very presence there won’t immediately do the job for me. This whole thing is ridiculous.
Kind of like the goddamn erection I’ve been sporting since I set eyes on her.
I know this isn’t a fake marriage. We might have been forced into it, but it’s ours to do as we wish, and she’s absolutely beautiful.
Sweet, innocent, huge eyes, plush lips, an ass that I’d love to sink my fingers into while I’m plowing into what is probably the world’s tightest cunt, her gorgeous legs wrapped around my waist.
Fuuuuccckkkk. Thoughts like that are seriously not helping. I nearly drop the plates I’m carrying.
I set them down at the table. Leena dips her head and stares at me shyly from beneath lowered lashes. She doesn’t thank me, but then again, I don’t expect her to. She picks up her fork and toys with the food, though she doesn’t actually eat anything.
I figure I’m making her nervous, staring at her.
I turn my attention to my own plate. I tuck into it, my stomach completely empty after the morning’s purge.
I can’t shovel food into my mouth fast enough and I realize, after I’ve basically licked the damn plate clean, that it’s probably incredibly unattractive to eat like a beast beside the woman who is now my wife.
I don’t look at her. Instead, I focus on Wing and her sister. I think her name is Stephanie, if I remember correctly. Wing is smiling at her like a fool and she’s smiling back shyly. She says something, and he passes her his uneaten bun. Even fucking butters it for her first.
What the fuck?
I turn to take in Gage and Ami, who are sitting in the middle of the table.
Gage is to my left. He’s so drunk that he looks like he’s going to hit the floor at any moment.
His new wife looks like she could drink him under the table.
I’ve seen her have at least ten drinks of stiff shit with no mix, and she’s still upright, picking at her food, and staring daggers at her new husband.
Jesus. I’m glad I didn’t draw the short straw.
Ami is probably the troubled one that got her other sisters into this mess.
She’s probably all of twenty-one or twenty-two, but she’s dark eyed like the devil, with a body made for sin.
I can see how she’d lure any man straight down to his doom.
Stephanie, on the other hand, is so gorgeous she’s intimidating.
The kind of woman that every man secretly lusts after, but no one dares approach, because she’s a goddess up there in the clouds, untouchable.
Leena is somewhere in the middle. Her beauty is understated, but only because she seems shy.
Although, it’s her shyness, that gentle sweetness, her timidity that draws me in.
I want her to bare that throat to me so I can sink my teeth into that column while I fuck up into her and make sure she knows she’s my damn mate.
I nearly groan. Not that it would matter. The room is so loud that no one would hear it.
I chance a glance at Leena. Her head is still bent.
She’s set down her fork, her food untouched.
My stomach cramps. I remember how it roiled and twisted just that morning, the nerves wringing me out like a rookie sailor desperate for land.
That strange tightness compresses my chest again, like a string twisted around my organs, drawing them away from where they should be, closer together.
Before I realize what I’m doing, I set my hand on the bare skin of Leena’s back, right in the space between her shoulder blades, where her dress dips low.
The pale, creamy swell calls out to me, her skin like fire beneath my fingertips, branding me when I should be the one leaving my mark on her.
Her breath hitches and she goes completely rigid as I spread my fingers, until my whole palm rests against her bare skin between the thin straps of her dress.
God, I want to haul her out of that chair, take her to the hall, rip that dress in half and fuck up into her like an animal from behind, just so I can bite her after, right where my hand is.
My mouth waters and my dick hardens past the point of pain. It was painful hours ago. This is nothing short of a punch to the nuts and it’s fucking ridiculous.
I lean in, so that she can actually hear me above the roar in the hall. “We can leave if you want. You look tired.”
Leena turns her head to me, and I nearly drown in those beautiful eyes. “Do I? I’m sorry if that disappoints you.”
I ignore the barb in her tone. “You don’t disappoint me. I’m fucking exhausted. I’m full, I’m surrounded by friends, and I have a beautiful wife to ride bitch on my bike out back. What more could a man ask for?”
Her already pale face goes even whiter. “B-bike? You plan to- to take me to your home on a… bike?”
I grin. “I do belong to a biker club, in case you didn’t know what it was exactly that The Riders did.”
Her lips twitch. She bites down hard into her bottom one, echoing the same movement I want to make, after I plunder her mouth.
I want to suck that lip into my mouth, knead it between mine, between my teeth, make her come just from that seductive kind of lingering kiss.
My cock nearly punches a hole through my slacks for the six millionth time that night.
“I’m not dressed to ride on a bike,” Leena protests. “Obviously.”
“I have a helmet. That’s all you need.”
“You planned this? To take me in a wedding dress on the back of a bike?”
“It’s not far. You’ll be fine. You can wear my tux. Fucking thing’s uncomfortable as hell anyway.”
Again, she nearly smiles. Her eyes twinkle, betraying her beautifully. I stare at her, sure as hell that I’m seeing the night sky reflected in those eyes, which is impossible, because we’re indoors.
Leena casts a glance at her sisters. Stephanie and Wing are still happily chatting.
They look like a good match. Gage, on the other hand, has his head down on the table.
I’m not sure if he’ll get vertical again.
Ami is looking longingly at the bar. Her eyes sweep the room, as if she’s checking to see if her father or maybe her brothers are going to police her.
Leena stands abruptly. She glides over to her sister. Ami looks up, and the relief in her eyes is obvious. Leena bends down, her auburn hair nearly sweeping the tabletop as she exchanges a few words with Ami.
I shove back my chair just in time to hear something about a woman’s greatest power lying between her legs.
Yeah. Good advice. Probably the best Ami ever gave to her sister.
Fuck, is she right. Because I’m sure that Leena’s cunt is so beautiful it would bring me to my knees.
A position I’d be happy to stay in for hours if it meant my face was buried between her creamy thighs.
Without any further ceremony, I sweep Leena into my arms. She lets out a shocked protest but has no choice but to wrap arms around my neck and hang on.
The dress is tight at the bottom, restricting her legs.
I carry her through the hall, ignoring the shouts and cheers that send us off, outside to the parking lot.
She weighs nothing at all and even when she starts thrashing, her tiny body is no match for me.
My dick, on the other hand, stands up and salutes all that protesting.
I set her down roughly beside my bike, trying like hell not to notice how her skin is so fucking petal soft or how she smells good, like fresh air and rain and the open road, vanilla and flowers, and everything else that is sweet and fucking intoxicating.
The frustration welling up inside of me, twisting and churning at my stomach and compressing my throat makes me want to find a wall and put my fist through it.
Instead, I take it out on her dress, because there is no way in hell she’s getting on my bike in that thing otherwise.
Grabbing her dress, I rip it roughly along the small slit in the leg.
The fabric and lace tears, giving easily against the onslaught of masculine brutality.
Yeah. This shit was made to be ripped off.
“You know, this could work,” I say roughly, as I tear the other side of her dress. She won’t be needing it again anyway. “It works out all the time in romance novels. Arranged marriages and whatnot.”
Leena snorts indignantly. “Romance novels? Because you’ve read so many?”
I grab the extra helmet I brought with me, off the handlebars. “Actually, I have. My mom used to leave them around the apartment all the time. She liked to get lost in them. It was better than her own life, I guess. At least for a while, she could escape.”
Leena goes completely rigid, like a rod was just jammed up her spine.
Finally, she reaches out and takes the helmet from me.
“That’s not stuff you should share with a stranger,” she says, and it’s impossible to unravel the emotion in her voice, and not just because I’m shit at trying to decode that type of stuff.
“You’re not a stranger,” I correct, refusing to lose the levity in my tone. “You’re my wife.”
“Yeah, well those stupid books are just romance novels. Dumb shit. I’ve never read one. I wasn’t allowed to waste my time with garbage like that.”
“Sounds like you read some pretty boring shit then.”
Since she makes no move to put the helmet on, I take it from her hands and plunk it down on her head.
She goes to protest, but I cut that off too.
Gripping her by her hips I set her down hard on the back of my bike.
I get on after, rolling out of the lot and giving her no choice but to wrap her tiny arms around my waist as I tear off into the night.
My cock loves her death grip. I just wish she’d move her hands down a little lower, maybe give a few good strokes while she’s at it…
Leena doesn’t scream. She doesn’t make a sound.
She clings to me like a second skin and maybe it’s actually a good thing her arms ride high up on my chest or she might get more than she bargained for, because my cock really enjoys having her at my back and I’d like to do more than last for all of five seconds with my new wife. That would hardly be impressive.
When we get to the house, a little one-and-a-half-story war time construction that’s definitely seen better days, one I bought for next to nothing and spent a hell of a lot of time fixing up, I don’t give her time to admire or judge it—probably judge it.
I sweep her up in my arms and cart her to the front door.
I’m not terribly romantic, I really did read those novels for lack of something better to do, an escape of my own, but I’ve done little more than straight up fucking in the past, nothing romantic about it.
“Abby will be so happy to meet you,” I grind out roughly, right before I throw open the door and carry my new bride over the threshold, helmet and all.
To be greeted by a house full of shit.
Literal. Actual. Stinking. Shit.