EPILOGUE I RAE #2
He’s holding a small velvet box.
My heart flatlines. If a paramedic were present, they’d have the paddles out.
“I was going to wait,” Lukas explains. “Turns out I’m terrible at waiting.”
“You’re terrible at a lot of things,” I croak in a feeble attempt at defusing my fluttering anxiety. “Asking permission, for example. Personal boundaries.”
“Almost certainly.” His mouth twitches. “But I’m not terrible at this.”
He sets me on my feet, sinks to his knee, and opens up the box.
The ring is simple and extraordinary. It’s a single stone, deep and clear and brilliant, set in a band of weathered platinum that looks old and patient, like it’s been waiting somewhere for a very long time.
“Marry me, Rae Everett.” He’s not blinking. I, meanwhile, am blinking enough for both of us in a battle against tears that I am going to lose badly any second now. “Let me spend the rest of my life choosing you.”
I stare at the ring. As I do, I think about the girl I was two months ago—dressed in drab Target slacks, eating stale sandwiches at her desk, drowning in debt, so lonely she’d forgotten what it felt like to be touched.
That girl didn’t know how much was ahead of her.
How much terror and how much tenderness.
How many unforgivable things and unspeakable ones.
But she’d make it through all of them. That girl would make it. To here.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Obviously, yes. A thousand times yes.”
Lukas slides the ring onto my finger. It fits perfectly.
Of course it does. The man already knew my measurements.
Then he rises and pulls me against the kitchen counter, one hand fisting in my hair while the other grips my hip hard enough to bruise.
He kisses me like the ring gave him permission to stop being careful.
His tongue pushes past my lips and makes no apologies for it.
I emit a sound against his mouth that I’d be embarrassed about if I had any dignity left, but we both know that dignity packed its bags and left this brownstone a long time ago.
The kiss falls apart. Lukas’s pupils are blown so wide his gray eyes look black, and the hand in my hair tightens just enough to tilt my head back.
“I need you,” he growls against my mouth. “Right now.”
The ring on my finger catches the January light as I grip the front of his henley. The stone throws a tiny prism across his jaw, and something about that—my ring, his skin, the way the two look together—makes my whole body clench.
“You just proposed to me thirty seconds ago,” I say. “Most people celebrate with champagne.”
His teeth graze my earlobe. “I’m not most people.”
No. No, he is decidedly not.
Thank God for that.
He lifts me onto the counter and crowds into me. The cold marble bites into the backs of my thighs and I gasp, but the sound gets swallowed by his mouth as he kisses me again.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my pajama shorts and works them down my legs, then tosses them carelessly aside. His palms slide back up the outsides of my thighs, pushing the stolen T-shirt up to my waist as he goes.
He stops and looks down. His thumbs press into the creases of my hips, and I watch his jaw tighten.
“No underwear,” he observes with a smirk. “Were you hoping for this, sweetheart?”
My cheeks ignite. I prepare myself to deliver some devastatingly witty comeback about laundry day constraints and the constitutionally-enshrined human right to go commando in one’s own home, but nothing comes out except a shaky exhale.
He chuckles. “Mm. That’s what I thought.”
His hands slide inward, teasing, hovering, and then he’s there, two fingers pressing into me with a steady certainty that makes my spine arc off the counter.
I’m already soaked. I know it. He knows it. The sound his fingers make as they sink in is wet and undeniable in the quiet kitchen, and the groan that tears out of him vibrates through my sternum.
“So ready for me,” he murmurs, curling his fingers up toward my belly button. He works me almost lazily—in, curl, drag, out—while his free hand pins my hip to the marble so I can’t squirm away.
I squirm anyway. My hips rock forward into his palm, chasing the pressure, chasing him, while my heels drum uselessly against the lower cabinet doors.
“P-please,” I breathe.
He withdraws his fingers and brings them to his mouth. His lips close around them, his tongue working between the knuckles, his eyes locked on mine the entire time.
He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t rush. He laps up every last drop of me.
Then he smacks his lips and says, “Delicious.”
His hands drop to his waistband. A button, a zip, a shove of fabric just far enough down his hips, and then he’s springing free, thick and flushed and straining toward me.
My breath catches. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen him, touched him, or taken him inside me—the sight of Lukas Lazarev’s cock still makes me go all fuzzy inside. Something about the sheer scale of the man, the way he fills every room he enters and then some…
It translates, is what I’m saying.
Generously.
He steps between my spread thighs and I feel the blunt, hot press of him notch against my entrance. “Look at me,” he commands.
My eyes snap to his face.
His gaze is molten steel—dark, liquid, absolute.
The hand on my hip tightens as he holds himself perfectly still.
Every tendon in his forearms is taut with the effort of not moving.
The ring on my finger glints between us as I grip the edge of the counter, and his eyes drop to it for just a heartbeat before returning to mine.
He pushes inside.
Slowly, though. So slowly it’s almost cruel, stretching me open around him. I’m glad he’s the one controlling the pace, not me, because I’m so needy that it’s kind of embarrassing.
My hands fly to his shoulders to dig into the henley’s soft cotton and the hard muscle beneath, and I hold on as the pressure builds, that exquisite, overwhelming fullness that never quite stops being a whole hell of a lot, no matter how many times we’ve done this.
“That’s it,” he murmurs. He kisses my cheek softly. “Take all of me.”
When he bottoms out, I whimper. His response isn’t much more composed, just a guttural snarl that rumbles up from somewhere deep in his chest and ripples through every point where our bodies are fused together.
As soon as he’s all the way in, though, he stills.
His forehead drops to mine. We breathe the same air, share the same thumping pulse, exist in the same trembling, suspended second while my body adjusts to the impossible reality of all of him.
“I’m not pulling out tonight,” he decides.
My eyes snap wide. The words land somewhere between my ribs and my ovaries and does wild, heinous things to everything it touches.
“Lukas—!”
“I mean it, Rae. I want to fill you up. I want to get you pregnant.”
I’m skewered on him and I want him to move so fucking badly. But it’s like he’s cemented in place, as if my understanding and acceptance of the crazy-ass shit he just said is the only way I’ll get him to give me what I want.
I stare at him. I search those eyes for the smirk, the tell, the flicker of gotcha that would let me write this off as dirty talk.
I find nothing.
“You’re serious,” I whisper.
“Deadly serious,” he confirms.
Then he begins to move.
His hips snap forward in one brutal, full-length stroke that drags a scream from somewhere I didn’t know existed. The counter bites into my ass and I don’t care, can’t care, because he’s already pulling back and slamming home again, setting a pace that’s less lovemaking and more hostile takeover.
“Tell me you want it,” he growls, fisting the T-shirt and using it like a handle to yank me onto him with every thrust. “Say it.”
“I—well—I don’t know if—”
He shifts his angle, hitches my left knee higher against his ribs, and drives up into a spot that whites out my vision like a blown fuse. My skull drops back and my mouth falls open and nothing comes out; language has simply ceased to function.
“Tell me.” His free hand clamps around my throat. A reminder of who’s steering this ship.
“I want it!” I gasp. “I want you to—oh, God—please.”
His grip tightens on my throat. His hips piston harder. “Please what?”
“Please cum inside me,” I beg. “Fill me up, Lukas, please—I want your baby, I want—”
His hips stutter. “Say it again,” he snarls against my jaw. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want you to breed me.” He keeps bottoming out inside me as I babble, insane words pouring out of my mouth like they’ve been waiting my whole life to be set free. “I want to feel you dripping out of me all day. I want—fuck!—I want to be so full of you there’s no room for anything else.”
“Jesus Christ, Rae.” He nips at my collarbone.
“You have no idea what that does to me. Hearing my good girl beg for my cum like a greedy little slut.” He drives in so deep my vision sparks.
“I’m going to pump you so full you can taste it.
Going to put a baby in this perfect pussy and watch your belly swell with it.
” His thumb strokes the column of my throat.
“You want that? Want to carry my child?”
“Yes. God, yes. I want—”
I’ll never find out how that sentence would end, because right then, the orgasm takes over.
I go from babbling pure filth to seizing around Lukas’s girth, every muscle from my scalp to my toes locking down in one catastrophic spasm.
I scream his name. I pity the neighbors, but there’s no way in hell I can use an inside voice for what’s happening to me.
Lukas follows me over the edge almost instantly, like my body clenching around him yanked a pin out of something he’d been holding together with sheer force of will.
His hips slam forward one final time and stay there, buried so deep I can feel him in my teeth.
His cock pulses inside me in thick, staccato surges, and the heat of him flooding me is so searingly intimate that fresh tears spring to my eyes.
His hips jerk twice more, aftershocks shuddering through him as his head lolls forward. His breath comes in broken gusts against my collarbone.
“Stay right there. I want to see it drip out,” he rasps against my throat.
My post-orgasm haze evaporates as I realize that he wasn’t just talking dirty. The breeding, the filling, the baby…
He meant every single syllable.
Lukas pulls out slowly. I mourn the loss of him, though it’s followed immediately by the warm, slick evidence of what we just did beginning to slide south.
Before I can so much as press my knees together, his hands are on my thighs, spreading them wider against the cold marble, his gaze dropping between my knees.
My face goes thermonuclear. I try to close my legs, but his grip tightens. Immovable.
“Don’t hide from me,” he growls.
So I don’t. I sit there on his kitchen counter, trembling, while Lukas Lazarev watches his own release seep out of me.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs, his thumb massaging the crease of my inner thigh. “You’re so fucking beautiful like this.”
His hand drifts lower. One finger pushes through the mess of us—my arousal and his cum blended together—and he lifts it to my mouth.
“You’re mine, Rae.”
I hold his gaze. Those gray eyes, storm-dark and burning, the eyes that saw me before I ever saw myself.
Without blinking or looking away, I open my mouth and take his finger in. My tongue curls around the knuckle as I suck him clean. I smile at the exact moment his hungry pupils swallow up the last ring of silver iris.
When I’m done, I let his finger slip from my lips.
“Yours,” I whisper. “Always.”