Fourteen
“ M ake sure she bleeds!” one of the older men at the reception hollered as we walked hand and hand back towards the mansion.
“It’s going to be a long night for you two,” another one whooped.
The heckling was coming from the older members in the crowd and was only a fraction of the disgusting comments coming from the older generation of the Keane family all night.
“Ignore them, pet,” Edison whispered to me before sweeping me off of my feet, much to the delight of the onlookers.
Truthfully, he’d probably caught onto the fact that I’d been limping towards the end of our walk around the reception where we’d spent most of the evening greeting the guests. The sky high white heels that Oona had forced me into earlier were starting to dig into my feet and it was taking me everything not to take them off.
They’d begun to really ache right after our first dance when we were watching the doves fly off into the sunset—the surprise Edison had promised. I was pretty sure that, had he not been the leader of a notorious mob family, the man would be living in the countryside somewhere gardening and caring for a whole flock of different kinds of birds. The man was absolutely obsessed with them.
But his lot in life was to lead his clan and mine was to be his wife—nasty comments and all.
“Is that better?” he asked as we passed Rhodes and the two exchanged a nod before the other alpha fell into step behind us.
Rhodes had made himself scarce after I found them kissing in the hallway and I still couldn’t forget the war of emotions that had crossed his face when we looked at each other.
Over the past few weeks, I’d managed to get him to smile a few times and laugh even less, so to see so much raw emotion on the normally stoic man’s face had thrown me for a loop.
Truthfully, I’d already come to the conclusion that Edison Keane and Rhodes McCreary were far more than friends.
No one exchanged looks that seemed to hold entire conversations the way they did while only being friends.
I’d decided to write it off as not my business until earlier when Edison, knowing full well that I was coming down the hallway, had shown me a scene that had made my entire body flush with heat and had made it my business. The two seemed hungry for each other and I’d watched, open-mouthed as Edison pressed the other man into the wall and kissed him with the kind of ferocity that made my insides twist with need. .
I’d already figured it was happening—but what I hadn’t been counting on was how it would make me feel to see it happening in front of me.
It had been… almost invigorating to watch the two men together. A sense of rightness clicking into place in the deep recesses of my brain where I’d shoved my omega instincts.
And that wasn’t even mentioning the slick. Omega slick was something that was supposed to be natural, but I’d long since stopped thinking I was capable of it. That the treatment for my leukemia had jacked up my omega biology so much that I figured that I was basically a beta with the chance to have a heat—something I didn’t necessarily believe even if my doctors insisted my body was capable of it.
Watching Edison and Rhodes together had quickly proven those doctors right. It wasn’t a lot but as they kissed, Edison’s tongue slipping sloppily into Rhodes’ mouth the same way it had into mine earlier, I felt wetness gush in between my legs and the overwhelming scent of strawberries fill my nose.
Edison could smell it too. I knew by the way his nostrils flared when he held his hand out to me and how his dark pupils seemed to expand even more as he drew a finger down my spine, making me shiver.
By the time we made it outside, I’d managed to regain control over myself, but now that my body was pressed against his chest as he carried me out of the reception I could feel it starting again.
But the harassment from the older men wasn’t over yet. “Make sure you get those sheets ready for the presentation in the morning!”
I grimaced at that. Oona had explained the wedding night to me and while Edison said he wouldn’t touch me without my permission, there were certain things that were tradition in the Keane clan.
The presentation of a virgin bride’s sheets the morning after the wedding was one of them.
“What would happen if I wasn’t a virgin and there wasn’t any blood?” I muttered my question quietly enough so that only Edison could hear me.
“Then I’d make it look bloody, pet.”
“Even for such an archaic tradition? I didn’t take you for someone who followed those by the letter.” Edison actually seemed to buck against the very idea of tradition, and if the way the older generation treated him was any indication, they hated him for it.
“I hate it, yes,” Edison’s fingers tightened on my waist as we stepped inside of the very same hallway where I’d watched him kiss Rhodes only a few hours earlier. “But for some things, it’s worth not having to deal with the headache of those men in my office in the morning if we don’t.”
Leaning back, I examined his resigned expression, my eyes tracing the tightness of his jaw underneath as he spoke. “But aren’t you the boss? Why does it matter what they think?”
Edison let out a bark of laughter which vibrated pleasantly through me as we headed in the direction of the east wing. “You’re going to be so good for my ego, Perrie Keane, I hope you know that.”
After twenty-two years of being known as Peregrine Chandler, the new last name sent warm tingles through me that had nothing to do with the way his hands felt under my back and legs.
“And what do you think about Perrie’s words, Rhodes?” Edison called to our silent shadow and I looked back just in time to see his confident steps stutter ever so slightly before he finally seemed to give in and hurry his pace until he was walking with us.
“I think…” Rhodes began slowly, dark eyes glancing at me and then Edison, “That if your ego grows any bigger we’re going to have trouble fitting you through doorways.”
A surprised snort slipped out of me before I could catch it and my face warmed even as Edison continued to laugh at the jab given by his… right hand man? Lover? Best friend?
I wasn’t quite sure what label to put on them anymore.
“How can that be when I have you here to deflate me whenever I need a good reality check?”
The two shared an intimate chuckle and for a brief moment I felt like an interloper despite being the bride.
They had so much history together. History that I probably would never know about because they had to keep their relationship a secret.
We’d reached the hallway of glass windows that led into the greenhouse and I felt Edison’s steps slow before he stopped entirely. “You coming in with us?”
Sucking in a sharp breath of surprise, I gaped at Edison and his offer seemed to completely take Rhodes off guard as well because his dark eyes widened before he glanced over at me.
Him offering to let another man, one that he was romantically involved with, join in on what was essentially our first night as a married couple should have made me inexplicably angry.
Some other omega bride may have clawed his eyes out.
But instead, my brain decided to conjure the image of the two of them pressing in on either side of me and what their skin would feel like sliding against my own.
My face flushed as moisture seemed to leak out of me at an alarming rate. During all of my lessons with the ancient omega teacher they’d brought in, she’d never told me how to stop this part of my biology and only spoke of it in the most clinical of ways. In fact, she’d avoided the topic of slick entirely, the bitch.
Both of their gazes sharpened as my scent welled up in between us.
“Pet, do you like that idea?” Edison’s purr was smooth and warm, like what I assumed a very good bottle of whiskey would taste like going down my throat. Not that I’d ever actually drunk whiskey—or much of any other alcohol before. Spending your twenty-first birthday at the tail end of your last chemo treatment tended to put a damper on getting shiftfaced drunk.
I didn’t want to admit to Edison or Rhodes that the thought of the two of them together was turning me on, so instead I just buried my face in Edison’s neck and hid entirely.
“I need to go and handle security for the rest of the party going on outside,” Rhodes’ voice was strangled as he spoke.
I felt Edison huff a silent laugh at the other man. “Fine, suit yourself.”
Together we listened to Rhodes’ retreating footsteps and I waited until they’d faded completely before leaning back to get a good look at my new husband’s face. “Why did you do that?”
“Why did I do what, pet?” We crossed through the greenhouse which felt warm and muggy thanks to how hot the day had been. Moisture clung to my already flushed skin, doing little to soothe the heat that had been building ever since Edison swept me off of my feet.
“Why did you invite Rhodes upstairs with us?” I’d been putting off really thinking about the kiss I saw earlier, and now it was all I could think of. “Did you just want to kiss him some more and not me?”
Edison stumbled on the steps up to my room, nearly sending the both of us careening down them.
“What on earth would make you feel like I didn’t want to kiss you?” Edison’s gold eyes were wide as if I was the craziest woman he’d ever met.
Because I caught you kissing a man in the hallway?
My question was asked only in my head, but my face must have shown it because the alpha let out a huge sigh and finished climbing the stairs, pushing his shoulder against the door of my bedroom to open it and stepping inside.
“I guess I should tell you about Rhodes—” He paused as he got his first good look at the space.
At the center of the room was my nest which I’d painstakingly put together at my old omega teacher’s insistence. Apparently, my usual set up wasn’t good enough for my wedding night even though, at the time, I was firmly on the side of Edison not touching me until my heat.
No. My teacher insisted that I needed a bridal nest, made of only the best and softest chiffon. The same chiffon that matched the material of my wedding dress.
Making nests still wasn’t my strong suit, but over the past few weeks I liked to think that I made do and the structure in front of us was no different. I’d utilized the four posts of the bed and the top railing to make a cozy cave that was big enough for an alpha to get inside of it with me.
Or two, my nasty little brain whispered as I waited for Edison to speak again.
This morning when I’d gotten up and decided to bite the bullet and build the bridal nest, I still wasn’t considering inviting anyone into it, let alone two men.
That was, at least, until Edison kissed me in the garden after the ceremony. I could still feel the way his lips had rasped against mine and the hunger in his dark, blown-pupil eyes. Then I’d watched him devour Rhodes with the same kind of hunger, his expression an invitation into a world I had no clue how to navigate. I was a damn goner after all of that.
“You were telling me about Rhodes?” I finally prodded, giving him a gentle tap so that he would put me down on my own two feet again.
Instead Edison deposited me onto the little settee that sat against one of the tall windows and began to fiddle with the buckles of my heels as he started to speak again.
“Rhodes and I met when we were nine. He was the son of one of my father’s men and because we were in the same age group my father thought it would be a good idea for us to become subordinates.”
“Not friends?” I cut in to ask.
Edison’s chuckle was sardonic as he shook his head. “Father didn’t believe in friends , pet.”
Finally managing to free one of my feet from the death trap Oona called a shoe, Edison gave my foot a gentle squeeze, working his fingers over the red sore spots with a finesse that nearly made me moan out loud.
“We grew up together and did everything together. School, college, all of it.”
“And did you always love each other?”
My question seemed to throw the alpha off as he struggled with the buckle of my other shoe.
“Love?” Edison asked with a scoff, black brows drawing together. “Pet, what Rhodes and I do isn’t love. It’s a necessity.”
“How so?” I understood needing me to an extent. I could give birth to heirs at the very least, but what use would kissing and sleeping with his closest… subordinate have?
“A few years ago I slept with women pretty freely,” Edison began and I had to shove down the sudden, irrational wave of jealousy his words gave me. It made no sense whatsoever to feel this way as my only claim on the man in front of me was thanks to the ring on my finger.
It’s a contract marriage, Perrie, get your shit together, I reminded myself, my insides twisting a bit as he continued to massage my sore feet.
“It’s a need for an alpha and I never had any trouble with it… until one of them decided to put two bullets in my chest while we were in the middle of having sex.”
My mind went back to the first night that I saw them both and the wound he’d come into the cancer ward to get Dr. Stedmeyer to patch up for him. Was that injury the same one he was speaking of now?
“After that I locked it down… and Rhodes helped me with that. As my best friend, nothing more.”
I wanted to snort at his words. The way the two looked at each other in the hallway told me that they were anything but best friends.
Apparently, my earlier deduction that I was going to become their very pretty beard was wrong, but that didn’t also mean that they weren’t in complete denial about how they felt about each other.
Sometimes men really were the denser sex.
“And inviting him into my room earlier? What was that about?”
Edison’s hands started to travel up my legs, continuing to squeeze and massage my sore calves with strong fingers. “My hope, pet, is that eventually you may want to… welcome him into our union as a member of our pack.”
Reaching down I stopped him before he could slide up past my knees. If I let him go any further then I was afraid I would agree to anything Edison Keane asked of me so long as he didn’t stop touching me. “Last time I checked, the Keane leaders don’t have packs. It’s a tradition and all that, remember?”
Every single thing I’d heard from the long-winded droning of the older omega who taught me told me that they were staunch traditionalists that bucked against change.
Edison didn’t seem dissuaded by my hands stopping him and instead he just pulled my fingers up to his lips and brushed a kiss across my knuckles. It was far more innocent than the rasp of his hands on my legs had been, but for some reason it made my insides clench even more tightly as our eyes met.
“Pet, over the past three weeks has anything I’ve done shown me to be a traditionalist in any sense of the word?”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so. Besides, if I really wanted to be a traditionalist I never would have married you and that would have been such a shame.” At my confusion, Edison grinned. “Keane men also don’t marry outside of the clan. There are a plethora of branch daughters that were born for the express purpose of maybe being my wife one day and I didn’t choose any of them.”
My mind reeled at that and suddenly all of the tension between Edison and the older generation made a lot more sense. He’d basically told them to shove their ways up their asses and was probably going to continue to do so for as long as he lived.
And damn if I didn’t feel flattered by it.
“But why are you so against it all? Wouldn’t upholding your traditions make your place as their leader more solid?”
Edison cupped my face in his hands, gently pulling me forward until our lips were a hair’s breadth away from each other. “Because I think it’s all bullshit. The entire system is the reason why my mother couldn’t live her life in peace after everything that happened to her. Why she still was forced to bear an heir long after her mind had been shattered. Pride and tradition is the reason why the family started to weaken by the time my father finally kicked the bucket two years ago.”
Edison’s words contained a deep anger despite the bland expression on his face.
Then his lips were on mine again, reminding me of the reason we were in my bedroom in the first place. I couldn’t, nor wouldn’t fend off his hands this time as they bypassed my knees and slid under the short chiffon skirt of the reception dress Oona had put me in.
His palms were almost too warm on my thighs as they lifted me up out of the chair and spread me astride his knee. It was more contact to a place that no one but me had ever touched than I’d ever had before and I let out a squeak of shock.
“I thought you weren’t going to touch me until my heat?” I managed through gritted teeth as I tried to shift into any position that would ease the sudden tingling sensation that sitting on his leg was bringing.
Edison’s lips ghosted along my jaw, sending a shiver down my spine. “Actually, Perrie, the contract we made stated that I wouldn’t touch you unless you wanted me to.”
“And if I don’t want you to?” To my own ears, my voice sounded high and thready, like it belonged to someone else entirely and I didn’t know who the hell she was.
“Then I wouldn’t be touching you at all, but look at your hands, pet.”
Reeling back and doing my best to ignore how the movement rubbed my core against the top of his thigh, I found my hands gripping his tuxedo jacket tightly. My strawberry scent wafted up in between us and Edison’s lashes fluttered and his nostrils flared wide as he took a deep drag of my scent.
“And if that wasn’t any indication, the slick leaking from what is sure to be the prettiest pussy I’ve ever seen in my life sure is.”
It was clear he was changing the subject and steering us away from our earlier discussion. I had half a mind to let him, but I still hadn’t gotten my answer about Rhodes.
“What are you going to do if we say no to being a pack? Rhodes and me, I mean.”
Edison’s hands paused on my bare thighs, his body stilling entirely as he seemed to contemplate my question.
“I don’t know, but I really don’t think I’m going to have to worry about it much.” He leaned in close and pressed his mouth to the shell of my ear. “You looked as if you wanted to devour him whole today after you caught us in the hallway.”
“I did not .”
A total lie. One created in order to protect the pieces of the fragile dignity that I still had left because even if I was feeling that way in the hallway, Rhodes’ refusal to come upstairs with us had definitely checked that desire.
Rhodes didn’t like me. Maybe he liked the way I smelled—but he didn’t like me and what I represented. At best he tolerated me for Edison’s sake.
“Whatever you say, pet, now would you like me to continue to touch you or shall we pull out a game of cards? We’ve got all night and I am a killer speed player.”
Nibbling on my bottom lip, I glanced down to where the skirt of my dress was hiding the evidence of my arousal. The same arousal that I knew he could definitely feel through the legs of his pants. “And if I say no? What about the bloody sheets that you need for the morning?”
Edison’s expression flattened into a grimace as he lifted me up into his arms again and tossed me into the nest, reaching into his jacket and fumbling around for something.
“What are you—?” I began but my words were cut off when I saw him hold a fancy looking pocketknife up.
For just one, brief second I thought he was going to use it on me.
Then I watched in horror as he drew the knife down his palm, causing a thin rivulet of blood to form in its wake. It wasn’t overly deep, but the sight of it ripped a gasp from me.
“Edison!” I sat up quickly, reaching for his hand but he pulled it out of my reach before leaning over me and drawing his hand down the sheets next to me, leaving one long smear behind.
“Perrie, let’s get one thing straight,” he growled as he put one knee on the bed and shrugged out of his suit jacket, revealing the chest holster underneath and the shiny black pistol that sat underneath his right arm. “I will never make you do anything you don’t want to. Ever. You are now my partner in this life—even if it started as a contract. I can’t promise you love, but I can promise you that.”
Then he undid the buckle on the holster and let it drop to the floor. Not even a few minutes ago he told me that a woman had shot him in the chest when he was vulnerable and it had caused him to not sleep with anyone but Rhodes again, and now he was opening himself up to it again.
It was showing that he trusted me. A warmth filled my chest and it had nothing to do with how turned on I was.
“So what’ll it be, Perrie?”
We stared at each other for a beat, sizing each other up, before I finally gave in and reached out and tugged on the front of his dress shirt.
Edison fell over me, his arm resting above my head as his nose brushed against mine. “Tell me. Verbally.”
I knew what I wanted and I just hoped I wasn’t making the biggest mistake of my life. Sucking in a deep breath, I nodded to him. “Please touch me, Edison.”
Our lips met in a crash and Edison wasted no time tasting me, his tongue slipping into my mouth in an even deeper kiss than the ones we’d shared earlier. His vanilla scent wrapped around me so completely that I felt almost drunk on it.
Edison’s other knee came up on the bed, forcing my legs to spread in order to accommodate it as a hand returned to the inside of my thighs.
“Have you ever touched yourself before, Perrie?” Edison asked gently, his words muffled by our still joined mouths.
I didn’t know how to respond to that, my face turning red as I remembered the times that reading my romance novels had made my insides tingle so badly that my hand couldn’t help but creep up in between my legs to soothe it.
“Is that a yes?” His thumbs hooked on the strings of the lacy white panties that I was wearing, his breathing turning heavy when he realized that he wouldn’t actually need to pull them down because there were little strings on either side he could untie.
You’ll be like a present, Oona had declared proudly earlier when she presented them to me. Master Edison won’t know what to do with himself .
That was a lie, though, because Edison Keane seemed to know exactly what to do as he undid each little bow and pulled.
“Yes,” I finally managed to rasp out.
“Really? My sweet little omega touches herself? I didn’t take you for the type.”
He was teasing me now, his fingers returning to my legs and slowly inching upwards to the spot that was now leaking freely.
“And what type am I?” I challenged, feeling his purr of satisfaction at my snappy question.
“Sheltered, sweet, maybe a bit of a prude.”
His lips cut off my squawk of protest, his teeth gently pulling at my bottom lip and making me squirm underneath him. “I bet you can’t even say the word pussy.”
“I can too!”
“Then prove it.”
I’d read the word enough in my books that it should have been easy to say. Pussy, cock, length, member, cunt, I’d seen them all written in little black words on the screen of my kindle. I’d read so many of them over my years being hospitalized that I figured I was pretty much desensitized to all of it.
But now that I was being confronted, I found my mouth opening and no sound coming out.
This seemed to please Edison to no end because he grinned down at me like a lunatic, strands of black hair flopping into his gold eyes and making him appear more boyish than I’d ever seen him before.
“Say it for me, pet, and I’ll make you see stars. Say: ‘ please touch my pussy, Edison .’”
Edison’s fingers slid up so far that if he inched over just a little bit more, he’d be touching me. I didn’t know much about my husband—we’d only had a few weeks together after all—but I knew that if I gave him the chance that he would make every single one of my fantasies come true.
“T-touch my pussy, Edison,” I managed to get out, my words a bit strangled as I felt my face burn with enough embarrassment that surely my skin was starting to match the same red as my hair.
When he didn’t move, my eyes lifted to meet his and found them to be full of amusement. “Why aren’t you doing anything?”
“Because you didn’t say please.”
I was about to scream.
“You’re kidding me.”
“I never kid, Perrie, which you’ll learn soon enough.”
Sucking in a deep, steadying breath, I repeated myself. “Touch my pussy, please, or I swear I’ll go find someone else to do it for me.”
My little jab made the alpha above me growl. “You’ll do no such thing.”
Then he was leaning back, balancing himself on both knees as the fingers of one of his slipped in between moist folds. I gasped with the suddenness of it.
With his free hand he pushed up the chiffon material of my skirt and looked at me, bare and spread underneath him. “I knew it’d be pretty. Did you know how pink and plump this pussy of yours is, pet?”
I covered my face with my hands as he explored, my hips twitching upwards when his pointer finger barely brushed past the sensitive bundle of nerves that sat towards the top of the folds. “And your clit is already so very swollen.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I managed to say, tamping down on the indecent moan that was threatening to leave me.
Because my hands were over my eyes, I couldn’t see Edison’s face but I could hear him chuckle. “You’ll have to get used to it seeing I plan on doing more to you than just touching your clit. Now, let’s find out just how tight you are.”
Before I could ask what he meant by that, his pointer finger which had been ghosting over my clit slipped inside of me, forcing the entrance of my pussy to quickly accommodate the sudden intruder.
It was tight and slightly uncomfortable and I swore I could feel each ridge of the digit as he gently moved his finger from side-to-side. “Very tight indeed.”
Edison’s thumb pressed into my clit and this time I couldn’t hold in the noise of need that leaked from in between my hands.
“Do you like it, Perrie?”
He paused when I didn’t move, his price for pleasure still clear. The burning desire for him to keep going was what finally made me uncover my face and nod. “I do.”
“Good, because I’m going to be the first man to make you come from something other than your own fingers, then I’m going to do it again, but with this instead.” Taking one of my hands in his, he brought it up to the lump in his slacks.
He wants me just as much as I want him, I realized with a jolt as I felt the lump grow stiffer under my touch.
“Are you up for it?” Edison asked, his eyes on where my hand was caressing him.
It was too intense for me, a relative newbie to the actual physical aspects of married life and for just a moment it was almost too hard to breathe. Forcing myself to suck in a long pull of our combined scents, and finding that it seemed to soothe my nerves, I nodded again. “But are you sure you are? I’d hate for you to break a hip.”
Edison’s expression slackened into shock, his gold eyes wide at my teasing before he threw his head back and started to laugh.
If I’d learned one thing about Edison and Rhodes over the past few weeks it was that they both hated and loved when I teased them about being old. I was sure it reminded them of the fifteen year age gap that we shared between us, but it also made them more comfortable with me—the teasing forming a tenuous bond between us in the face of uncertainty.
“I can assure you that my hips are very healthy, pet,” Edison said as he slipped a second finger inside of me. “And I looked forward to showing you exactly how healthy I am just as soon as I feel this tight cunt spasm around my fingers.”
The tightness of two fingers was almost overwhelming as he gently began to slide them in and out, wriggling them separate from each other before moving them in tandem as his thumb circled my clit.
One of his knees was still pressed in between my thighs, almost interlocking our legs, so as he began to quicken the pace of his fingers, my legs began to rise up almost of their own volition. The top of one of my knees brushed what had to be his painfully hard length straining against his pants.
“Let go and come for me,” Edison muttered with a grunt, his pupils completely blown now as a flush started to ride up the side of his neck, stark against the crisp white shirt he was wearing.
Before—when it was just me by myself—I could control how fast I wanted things to go. But now that Edison was touching me it dawned on me how little control I had over it and my body seemed to be rising to the occasion clearly enjoying being told what to do by the alpha above me.
My inner omega seemed to have fully come awake and was practically panting inside of my mind, urging me to do as Edison bid.
Electric sensations from the touch of his fingers had my hips rolling up to bring him further inside of me as I tilted my chin up to the gauzy canopy of my bridal nest and came with a garbled scream.
Edison’s fingers never stopped moving as I spasmed around them. My eyes rolled back in my head as I tried and failed to pull in a deep breath, my lungs desperately sipping on the available air around me. Edison leaned down and began to shower my bare neck with kisses, whispering praises that my muddled mind failed to translate into anything coherent as my legs continued to twitch long after the crest of my orgasm had ended.
Then someone knocked on the door, causing Edison to stiffen against me.
“Someone had better be dying,” he barked over his shoulder.
“Well, I hate to break it to you,” Rhodes’ voice, unperturbed by the venom in Edison’s words, came sheepishly from the other side of the door.
With a growl, Edison pulled his fingers from inside of me and pressed a soft kiss to my lips. “I will be right back.”
But as soon as the door was opened and he began speaking in a hushed tone to Rhodes, I watched his shoulders stiffen and heard him sigh.
Edison shut the door and turned to me, his expression completely blank as he reached down to snag his chest holster and jacket.
“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting up in my nest and watching as he redressed himself.
“Apparently,” Edison said, snapping the chest holster in place and sliding an arm into his jacket. “Our guests don’t know how to behave themselves and I have to go play parent.”
As he turned to leave, my eyes caught on the little wet spot on his pants that I’d left earlier when he pulled me onto his knee. “Wait—you’re not going out there with that still on you, right?”
Edison glanced down at it, warmth returning to his face for just a breath before it was gone again. “I am. Maybe it will help my relatives realize just what they’ve interrupted tonight. Don’t wait for me, pet, I don’t think I’ll be back.”
With that, he turned and left the room, passing a stone-faced Rhodes who shot me a quick nod before reaching inside and shutting the door, leaving me all by myself in my bridal nest.