7. The First Rule #2
When he bottoms out, hips flush against my ass, we both groan. He holds still, letting me adjust, forehead pressed to the back of my neck._
“Move, Beck,” I whisper like an order, desperate to be wrecked by him, “Please, my Alpha?”
The man loves it when I beg him.
He pulls back almost all the way and slams home. The force rocks me forward onto my toes.
From there it’s relentless—deep, powerful strokes that hit every sensitive spot inside me. The elevator fills with the wet sounds of sex, skin slapping skin, my desperate moans, his low grunts.
Every thrust sends sparks up my spine. My breasts bounce with the rhythm, nipples dragging against the inside of my blouse. He reaches around to palm one, pinching the peak, and I clench around him.
“Yes—fuck—right there—”
I’m surprised we’re not rocking the whole elevator with how he’s fucking me so damn right.
He angles his hips, finding that perfect spot again and again. The mirror shows everything: the way my face contorts in pleasure, his powerful body driving into mine, sweat beading at his temples. One of his hands slides down to rub my clit in tight circles.
“My Sweet Apricot is going to be a good Omega and cum for me, yes?”
“Mhmm!” If only he realized how close I am.
“Words, my love. You’re going to be our future wife. You better learn to use that voice of yours, so when we’re fucking you for hours on end, you can speak that safe word, yes?”
“Fuck yes,” I moan and tremble. The envisioned future is too daring not to react.
“Come on my cock, Amber. Want to feel this sweet pussy milking me up as I fill you up with my cum.”
The words, the friction, and the overwhelming scent of us together—it’s too much and yet the perfect blissful concoction to send me over the edge.
I shatter again, harder this time, vision whiting out as my walls spasm around his thick length. He fucks me through it, pace faltering but not stopping.
When I come down, he pulls out abruptly. I whine at the loss, but he’s already turning me around, lifting me.
My back hits the mirror wall again as he hooks my legs around his waist. This time when he enters me, it’s smoother, deeper, gravity helping him sink all the way to the hilt.
“Look at me,” he demands.
Our eyes lock. Hazel on stormy gray. He kisses me as he starts moving again, slower now, savoring. Each roll of his hips grinds against my clit. I cling to his shoulders, nails digging into the fabric of his shirt. My hips rock to meet his thrusts, chasing another peak.
The elevator air is heavy with our combined scents—his dominant Alpha notes wrapping protectively around my sweet Omega perfume.
It feels like coming home and like falling all at once.
He shifts his grip, one hand under my ass, the other braced on the wall beside my head. The new angle lets him hit even deeper. I cry out with every thrust, the sound bouncing off the mirrors.
“Beck— I’m close again—”
“Good girl. Give me one more.” His thumb finds my clit again, pressing firmly, which is such a flex when he’s using his other hand to keep me up so I’m not having to concentrate on fully clinging to him. “Come on, Sweet Apricot. Soak my cock.”
I break apart with a wail, body seizing around him.
This orgasm is longer, deeper, with waves of pleasure that seem to go on forever. My vision blurs. Somewhere in the haze, I feel him stiffen, hips stuttering as he follows me over the edge.
He buries his face in my neck as he comes, thick pulses of heat flooding me.
The knot at the base of his cock begins to swell, and how he curses, needing to pull out for our own sanity, but I’m doing my duty in taming that thick knot of a beast, trying not to feel some sort of disappointment that we can’t lock right here and now.
It’s fine…the wedding is approaching.
I massage his knot until it deflates, leaving us breathless before he kisses me long and hard, making me feel as if I’m such a precious existence in his life.
“We should probably figure out how to get this thing moving again before someone calls maintenance.”
I laugh softly, the sound shaky with emotion.
“Probably. Though I’m not sure my legs work yet.”
He chuckles, the vibration traveling through where we’re still connected.
“I’ve got you.”
Slowly, carefully, he lowers me until my feet touch the floor, supporting my weight as his knot deflates enough to slip free.
Slick and his release trickle down my thighs.
He grabs my discarded panties and uses them to gently clean me up, then tucks them into his pocket with a wicked little smirk.
“Souvenir,” he says.
I roll my eyes but can’t hide my smile.
The memory is gone just as the elevator dings upon arrival, and I’m pressing my thighs together, angered that such a vivid memory could still affect me as if the man I once fucked beautifully in the metal box, who was excited to be my husband, is the same person standing in the corner as if my existence now threatens his.
How pathetic of me to remember what’s already broken…
Maybe it hurts because here I am, feeling needy and desperate for the man who’d aid in my every need like the fixer-upper he is, while he’s acting like this brief presence together means nothing to him.
What are you doing, Amber? This man left you at the altar. Yet, you’re hot and bothered for him because he’s in your damn orbit. Stop this nonsense.
I bite my bottom lip, reminding myself that this is my new reality.
Outside, the world waits…and the reality is, this man doesn’t love you like he did five years ago…
Five years of celibate nights and careful distance in trying to be with anyone else…as if no one else seemed worthy of bringing me pleasure…all for what?
All because I yearn for only their touch and no one else?
I mentally have to shake my head out of this, thankful that this ride is over, and I can tuck the past back in that hidden box of myself.
I need to move on…the past…these men… their lives are simply not in the cards for me.
When the doors open on the lobby level, he waits, unmoving, until I'm out and clear before he follows.
We go to our separate trucks like two people who did not just survive something in a brass box, only I’m the only one who’s surely clinging to the past.
Thursday, ten a.m., I arrive at the Lantern House gates with an army, which is the entire point of the army.
Priya, flown back for forty-eight hours, contract tabs ready. Marlowe, for structure and décor, and because her face is the best lie detector on the coast.
Juniper, officially for catering-and-cake logistics, unofficially riding shotgun as morale and menace. Niall, clipboard, three colors of tape.
If Beckett Shaw imagined a reunion, some quiet corridor moment, two people alone with a view, he can enjoy watching me deploy four professionals across his lawn like a landing party.
The version of this where it's private doesn't exist.
I built the guest list to make sure.
The gates open on time. The drive curls up through old hydrangeas gone blue as gas flames, and then the house comes out of the trees, and I make myself look at it straight on, because I've been practicing in my head all week.
Weathered gray shingles, the wide porch, the lantern over the door burning even at midmorning, gold against the sea haze, and it's beautiful, it was always beautiful, that was never the problem, and my body runs its little rebellion, throat tight, palms cold, and my neutralizer holds the border, and I get out of the van with my clipboard and my people, and the machinery takes over.
Thank God for the machinery.
You can walk through nearly anything, I've found, if you walk through it taking notes.
Beckett meets us on the gravel with Lena Flores, introductions handled in under a minute, professional as a permit office, and then he gives us the house.
He gives it the way I'd forgotten he gives things, thoroughly, honestly, wear and all.
The ballroom first, restored down to its bones, herringbone floor refinished by hand, the original plaster medallions cast and repaired, and Juniper actually whistles, and Marlowe drifts off from the group to lay her palm flat against the wainscoting like a doctor taking a pulse, and pronounces it, high praise, "not ruined. "
The conservatory next, that long glass spine off the east wing, and here he stops us at the door and points up before anyone steps in.
"Temporary bracing," he says, and there it is, honest steel scaffolding holding the ridge where the old glazing bars have gone soft.
"It's safe to walk. It is not safe to hang a hundred pounds of florals from it, and it won't host two hundred people until the steel's replaced.
I'll get to the full list at the end. I want you to see problems in daylight, not find them in a contract. "
Priya makes a note.
I make a different one, private, which is that I came braced for a sales pitch and I'm getting a confession, room by room.
The cliff gardens take twenty minutes because Juniper keeps stopping to gasp at things, and in fairness, the gasping is warranted.
Old roses gone half wild along the stone walls, the long lawn running out to the cliff edge where the sea lays itself out like a delivered promise, borders that somebody, and I know exactly which somebody, has kept in the loose romantic style the house had in its photographs from 1910, nothing municipal, nothing clipped into fear.
Sloane's golden-hour ceremony will happen on this lawn or nowhere else.
The light out here at six p.m. will need no equipment at all. I write light: free in my notes and underline it, planner shorthand for the thing money can't buy being included.
Then the library with its ladder rails and its smell of a hundred years of paper.
The service halls, wide, dry, blessedly modern where it counts, and Niall lights up taping routes nobody else can read. The carriage house, high-beamed, perfect for vendor staging.