Chapter 43 Mehar
Mehar
The helicopter lifted off the pad behind the compound and my stomach dropped but I didn’t grab anything this time.
Yesterday I was death-gripping a Cessna armrest and today I was sitting in a glass bubble with nothing between me and a thousand-foot canyon drop and I wasn’t scared.
I was leaning forward with my face close to the window, watching Sedona open up beneath us like the earth had cracked itself open to show me what it was hiding underneath.
Red rock formations rose from the desert floor in shapes that didn’t look real.
Towers and arches and layered cliffs striped in orange and rust and deep burgundy, carved by millions of years of wind and water into something that made everything humans built look temporary and small.
The canyons were massive, deep cuts in the earth with shadows pooling at the bottom and sunlight hitting the upper walls in stripes of gold.
I could see the river threading through the valley below, thin and silver, surrounded by green cottonwoods that looked like someone had painted them there.
“You good?” Quest asked through the headset.
“I’m better than good.” I couldn’t stop staring.
I’d never seen anything like this. I grew up in Shamir Ali’s house where the view from my window was the side of another rowhouse.
I lived with Ahmad in an apartment where the only landscape was a parking lot.
My dungeon was in a basement. My world had always been walls and ceilings and locked doors and here I was flying over open canyons with no walls at all and it felt like my chest was expanding to match the space.
I’d specifically requested a trip to Sedona because I wanted to see this place in person.
And it was more beautiful than I could even imagine.
Quest pointed out Cathedral Rock and Bell Rock and the Chapel of the Holy Cross built into the side of a cliff and I realized this man had studied this place before bringing me here.
He didn’t just rent a compound and fly me out.
He learned the geography so he could narrate it for me. That was Quest. He did nothing halfway.
We landed back at the compound around noon.
Quest disappeared into his office for a call and told me to go enjoy myself.
An hour later I understood what he meant.
A massage therapist and a makeup artist were waiting for me in the master suite.
They’d set up a full station with a portable massage table, a ring light, brushes, palettes, and a steamer for my skin. He’d flown them in from Scottsdale.
The massage was ninety minutes of someone putting my body back together one knot at a time.
The makeup artist was a Black woman named Toni who had worked with Rihanna’s team and understood brown skin without me having to explain what undertones I needed.
She spent an hour on my face and when she turned the mirror around I looked at myself and didn’t recognize the woman staring back.
Not because I looked different. Because I looked like the version of myself I’d always been but had never been allowed to be.
Beautiful without performance. Feminine without submission.
The dress was laid out on the bed. Pink, tight, Roberto Cavalli with ostrich feathers cascading from the hem.
When I put it on and looked in the full-length mirror I understood that Quest had picked this dress for me because he’d picked this color for me since the beginning.
Peach. Pink. The warm spectrum that he associated with the woman who softened every hard edge of his life.
I walked out onto the deck and Quest was standing at the railing in a black suit with no tie, his top button undone, looking out at the canyon with a glass of champagne in his hand.
He turned when he heard my heels on the stone and his face did something I’d never seen before.
His mouth opened slightly and his eyes moved from my face to my feet and back up and he didn’t say anything for about five seconds.
He was never speechless. This was a first.
“Say something,” I said.
“I can’t. You broke my brain.”
I laughed and walked toward him and he met me halfway and put his free hand on my waist and kissed my forehead because he didn’t want to mess up my makeup and that small act of consideration after everything this man had done with those same hands was the most tender thing I’d ever experienced.
Dinner was set up at the edge of the deck overlooking the valley.
A table for two with white linen and candles and pink roses and the Sedona sunset turning the sky behind it into layers of color that no filter could replicate.
Pink and purple and deep orange bleeding into each other while the red rocks below went from gold to copper to shadow.
We ate lobster tail and filet mignon with lobster mashed potatoes and sautéed asparagus and drank champagne that definitely cost more than my first car.
But the food wasn’t the point. The point was Quest sitting across from me in the fading light, looking at me over his glass with an expression that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with certainty.
He was sure about me. He’d been sure about me since he slid that garter up my thigh.
And tonight he was going to say it out loud.
We finished dinner and the server cleared the table and the sun was almost gone, just a thin line of orange on the horizon, and the first stars were coming through and Quest stood up and walked around to my side of the table.
He crouched beside me. One hand on the back of my chair, his face level with mine, those dark eyes steady and stripped of every layer of armor he’d worn for thirty-eight years. He was just a man looking at a woman he’d chosen.
“From the moment you came into my life there ain’t been shit but chaos.”
I let out a giggle, because he was right.
“And that chaos has lit me up in ways I never knew I needed. You keep me on my toes. You make me feel alive. You’ve given me something I didn’t believe existed.”
He opened the box. The ring caught the last of the sunset light and fractured it into a hundred tiny fires. A seven-carat oval diamond on a platinum band that was so beautiful it hurt to look at and so specific to me that I knew he’d designed it himself.
“Marry me, Mehar. Not just because I need you. Because I chose you. And I’ll choose you every day for the rest of my life.”
My hands were shaking. My eyes were full.
My heart was beating so fast I could hear it in my ears.
I looked at this man crouched in front of me on a deck in Sedona with the desert behind him and a ring in his hand and I thought about every door I’d walked through to get here.
Every door led to this one. And this was the first one I was walking through because I wanted to, not because I had to.
“Yes,” I said.
He slid the ring onto my finger and I looked down at it and the diamond was so clear I could see the candlelight reflected inside it and on the inside of the band, engraved in tiny letters, was one word: Peach.
I grabbed his face and kissed him and he lifted me out of the chair and held me against him and somewhere behind us I heard the soft click of a camera. He’d hired a photographer. He’d planned every detail of this night, leaving nothing to chance. No one had ever done anything like this for me.
We stood there holding each other while the sky went dark and the stars filled in and the photographer captured it all from a respectful distance and when Quest finally pulled back and looked at me he was smiling with his whole face.
Not the business smile or the charming smile or the dangerous smile.
The real one. The one that only existed for me.
The staff cleared everything and left around ten. The compound went quiet. Just us and the desert and the stars and the ring on my finger that I kept looking at like it might disappear if I stopped.
Quest found me on the glass balcony off the master bedroom.
I was leaning on the railing looking out at the mountains with my heels off and the champagne still warm in my chest. He came up behind me and put his hands on my hips and pressed his mouth against the back of my neck and I felt his breath on my skin and his body against mine and the ostrich feathers from my dress brushing against his legs.
“Take this off,” he said against my ear. “I want to see my fiancée.”
“Your fiancée.” The word tasted new in my mouth. “I like that.”
“Get used to it.” He unzipped the dress slowly, one hand pulling the zipper down my spine while the other held my hip steady. The dress fell to the glass floor in a pool of pink and feathers and I stood there in nothing but the ring and the moonlight and the desert air on my skin.
He turned me around and looked at me. Really looked. Like he was memorizing every inch of my body against the backdrop of the Sedona mountains and filing it somewhere permanent.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “And you just agreed to be mine forever. Do you know what that does to me?”
“Show me.”
He kissed me hard and walked me backward until my back pressed against the glass railing and I could feel the cool air behind me and the warm night in front of me and his hands moving down my body with purpose.
He dropped to his knees on the glass floor and put my leg over his shoulder and buried his mouth between my thighs and I grabbed the railing behind me with both hands because if I didn’t hold onto something I was going to fall off this balcony and die happy.
His tongue was slow and deliberate, working me in circles that tightened with every rotation.
I looked down at him on his knees in his black suit with his mouth on my pussy and the diamond on my finger catching starlight and I thought this is what it feels like to be loved by a man who worships you. Not the dungeon kind. The real kind.
“Quest, I’m gonna…” I couldn’t finish because the orgasm hit me like a wave that started at his mouth and rolled through my entire body. My legs shook and my grip on the railing tightened and I came against his tongue with the mountains behind me and the stars above me and his name on my lips.
He stood up and unbuckled his belt and lifted me onto the railing.
My ass was on the cold glass with nothing but open air behind me and he was standing between my legs holding me steady with both hands gripping my thighs.
I wrapped my arms around his neck because he was the only thing between me and a very romantic death.
“I got you,” he said. “I’ll always have you.”
He pushed inside me and I gasped and pulled him closer and felt every inch of his dick filling me up while the desert stretched out behind us in every direction.
He fucked me on that railing with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be and nothing else to prove.
Deep and slow, his forehead pressed against mine, his hands holding my body like I was the most valuable thing he’d ever touched.
“This pussy belongs to your husband now,” he said against my mouth. “You understand that?”
“You’re not my husband yet.”
“I’ve been your husband since the day I met you.
The ceremony is just paperwork.” He thrust deeper and I moaned and dug my nails into his shoulders and he picked up the pace until the railing was shaking and my body was trembling and I was so close to the edge in every sense that the line between pleasure and freefall had completely disappeared.
“Come with me,” I said. “Together.”
We came at the same time, his face in my neck, my legs locked around him, both of us shaking on a glass balcony in the Arizona mountains while the stars watched and the desert held its breath.
Afterward we lay on the balcony floor with a blanket pulled over us and the glass cool beneath our backs. I held my hand up above my face and turned the ring back and forth and watched the diamond catch the moonlight and scatter it across the ceiling.
“Peach,” I said, reading the inscription.
“Peach,” he repeated. And pulled me closer. And said nothing else. And that was enough.