Epilogue
QUINN
Three months later
“Stop fidgeting.”
“I’m not fidgeting.”
Mom gives me an evil look in the mirror mounted to the back of the closet door. “You’ve been fidgeting since I zipped you into this dress, and if you don’t quit it, I’m going to pin your arms to your sides and walk you down the aisle like a mummy.”
“Mom.”
“Quinn.” She’s standing behind me in Dorian’s bedroom—our bedroom—holding a veil in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other, and she is in her absolute element.
This is the Super Bowl of motherhood. This is the event she has been training for since the day I was born, and she is not going to let a little thing like her daughter’s nervous system ruin it.
“Hold still.” She sets the champagne on the dresser and brings the veil up behind me, and I watch in the mirror as she pins it into my hair like the entire future of the human race depends upon the outcome. “There. Don’t touch it.”
Is this how I sound when I’m talking to Lillie?
The dress is white, obviously, because my mother would have disowned me if it wasn’t, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever worn—more beautiful than the green dress, which I didn’t think was possible.
It’s simple. That’s what I wanted. No beading, no train that requires its own zip code.
Just silk, fitted through the body, with a neckline that shows a tasteful amount of skin but no more.
“Your father is going to lose it,” Mom says, stepping back to look at me.
Her eyes are already welling with tears she’s fighting to blink back. “Oh, honey. Look at you.”
“Mom, don’t.”
“I’m not crying,” she insists before sniffling.
“You’re literally crying right now.”
“These are champagne tears. They don’t count.” She fans her face with both hands and takes a breath that shudders on the way in. “My baby is getting married to a man who owns a—what is it he does again? Acquisitions?”
“Something like that.”
“Acquisitions.” She says it like she’s tasting it. “Very fancy. Very mysterious. Your Aunt Linda thinks he’s a spy.”
“He’s not a spy.”
“I told her that. I said, Linda, the man is not a spy, he’s just very private and very rich, and has a lot of security because of the—what was it?”
“High-profile clients.”
“High-profile clients.” She nods, satisfied. “That’s what I told her. She didn’t believe me, but she also thinks the moon landing was staged, so.”
I look at myself in the mirror and think about the things my mother doesn’t know.
I think about how she never will, and I feel the weight of that, and the lightness of this dress, and the fact that in approximately thirty minutes I am going to marry a man who runs a criminal empire and loves me like I’m the only clean thing he’s ever touched, and I am at peace with every single part of it.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She presses her forehead against the back of my head, careful not to hurt the veil. “I’ve been waiting for this since you were three years old and told me you were going to marry a dinosaur.”
“He’s not a dinosaur.”
“No. He’s much better-looking.” She straightens up and squares her shoulders. “Let’s go get you married.”
The estate has been transformed.
I don’t know how else to say it. The back lawn—the same lawn where Poptart grazes, Lillie runs, and the security team does their morning sweep—is covered in white.
White chairs, white flowers, white fabric draped between the trees, catching the late-afternoon light like sails.
There’s an arch at the end of the aisle made of roses and wisteria, cascading down in pale purple and cream.
Beyond it, the paddock fence, and beyond that, the tree line, and beyond that, the wall, and somewhere past the wall there are men who watch the road, but in here, right now, it looks like something out of a story.
Lillie is waiting for me at the back door in a white dress with a tulle skirt so enormous she looks like a very small, very aggressive cupcake. She’s holding a basket of rose petals and vibrating.
“Quinn.” She gasps dramatically, eyes perfectly wide. “You look like a princess.”
“So do you, baby.”
“I know!” She does a spin. The tulle takes out a potted plant. Ms. Beaumont catches it without looking up from her clipboard. “I practiced throwing the petals. Watch.” She grabs a fistful and hurls them at the ground with the force of a person throwing a grenade. “See?”
“Maybe a little gentler,” I suggest as I take hold of my bouquet of white roses.
“Daddy said to throw them like I mean it.”
How do I argue with that?
The music starts—something with strings, something that makes my throat close.
Lillie takes off down the aisle at a pace that can only be described as aggressive.
She throws petals like she’s sowing a field in a windstorm, and the guests laugh, and I watch from behind the door with my hand on my father’s arm, and my heart in my mouth.
Then it’s my turn.
Dad walks me down the aisle, and I don’t see the guests.
I don’t see the flowers or the arch, or the chairs.
I see Dorian. He’s standing at the end of it in a black suit, and he’s watching me come toward him, and his face is doing something I’ve never seen it do.
It’s open. No flat expression, no carefully managed stillness.
He looks like a man seeing something he was afraid to believe in, and I watch him press his lips together and blink hard, and I realize, halfway down the aisle, that Dorian Moretti is trying not to cry.
I almost trip. I don’t, because my father is holding me up, but I almost do, and Dorian sees it, and the corner of his mouth moves, and there he is. There’s my guy.
Dad puts my hand in his, and Dorian’s fingers close around mine, and he leans in and says, very quietly, “Delicious.”
I’m going to kill him. I’m going to marry him, and then I’m going to kill him.
The ceremony is short because Dorian doesn’t like long speeches, and neither do I, and the officiant keeps it simple—vows, rings, the basics. Except for the ring part.
Because the ring part involves Poptart.
This was Lillie’s idea. It was a terrible idea, and I said so, and Dorian said so, and Ms. Beaumont said so with her eyes, but Lillie wanted Poptart to carry the rings down the aisle in a little pouch on his halter, and none of us—not a single adult in this household, including a man who controls half the eastern seaboard—was able to say no to her.
So Poptart is led up the aisle by one of the stable hands, wearing a white ribbon on his halter and a small silk pouch tied to his neck.
The guests are delighted, and he makes it approximately three-quarters of the way to the arch before he sees the rose petals on the ground and decides they’re food.
He stops. He drops his head. He begins to eat.
“Poptart, no,” Lillie hisses from her position beside me.
Poptart does not acknowledge her. Poptart has found rose petals, and he is chewing them with the placid commitment of an animal who has never once in his life been in a hurry.
The stable hand tugs the lead. Poptart does not move. The stable hand tugs harder. Poptart leans back against the rope the way he leaned back in the parking lot at Sweetwater, with the full-body stubbornness of a creature who knows he cannot be made to do anything through reason.
“Oh, for—” Dorian starts, and then Tristan appears.
I don’t know where he came from. I never know where Tristan comes from.
He materializes beside the horse, and without a word, without expression, without the slightest disruption to the stillness that surrounds him like weather, he takes the pouch off Poptart’s halter and walks it to the arch and hands it to Dorian.
The guests applaud. Poptart continues to eat rose petals. Lillie puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head.
Dorian slips the ring on my finger. I do the same with his. The officiant says the words, and Dorian kisses me. It’s the kind of kiss that makes my grandmother clear her throat from the second row.
That’s it. I’m married.
I am married to a mob boss, and I have never been happier in my entire life.
We planned this. A few minutes alone during the cocktail hour, when we’d step away and change into our reception attire.
That means a second dress for me, along with a pair of dance-friendly flats I already can’t wait to slide my feet into after meeting and greeting for the past half hour post-ceremony.
“We have twenty minutes before the reception,” my husband announces as we step into the suite while a party unfolds outside.
“We have fifteen,” I point out.
“I’ll take fifteen.”
The bedroom door closes behind us, and his mouth is on mine before the lock clicks.
My back hits the door, and his hands find the silk at my waist, and I’m already reaching for his belt, because we’ve been playing it cool for the last hour while the tension has been building like a storm front.
I need him the way I need air, which is to say desperately and immediately.
“The dress—” I gasp against his mouth. “Don’t ruin the dress, I have to change but don’t ruin—”
“I’m not going to ruin the dress.” He’s already working the zipper down, slowly, carefully. The silk slides off my shoulders and pools at my ankles, and now his hands are on my bare skin. Stroking, caressing, his lips skimming my throat and my shoulder until I shiver.
“Fifteen minutes,” I remind him before gasping when he sucks my taut nipple through the lace cup covering it.
“I’ve done more with less.” He lifts me, and I wrap my legs around him, and he carries me to the bed and lays me down, and the veil is still in my hair, and I don’t care. His mouth moves down my throat, my collarbone, lower, and I arch into him and pull at his shirt.
“Off,” I manage. “Take it off.”
He does, and I run my hands over his chest, and he makes a sound against my skin that undoes something in me and makes me cup the back of his neck to pull him down for a kiss.
His hand slides up my thigh, finds what’s underneath, and I arch into him again.
I give myself to him the way I always do, because this is the only way I ever want to be.
“Wet,” he grunts before he rolls his hips and grinds his dick against me. His fingers move, and I gasp and grip his shoulders.
“Dorian…” I moan when he makes contact with my throbbing clit.
“I know.” He always knows—where to touch, how to move, the exact pressure that turns me liquid.
His hand works between us until my hips buck, and I moan into his mouth.
I’m already falling apart when he pushes into me, and the feeling is so full and so right that I make a sound I’ll be embarrassed about later.
“Fuck.” It’s a grunt, deep, animal, delivered once he’s filled me. “I love this sweet pussy. I love you.”
Then he moves, and I move with him, and it’s fast and urgent, and nothing like the slow, careful first time.
This is need, raw and honest, his hands gripping my hips, my nails in his back, both of us chasing the same edge.
The bed hits the wall, and I don’t care.
The veil falls out of my hair, and I don’t care about that either.
Nothing exists except where we’re connected, and the way he says my name like it’s the only word he knows.
I come first, hard, my whole body tightening around him, and my teeth digging into his shoulder to stifle what I can’t hold back.
He follows seconds later with his face pressed against my neck, and a groan I feel in my chest. We stay like that—tangled, breathing hard, his weight on me in the way I love, the way that makes me feel held and covered, and completely his.
“Mrs. Moretti,” he says against my throat.
I laugh. It comes out breathless and overwhelmed. “Don’t start.”
“Mrs. Moretti,” he says again, and kisses the spot below my ear, and I feel him smile against my skin. I like the sound of it. My new name, spoken by the man who gave it to me. Nothing has ever been this right in the whole history of the world, and nothing ever will again.
From somewhere outside, I hear Lillie’s voice, carrying across the lawn. “Poptart! Those are not for you!”
Dorian lifts his head. I look at him—flushed, his hair ruined, his shirt on the floor, his eyes soft in the way they only ever go for me and for the girl yelling at a horse outside.
“We should go,” I tell him.
“We should,” he agrees.
Yet neither of us moves.
“Five more minutes,” he murmurs, and puts his head back down against my neck, and I hold my husband in our bed and listen to our daughter scold our horse, and I think: this is it.
This is my life. It’s not the one I planned. It’s better.
Thank you for reading Rent a Mob Boss.