40. Epilogue #2
I break. The orgasm crashes through me in waves, and my thighs clamp around his head. He doesn't stop. He works me through every aftershock until I'm twitching and whimpering and pulling his hair hard enough to hurt.
He rises, and his mouth is glistening. The sight of it sends another throb through my core.
“Good girl,” he says, and the words should not hit the way they do.
“Don't call me—”
“You liked it.” He cups my jaw and kisses me, and I can taste myself on his tongue. “Don't lie to your husband.”
“You're impossible.”
He pulls the slip over my head, and I'm bare. He's still fully dressed. The imbalance is infuriating and arousing in equal measure.
“My turn,” I say, reaching for his shirt.
He catches my wrists. “Not yet.”
“I swear to God, Dmitri—”
He lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist on instinct, and he carries me to the bed, laying me down with surprising gentleness. Then he strips. Slowly. Shirt first, button by button, revealing the planes of his chest, the scars, the muscle. Then trousers. Then nothing.
His cock is thick and hard, curving up against his stomach, and the sight of it makes my mouth water.
“Like what you see?” he asks.
“I've seen better.”
He laughs. Actually laughs. The sound is so unexpected and warm that it aches behind my ribs.
“Liar,” he says and climbs over me.
His body covers mine, skin to skin without barriers, and the heat of him is overwhelming. His cock slides against my entrance, slick from how wet he’s already made me, and my hips rise to meet him.
“Tell me what you want,” he says, braced above me on one arm, the other hand brushing hair from my face with a tenderness that cracks something open in my chest.
“You. Inside me. Now.”
He pushes in, and the sensation is unrecognizable. I feel every ridge, every vein, the blunt head pressing deep, and the raw skin-to-skin heat of him short-circuits every nerve I have.
“Fuck, Cara.” His arms shake. “You feel—without the—”
“I know.” I wrap my legs around his hips and pull him deeper. “I know.”
He starts to move, slow and deep. His forehead presses to mine, and our breath mingles. This isn't fucking. This is something I don't have a word for in any language.
“You’re mine,” he says, his voice wrecked. “You chose me. No stamp could give me that. No man could order it.”
“I chose you,” I whisper, and the words taste like surrender. “Don't make me regret it.”
“Never.” He drives deeper, and I arch off the bed. “Never again.”
He pulls out and flips me onto my stomach with a strength that should be terrifying but isn’t. His hand presses flat between my shoulder blades, pinning me, and his cock slides back inside from behind in one long stroke that punches the air from my lungs.
“Oh, fuck—”
“This is what you do to me.” His hips snap forward, harder now, the pace building. “This is what five years of wanting you feels like.”
His hand fists in my hair, pulling just enough to tilt my head back. His other hand grips my hip, and each thrust jolts my entire body forward on the mattress. The wet sound of him sliding in and out of me without anything between us is intoxicating—raw, and impossibly intimate.
“Harder,” I say into the sheets.
“Greedy.” He obliges, slamming into me, and the headboard hits the wall. “My greedy, beautiful, infuriating wife.”
“Don’t stop—don't you dare—”
He doesn’t. He fucks me through one orgasm and into the start of another before pulling out and flipping me again. My back hits the mattress, and before I can protest the emptiness, he hooks my knees over his shoulders and sinks back inside.
The angle is devastating. He hits somewhere deep that makes my whole body light up, and the sound I make isn’t human.
“There,” he says, jaw clenched, sweat on his temples. “Right there. I can feel you clenching around me.”
“I’m going to—again—”
“Do it.” His thumb finds my clit, and I shatter. “Come on my cock. I want to feel every inch of you.”
I come so hard my vision whites out. My entire body seizes around him, pulling him deeper, and he makes a sound I've never heard from him before—guttural, broken, reverent.
His rhythm turns ragged. His hands grip my thighs hard enough to bruise, and his thrusts lose their precision, turning desperate and deep.
“Cara, I'm going to—”
“Inside me.” I pull him down, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I’m your wife. Inside me.”
Those words undo him. He drives in to the hilt and holds, his whole body rigid, and I feel him come—hot, thick, pulsing inside me with nothing between us. The sensation triggers one final, trembling wave through my body, and I clench around him as he empties himself completely.
His arms give out. He collapses beside me, still half inside me, his face pressed into my neck. His breath comes in broken gasps against my skin, and his hand finds mine, fingers lacing, our wedding bands clicking together.
For a long time, there’s only the fire, our breathing, and the winter dark beyond the glass.
“That,” I finally say, “was acceptable.”
He lifts his head. His hair is destroyed. His eyes are soft in a way I've never seen. “Acceptable.”
“We'll work on it.”
“Cara.” He kisses my knuckles, right over the ring. “I will spend the rest of my life working on it.”
I turn toward him in the firelight. My husband. The word is still new, still strange, still warm. His hand rests on my hip, possessive even now, and I let it stay because I want it there.
Outside, snow begins to fall across the estate grounds. Inside, Dmitri’s arm tightens around my waist. I press my back against his chest, and for the first time in five years, I close my eyes without checking the door.
The red car sits on the nightstand where he placed it. Blue waits in the small pocket sewn into my wedding skirt, close enough for me to touch if I need proof we came back.
Both of them safe. Both of us home.