Epilogue
Sophie
By the time the private elevator opens into the penthouse, Lucian still hasn’t put me down.
Not in the parking garage.
Not in the SUV.
Not even when I pointed out that I am perfectly capable of walking.
“I’m aware,” was his only response.
Caleb laughed.
Now Lucian carries me across the threshold as though I weigh nothing, his arm solid beneath my knees, the other locked around my back.
The familiar rooms open around us.
Dark walnut. Leather. The enormous windows filled with Houston lights.
Home.
Lucian finally sets me on my feet near the living room, but instead of immediately pulling me against him again, he glances toward Caleb.
Something passes between them.
My nerves stir.
“What?”
“Wait here.”
I narrow my eyes. “That sounds ominous.”
“It isn’t.”
Caleb starts toward the hallway with him. “His definition of ominous is unreliable.”
Lucian gives him a cool look.
Then they both disappear, leaving me alone for maybe thirty seconds.
Long enough for me to notice my cardigan still tossed over the chair where I left it. One of my books on the side table. The ridiculous mug I use every morning beside the coffee machine.
Nothing has changed.
And yet everything has.
Footsteps sound, and when I turn, my men are standing together, and Lucian is holding a familiar black velvet box.
My heart flip-flops.
Together, they cross the room and stop just steps in front of me.
“We didn’t bring these to your office.”
I look at each of them.
“Because we were afraid you wouldn’t want them.”
His simple admission nearly breaks me all over again.
Then Lucian flips open the box.
The engagement ring catches the light first, the emerald-cut diamond flanked by deep sapphires. Beside it are the two wedding bands.
My rings.
Lucian studies them for a moment. Then he looks at me earnestly.
“When I put the engagement ring on your finger, I gave you my choice.”
My throat tightens.
“I will never do anything like that to you again.”
And Lucian Hawthorne lowers himself onto one knee.
I stop breathing.
This is a man who does not kneel.
He commands rooms merely by entering them. He negotiates with governments, billionaires, criminals, and anyone else unfortunate enough to stand between him and something he wants.
Yet he is kneeling in front of me.
Waiting.
The symbolism is so enormous that I don’t trust myself to speak.
He removes the engagement ring from the velvet.
“Sophie Langford.”
His voice is steady, but his eyes are not.
“I love you.”
My eyes burn.
“I want you. Exactly as you are. Stubbornness, arguments, impossible questions, and all. I want to spend every year I have remaining trying to make you happy.”
Then, simply, he asks, “Will you marry me?”
I’m completely, irreversibly undone. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.”
Lucian closes his eyes briefly and then utters a faint, thankful curse.
Then his hand closes around mine and he slides the engagement ring onto my finger.
Now I’m the one to close my eyes. This is more perfect than I could have dared to dream.
Then he reaches for the first wedding band.
His gaze finds mine before he moves. “May I?”
Suddenly unable to speak, I nod.
Something dark and fiercely emotional passes through his eyes as he slides his band into place.
Then he raises my hand and presses his mouth against the rings, making me shiver.
Caleb steps forward and takes the velvet box from Lucian.
Like his partner, he goes down on one knee.
My laugh is a half sob, filled with pure joy.
He flashes me a devastating smile, but it disappears as he picks up the second wedding band.
For several seconds, Caleb simply looks at me, and the warmth in his expression makes my chest ache.
“Soph.”
Just that.
My name.
And somehow I hear his love, his promise, his commitment.
“Will you marry me too?”
Through my tears, I smile as he slides his band into place, where it’s supposed to be.
I stare at all three rings, at the sapphire and diamonds catching the light, and I curl my fingers slowly.
For a heartbeat, neither man moves, and none of us say anything.
Then the three of us embrace, and I kiss Caleb.
Then Lucian’s gaze drops to my hand.
A slow, deeply satisfied smile curves his mouth, making heat unfurl deep inside me.
“Wife…”
The words are gruff and part promise, part threat all at once.
“We want you naked.”
My breath catches.
“Turn around.”
Yes. This is right, natural. Where I belong
He unzips my dress with unhurried care, and the teeth part down my spine. Cool air touches skin that has been waiting for them since the elevator.
Slowly he kisses the places the zipper bares, and the tenderness of it makes my knees uncertain.
“I missed this,” he murmurs against my back. “Not the right to undress you. The privilege of being allowed to.”
The dress slips to my waist.
Caleb shrugs out of his jacket, then his hands return to me.
He eases the dress over my hips and lets it pool around my heels.
I step out of it even as Lucian unhooks my bra. Then Caleb draws my panties down with both thumbs, kneeling to help me free them, and stays there a moment with his mouth against the inside of my knee, breathing me in like a man who has been starving.
With his hands, Lucian touches my waist, my breasts, feeling every tremor I cannot hide.
I’ve missed this so desperately.
Together they walk me backward only far enough to reach the sofa, and Lucian sits first, drawing me down to straddle his thighs so that I am facing him.
“Look at me while he touches you.”
Slowly I nod my obedience.
Caleb’s mouth finds my shoulder from behind. His hand slides between my legs to discover I’m already slick, already shameless, and he makes a low sound that vibrates through my ribs.
“That’s our girl.”
Lucian watches my face while Caleb works me with maddening patience—circling, parting, dipping inside just enough to make me chase him. I try to rock into it. Lucian’s hands on my hips still me.
“Not yet. Feel it. Feel how much of this is yours to want.”
I do. God help me, I do. The penthouse, the city beyond the glass, the fight that nearly ended us—none of it is in the room except as the reason this slowness matters. Every stroke says we get to keep this. Every kiss says we almost didn’t.
When I am shaking, Lucian leans in and takes my mouth. “Tell us what you need.”
“You.” It comes out wrecked. “Both of you. I don’t want to be careful with the wrong things anymore.”
Caleb’s forehead rests between my shoulder blades. “Then we go where we haven’t gone. Only if you want it. Only if you stay with us.”
I know what he means. The knowledge sends heat and nerves through me in the same pulse.
“Yes.”
Lucian’s thumb brushes my lower lip. “Words, Sophie.”
“I want your fingers everywhere. I want you to show me. I want the future that we’re creating.”
Reverence ghosts through his eyes.
They shift me with a tenderness that would have once seemed impossible.
Lucian keeps me astride him, my chest to his, while Caleb reaches past us for the small bottle in the drawer of the side table—practical, unromantic, and intimate.
He warms the slick gel between his fingers first.
Then, because I am already so wet it embarrasses me, he gathers that too.
Caleb kisses the base of my spine. “Breathe for me.”
I do.
His slick fingertip traces the tight, secret place I have thought about in the dark and never asked for out loud. He does not push. He circles—patient, filthy, and careful in the same motion—until my body stops treating the touch as an intrusion and starts leaning back into it.
“That’s it,” he says. “You don’t have to perform this. You only have to let us love you here too.”
When he presses inward, it is slow enough that I feel every increment of stretch. The burn is bright and brief. Lucian holds my face and kisses me through it, swallowing the sound I make, praising me in a voice I have never heard him use in a boardroom.
“Good. So good.”
Caleb works the slick in again and again, until the burn thins into a deep, shocking fullness.
One finger. Only one. It is still enough to unmake my sense of where I end.
Lucian’s hand slides between us and finds my clit, matching Caleb’s rhythm, and the two sensations braid until I cannot tell which man is teaching my body the new language.
“Stay with us,” Lucian coaches. “We want you here when you come. I want you to know who you came home to.”
Caleb moves in close to my ear. “Ride it.”
He slides in a second finger, intrusively, stretching me, taking me in a way I never have been before.
I’m so full, shaking.
“That’s it.” Lucian slides two fingers into my pussy, and the fit of him against Caleb is so complete that a broken sound leaves me before I can stop it.
I am full in a way I have never been full.
Caleb’s fingers are seated in that tighter place, stretching me with a patience that feels like worship and theft at the same time while Lucian curls inside me and finds the swollen spot that makes my vision narrow.
He hooks. Presses. Rubs in a slow, devastating rhythm that has nothing to do with haste and everything to do with owning every inch of the yes I just gave them.
“Look at me,” he says.
I try. My mouth is open. My thighs are shaking around his.
He leans in to draw one of my nipples into his mouth.
The heat of it is a shock on top of everything else. He sucks deep, then harder, tongue working the peak while his fingers keep that merciless hook against my G-spot. Caleb adds a slick twist behind me, stretching me farther, and I make a noise I do not recognize as mine.
“Don’t you dare come.” Lucian’s words are insistent against my breast. “Fight it.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.” Caleb’s mouth is at my ear, voice scraped raw. “You wanted the future. This is the part where you stay inside it long enough to feel what we are.”
They do not speed up.
It’s simultaneously their punishment and their gift.