Surrender (Careless Whispers #3)(51)

Kayden Wilkens announcing he owns my orgasm isn’t exactly the way to prevent me from having one. “Careful,” I murmur, tilting my head back to look at him. “Or you’ll own it right now.”

He laughs, a low, sexy sound that strokes along my nerve endings, the sound a promise that I’m about to be right back on the edge any moment now. Kayden must know it too, because he doesn’t start moving again. He kisses my neck, teases my nipples, and scrapes his teeth on my shoulder. And then finally, finally, the slow, seductive sway of our bodies begins again.

Twice we repeat this process, starting and stopping, but there’s a point where we both cave to the inevitable, and he promises, “We have all night for repeats,” before he thrusts us both into oblivion, a place where pleasure and forever live, but nothing else can survive. A place we linger even after the storm of pleasure has become the calm sea of its aftermath, holding each other. Breathing with each other.

“I’d better get you a towel,” he finally murmurs, dragging my head back and kissing me before he pulls out of me and disappears.

I inhale and somehow, of all the things I could remember in this blissful moment, the words You’re CIA are the ones that come to me. But I shove away the million questions I still have about his meeting and this Trigger person. Kayden matters right now. What happened this afternoon matters right now. Remembering that moment when he’d walked out of the office, leaving behind jagged, broken emotions, and fixing it. That’s what comes first.

Kayden reappears, now wearing his jeans low on his hips, sans underwear, offering me the towel.

I accept it and as he takes my arm, helping me sit up, the chill of the stone walls has me shivering. “For you,” Kayden says, indicating his shirt in his hand. “Because it’s cold in here and I like you in my shirt.”

Those words and the look in his eyes warm me even before he sits down and slips the shirt over my head. I settle it over my body, the material soft, while I’m quite aware of it having been next to his hard body. Like I just was. Like I want to be again. “Thank you,” I murmur.

“Thank me by going to bed in my shirt every night for the rest of our lives.”

And just like that, we’re in the place I wanted us to be, staring at each other, the air pulsing with unspoken words I’m ready to voice. “You do know that there was never a moment when I doubted wanting to marry you, right? And that nothing in today’s meeting was ever going to change that. If you really believed that, why did you ask me to marry you?”

“When you hesitated over my proposal, it made me take a step back and ask myself if I was wrong about what you felt and what I thought—”

“Don’t say that,” I say. “You were not wrong.”

“No,” he says confidently, “I wasn’t. But regardless of understanding your reason for the hesitation, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he wants a yes.”

“I’m sorry, Kayden. I handled today horribly wrong.” I inhale and let it out. “And the truth is, if I’m honest with myself and you right now, as ironic and wrong as it is, when you started to doubt us, it hurt.”

“There was never any doubt, sweetheart. I explained where my head was. And like I said, I’m a selfish bastard when it comes to you. I’m owning up to that. I want you here, despite all the risks that are part of The Underground.”

“Don’t say you’re selfish. Because how am I not selfish, if I bring danger to you with Neuville hunting me? Or if I’m CIA—”

“You are CIA,” he corrects.

“Then what about the danger I might bring from that? The point is that if you keep saying you’re selfish for marrying me, then I see where that leads. If something happens to me, you’ll say it was because you were selfish—and you can’t. Because if I die, Kayden, I promise you I will have fought hard, taken someone with me, and enjoyed every moment I had with you. You have to promise me you’ll remember that. You have to, or you know what? I won’t marry you. Because I won’t—”

He cups the back of my head and kisses me. “You’re marrying me.”

“I know,” I say. “But promise me that you won’t say you’re selfish, or even think it.”

He doesn’t promise. He holds me there for several beats and then releases me and stands, leaning toward me and pressing his fists into the mattress and meeting my stare. “I’m going to be protective.”

“That’s understandable, since one mob boss killed your family and another one is after me. But eventually promise me that we can work together and get there.”

“We’re going to fight,” he warns.

“That’s okay, because I’ll win.”

His sexy, oh so talented lips curve. “You have a lot to learn,” he teases, “but I’ll teach you.” I laugh and shake my head while he straightens and offers me his hand. “Let’s go to the kitchen. I’m starving, and we have a lot to talk about.” I give him a tentative look and slide my hand into his, and he notices. “We’re just catching up on everything for the day. That’s what husbands and wives do.”

“Husband,” I say softly.

“Wife,” he says softly.

I haven’t missed the fact that he hasn’t let go of his self-proclaimed title of “selfish,”and I fear for how he’d deal with my death. But we have plenty of time to work on a remedy for that, since I don’t plan on dying.