Victorious(21)

I love that she wants to get on with our plans, that she’s curious and interested rather than turned off and appalled. That makes her as different from my first wife as it’s possible to get, but I already knew Natalie is made of much stronger stuff than Valerie could dream of being. Valerie… I need to do something about the trouble she caused between Natalie and me. I’ll take care of that when I get back to LA. In the meantime, I take advantage of Natalie going to get her phone to look at mine for the first time in a while.

A message from Liza catches my attention. Pictures of Natalie arriving at LaGuardia cropping up online. You won’t like them. Will send pics in next message if you want to see.

“Son of a bitch,” I whisper as I scroll through the pictures of her looking cornered, frightened and very small next to the hulking men on either side of her. I begin to wonder how I’ll ever let her out of my sight again. The thought of my precious love being afraid or surrounded makes me twitchy.

“What’s wrong?” she asks when she rejoins me on the sofa, pulling the blanket back up over us.

Because I’ve learned there’s no point in trying to hide anything from her, I hand her my phone and watch her closely as she studies the three photos Liza sent. “What’re you thinking?”

“I look like I did during Oren’s trial.”

“I hate that you look so afraid.”

“I wasn’t really. Josh and Seth were right by my side, and they moved fast to get me out of there. I was never in any danger. I think I was surprised more than anything. It happened so quickly.”

“This is why I always want someone with you going forward. If I can’t be there, then someone else needs to be to make sure you’re never hurt or overwhelmed. I’d lose my mind if anything ever happened to you because you had the poor sense to marry me.”

She puts down the phone and climbs into my lap, straddling me.

Pleasantly surprised by her assertiveness, I cup her ass and pull her in tight against my instant erection.

“Marrying you was the best thing I’ve ever done. I don’t expect to ever regret it.”

“Did you regret it yesterday?”

Shaking her head, she runs her fingers through my hair, arranging it to her liking. “Not for one second. The time we’ve spent together has felt like a fairy tale. No matter what else happens, it will always feel like that to me.”

“It’s been like a fairy tale for me, too. After you left yesterday, I was out of my mind. I threw a vase through a window, and then the doorbell rang. I thought it was you, but it was that FBI agent. I wanted to kill him for not being you.”

“Wait, why was he there, and why haven’t you told me?”

I sweep away her concerns with my hand. “He was following up on Rogers’s wife telling him Rogers had felt threatened by me. I assured Vickers the only way I threatened Rogers was legally. Why in the world would I kill him when I could’ve had the pleasure of watching him twist in the wind for years because of what he did to you?”

“Did you say that to Vickers?”

“Yep. I told him I was disappointed that Rogers had been murdered, because I’d been looking forward to making his life a living hell.”

“So where did you leave it with him?”

“That I need to remain available for follow-up questions, which I said was fine. Neither of us has anything to hide where Rogers is concerned.”

“I have nothing at all to hide, thanks to him,” she says bitterly.

“I hate him for what he did to you, Nat, but in a way, I’m grateful that we have no more secrets between us.”

She lays her head on my shoulder. “So am I.”

“I hated keeping things from you. It felt wrong to me from the very beginning. You’ll never know how badly I wanted to either tell you the truth or leave you to spare you from having to deal with something I didn’t know if you could ever understand. We all know how successful my attempts to leave you were.”

“You can’t leave me after all this. I was able to move on from everything that happened to me before, but something tells me I’d never get over losing you.”

I tighten my arms around her. “That’s one thing you’ll never have to worry about.”

She rolls her hips suggestively over my cock. “Can we go to bed? Please?”

As if I’ll ever say no to that question coming from her. “Anything you want, sweetheart.”





Chapter 6





We arrange to have Fluff taken outside, but she refuses to pee in the snowstorm. I hope we don’t awake to a mess, but Flynn tells me not to worry about it. He says he wouldn’t pee outside in this shit either.

In the bedroom, Flynn unties the robe I’ve lounged around in all day and pushes it off my shoulders, leaving me bare as his heated gaze travels from my face to my toes and back up again. He drops his shorts and raises the covers for me to get into bed ahead of him.

I’m freezing until he wraps his warm body around mine, pulling me in tight against him.

“You know what the worst part of yesterday was?” I ask him.

“What’s that?”

“Sleeping without you last night. I hated that.”

“I never went to bed at all, because I couldn’t bear to sleep without you.”