I glance over at my brother to affirm my mother’s lunacy.
“Unlike Jackie,” Hudson grunts while blowing smoke out the window. I’ve told him twice to knock that shit off. There’s no smoking in the holding tank, but Hudson never listens. Jackie’s been gone with Josh over a year now. Not that Hudson’s been after them. If it were my wife and kid, I’d be right there with them.
“I do what I can,” I say, adjusting myself in the mirror. It feels odd dressed in a tux. I’d much rather have worn a suit—a suit I can handle, but this feels foreign, unnatural. In fact, I offered to wear a suit, but Lee thought formal was best. Truth is, I would have worn scuba gear if she wanted me to.
Mom steps in and smooths out a wrinkle on my dress shirt. “Soon as you can, you should consider merging Townsend and Shepherd.” The whites of her eyes increase at the thought of a boardroom coup with the crosstown rival.
“Don’t do that—makes you look nuts.” I fiddle with my tie accidentally stretching one side farther than the other. “And, FYI, I’m not marrying Lee in an attempt to pull some hostile takeover.”
“No prenup,” she sings. “Nothing’s stopping you.” Third time today she’s reminded me there’s no legal infrastructure in the event we decide to dissolve the union that has yet to take place.
I avert my eyes. “Yeah, there’s another con I pulled.”
A knock erupts at the door, and Colton steps in flashing his cheesy Las Vegas smile. He looks sharp, too much like Mitch for comfort, but I decide to let his genetic deformity slide just this once.
“You made it,” I say as he slaps my back and ends with a fist bump. “Did you see Lee?” I’m hoping for a yes. I’m dying without communication. She said no contact until the big moment. She’s going old school on me, and I don’t like it. Deep inside I’m afraid she’ll be a no-show, and it crushes me to think about it.
“Yup. Says she hates you. Changed her mind.” He glances at himself in the mirror and twitches his brows.
“You wish.” I pluck my tie apart and start from scratch.
Deep down inside I’m afraid he’s right.
The sanctuary is decked out in roses. Every square inch of the altar is covered with enough flora and fauna to outfit the Garden of Eden.
My legs won’t stop shaking, so I alternate pumping my feet. All of those eyes glancing up at me from the pews make me feel like I’m under a microscope. The last thing I need is to have a panic attack in front of the who-cares-who’s-who of Mono.
Truthfully, I thought Lee might want something small since it’s her second go-around, but she went all out. In a way I’m glad. It shows she’s ready to move on, happy about it, too.
The church is brimming with bodies, standing room only in the back. The last time I remember it being this full was—
Crap. He’s getting in my head again. Sorry Mitch. Not today—and for damn sure not tonight. Lee thought waiting until our wedding night would be respectful to Mitch—thus the short engagement. God knows the only respectful thing I could do to please Mitch is lodge a bullet in my brain. Sorry Mitch, you get the casket—I get the bride. That’s how fate worked this one out. And tonight Lee is all mine, in name and in body—and do I ever have plans for that body.
The music shifts gears to something slow and melodramatic. Hudson walks Katrice down the aisle—just the two of them. I guess in that respect Lee decided to keep it simple. The wedding coordinator tries coaxing Stella to scoot on out. She’s all Lee with her blonde hair, those large doe eyes, and a smile that spreads ear to ear. Stella takes small, stiff steps, the curls bouncing on the top of her head in rhythm. A round of oohs and giggles circle the room as Stella sprays the runner with lavender petals, Lee’s favorite. Halfway down she runs out of flowers and pitches the basket into air, nailing my mother in the head.
I give a little laugh.
She’s my girl through and through.
Her patent leather shoes pick up speed until she crashes into my arms.
“Daddy!”
“Good job, baby.” I give her a quick spin, and plant a kiss on her cheek. “God, I love you.” My heart sings holding her like this.
It’s all happening. This is real.
The crowd turns. Lee appears in the doorway as a shadow, her arm linked with Colt’s.
Shit.
I bite my lip to keep from saying it out loud.
From this vantage point he looks every bit like Mitch. But it’s not. It’s just some wedding day mind fuck because deep inside I know its Colt.
Lee steps into the light, and illuminates the room all by herself. She steals the beauty from the flowers in her hands, the roses at her feet. Her hair is swept back, and she beams a big smile directed right at me. She looks like a queen—a goddess—some supreme being created just for sheer beauty.
Tears well up unexpected, and I try to blink them away.
Lee strides down with her gaze fixed on mine, her intoxicating smile with its sultry implications.
“You’re so damn beautiful,” I whisper, as she shoulders up beside me.
Her mouth falls open. She looks down at her shoes then back at the open door as if she woke up and found herself standing at the altar with me of all people playing the part of the groom. Her eye twitches, and she jerks like she might make a run for it. Her gaze lingers at the gaping space as if she’s waiting for someone, as if she might have left someone behind.
The last thing I want is Mitch getting too far in her head, crawling into her mind front and center and getting comfortable for the show.
It’s time to break with tradition and pull her out of the pit of sorrow she’s fallen into. I don’t want her to forget about Mitch—I just need her to love me. Mitch had his moment, and this is mine.
I circle my arms around her waist and crash my lips against hers—loving her with my hungry affection until she moans like a dove in front of the entire congregation.
The preacher bleats a half-hearted reprimand, and the room ignites with laughter. I don’t know what he said or why the room has suddenly erupted in cheers. I’m too lost in Lee and the deep well of her mouth. I take her face up in my hands and continue to shower her with slow, lingering kisses until one by one the memory of everyone who has ever lived on the planet disappears.
The Crystal Oaks Resort gleams under a baby-faced moon.
Lee wanted the reception partially indoors with a dance floor that bled out under the stars. A sea of tuxedos and women in sparkling gowns swirl over the wooden expanse, perfuming the night with laughter.
The wall of humanity is impossible to navigate, so I hold Lee by the waist all night as we make the rounds, thanking people for coming out. It’s like walking in a dream holding Lee—married to Lee. Like my time before Lee never existed, like it happened to someone else.
We smack into Viv and some poor idiot with enough shellac in his hair to reflect the overhead lights like high beams. It was Lee’s idea to invite her, and I hope Viv doesn’t make her live to regret it.
“You did it.” Vivienne offers one of her signature scowls. Her dark hair is draped over one eye, and it looks as if she stained her lips with the blood of her latest victim.
“It’s so nice you came.” Lee’s teeth glitter. She hasn’t stopped smiling since I gave her that last official kiss and made her my wife. She outshines the opulence the venue has to offer. The moon and the stars don’t have anything on her. I can’t take my eyes off my beautiful wife. Lee Shepherd. I’ve dared to think it a few times when she wasn’t mine, and now its here, and it still feels foreign as if on some level it could never be true.
“I plan on coming to all of Max’s weddings.” Viv bears her fangs for the hell of it.
The music, the laughter, it all grinds to a halt as a surge of rage sirens through me. Leave it to Viv to turn a sacred moment into a heap of sarcastic bullshit.
Lee throws back her head and laughs before sharpening her eyes on my, first and only, ex-wife. “Then I suggest you take a seat—eat the cake
, enjoy the music. Max won’t be having another wedding—not to you, not to anybody. When two people find each other and know it’s right, it lasts forever.”
“Oh, come on, Lee.” Viv bleeds a necrotic smile. “You and I both know forever is a lie. People leave, they disappear—and everything changes.”
I knew Viv was as bitter a bitch as they came, but I never thought she’d crack us over the skull with Mitch’s bones on our wedding day.
Lee’s face bleaches out, pale as chalk. “Max and I aren’t going anywhere,” she whispers. “Forever starts tonight. And the only person who should disappear around here, is you.”
Viv stiffens. Her features darken, and for a minute I’m sure I’ll have to play the part of a bouncer. But something in her relents and she snatches her date by the wrist before stalking off.
“You can thank me later,” Lee says, holding one arm open to Stella who’s running in this direction.
“I plan to.”
“Mommy!” She squirms from Lee then jumps into my arms. “Daddy!”
“Whoa.” I toss her in my arms and give a gentle ride. “Look who’s here? My two favorite girls.” I pull Lee in and form a small circle of love, just the three of us.
We sway to the music in our own private bubble. Lee laughs, plucking the tiara from her hair and placing it gently over Stella’s curls. She peels a quick kiss from my lips and narrows in on me with fire in her eyes. Lee is burning, and its all for me.
This is everything I’ve ever wanted. Lee and Stella—a real honest-to-God family.
Nothing can ever stand in our way.
We ditch the reception early and leave Stella in Janice’s trusted hands. My mother offered, but we were quick to decline. I’m sure she’d have Stella smoking stogies and toking off the bourbon after spending a week with her.
“Look at this place!” Lee takes in the honeymoon suite that overlooks the roaring Pacific. Outside the expansive windows, the world glows an eerie hint of purple as the stars hide beneath a veil of fog.
Candles illuminate the room. But in truth, Lee is all the light I need.
I plant a kiss over her neck, in the hollow of her shoulder, down lower still until she moans into me.
“I’m impressed,” she says, taking in the sight.
An explosion of rose petals in orange, lavender, and red cover the floors, the bed, the dresser. I paid an interior designer a small fortune to make it the most enchanting, fairytale of a room you’d ever want to be in.
“I don’t know how you pulled this off, but you’re a brilliant man, Max Shepherd.”
“The room or marrying you?” I reel her in again and dot her nose with a kiss.
Lee gives a seductive smile before pulling away and strutting to the other side of the bed.
“Where do you think you’re going?” The curve of a lewd smile plays on my lips. I take a step forward, and she darts around me like some erotic game of cat and mouse.
Lee lets out a bewitching laugh before crawling onto the mattress. Her perfectly manicured fingers lift her dress above her knees, exposing a pair of hotter than hell lace panties, and I let out a groan. Petals flutter in the air like confetti as she makes her way toward me. I take her in like this, Lee in a wellspring of roses—the beauty of nature rising to greet her. It’s all so perfect. She reaches over and pulls me in by the tie—raking open my shirt like it was on fire.
“Am I going to have to do this all by myself?” She asks with her lids half-closed, her lips parted and ready like I’ve envisioned countless times before.
I sink my knees on either side of her. “Can you?” I tease. “Might be fun to watch.” My heart tries to bullet out of my chest at the thought of Lee lost in ecstasy while I hangout on the sidelines. “Not tonight, though. Tonight, I definitely plan on pulling my weight.”
“Prove it.” Her lips curl in a dangerous smile.
“I’m not one to back down from a challenge.”
I unzip the back of her dress and pull it over her head. Lee reaches back and unhitches a barely-there lace bra with her pink nipples showing through. She hitches her thumbs into her shoestring underwear, and they drop to her knees with a flick of the wrist.
Fuck. My heart slams against my chest like a virgin on prom night. Dying of a heart attack suddenly feels like a very real option.
“Hot damn,” I whisper, hardly able to maintain my breathing.
I touch my finger to her lips and she inserts it in her mouth, pulls it out in one slow drag with her tongue riding hard over the back of it.
“Nice.” I pump a smile with my hard-on ready to burst the seam of my pants. I trace a line down her neck and her head falls back.
“You like that?” I inch toward her, tracking my finger slowly down her body until I hit the soft curls that dip down between her thighs and stop.
“Come on, Max,” she pulls the words out in less than a whisper. “Get with the program.” She gives a half-smile while I tear off my shirt, glide out of my shoes, my pants, my boxers.
Lee presses her body against mine, and everything in me comes to life for the first time in my entire existence.
Her lips pepper me with a hot string of kisses before finding my mouth and slipping her tongue so far down my throat I think she might actually fall in. Swallowing Lee, now that’s something I could sink my teeth into.
I groan into her, maneuvering my body over hers. My hand latches onto her breast, and I move my mouth down over her nipple and give a gentle bite.
I let out a groan for miles.
Lee arches into my body, and lets me know she’s there with me one hundred percent. I lunge over her in a frenzy of kisses—my urge to attack her on a primal level outweighs any need I might have to protect her. Being with Lee, is a powder keg, a starvation I’d like to satisfy in less than three rabid bites. I plan on devouring her well into the daylight hours and then long after that. Those were my own private vows, the ones I plan on implementing immediately.
She takes up my hands and rides them over her body, runs my open palms over her soft breasts, pulls me down to make a proper introduction to her hips, her thighs. I round out her curves like a dream. I may have been drunk when I slept with Lee Middleton once upon a high school party, but I committed her body to memory and replayed the footage far longer than I ever should have.
I slip my hand between her thighs and groan as I feel her warmth, the wet slick of her budding affection.
Tonight we make new memories—ones that I won’t have to bury in my subconscious because I’m afraid they won’t happen again. It’s happening—Lee and me, floating in the perfect sea of our love.
Lee wraps her legs around me, her bare flesh sears over mine. She takes me into her hands, traces me out with her fingers and rubs a little circle over the top of my dick with her thumb. She looks up at me and bites down a smile.
“Look at you.” Her eyes widen with surprise as she strokes the length of my dick. “You’ve got some damn impressive equipment, Shepherd.”
My chest trembles with a quiet laugh. Mitch blinks through my mind, and I evict him and his unimpressive equipment from my subconscious.
“You’re all mine, Max Shepherd.” She glides her hands over my cock again, and a guttural moan escapes from deep inside me. “Forever, you hear me?”
“Forever,” I whisper into her open mouth. Lee explodes a kiss over me like a nuclear detonation, something just this side of violent, something charged with an intimacy we’ve never shared before. Lee glides her hands down over my back, guiding me inside her.
“I love you,” I moan the words, hot in her ear, as Lee becomes my wife in every way I have ever dreamed. An entire slew of memories slice by of Lee and me at every stage and age—swimming at the beach as kids, those stolen glances in junior high, that final explosion of lust in high school that we finally have the chance to recreate. A part of me knew right from the beginning she’d be mine. Fate restored our journey, put us back on the right path, and here we are, with me burrowed dee
p inside of her—Lee wrapped around me like a glove. I never want to leave—never want to let go.
“Max”—she moans—“I love you so much.” It wrenches from her in a burst of passion.
If there was one moment in my life I could replay over and over, it would be this one, but I won’t have to.
I’ll be living it.
6
Borrowed Time
Three Years Later
Lee
“So are you going natural?” I ask Kat as we watch the waves crash over the shore from the back patio.
Four months ago they implanted five embryos, and three of them took. We sit outside on the deck, facing the listless horizon as the fog ebbs over the sand, crawling along the dunes like a plague of gossamer spiders. The salt ripens my senses, leaches onto my skin in a humid, sticky layer. It’s so hazy this morning you can’t see the water. You need to have faith it’s there—that it won’t whisper the words I’ll be right back then disappear forever.
“Are you kidding?” Her eyes bulge at the thought. “Hell, yes, I’m going natural. I have a way higher pain threshold than you.”
“As evidenced by?” I’m completely amused. Kat for sure has no idea that the threshold which she speaks of actually consists of pain. She believes eating three cheeseburgers in a row qualifies her for a morphine drip.
“For starters, I’m married to Steve.” Evidently there has been some strife in the Robinson household. Three IVF treatments have the ability to land a nail in the casket of any legal union. Rumor has it it’s a real bitch on their bank account, too.
“Anyway,” I whisper, “all I have to say is thank God for Max. If I were left to my own devices, I would never have gotten that epidural with Eli. Max was like a pit bull with the nurse until she called the anesthesiologist.” Max has proved to be my hero in every way. The night we had our precious baby boy was amazing. The only difference between that birth and Stella’s was that Max was actually in the delivery room while the miracle happened.