Blue eyes widened and she gasped. “What?”
I cupped her face, fighting back my smile at her outraged expression. “He will be a very lucky man, Marissa.”
“So you won’t make love to me?” she demanded, suddenly sounding angry. “Because I’m a virgin? For real?” She pulled away from me and I realized that she wasn’t just angry but pissed the fuck off. She moved farther away from me, wrapping the sheet around her gorgeous body as she climbed down from the roost. “You are such a fucking asshole.”
I quickly reached for my boxers at the end of the bed and pulled them on as I followed her out of the sleeping area and down the hall to the living room. Thankfully no one else was up, or if they were then they were off the bus since we had arrived at our next stop hours ago. The living room was empty and she tied the sheet tighter around her chest before turning to face me. “Marissa—”
“I can’t believe you. I really can’t.” She pushed her hair out of her face with a hand that trembled. “You said you loved me, and then tell me you won’t have sex with me. Because you want me to be a damn virgin for my husband? Yet, you will let complete strangers blow you? And I know you had sex with her. Why else wouldn’t you have come back to the hotel that night?”
How had we gone from making love, to arguing about her getting married, to this? I thought she had forgiven me for that night. Thought that it was behind us, even though I’d wanted to explain it to her. Yet she had refused every time I’d brought it up.
Well, no fucking more.
“I didn’t have sex with her!” I couldn’t help but roar when I saw the tears that had filled her eyes. Her tears should come with a damn warning label. At the sight of Marissa Bryant’s tears your insides will wilt and die.
For weeks now she had refused to let me explain about that fucking night with the groupie. But I couldn’t let her keep thinking that I had cheated on her. “And she sure as hell didn’t give me a blow job. You only saw, what? Five seconds? If you had waited five more you would have seen me push that stupid slut off me.”
“Yeah right,” Marissa said with a snort of disbelief. “She was on her knees, Wroth. And your pants were unbuttoned.”
“Unbuttoned maybe, but not down.” I raked my hands through my hair, silently begging one of Emmie’s fucking gods to help me here. My fucking life depending on this girl believing me right now. “I was checking on my Fenders, making sure that Pock had put them where they were supposed to be, and she caught me by surprise. One minute she was in front of me rambling some drunken gibberish, and the next she was on her knees with her hands on the zipper of my jeans. She was drunk and I didn’t know how to get her off me without hurting her. But when she nearly got my dick out, I pushed her off. I didn’t care if she got hurt or not. I just didn’t want her to touch me. She ended up on her ass, crying because she was drunk and mad since I’d turned her down earlier that night.” When Marissa still looked like she didn’t believe me I started to get mad too. “It’s true. I didn’t cheat on you.”
“Then where were you all night?” she demanded, more tears spilling from her eyes in a faster stream. The sight of those tears gutted me, but I wasn’t going to let them distract me from this conversation. This was too important not to get it out in the open. My future with her hinged on it. “Why didn’t you come back to the hotel room that night?”
“I took her home.” I told her and she turned away from me, shaking her head and laughing humorlessly in skepticism. “Pock and I took her home. She’d twisted her ankle when she fell and she was so drunk she didn’t make much sense. So I got Pock to help me take her home. When we got to her house, there was a big party going on that her roommates were throwing and Pock wanted to stay. I left him there and went back to the hotel, but by then Dev and Z had already gotten into a fight. I spent the rest of the night with Zander in a coffee shop letting him bitch about Devlin and Natalie.”
Marissa still had her back to me, but I saw the way her shoulders dropped a little and prayed that she was starting to believe me. I’d wanted to own up to what had happened that night for more than a year now, should have done it the night when she had thrown me out of her life. I’d thought, however, that she would cool down and realize that I would never have cheated on her. Never. She meant too much to me to throw away what we had with some meaningless fuck with a stranger.
Yeah, I’ll admit that I’d felt guilty for what had happened that night because for one insane second, when that drunken girl had had her hands on my zipper, I’d thought about letting her suck my dick. It would have proven to myself that I really didn’t deserve Marissa. That I wasn’t a good enough man for her. That one, stupid moment of insanity had made me think I deserved for her to hate me for a long, long time. But now that I had forgiven myself and had her forgiveness for my past, I knew that not only was she made for me but I was the only man who would ever cherish her the way she deserved.
No one would ever love Marissa Bryant as much as I did.
Marissa
The blood rushing through my ears made it impossible to hear anything over the beating of my heart. I clutched the sheet tighter to my chest, the tears on my face drying as Wroth’s words repeated over and over again in my head.
For days now I’d been thinking about what Dallas had said, that she hadn’t thought that Wroth had really cheated. She knew that he loved me too much to even think about it. I’d been living in denial, trying to convince myself that it had happened, when I knew deep down that what she said was the truth. Maybe he hadn’t said the words back then, but I had known that Wroth loved me. He was a man who wasn’t gentle by nature, yet he’d always been so with me.
All my life he had cherished me in one way or another. Whether it was joining the marines so that his parents wouldn’t lose their farm and so that I could still live with them, or helping my brother pay for my medical treatments and standing by that damned window every day that I’d been in isolation, or holding onto his control and not taking something he thought himself undeserving of. He always made sure that no matter what, I was taken care of.
In the past half hour, as I’d gone from having one of the best orgasms in my life to hearing him tell me he wouldn’t take what I so desperately wanted to give him—that my virginity was for my future husband—I’d let my anger overwhelm me and I’d lost my temper with him for only the second time in my life. All because I’d wanted him to say he wanted to be my husband.
And for the first time in all the years that I’d known and loved Wroth Niall, he had lost his temper with me. I’d never heard him speak louder than a soft roar in my vicinity but just now he had yelled so loud I was surprised that the glass in the windows hadn’t shattered. It was what I needed though, his angry words shouted at me as he admitted what had really happened that night was all the proof I needed that what he was saying was the truth.
I suddenly felt very, very stupid, however. I should have known that Wroth wouldn’t do something like that to me. I should have had more trust in his feelings for me, even though he hadn’t said the words to me then. Wroth wasn’t like other guys out there who would jump at any chance to get between some girl’s thighs. He loved me and respected me far too much to ever do that.
“Marissa?” Wroth’s voice was calmer now, but rougher than I’d ever heard it. “Please, sweetheart. Say something.” His voice cracked.
I scrubbed the last of my tears away and slowly turned to face him. “I believe you.”
He seemed to relax a little as he held out his hands to me. “You do? If you don’t I can get Emmie to find that chick somehow and make her tell you the truth. Or Pock will tell you. He was there.”
I shook my head. “No, no I don’t need her or Pock to tell me anything. I believe you, Wroth. I think deep down I knew that you wouldn’t do something like that to me. You loved me then too, didn’t you?”
He wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his face in my hair. “Yes, sweetheart. I’ve loved you for most of my life. You
have no idea how much, could never understand how deep my love for you goes.”
A small smile lifted the corners of my mouth as I held onto him even tighter. “Oh, I’m pretty sure I can understand it better than you think.” I turned my head and kissed the side of his face. “I love you, Wroth,” I whispered.
The big man in my arms went completely still. I heard his inhale and when it wasn’t automatically exhaled, I pulled back, concerned. When I saw the glint in his espresso eyes, my own breath caught in my chest. “S-say it again, Mari.”
“I love you, Wroth. More than you will ever know.” Strong arms lifted me up until I was at his eye level.
His gaze ate up the sight of me before he shook his head and pulled me forcefully against his hard body. “I love you too, Marissa. You are my world, girl. Nothing matters to me except for you. Do you understand that? Only you.”
“I—”
The door of the bus opened so suddenly that the door made a squeaking protest as it swung back and slammed into the outside of the bus. Wroth’s hold on me tightened painfully as Liam rushed into the living room. His eyes were wild, his breathing coming in sharp pants as his eyes raked over me. “Are you okay? One of the roadies was walking by and heard you screaming and crying.” His gaze went to Wroth. “He said that you were shouting at her. What the fuck have you done this time, motherfucker?”
“Don’t talk like that in front of your sister,” Wroth gritted out.
“You make my sister cry and the first words out of your fu…freakin’ mouth is for me not to cuss in front of her?” Liam’s nostrils flared. “I will kill you if you hurt her again, Wroth. I don’t care if I did give you permiss—”
“I’m not going to hurt her, damn it,” Wroth roared, cutting whatever my brother had been about to say off. “And if you would get the hell out of here, we could get back to making up like we should have done last spring.”
Liam’s mouth snapped closed and he glanced from his cousin to me, taking in how I was dressed. Blushing, I wrapped the sheet closer around me and bit my bottom lip. “Will you please stop biting that damned lip, Rissa? It’s annoying as hell.”
I released my bottom lip with a laugh and was happy to see that Liam’s anger was fading away. He looked back at Wroth, a small smile tilting his lips upward. “So everything’s okay in here? You didn’t break my sister’s heart again?”
“Everything is great in here at the moment,” I told my brother before Wroth could open his mouth. “And no, Wroth didn’t break my heart again, Li. If anything he just put it back together again.”
Liam let out a relieved sigh. “Good. Good.” Slowly he backed away. “Well, then. I’ll just go so that you two can get back to… whatever it was… I really don’t want to see the images that’re already forming in my head of how you two are going to make up…” He grimaced. “I’m glad you’re okay, Ris. I love you.”
“I love you too, Li,” I called after him as the door slammed shut behind him.
As soon as my brother was gone, Wroth was pulling me back into his arms. Espresso eyes were glittering down at me with a mixture of amusement, love, and need. “I love you, Marissa. Then, now, forever.”
I soaked in those words. Right then, in that very moment, I had never been happier. “I love you more.”
Wroth growled low in his throat and lifted me off my feet. Instinctively I wrapped my legs around his waist, gasping when I felt his hardened flesh flex against my core through the sheet. “Sweetheart, that just isn’t possible.”
“Oh yeah?” I teased as I brushed my lips over his. “Prove it.”
With a deep, rumbly laugh, he walked with me still in his arms back toward the sleeping compartments. The sounds coming from the roost across from ours was still hot and passionate and I rolled my eyes up at Wroth. “Animals,” he said with disgust, making me giggle. “Get ready to scream for me, Mari.”
My sex flooded with liquid heat and I scooted across our bed, holding my arms open for him as he climbed in and closed the curtain. “Does this mean you’re going to really make love to me?” I asked shyly.
“It means I’m going to lick your pussy until you come all over my face and then you’re going to use this gorgeous mouth on me.” He rubbed his thumb over my bottom lip. “The love making will come soon, sweetheart. Very, very soon.”
Chapter 15
Marissa
I felt like I was floating on a cloud the rest of that day and well into the next. I didn’t know how it was possible to be as happy as I was right then, but I hoped the feeling never went away.
On the second day in Kansas, I woke up with a tray of breakfast being placed on the mattress in our roost. I stretched and smiled as I picked up the little note on the tray that had a covered dish of something yummy smelling, a small glass of orange juice, my daily dose of Synthroid that I would have to take for the rest of my life because of my underactive thyroid, and a small little vase with a single flower in it.
A poppy! My obsession with The Wizard of Oz made recognizing the little flower easy. It was also one of my favorite flowers and Wroth knew it.
I grinned as Iread the note written in Wroth’s disaster he called handwriting. Luckily I had years of practice deciphering it.Enjoy your breakfast sweetheart. When you’re done, take a shower and put on the outfit Natalie left hanging for you in the bathroom. Someone will be waiting to bring you to me in two hours. I love you so much Marissa. Then. Now. Forever. –Wroth.
My heart melted at his note, and then curiosity and excitement kicked in. Wroth had told me last night before we’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms that he had something important to do this morning and when he was done I could meet up with him and spend the afternoon sightseeing with him. All he’d had to say was Oz Museum and I’d been hooked.
My excitement got the better of me and I rushed through my breakfast, delighted that it was my favorite with a Colorado omelet with salsa and toast. I knew that Wroth hadn’t made this for me because he couldn’t even boil an egg let alone make an omelet. This had Linc written all over it, but it was still incredibly adorable.
After I was finished I showered, noticing as I stepped into the large tiled walk-in shower that there was a zipped up dress bag hanging from the back of the bathroom door. I wanted to open it and see what Natalie had picked out for me to wear, wondering briefly why she would even need to pick out my clothes, but decided to wait until I was washed before peeking.
I took my time showering, shampooing and conditioning my hair before shaving everything that needed some attention. Unlike the majority of my girlfriends, I didn’t like getting waxed. Call me a cry baby all you want, but that crap hurt. I’d gone through plenty of physical pain. I didn’t want to willingly put myself through it ever again.
When the water grew tepid I turned it off and dried myself before climbing out. Since today was special and I would be taking all kinds of pictures at the Oz Museum, I was going to look my best. I blew my hair dry then curled the ends before putting on a little makeup—just a little foundation, some eye shadow and mascara, with gloss completing it.
Finally, I let myself open the dress bag and nearly fell on my ass when I stumbled back in surprise. No. Freaking. Way. My heart moved up to my throat, making it impossible to breathe as I lifted a trembling hand to touch the ruby red shoes that were hanging with the simple white sundress. Tears fell from my eyes, ruining the makeup I’d just applied.
When I picked up the shoes, a piece of paper fell to the floor and I carefully bent to pick it up. Like the note that had been on my breakfast tray,it was written in Wroth’s handwriting. ‘A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.’ You are loved more than you will ever know, Marissa. By our friends, and your brother but especially by me. –Wroth
The famous quote that the Wizard had told the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz brought even more tears to my eyes. It took me forever to get my tears under control and by the time I’d fixed my makeup and dressed
, the two hours Wroth had given me to be ready by had been over by a good twenty minutes.
Cursing, I slipped the ruby heels on as I rushed through the bus. When I opened a door, an older man with graying hair dressed in a chauffeur’s suit stood just a few feet away. He had a sign in his hand with my name on it. His eyes went to my shoes and grinned. “Miss Bryant?”
I nodded. “Yes, that’s me.”
“I thought it might be.” He took off his hat and offered me his arm. “This way, please.”
Excitement filled me once more and I took his arm, feeling surprisingly safe with the older man. We walked through the deserted parking lot, something that surprised me the most. I’d known that the bus was empty but where was everyone else? I didn’t even see the roadies, just a few security guards that I didn’t recognize.
The chauffeur placed me in the back of a black limo and moments later pulled out into traffic. The partition was left down and he talked to me as he drove. And drove. And drove. He kept driving for over an hour before he stopped right outside the biggest warehouse I’d ever seen. The parking lot only had a few vans parked around the side of the warehouse but other than that the place looked deserted.
Nervous now, I hesitated before getting out of the limo when the chauffeur, who had told me his name was Larry, opened the door and offered me his hand. Seeing my reluctance, Larry smiled encouragingly. “I promise that this is where you want to be, Miss Bryant. Mrs. Armstrong made sure I knew exactly where I was going this morning.”
I relaxed a little when he mentioned Emmie and finally took his hand, letting him help me out of the limo. Once I was out, I gazed up at the warehouse. It was even bigger than I had originally thought. From the outsides I could imagine the inside being big enough to hold two or three football fields. Why in the world would Emmie want me to come here? Why would Wroth?
With my hand on his arm, Larry escorted me to the side door of the warehouse and knocked twice. I frowned up at the blue sky as we waited until the door opened. When it did, I nearly screamed.