Page 41 of After Hours
“And that’s how you got here,” Zachary said. “To me.”
“That’s the story,” Romily agreed. “So I guess you could say that technically, I’m still married. Because I don’t think I can serve divorce papers on him without an address and I don’t want him to have my address. If that’s a dealbreaker for you I understand.”
Romily did not understand, actually. It would kill her. But she felt that was the right thing to say.
Zachary laughed. “I don’t give one shit if you’re still married to that abusive fuck,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, he lost the right to call you his wife the first time he turned on you. So that puts it about five years ago, on your wedding day. Fuck that guy.”
And Romily had only ever told this story to one other person. Her therapist. She’d done it crying and shaking, feeling so sick to her stomach and covered in shame that she’d thought she might never heal.
But Zachary made her laugh.
And then he was moving again, sliding closer to her and lifting her up so he was beneath her.
She could feel his hot, muscled body underneath hers and felt like crying again when he settled her astride him. But not because she was sad.
Because she had told him the worst thing that had happened to her—the thing she hadlethappen to her—and he was still here.
He had told her to trust him and she had and he wasstill here.
This was the first time she could remember crying actual tears of joy.
Zachary reached up and took the blindfold off, his blue eyes serious and intent as he stared up at her. He stroked her cheekbones, her cheeks. He moved his fingers over her lips.
“Thank you,” he said, in that stern, sure,comfortingtone of his. “I know that wasn’t easy. That you trusted me enough to tell me is beautiful, Romily. You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever known. I’m lucky that you chose me.”
She was…staggeredby that. She hadn’tchosenhim. He was a force of nature. He was a Viking. He had appeared out of the fog and changed her life, and what did she have to do with that?
“You chose me,” he said again, as if he could read her mind. She was already pretty confident that he could. “You know me well enough by now to know that if you told me to leave you alone I would have. Instead, you took my hand.”
He took one of her chained wrists and moved it toward him, so he could kiss her fingers. It seemed so oddly… courtly and romantic, here in this bed where they had already done unspeakable things, and would do so many more.
But it still made her melt inside. And everywhere else.
He settled his hands on her hips, shifted her up, and then lowered her with an electric intensity down the length of his cock. He watched her take him inside her body, every hard and hungry inch.
And then he grinned that hard, beautifully merciless grin of his as she came all around him. Immediately.
At some point, he took off those nipple clamps and the sensation that charged back into those nipples gone numb, made her scream, and come even harder.
She didn’t know when in all of that he released her wrists from the chains. The next thing she knew—still shuddering and lost in the grip of all that seismic glory that he had set off inside of her—he was between her legs, coming over her on the bed and holding her down with his hands.
And when he began to move, it was something else entirely.
They had fucked so many times. She assumed the rest of their lives would be spent finding new and improved ways to fuck each other silly.
But this was something else.
He was still Zachary. He gave her his weight. He kept his rhythm deep and hard. He held her arms up above her head and when she tested his grip, she couldn’t move. All of that was delightful. Deliberate.
But the look on his face was new.
“Put your legs around me,” he told her.
And when she did, it was like everything that separated them melted away.
It was like they were one. No end, no beginning. Just the blue of his eyes and the deep hard reach of his cock. The endless melting softness of her pussy and the way he let her clench her legs around him so that they moved in unison.
And when he told her to come, he did too, flooding her with so much scalding heat that her climax went on and on and on.
