Snorting out a half-pained laugh as he felt his dick jerk in response to her wriggling behind, Zeke dropped another kiss to the back of her neck. “C’mon, Kitten,” he cajoled gently, tickling her sides as she tried to roll away from him on the mattress. “We both know you’d kick my ass if I let you miss the firework show. Next to the Christmas nativity scene and Thanksgiving dinner, it’s your favorite holiday activity.”
Yawning into the pillow, Honor reached behind her to pat Zeke’s whiskered jaw. “Shhhh….sleep,” she lectured him sleepily as another slightly louder explosion split the air, this one making the barn walls tremble slightly. Jerking her head upright, she looked left then right. “What was that?” she drowsily asked while she blinked rapidly as he watched her try to clear the cobwebs from her mind. “Where the heck….” He heard her begin to mutter as she pushed herself up in the bed, her sheet falling around her waist as she stared down at her naked body.
“Zeke, I’m naked!” she announced as her shocked eyes darted up to meet his laughing ones. “Quit gawkin’’ at me, you pervert! What in the world are you doin’?” She squeaked, her hand already reaching for the sheet she dropped. Fortunately, his hand was faster as he watched her give up the battle for the sheet and cover her breasts with her cupped hands.
“Watchin’ the fireworks,” Zeke drawled, and he wasn’t just talking about the show in the sky.
Honor frowned as another boom rocked the barn and her gaze flew toward the sky as a bright display lit up the sky. “Fireworks,” she echoed as, awestruck, she forgot about her nakedness and dropped the hands she’d been using to shield her bare breasts.
Never one to waste an opportunity, Zeke quickly slipped behind her and slipped his arms around her waist, pulling her back to his chest while he pressed his lips to her neck. “Relax, baby,” he murmured when she remained stiff against him. “You already showed me everything that’s mine. Seein’ it now just reaffirms that it belongs to me.”
“I suppose,” she relented, softening against him as she continued to stare up into the dark night sky. “It’s so beautiful,” Honor breathed, her eyes glued to the skyline as blue, red and green sparks lit up the night sky.
Burying his face in her hair, Zeke nodded. “Oh, it’s beautiful alright,” he agreed though he was talking about the woman he held in his arms and not the show in the sky. “Those fireworks ain’t got nothing on you though.”
Relaxing completely, Honor turned her head to smile at the man holding her. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?” she murmured huskily. “We really…”
“Made love? Yeah, sweetheart, we did. Finally,” Zeke confirmed with a firm nod. Resting his chin on her shoulder, he took a deep breath. “You have regrets?” he asked, his stomach sinking as she bent her head and stared at where his hands rested against her naked belly. Mentally steeling himself for a negative reaction, he clenched his jaw and waited.
“Just one,” she replied quietly as his arms constricted around her reflexively.
“Okay,” he replied huskily as his eyes fell closed and his head bent and hung dejectedly from his neck. Her rejection pierced his soul, but part of him had always known that when the hormones had settled she might be disappointed about her decision to share her body with him. He’d just have to work harder to overcome her doubts about them. He could do that. He was no stranger to hard work. She was worth it.
“I’m sorry I made us both wait so long for something so obviously and wonderfully meant to be,” she continued, her musical voice heartbreakingly poignant as the seconds ticked by.
Honor’s meaning penetrated his mind a split second before he crushed her against him, covering her lips with his and kissing her deeply. “Oh, thank you, God,” he muttered reverently between sweet kisses to her soft lips. “Fuck, you scared me, Kitten. I thought… never mind what I thought,” he continued, not wanting to waste a single second more on thoughts of regrets and doubts. From now on, he only wanted to concentrate on the future they’d create together. Cupping her cheeks, he met her adoring eyes. “Do you have any concept of how much I love you, Honor McKinnon?”
“Honestly, it defies comprehension,” Honor whispered, tearing up. “You waited… all these years… you waited for me to be ready for you. I don’t even know how to tell you what that means to me. To know that you refused to give up on an emotionally damaged, severely messed up, half-alive woman because… because… why did you never give up on me?” she questioned in a whisper, tilting her head as she stared at him through her tears.
“Do you remember the night of your eighteenth birthday?” he asked hoarsely.
Averting her eyes, Honor swallowed. “That was a bad night,” she whispered.
Zeke nodded as he remembered. “I’d come to tell you we’d caught one of the men that hurt you.”
“You didn’t catch him; you killed him,” Honor corrected knowingly.
Zeke shrugged, unconcerned by his actions that night. Frankie Hughes was one of the two men they’d been able to tie to Honor’s rape with DNA evidence. “The bastard resisted arrest,” he replied, markedly unconcerned by what he’d done that night. Glancing at his woman’s face, he didn’t regret for a second that he’d kept Honor in the dark about most of the events that had happened that night. She didn’t need to know the details of that night; she didn’t need any new nightmares.
Suffice it to say that it had been one of the rare occasions that Wrath and he had been on entirely the same page inside identical books. Each man had been working tirelessly for close to two years to locate the former Hell Hound prospect partially responsible for Honor’s assault. The police had connected Frankie to the case by skin fragments physicians had found underneath Honor’s fingernails the night she’d been found, but by the time an identification had been made, the former Hell Hounds prospect had been in the wind. But the day before Honor’s eighteenth birthday, Wrath and Zeke had caught a break in the case in the form of Frankie Hughes’ dying mother. The woman’s cancer had finally taken her life and news of her death had spread throughout the Hughes family. Since Frankie had been the youngest and a momma’s boy, it wasn’t a huge leap of logic to assume the snake would slither back into Paradise for his mother’s funeral.
Zeke had caught him leaving his mother’s grave late that afternoon and quietly arrested him, deliberately leaving the asshole un-cuffed in the back of an unlocked police cruiser. Zeke had only needed to wait for a few minutes as he pretended to question a few of the other mourners for Frankie to make his move and make a run for it.
The idiot had taken off through the woods bordering the graveyard – just like Zeke and Wrath had planned he would. If the bastard had known what waited for him in those dark woods, he would’ve begged to be hauled off to jail. The stupid fuck hadn’t once considered that he was running straight into a well-laid trap.
When Honor’s rapist had been caught and surrounded by the Hell Hounds MC in a grassy clearing just outside the Paradise town limits, he’d been in tears, begging his former motorcycle brothers for his life as the men had taken turns kicking and spitting on him, his body beaten heavily. The lanky fucker had actually looked relieved when he’d spotted Zeke, ostensibly there to arrest him. Of course, everybody there, with the exception of Honor’s rapist, had known that Frankie Hughes wasn’t leaving that clearing alive.
That’s when the real fun had started.
Zeke and Wrath had questioned Frankie for hours, trying to obtain the names of Honor’s other three rapists. Since Zeke had already taken care of one of them through one well-placed gunshot to the head while the man had smoked a cigarette in his prison yard, they’d thought they’d make quick work of getting the other three names.
Their assumption that Frankie would break easily had been wrong.
The identities of Honor’s other assailants had proved to be even more terrifying than the torture he and Wrath had taken turns inflicting on the suddenly mute Frankie. And since both Zeke and Wrath had talented and varied imaginations where tortur
e was concerned, that was saying a lot for the late Franklin Hughes.
After several hours, Zeke had grown both weary and impatient. Exchanging a look with Wrath, he’d waited until the other man had disappeared into the trees with his biker brethren before approaching Frankie again. Tired, bloody, and more than a little disgusted things hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped, Zeke had fisted his hand in Frankie’s hair and jerked the man’s head upright one last time, calmly asking him for the names of the men that had hurt Honor. When the beaten man had merely stared back at him with cold eyes and smiled, silently defiant and confident in the knowledge that the fine, upstanding sheriff would never actually end his life despite his threats, Zeke finally lost the battle with his conscience, pressed the barrel of the gun to Frankie’s forehead and pulled the trigger at point blank range.
“I did kill him,” Zeke confirmed, admitting it to her out loud for the first time ever. “I did, and I’d do the same thing again tomorrow if I could find the other two fuckers that hurt you. But that night… when I came to tell you that at least another one of those animals could never hurt you again, you looked up at me with those big blue eyes and I could see your despair. I could feel your pain. And it gutted me. Do you remember how long I stood with you on that porch, staring into your eyes?”
“A really long time. I remember thinking that maybe you’d fallen asleep with your eyes wide open,” she reminisced with a faint smile.
“Nah, baby, I wasn’t asleep. You were waking me up. Way down deep inside my soul, you roused something powerful. You awakened part of me that had been restin’ dormant, waiting for just the right woman to stir it up.”
“That so?” she murmured.
“Yeah, that’s so. Something else happened, too. You showed me something special in those captivatin’ eyes of yours, darlin…something incredibly special. I got a glimpse at something I wanted more than I wanted to take my next breath, Honor.”
“What?” Honor whispered. “What could you see in my eyes that was so special? I was miserable, Zeke. Miserable and lost.”
“And yet, I still saw my future swimming before me in that bottomless gaze of yours. I saw it plain as the nose on my face. You. Me. And you were holding a little baby girl that had eyes that could break me in two the same way yours do. I knew that night where my future resided, sweetheart. Right here with you.”
Honor bit her lip as she took a deep, shaky breath. “You heard what the doctors all said, Zeke. Children…babies might not be possible for me. What if with all the damage those men did… only having one ovary…I might not be able to… God, Zeke, now that I have you… really have you, I don’t want you to give up on me if I can’t…”
“Children are possible, doctors be damned,” Zeke declared firmly, cutting off her worries. “I saw it, Honor. I don’t believe in a lot, but I believe in what I saw that night to the bottom of my soul. God showed me my future in your eyes, and that future is with you. I know it as well as I know my own name. It might take some time, but it’ll happen. And it’ll happen because I fell in love with you that night, standing right back there on that porch with you six years ago,” he stated decisively, pointing toward the wooden steps at the back of the house. “I been fallin’ a little more every day in every way since then. Giving up on you? Baby, that was never an option for me. I just had to wait to share all this with you until you could see what I’ve known for years. We were meant to be. We’ve had to travel a painful, broken road to get to where we are, but I wouldn’t have missed a single moment of the walk, baby, because every step I made took me toward you.”
Honor stared at Zeke for a long minute as the fireworks reached a crescendo, blue, red, green and white sparks exploding over the horizon. But neither of them so much as twitched.
“A baby girl?” Honor choked as tears spilled down her alabaster cheeks.
Zeke nodded, tightening his arms around her. “Yep. Your eyes. My hair.”
Honor squeezed her eyes shut as she shuddered in his arms, overcome with emotion. “We’ll need a boy, too,” she finally managed to say through her tears. “Being an only child would be boring.”
Burying his own wet face in her neck, Zeke could only nod. “Whatever you want, Kitten. I’ll always do my best to give you whatever you want.”
“I want a matched set,” she wept, turning so that she could push her face against his chest and clutch his waist.
“Then we’d better get started on a wedding, because I’ve got some work to do here,” he growled into her mouth as he guided her back down in the bed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
August 18, 2016 – The I Don’t Care Cafe
3:30 pm
Honor
“So, after Pastor Wilcox finishes performing the very conventional ceremony you’ve chosen…”
“Harmony, will you let it go. There is nothing wrong with a traditional ceremony with traditional vows,” Honor remarked with a glare at her eldest sister. Honest to God, she loved all her sisters, each one special to her in a different way. But today, Harmony’s specialty seemed to be irritating the dickens out of her. She’d already made her decision about what kind of religious service she wanted for her marriage to Zeke, and she wasn’t budging on it. Zeke agreed with her and that’s all that mattered. The Wicked Witch of the Wedding World could shove a broom up her butt! She was going to recite the same vows her momma had said to her daddy and that’s all there was to it!
“But think how unique this could be, Honor. Everybody is writing their own vows these days, sis!” Harmony pled her case hopefully.
“I didn’t,” Patience interjected as she lifted her son, Granger to her shoulder to pat him on the back.
Harmony narrowed her eyes at Patience. “You got married in your freaking pajamas. Your opinion doesn’t carry any weight regarding Paradise’s wedding of the year!”
“They were yoga pants,” Patience retorted on a hiss.
Harmony rolled her eyes. “Faith, you’re usually the voice of reason. Back me up here,” she requested with a look toward the second oldest McKinnon daughter.
Looking from a determined Harmony to a resolute Honor, Faith quickly shook her head. “I think Honor’s got you on this one, Harm. Not only is she the bride, but I don’t think our baby sister is the type to get up in front of… what was the guest list count again?” she asked Honor.
“Last tally put us just over three hundred people,” Honor answered unhappily. “My simple, uncomplicated wedding day is turning into a cast of hundreds.”
Turning back to Harmony, Faith raised an eyebrow, “Yeah, I don’t think our little sister is gonna stand in front of hundreds of folks and talk about her feelings, Harmony. She can barely talk to us about how she feels for Zeke.”
“I love him. I can say that, easy as pie. But saying your own vows requires a certain level of detail that I’m not comfortable expressing in front of my doctor, the mailman, and Old Lady Winslow,” Honor huffed.
“Honor, we have to have this many guests otherwise you’re gonna alienate half the population of Paradise,” Harmony contended, not for the first time. “You and Ezekiel are like Snow White and Prince Charming, honey. Everybody’s been waiting to watch how the fairy tale ends.”
“My life is not some kind of children’s story – certainly not a fairytale,” Honor growled. “And my wedding is a beginning, not an ending,” she added a bit petulantly.
Holding up a hand, Harmony nodded. “You’re right. It is a beginning. If you’re more comfortable having a traditional ceremony, then a traditional ceremony it shall be,” she proclaimed, pausing for a moment to clear her throat. “As I was saying, after the ceremony concludes and the Pastor pronounces you man and wife, we have a decision to make. Would you rather release doves or butterflies as you exit the venue…”
“The venue?” Honor scoffed. “You can say the barn, Harmony,” she pointed out with a chuckle.
“I keep hoping you’ll change your mind and move the wedding to somewhere not quite
so….”
“Rustic?” Maggie supplied helpfully, entering the conversation as Honor watched her lean forward to grab Patience’s daughter, Harri’s, pacifier from the Donald Duck diaper bag next to her high chair and offer it to the crowing baby with a look most closely identifiable as desperation. Because as much as Margaret Winstead loved her nieces and nephews, she was not a baby person. Or a child person. And probably not even a teenager person, Honor thought with a small smile.
“I was going to say dirty, but rustic will work,” Harmony returned with a sigh, sharing a frustrated look with Maggie.
“It won’t be dirty after Zeke finishes the restoration project,” Honor assured her with a smile. “It’s going to be perfect,” she claimed dreamily, a smile pulling at her lips as she thought of her new favorite place on Earth.
“C’mon, sis. Even I’m confused about why you’re so determined to have the nuptials in that old barn. It was almost falling down before Zeke started work on it. What made y’all wanna restore it anyway? It’s not like you and the sheriff are gonna become farmers anytime soon,” Patience pointed out as she shifted Granger into Faith’s arms and took a fussy Bronson from Aunt Orla’s arms.
“Can’t you crazies read between the lines? That barn symbolizes something important for your sister and her man,” Aunt Orla declared as she took a sip of her sweet tea. “Plus, I’m willin’ to make a cash bet right here and now that the mighty stallion in question mounted this shy young mare for the first time in one of them stalls inside that very barn,” she added with a wink at a blushing Honor.
“Auntie!” Honor hissed with burning cheeks as she looked around the table with wide eyes. She loved her aunt like a second mother, but today, she’d happily have her committed to the nearest funny farm for her knack for always seeming to know exactly what she’d been doing. It had been inconvenient when she was a child, but now it was just flat out humiliating.
“Holy shit! That’s it! You two did it in the barn, didn’t you?” Patience laughed, pointing at Honor’s bright red face.
Man of Honor (Passion in Paradise Book 4) Page 44
