by Bethany-Kris
“Call him,” Michel said as he pulled into the garage of the hotel where they would be staying. The Astoria had always been a favorite of his; sometimes, having expensive taste was more than worth the price. “You won’t feel okay until you do, so just get it over with.”
Gabbie nodded. “Okay.”
Michel parked the car as Gabbie dialed on the phone. He thought she would put the phone to her head, allowing him access to only her side of the conversation, but she put it on speakerphone for him to listen in.
It rang three times.
Each ring, his anxiety spiked.
He almost thought the phone would go to the voicemail, which might be for the best, but he couldn’t be so lucky. Charles picked up on the fourth ring.
“Aye, I’m feckin’ busy here!”
“Da,” Gabbie said softly.
A silence answered his wife back, thick and loaded. Michel didn’t miss it, and even their car became so quiet that he could hear her swallow in the seat next to his. Wordlessly, he reached across the car to place his hand on her thigh. His fingers curved around her body, and he squeezed tight. His silent show of support, if she needed it. Gabbie gave him a small smile, but this time, it didn’t reach her eyes.
He didn’t need to ask why.
“Gabbie?”
“Yeah, Da, it’s—”
“Where the feck are you, lass?”
“I’m—”
“You took off with that Italian cunt again, didn’t you?” Charles let out a dark noise. It sounded like disappointment and anger all rolled into one. Michel felt the tremor that worked its way through Gabbie’s body as it vibrated against his palm, but he just squeezed her leg again. It was the best he could do if she really felt a need to do this to herself. “Just tell me where you are, and make this easy on all of us, Gabbie. I’ll send someone to come get you—do you want me to promise I won’t kill the Italian? Fine. I will leave him alive. Is that better?”
Gabbie cleared her throat. “Da—”
“I don’t have time for this shite, girl. Do you understand me? This entire city is in an uproar, I have police banging on my door, and too many men dead to count. And you want me to play tag with you all over Detroit while you chase after a man you can’t have?”
“I’m not in Detroit, Da.”
That silenced Charles.
For all of one second.
“What did ye just say to me?”
“I’m in New York with Michel. We just got married. I’m not coming home, Da. It’s not where I want to be, and it’s not where I belong. I love you, but I need to be where—”
“Say that again.”
“What?”
“What you did, lass … say it again.”
Gabbie cleared her throat. “We just got married.”
“You’re dead to me.”
His wife stiffened.
Michel went to grab the phone out of her hand, but Charles got in the last word before he could hang up on the asshole.
“Don’t you ever step foot in my city again—I’ll kill every single feckin’ one of you. You want the Italian so much, do you? Then, you have him. You are dead to me, Gabbie.”
He hung up the phone, so she didn’t have to.
Not that it mattered.
Gabbie was already crying.
• • •
His wife was too quiet.
Michel didn’t like that at all.
Inside the hotel room, he wanted to see her wide-eyed and excited at the beauty and history surrounding her. He wanted her to ask him why he picked this hotel, so he could explain that his father rented a permanent room in the Astoria just so that Michel’s mother had a place to escape to when she needed, often with her husband.
Instead, he watched Gabbie as she stared out the window. Entirely silent, she stood there while rubbing her arm with the palm of her hand as the people crowded the street from all different directions down below.
Yeah, way too quiet.
Stuffing his hands in his pockets, Michel cleared his throat. It did nothing. Gabbie didn’t turn away from the window, and there was no flicker in her distant gaze to say that she had even heard him make any noise.
Damn.
“Gabbie,” he murmured.
Still, nothing.
Michel sighed.
He was seriously regretting that phone call, now. It wasn’t his choice, though, and he was never going to do that to this woman. She could and would make her own decisions, and whether he thought they were good or bad, he was going to be there to support her through it. Simple as that.
Since she didn’t seem to be hearing him from all the way across the room, Michel figured the easy solution to that problem was for him to go to her. He closed the space between them until he was close enough to reach out and enclose her in his arms from behind. Resting his face in the spot between her shoulder and neck, he pressed a lingering kiss to the skin just above her neckline. He physically felt the tension drift from her body as she relaxed in his embrace.
That was slightly better.
“I know that wasn’t what you wanted from your dad,” he said quietly.
She shrugged. “It was inevitable, maybe.”
“No, it wasn’t.” That was his hard line—she should not expect that kind of thing from people who loved her, ever. No one should ever expect people who proclaimed to love them to hurt them. That was not how love worked. It might hurt occasionally, but only to make it better. “People always have a choice, Gabbie, to do what is right, or to do what they think is right. It might not always be obvious or easy, but that’s what it is. He made the wrong choice, and I’m sorry.”
A sniffle echoed in the room.
He kissed her skin again.
“My da was all I had … my mam’s been dead for years, and—”
“You have me,” he said quickly. “And I promise there’s a whole family of people here who are going to love you. They will love you so much just because I love you.”
She sunk a little more into his embrace.
Michel held her tighter.
“Promise?”
“Until the day I die.”
“Hmm,” Gabbie said.
“What?”
“I was just thinking.”
Michel’s lips grazed higher on her neck until he came to the shell of her ear. Letting his teeth nibble on the flesh, he muttered, “About?”
Gabbie laughed, but he didn’t miss the way her body shivered, either. “You.”
“Oh, keep going. I do love it when people talk about me.”
“Vain.”
“But is it really, though?”
“A wee bit, but I like it,” she whispered. “I was thinking I don’t know where you came from, or what put you in my path, and I don’t think I deserve you … but you’re mine, I’m keeping you, and I love you, Michel.”
“I love you, too.” He grinned against her ear. “But you already knew that, right?”
Gabbie pressed the side of her head against his. “I suppose. So, what do we do now?”
Oh, there was a lot of things they had to do. He still hadn’t called his parents despite being in the city for two days, now, and he hadn’t ate since that morning. Although, he did manage to find something healthy and appropriate for Gabbie to eat during their long wait at the City Clerk’s office.
But right now?
“I really just want to fuck my wife,” Michel told her.
He saw her grin grow sinful in a blink.
“You should probably get on that, then.”
Oh, most definitely.
It was silly, maybe.
Kind of stupid.
But Michel still picked Gabbie up in a cradle embrace to walk her to the bedroom. Because wasn’t that what husbands were supposed to do with their wives on the night of their wedding? Walk over the threshold to start their life while carrying their life at the same time?
It was silly, sure.
It still felt right.
&nbs
p; Once Michel had Gabbie on her back in the large king-size bed, he took his time to pull every piece of clothing keeping her body from him away until she was bare on the bed in nothing but her sin and skin. His fingertips traced the dots of her freckles—he still loved those the very most. The spattering of freckles across her breasts, and the ones coloring her features. His mouth followed the same path as his hands, too.
Kissing.
Tasting.
Biting.
Not hard, though.
Not tonight.
Gabbie made the sweetest sounds when she was being loved. Breathless, and high, he thought. Her soft moans echoed in his ears as he kissed down her clenching stomach, stopping only long enough to let his tongue trace her navel.
Then, he was lower.
Widening her thighs …
Finding heaven.
His heaven was wet, and pink, and hot. She tasted like candy on his tongue, a tart sugar he couldn’t get enough of no matter how many times he got to indulge. The second his mouth encased Gabbie’s pussy, her back lifted from the bed. Her hands fisted into the sheets when he sucked on her clit, drawing the little bud between his lips to really give her that shock she seemed to like so damn much.
“Please, please …”
Michel replaced his mouth with his fingers—not that he would be able to hold himself back from getting another taste of her, but for now … He worked her clit with two fingers, rubbing tight little circles into the nub as another two fingers slid into her tight sex.
“What do you want, Gabbie? Tell me.”
“Make me come. Please, make me come.”
He loved when she begged.
Loved it more when she sounded so desperate for it, too.
Nothing got him hotter.
“And then?” he demanded.
She let out a whine. “Love me.”
Yeah.
That’s what he planned to do.
His fingers kept fucking her, but he replaced his other hand on her clit with his mouth again. A steady, hard beat with his tongue took her over the edge faster than he thought it would, but he wasn’t about to complain.
“God,” Gabbie mumbled, her face turning into the pillow. “Love you.”
More than she would ever know.
Michel couldn’t shed his clothes fast enough, but once he was naked, and his cock was covered in the condom he found in his pant pocket, he was back between her thighs again. Pushing in deep and taking her slow. Instead of fingernails scoring down his back, he got her fingertips making lazy circles over his shoulders as he loved her. The gentle rocking of their bodies wasn’t the roughness that usually accompanied their sex, but it didn’t need to be, either.
He had all the time in the word for fast and hard later.
Right now, he just wanted to love.
• • •
It was only once Michel was sure that his wife was out for the rest of the evening that he finally crawled out of the bed, and away from her. Although, a part of him was still there, tucked into her side and feeling her heart beat under his palm. He’d get back to her soon enough, and she wouldn’t even realize he’d left the bed at all.
Michel snatched the phone up from the bedside table and slipped out of the bedroom with quiet steps. In the darkness of the connecting room, he stared at the screen of his phone before turning it on, and scrolling through the contacts.
It was too late.
A little after eleven, now.
His parents hated late calls.
Michel put the phone to his ear, and waited as it began to ring through. Like an echo reverberating through his very bones, he swore it sounded like it was whispering now or never, boy. He shouldn’t be this nervous, but here he was, feeling exactly that.
“Michel, it is way too late for you to be calling me,” he heard his father grumble as soon as Dante picked up the call.
“Sorry, but this couldn’t wait.”
Dante made a noise under his breath, and something shuffled on the other end of the call. Was his father in bed already? Probably. “Well, what is it?”
“Is Ma awake?”
“She is now.”
“I raised him better than this,” Catrina snapped, making Michel chuckle.
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah. What is it?” his father asked.
“I’m … uh, in the city,” Michel said.
Silence answered him back before his father gained his bearings enough to respond with, “Since when?”
“Yesterday.”
“What—”
“We needed to wait twenty-four hours before we could go into the Clerk’s office after we got the marriage license, that’s all.”
It took his father entirely too long to respond.
And then, when he did, all Dante could do was splutter. Michel couldn’t remember a time when his father had been as equally upset and confused at the same time, but apparently, he got to be the lucky fuck who did it for him.
“What?” his father finally settled on barking.
Michel cleared his throat, adding, “I did some stuff.”
“I fucking guess, Michel!”
“Give me the phone—you give me that goddamn phone, Dante!”
Something crackled, and then, his mother was on the phone, too. Michel thought to move the speaker away from his ear because he was pretty sure his mother was about to get very loud. Like the idiot he was, he kept the phone pressed tight to his ear, and just about got his eardrums busted out for doing it, too.
“You got married and I wasn’t there?”
Michel blinked. “Hey, Ma.”
“Why would you do that to me?”
She was hysterical.
Her words, a shriek.
“I have spent years loving and raising you, and this is what you do to me? How dare you, Michel Dante Marcello!”
Oh, full name.
He was sure Dante hadn’t been his middle name before his parents adopted him, but as he didn’t know his middle name from that time, this worked just as well to get his mother’s point across.
Michel said the first thing that came to his mind, hoping it would calm his mother down. “You’re going to love her, Ma. She’s fucking amazing, and I just want … I just want you to love her like I do, okay?”
Catrina quieted.
He breathed a little easier, then.
Finally, his mother asked, “What’s her name?”
“Gabbie. Gabbie Casey.”
He must have been on speakerphone, because in the background, he heard his father ask, “Gabbie Casey, daughter of Charles Casey?”
Michel made a noise under his breath. “So yeah, that’s uh … the stuff I did, Dad.”
“Oh, my God, Michel.”
Yeah, that’s how he felt, too.
TWENTY
The first thing Gabbie thought when Michel parked the car in the driveway of his childhood home? It seemed welcoming.
The second?
Is that his mother?
Standing on the front porch, like they knew exactly what point Michel and Gabbie would drive up, were a man and a woman. The man, dressed in a silk dress shirt, black slacks, and a tie that had been loosened around his throat smiled briefly. Michel’s mother, on the other hand, wore a long dress that draped her body, and maybe it was the appearance the woman exuded, but Gabbie thought the clothing had the privilege of being on Catrina, and not the other way around.
Rings adorned her fingers. It was closing in on supper time, and the woman’s makeup looked like it had been painted on with such skill that it wouldn’t move an inch throughout the rest of the day. Her hair, a few shades of a deeper red than Gabbie’s, had been let loose in soft waves.
Catrina, who was simply standing next to her husband, seemed regal. That was the only appropriate word Gabbie could think of, and yes, it intimidated her. She had never met a woman who displayed the same air of authority that a man did simply by being, but what she knew about Michel’s
mother … she wasn’t surprised that Catrina seemed this way, even from afar.
“Oh good, they came out to welcome us.”
Michel’s sarcasm did nothing to help settle her.
So, yeah.
Dante and Catrina.
Gabbie tried to calm her nerves, but it really didn’t work. At all. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to think on it when Michel was already out of the car, and coming around to her side to help her out. He was the get it over with type, and Gabbie had figured out she was more of a let it die a slow death while she avoided it type.
Yup.
“Smile,” he said, kissing her cheek as he helped her from the car. “They’re going to love you.”
Right.
Before or after they explained everything that went down in Detroit?
Gabbie didn’t bother to ask.
Besides, she had other things to consider now, like the fact they were getting closer to the man and woman waiting on the front steps of the large, three-level home by the second. Michel slipped an arm around Gabbie’s waist like he thought she might bolt, and frankly … he wasn’t entirely wrong. She felt like a deer about to meet a Mack truck, but she didn’t know why.
“Ma, Dad,” Michel greeted as they climbed the steps.
Catrina, his mother, hadn’t looked away from Gabbie once since she stepped out of the car. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but here they were.
“Michel,” Dante replied, “and … Gabbie, yes?”
She smiled. “It is. It’s very nice to meet you.”
Dante looked to his wife, saying, “And us for you.”
Catrina cleared her throat, and for the first time, looked away from Gabbie as she turned toward the front door. With a wave, she said, “We have coffee in the pot, if you two want to come in and … get this started.”
Get this started.
That was a great way to describe this.
“That sounds grand,” Gabbie said, “I take mine black.”
Catrina cracked a smile. “Me, too. It’s an acquired taste.”
Dante chuckled next to his wife. “Something Catrina can relate to being herself, I assure you.”
“That’s quite enough of that, Dante.”
“But also, not a lie,” Michel murmured in Gabbie’s ear. At the same time, she smiled at his whispered secret, Catrina turned to look back at them. Her stance softened momentarily at the sight of the two together, but she quickly spun back around. “Come on, babe, let’s get comfortable for this.”
