BENT AT THE ALTAR

by Claire St. Rose

  “So here’s the deal,” he said and looked at me. “You were in possession of a gun that was licensed to the morgue. Everything that happened, the shootings, was self-defense according to the amount of weapons we confiscated from the men you shot. They were so juiced up on drugs I’m relieved they didn’t all have guns, too.”

  I breathed out in relief.

  “As for the drugs, all the ingredients were in the morgue. The redhead confessed to everything.”

  “What’s going to happen to her?” Emily asked. I looked at her. She seemed worried. Ever-caring.

  “Nothing good. A hell of a lot of jail time since this is a not a death-sentence state.”

  Emily breathed out in relief.

  “As for the lot of you, I suggest you go home, clean up, and get some sleep. It’s been a hell of a morning.”

  We all nodded and got up. It was all over. Finally.

  We stepped out of the station, one by one, and for the first time that day, it felt like the sun broke through the clouds, even though it had been shining since this morning. I felt lighter. Everything about my life felt lighter, almost as if we’d reached some conclusion or some ending. This was where the story ended; the story where I was stuck in the past and wallowing in pain and self-pity and driving a show that I didn’t want. This was where I started over.

  I looked at Taylor. I didn’t know what he was thinking of feeling, but he looked like I felt…relieved. He smiled at me, a half-cocked smile that was more drawn toward Sarah than me. When he looked at her, the smile broke out over his face fully, and I knew that somehow she wasn’t just going to be some fling.

  I took Emily’s hand and turned to the other two.

  “Well, this is where we go home,” I said. I looked at them and hesitated. Saying anything now seemed so empty. It was the aftermath, and life was strikingly normal. Everything carried on. We would go back to our jobs, and this was going to fade away until it was another part of the past.

  Taylor nodded. He was holding onto Sarah’s hand the same way I held onto Emily’s.

  “We’ll see you around,” he said.

  I nodded. Emily hugged Sarah, and then they walked away. We looked after them until they turned the street corner and disappeared.

  “Is it just me or does everything seem too normal?” she asked.

  “I feel it, too.”

  She looked at me and her eyes were dark and drowning deep. I realized that I wanted to look into those eyes forever. The feeling settled inside me like the resolution that I was going to hold onto my father’s legacy in case he came back. And I had a feeling that, unlike the promise I’d thrown into the void for him, this one was going to work out in my favor.

  “Can I ask you to take me to the hospital?” I asked. Emily stopped in her tracks and frowned at me. Her eyes slid over my body, but she had a doctor’s look about her, the one where there was nothing sexual in her eyes, and all business.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked. “Is there something you didn’t tell me?”

  I swallowed. The kind of pain wasn’t something medicine wasn’t going to fix.

  “Where does it hurt?” she asked.

  “My chest.”

  She put her hand on my chest, and it was warm and heavy, a weight right over my heart.

  “Let’s go to my office. I have everything there you may need, including privacy.”

  I was glad for that. Privacy was exactly what I wanted, and not because I was planning on getting it on with her, either. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to fix it all. I wanted this ache in my ribs to go away. And I didn’t want any of her nurse or doctor’s friends to intrude on our moments together. I wanted as many private moments with her as I could get from now on. I wanted her all to myself.

  We got into her car, and she insisted on driving. Her window was non-existent after the shooting, and as we drove, her hair flew in the wind, making her look wild and free. Her face was scrunched with concentration and worry, though, as if she was already trying to solve everything before we got to the hospital. But even that was beautiful. Everything about her was beautiful, and this face of hers was just another part of her that I’d come to love.

  I leaned on the passenger door and watched the city slip by as we drove to the hospital. It was still the same place, and yet everything looked different. It was hard to think that…after something so monumental had happened and nothing on the outside had changed. It felt like the world had to be a different place because of everything that had shifted inside of me, shifted in my own world.

  But that was how life was, wasn’t it? No matter what happened, even if it had the ability to shatter you, the world stayed the same. It had happened when my mom had died. It had happened when my dad had left. It had happened when Ruby and I had broken up. It had happened when Taylor nearly died.

  I glanced at Emily again. She was the same, too. But that was something I didn’t regret. She was a kind of stability I’d never expected to find, and I liked her that way. Emily was the pivotal point in my life now, the thing that everything else rotated around. And it made me want to change everything.

  I reached over and put my hand on her thigh. She let go of the steering wheel with her hand closest to me and put it on top of my hand, squeezing slightly. Her lips curled with a ghost of a smile, her feelings for me filtering through, even the medical worry that was carved out in lines on her face.

  When we stopped at the hospital, she led me to her office. She greeted nurses and doctors on her way in. Even though she wasn’t dressed for work and her shift was hours later, they didn’t seem surprised she was here. Maybe this happened more often than not. I could imagine she would be here more than she would be anywhere else. I knew what it meant when your job was your life.

  When she closed the office door, I looked around.

  “You know, I’ve never been in here,” I said. The office was small and crisp white from top to bottom, with a beige plastic desk, an examination bed in the corner, and a shelf with leather bound books that looked old and important. There was nothing personal in here, no photos of loved ones, no paintings, nothing that wasn’t work-related.

  She looked around and shrugged.

  “It’s not much. A place to exist when I’m here and not busy mopping up someone’s blood.” She turned to me, her face concerned again.

  “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t hurt,” I said.

  She frowned. “Why did you ask to come here?”

  “Because I wanted to be alone with you. Nothing hurts anymore. Not my past or my life. And it’s all because of you.”

  She was still frowning, and she looked a little like I’d taken the wind out of her sails, bringing her here and not offering her a medical emergency. It was what she did best—taking care of people. If only she knew how much she’d taken care of—and healed—me.

  I took both her hands in both of mine.

  “Marry me,” I said. The words shocked her. I had to admit that it surprised the hell out of me, too.

  “What?”

  I took a deep breath and realized that I meant exactly what I’d said.

  “Marry me,” I said again. I went down on one knee even though it made me feel like an idiot. The look on her face was confusion. I got up again because I felt like an ass and I hadn’t even gotten her a ring yet, anyway.

  “Daniel …” she started.

  I shook my head. I was going to make my case before she said no.

  “I want you in my life. Forever. And not just as a fling or a temporary girlfriend or whatever. I want you to be my wife so that I can wake up to you every morning. The last couple of days with you and Sarah… waking up to you has been magic. And at the inn? I realized that I love you.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but I put my fingers lightly on her lips.

  “I’m not finished,” I said. She laughed and pushed my hand away.

  “You’re asking me to marry you, and then yo
u don’t give me a chance to answer?”

  “Just hear me out,” I said and took a deep breath. This was important, and I knew I had the whole thing backwards, but it was sincere. “I don’t know how to be the conventional guy. Hell, this proves it. But I know what I want, and that’s you. And I don’t want to have you live this life, either. I’m going to hand the club over to the boys to do what they need with it. Ben has a better handle on it than I’ve ever had, anyway. I’m going to figure out what business I want on my land, and I’m going to do that, far away from all this madness and all these things that were just a distraction all the time. I want a better life for you. For me. For us. And I want to start changing things so that we can have it all.”

  I took a deep breath, finally done with my speech. I looked at her and fought the urge to shuffle on my feet, fiddle with my hands, and chew on my lip. I was suddenly scared she was going to say no. After all of that, what if she didn’t want me?

  What if I’d misread everything she’d said? What if marriage was too big a step, too quick? I was beating myself up. Maybe I should have waited. But this was all me, jumping in headfirst. Typical.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “What?”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I didn’t want to misinterpret it. Better to know for sure.

  “Okay,” she said again. “I’ll marry you.”

  Her words rang in my ears, and my brain couldn’t process it at first. I’d been preparing myself for rejection. She smiled at me and her face was radiant. Radiant and beautiful. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Oh, my god,” I said. I took her face between my hands and kissed her. She was mine, and she was always going to be mine. And I was going to fix up my life, because I wasn’t going to let a woman like this slip out of my hands. Never.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Emily

  He’d just asked me to marry him. Everything had happened so fast. My life had turned from a stable going-nowhere train into a whirlwind whipping everything up into a frenzy. And I liked it. I liked the thrill and the not-knowing and breaking away from my usual mold, where, to be frank, things had been starting to get stale.

  And everything with Chrissy? Well, I can’t say I’d exactly forgiven myself. Not yet. But it was a lot better than it used to be before. Daniel somehow understood, and when he’d told me it wasn’t my fault back in the parking lot with all those criminals around me, it had sunk in.

  It hadn’t been my fault. Sure, we’d been young and stupid, and we’d had to bear the consequences for that. Chrissy more than me. But at the end of it, I hadn’t forced her to take the drugs. No one would have known that her body would react like that. In a way, we were all just victims.

  Would it take me time to get over it? Probably. It wasn’t just going to go away. You didn’t just dump emotional baggage you’d been dragging with you for a decade. But it would start to clear now. Slowly, and with Daniel at my side—as my husband, imagine that—I could start facing it.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Daniel said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m just about ready to go home and show you how much you mean to me. In the horizontal, non-talking way.”

  I smiled.

  “You have a way with words, don’t you?”

  His confidence, now that I’d said yes, was stellar. I had the feeling that he hadn’t been sure I would say yes. When I’d agreed, he’d looked like he was going to pass out. Good thing we were in the hospital where I would have been able to tend to him properly.

  “You know what,” I said, stepping closer to him. “You haven’t seen this office before. It hasn’t been christened.”

  I said it very casually, but when Daniel smiled at me, it held promise. I walked toward the door and turned the lock. No one would be bothering us because I wasn’t on duty. As long as we could keep it down we could do whatever we wanted.

  When I turned to Daniel, there was hunger on his face. He looked me up and down, eyes sliding over my body as if he was already touching me. I didn’t think I would ever get over the way he looked at me, as if he could just eat me.

  He was the one that closed the distance between us. He stepped into me, wrapping his arms around my body and kissing me. His mouth came down hard on mine. His lips were like velvet, and he didn’t waste time. He parted them, slid his tongue over my lips and then into my mouth, and drew circles around it, tasting me, testing me.

  Heat washed through my body. No matter where we were, whenever Daniel handled me like that, claiming me as his own, I got hot for him. The sensation was a fire that burned beneath my skin and it wanted out. I needed Daniel to let it out.

  Daniel drove me back until I was against the wall. He pressed the length of his body into mine, trapping me. I felt the length of his cock pushing against my hip, and he was as hard and ready as ever. I gasped. The lust was so thick around us it made my breath catch in my throat.

  I found the hem of Daniel’s shirt and pushed my hands underneath, feeling his smooth skin. I ran my hands up his sides, and he shivered. He was so strong, big and muscular, a colossal hero against my slight form. And still it fit. We fit.

  Daniel returned the favor by putting his hand on my ribs. His palm burned next to my breast through the material, and I was aware of my breasts, pushing against his body as if they were straining to get out of their confines.

  Daniel slipped his thumb between our bodies and onto my nipple. I gasped. This was where I wanted him. Well, one of the places. My nipple tightened as he rubbed me, and I tipped my head back, closing my eyes, getting lost in the hunger he was stirring up inside of me. Daniel took the opportunity to move down to my neck when I tipped my head back and he nibbled and sucked the skin down the side of my neck.

  I moaned and my hips undulated against his, the sensations causing my body to roll beneath his. I wanted him. I could feel the heat and the wetness in my panties, and it was all for him.

  I pushed the shirt up, and he stopped, lifting his arms so that I could get it over his head. I dropped the warm material on the floor and his hands moved back to me. He cupped both breasts through my shirt, pushing them up, massaging them. His eyes were on mine, electric blue and wanting, with pupils dilated so far it ate up the color.

  He didn’t spend a lot of time on my breasts before he moved his hands down and found the bottom of the shirt. He pulled it up, and I did the same thing he had, lifting my arms so he could take it off.

  When the shirt was off, the cool air in the office brushed along my skin, and I got goose bumps. It tightened my nipples even more, and they pushed against the satin material of my bra. My bra wasn’t padded, and when Daniel’s eyes trailed down to my breasts, I knew that he could see how aroused I was.

  His eyes reluctantly returned to mine, and his hands moved up. I thought he would go from my breasts again, but instead he wrapped his hands around my waist and moved me. He guided me to the desk, carefully enough so that I didn’t trip but rough enough so that I went where he wanted me to be. He pushed all the papers off my desk. They landed in a whoosh on the floor, and then the top was clear.

  He lifted me up and laid me out across it.

  “I’ve never used this desk for something that’s not work related,” I said.

  Daniel chuckled. He didn’t say anything. I opened my legs to make space for him, and he took it, bending over me so that his cock pressed against my core. I moved my hips against him, and he groaned, but he was headed for my breasts again. He flipped the satin cups down on both sides, and with one hand on the breast that was going to be neglected, he honed in on the other nipple. He sucked it into his mouth, and alternated between softly grating against it with his teeth, drawing circles around it with his tongue, and taking it into his mouth and suckling on.

  Daniel was coaxing the flame inside of me into a fire. I arched my back, pressing my breasts up into his face and hand, pushing my body against his. I wanted him. God, I wanted him badly.

  He knew it, too. And he delib
erately kept things slow, as if he knew he was driving me absolutely wild.

  I was the one who sat up and undid my bra. He was quite happy carrying on, but I wanted to be naked for him. I wanted to be on display for his viewing—and tasting—pleasure.

  When I dropped my bra on the floor, he looked at me. His eyes were hungry, and he stared like he hadn’t seen breasts before. His lips were slightly parted and his cock twitched against me. I smiled and sat up. I pressed my upper body against his, skin on skin. His skin was hot. I ran my hands down his back and headed for his ass. He was still wearing his jeans, but I grabbed his ass cheeks with both hands, digging my nails through the thick material as best I could, and pulled him against me so that his erection pressed against me. We both gasped.