“The consequences being…”
“Marriage. Babies. We’d be family, irreversibly, whether we’re ready for that or not.”
“Is it wrong that I think that reality sounds so much better than the one we’re living in right now?” I ask him. “I know I haven’t known you for long, but I recognized you as a higher quality man almost immediately. I have wished you would’ve been the one to get me pregnant before, I just… well, I never thought I’d tell you that.”
He presses his lips together, not appearing wholly convinced. “I’m not sure you entirely understand. I take my commitments very seriously, and I’d expect the same of you. This wouldn’t be a trial arrangement, Alyssa. It would be a commitment that would last forever. I wouldn’t be your boyfriend you could break up with and go on without if you weren’t as happy as you expected to be. I’d be your husband, for better or worse, ‘til death do us part. If you’re not happy, you don’t leave, you fix it. Only reason I’d consider leaving a marriage would be broken vows, and I promise you, if you ever cheated on me, a divorce would be the very least of your problems.”
My eyes widen involuntarily. I’d never cheat on him, but I need details. “What do you mean? Like, you’d hurt me?”
Slowly, he shakes his head. “No. My vows would be to protect you, not to hurt you. I wouldn’t break mine, even if you were misguided enough to break yours. Him, though—I’d fucking kill him. I’d make you watch. I’d make you help me clean up the bloody pieces of the son of a bitch, then I’d haul your traumatized ass to our marriage bed and fuck out all my anger into you.”
I bite down on my bottom lip, that primal part of me stirred again. “God, you say the sexiest things.”
A flash of surprise skates across his handsome features, followed by amusement. “Which part was sexy?”
“All of it—the murder, the threats, the fierce possessiveness. You oughta stop saying things like that before I find my panties and fling them at you.”
“You need a therapist,” he informs me. “That was meant to scare you, not turn you on.”
I shrug, grinning at him. “Maybe I’m just the right kind of crazy for you.”
He looks at me a little differently, like maybe he’s considering the possibility that I’m right. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Alyssa,” he says seriously.
“So keep me for a while.” I wrap my arm around him tightly, starting to gain confidence in all my crazy ideas. “Keep me here and let’s try each other out. If it doesn’t work, I’ll accept that, because I’ll know it didn’t work for the right reasons. I can’t stand Theo being the reason I can’t have you, but if it just doesn’t work because you don’t like me enough, I can accept that. We’ll both move on, and that will be that. But… if we do really like each other, if we maybe even started to more than like each other… there is a way we could be together. It would just be a big, crazy one. But, I mean, you broke into my house, held me down while you watched a video of me masturbating, and then kidnapped me with intent to kill me, so it doesn’t seem like you’re afraid of big, crazy gestures if you think it’s the right course of action.”
“That is true,” he murmurs, not even trying to deny it.
“So, what do you say?” I ask, getting a little excited at the possibility that maybe we’ve finally found a way this can work.
Looking back at me, he’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Let’s do it.”
11
Brant
When I wake up the next morning, it’s later than I meant to sleep, and my bed is a lot less empty than the one I intended to go home to before I started drinking all that whiskey.
Alyssa is curled up beside me with one hand thrown across my chest, her long blonde hair draped over my arm, and her face snuggled against my side. She’s flushed and warm from sleeping on me all night, and as I look down to peek at her pretty little tits, I see she’s wrapped in a bath towel.
I frown, then a string of jagged memories from last night start to come back to me.
I had a whole hell of a lot of whiskey. I remember drinking from the time Theo left until the last employee walked out the door, then drinking a little more once I had the place to myself. My mouth is dry as hell and my head aches like someone took a baseball bat to my skull, but Alyssa lying naked in my bed might just be the worst part of what I did last night.