His mouth formed a lopsided smile. “What’s that now?”
“I wanted to paint over the bad memory with something good. Something that should have always been.” She held out her hand, laughing tearfully as he slipped the twisted silver onto her finger. “Vaughn, we can be a family anywhere. We don’t need my parents’ house. Or a house at all. We have love. That’s more important than some pile of bricks. I want to do it on our own.”
He pressed their foreheads together on a broken sound. “You trust me that much, Riv?”
“Yes.” She pushed up on her toes and kissed him, once, twice. “I didn’t think you’d left town. Not for a single second. I knew I just had to wait and you’d come to me. I knew.”
His breath released in a long rush. “Thank you. I don’t know what I did to earn that kind of belief, but I’m going to fight like hell to keep it. I’m fighting already. No more secrets…just River and Vaughn. All in.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he started backing River toward the bed, groaning when she fell across the mattress, and teasing the hem of her dress with coarse fingertips. “Tell me you love me.”
Lightness invaded her chest. “I love you.”
“Tell me you know we can do this.”
“I know we can do this. We can do anything.”
Vaughn closed his eyes a moment, as if savoring the words where they hung in the air. Then he fell forward, planting his fists on either side of River’s thighs, bending down to snap his teeth at her belly button. “Now, tell me to fuck you.”
River’s nipples went so stiff, such wetness rushing to the juncture of her thighs, she released a loud whimper. “Fuck me, please.”
Using one fist to keep himself propped above her, Vaughn reached down and undid his belt and fly, loosing his erection from his pants, where it hung between them like a promise. River parted her thighs, running greedy hands over her breasts while repeating the words he’d asked her to say. Chanting them.
Finally, Vaughn sunk down between her legs, rocking into the valley between them, stretching River’s arms above her head and anchoring them there. “Took your innocence in this bed. Got you pregnant in this bed.” His mouth skated down the side of her neck. “Took you rough both times, didn’t I? So rough.”
“You always do,” River panted, sliding her feet up and down his backside.
“I always will, doll.” His mouth worked the buttons of her dress, popping them free as he thrust against the cradle of her body, guarded only by her panties. “But the first time I take you wearing my ring, it’s going to be slow. If you can’t feel how much I fucking love you in every drive of my cock, you tell me, so I can slow down even more. You with me?”
“Yes.”
Vaughn transferred his grip on her wrists to his right hand, using the left to remove her panties with painstaking care, testing her wetness the same way, until River was a writhing, begging mess on the bed. She strained in her fiancé’s hold as he covered his column of flesh with latex. Eager. So eager.
“Oh, please…” His first pump into her body was far from gentle. No, he filled her with a vengeance, in one swift drive, grunting loudly into her neck. After that, though…it was all slow, grinding movements, rolling River’s eyes to the back of her head.
“My wife. My River.” His mouth worked hers over with desperate glides of his tongue. His eyes were pinched so tightly shut that River felt moisture gather behind her own. And all the while he entered her with powerful but unhurried thrusts. “You feel my love?”
“I feel it,” she gasped.
“You’ll never be without it another day.” His breath bathed her lips. “You never have been. I’ve loved you up one side of forever. Now I’m going to love you back down the other.”
“I’ll love you forever, too.”
“River.” The rolls of his hips grew jerky, frantic. “Don’t let go of me.”
“Never. Never again.”
Epilogue
Someone once said it takes a village to raise a child. Or maybe just a house full of divorcées…and their extremely patient brother, who honestly just wanted to watch SportsCenter.
River’s father hadn’t thrown them out of the house after all, but River, Vaughn, and Marcy had moved out one week ago, despite the older man’s concession. Without Vaughn having to say a word, River had understood his reluctance to depend on her father’s act of kindness—and while River and Vaughn had accepted an apology from the man who’d raised her, she shared Vaughn’s urgency to be an independent unit.