I laugh, because as corny as it sounds, the idea is also exciting. “Interesting. I think I’d like that.”
“Would you?” He reaches over and begins to unbutton the shirt that I just put back on. I lean toward the console so that I can raise the privacy screen.
“No,” he says as he peels the shirt off.
“Damien!”
His fingers unbutton my skirt, then tug down the zipper. “Do you really think that someone is going to lean on the hood, press their face to the glass, and peer all the way back here?”
“They might,” I say, though I agree it’s doubtful.
“They won’t. But doesn’t the possibility make you wet?” He slides his hand up my skirt. “Yeah,” he says. “I think it does.”
I lick my lips, refusing to admit the excitement that’s building inside me. “I was already wet,” I say.
“Mmm-hmm.”
I feel my cheeks heat. “I thought you didn’t do public sex.”
“I don’t. And I’m not going to. We’re in a limo. No one’s looking in. But I like the fantasy,” he admits. He leans forward and kisses me, even as he slides two fingers deep inside me. “And so do you.”
“I do,” I admit, both because it’s true and because I don’t want to have secrets from Damien. “You are my fantasy, Damien. You know that, right?”
“And you are mine,” he says, after kissing me softly. “We’re lucky, you and I. There were so many places where our lives made wrong turns. And yet all those turns, all those horrors, all those days that we want to forget—they all add up to this moment. To you in my arms.” He strokes my hair, his expression tender. “I have no regrets for the past, Nikki. And when I’m with you, the only thing I can see is the future.”
“Damien,” I say, the word soft like a prayer.
“Yes?”
“Kiss me.”
“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” he says before his mouth closes over mine and I slide down into the bliss of his arms.
Chapter Seven
I sit in the silence of the Malibu house, sipping a sparkling water as I work at a small desk in the library. The library is my favorite room in this house, and it’s not really a room at all. Instead, it’s a level—a mezzanine—broken into a variety of sections. The comfy chairs and coffee tables are by the wall of windows overlooking the ocean. The bookshelves line the area that is visible from the massive staircase leading up from the entrance hall. The work areas are farther back, hidden from view, and it is in one of those quiet corners that I now sit.
It is late—barely three in the morning—and Damien is asleep in our bed.
I couldn’t sleep, and though I stayed in bed for hours, warm in Damien’s arms as I drifted in and out of a hazy dream state, I never managed to fall into slumber. I’m not sure if it was nerves or too much bourbon or the persistent thoughts of my mother, but in the end I gave up and came down here. Now I am sitting in the light of my laptop monitor putting the finishing touches on the gift I intend to give Damien on our wedding day—a scrapbook of our time together.
I’ve been working on it for months, even before we were engaged, and have managed to gather and edit photos ranging all the way from our very first meeting at a Dallas pageant to the present. I had originally intended it to be entirely electronic, but once he proposed and I realized that this was the perfect wedding-night gift for the man who owns everything, I decided that it needed to be tangible. I bought a leather-bound scrapbook with thick, archival paper, and have been carefully pasting in the images and writing captions and notes to him with my very best effort at penmanship.