Page 52 of Accidental Vegas Vows

I swallowed the lump of lobster meat and turned toward him. “Only if you want to speak about her. All I know is she’s, uh, passed.”

He nodded. “Yeah, early last month. I hadn’t spoken to her in over five years,” Damien said, plucking my glass of champagne from the table and passing it to me. I hadn’t touched it yet — I’d been too worried about what it would do to me around him. But if he was going to speak about her…

I took it, gratefully.

“But before that, before we stopped speaking and before Noah existed, we were together. For two and a half years, we were serious.” His head tilted back toward the harsh oranges and pinks that littered the sky, the sun just barely visible over the horizon. He looked almost otherworldly as the colors painted him, and all I could do was watch — watch, and wait. “I wanted to marry her. Bought a ring and everything. I was convinced she was the person I’d been waiting my entire life to meet.”

I took a sip of my champagne, craving something to do, something to distract myself from the heaviness of his words. I couldn’t admit to myself that I didn’t like hearing about this — not when that was an admission to other things. I couldn’t even admit that it was a relief to hear that he was capable of an actual relationship.

“I was wrong,” he rasped, tilting his head back up, his eyes meeting mine in a flash of blue amongst the pinks and oranges. “For a lot of reasons, I was wrong, but overwhelmingly because she wasn’t… faithful. There was someone else in the picture, someone she’d met fairly recently toward the end of our relationship, and she didn’t tell me until I proposed. I’d gone through the motions of it all. I’d dropped to one knee. I’d expected an enthusiastic yes, I’d told my friends, my family. I couldn’t… I couldn’t keep it in. But I’d received a look of genuine fucking horror and a blubbered apology.”

Oh, God.

“I had a speech ready. I had everything planned. But it went to shit,” he sighed. “And I’ve had almost six years to come to terms with it and get over it, and I have, but with Noah coming into the picture and everything hitting me in the face once again, it’s felt like I’ve been reliving it. Like she deceived me again, because she did. I don’t doubt, for one second, that she was a good mom to Noah. I know exactly how she would have been with him — how she was with any child we met, how she planned to be for the kids we would have. She loved him. She wanted him to have the best possible opportunities in life, even if it meant the shit with Grace, even if it meant thrusting him upon me and owning up to her secrets.”

He downed the last of his glass of champagne before pouring himself another. I didn’t know if there was something I could say that would make it better — wasn’t even sure if there was a reason he was telling me all of this. But if he needed to speak it, I was willing to let him, even if it made my stomach churn.

“I still don’t understand why she never told me,” he breathed, the words so quiet I almost didn’t hear them. “That’s the one thing I can’t wrap my head around. Maybe she knew back then that she was sick. Maybe she wanted as much time with him as she possibly could have, alone, before she had to leave. Either way, I’ll never know, and that fucking haunts me.”

His hand slid down the cushions, coming to rest gently on the top of my knee. I stilled.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know where I was going with this,” he mumbled, pushing himself upright and leaning onto the table, one elbow carrying the weight of his face in his hand. He squeezed my knee gently, and all I could think to do was put my hand over it, hold it, and show him in the only way I could that it was okay. “You asked about Sarah. And all I could think was, shit, does she think I’d fuck anything that moves? Does she think I don’t have a single bone in my body capable of caring for anyone other than myself and Noah? And I… I don’t know. I don’t want you to think that about me. I don’t want you to think that I’m some monster that fucked you purely out of a need to perform a conquest?—”

“I don’t.” I do. I don’t. I don’t fucking know anymore. “I don’t think that, Damien.”

He offered me a half-hearted smile as he released my leg, his hand coming up instead to cup the side of my face. Warmth blossomed from his touch, and I found myself heating, both in my cheeks and elsewhere. “You do, princess. And it’s okay that you do. I would too if the tables were turned.”

He tucked a stray wave behind my ear and that woman I’d chained in my mind reared her head, screaming, desperately tugging at her restraints.

“For what it’s worth,” he added, his fingers trailing along the edge of my jaw, the backs of them bushing back over it, “I care about you. In whatever weird form this is where we’re married and taking care of my child and tearing it down for good reason, I care about you.”

Oh, fuck. The snap of metal, and a single restraint broke in my mind.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he breathed.

I was moving before I could bear to stop myself.

The second and final restraint cracked and broke and I was on him, crawling into his lap, my chest against his, my hands encasing his face in them as I pushed him back against the cushions. His champagne flute shattered against the wood floor as he grasped me in his arms, and all I could do was hold him there, watch him, our lips an inch apart and our eyes locked.

He took it that step further for me.

His mouth met mine, a flurry of sensations wracking my body from nausea to heat, and I could taste the salt air on his lips, could taste the lingering bit of champagne on his tongue. His hand fisted the too-loose fabric of my shirt, twisting it, burying his fingers against my flesh and holding me tightly.

“Fuck,” he rasped, and I took that minuscule break between our lips to kiss his jaw, his neck, the curve of his Adam’s apple. The scent of roasted almonds, vanilla, and rum invaded my nostrils, and for some reason I couldn’t comprehend, it smelled more like home than my apartment. “Liv.”

The way he said it was like a warning, and I knew what would come after. “Don’t,” I begged. “Please.”

“But you don’t want?—”

“I do.” I popped open button after button on his shirt, dragging my lips along his collarbones, along the top of the muscle that ran beside them. His hand grasped the back of my neck, holding me to him, acting in opposition to his words. “If you do, I do.”

“Of course I do,” he swallowed. The strain beneath my parted thighs, pressing up against the soft linen of his slacks, confirmed that well before he’d said it. “But we put up boundaries.”

Freeing the last button, I pushed his shirt open, revealing the entirety of his heaving chest.

“You were conflicted the last time we crossed your lines,” he reminded me. But he didn’t stop me as I continued, as my hand reached between us for the button of his pants, as my other trailed along the expanse of his chest, across ribbons of muscle and the tips of his nipples. “We’re barely married, Olivia. We’re getting an annulment. Yes, things are… different, on my end. And you’re with me more than I expected. But I don’t know if I can give you what you want out of this.”

I don’t care. I did. I don’t.

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