Page 129 of Keep Me

I chuckle into my pillow, remembering her obsession with the rug in Killian’s house. “No. She came by Enid’s gallery. I don’t think she was expecting to see me. But she sure had a lot to say.”

“Oh yeah?” He’s on guard and skeptical as he waits for my response.

“Yeah, she told me what a terrible mother she was and what a good person I turned out to be.”

He lets out a laugh and then scrutinizes my reaction. “Wait, you’re serious?”

I nod. “It surprised me too.”

He sits back and shrugs his shoulders. “It must have been the rug that knocked some sense into her.”

“It might have,” I laugh.

His eyes rake over me again before he drops the book on the end table and lays his body over my back, grabbing my hands and putting them above my head as he grinds into me from behind.

I let out a sultry moan as he groans into my ear. “This is one way to wake up,” I say with a squeak as he kisses his way along the back of my neck.

His cock grows incredibly fast in his boxers as he continues rubbing against my ass. Before I know it, he’s pulling my hips up, positioning himself between my legs, and thrusting himself inside me.

“Eventually, I’ll learn to take my time with you again,” he grunts as he slams into me again. “But right now, I need you too much.”

As his hand slides up my throat, a wicked smile stretches across my face. “You won’t find me complaining,” I moan.

It takes most of the day to get us out of bed. Every time we try, we end up screwing instead. When we do finally get hungry enough, we manage to get showered and out the door.

As we walk together down the street, I keep his hand in mine, squeezing his fingers and clutching to his arm like he might float away on a breeze. I love showing him New York the same way heshowed me his property. Especially since it’s spring and New York is beautiful in the spring.

We end up taking a longer walk than we intended. To neither of our surprise, we find ourselves at the City Clerk’s office.

As we’re waiting in line, he turns to me and whispers, “Are you sure you don’t want a big wedding?”

I rest my head on his arm. “I’m sure. We already had a wedding.”

“It was bloody awful. We hated each other.”

The woman in front of us turns and gives us a quizzical look.

“I know,” I reply to him quietly. “But that’s just part of our story. I don’t want to replace it.”

He shrugs. “If you insist.”

When the clerk informs us that there is a twenty-four hour mandatory waiting period, Killian slips her a disarming smile and begs in his thick Scottish accent.

“You see,” he says. “We’ve already been married, for almost a year. Far more than twenty-four hours, and I came a very long way to make her my wife again. You wouldn’t make a desperate, lovesick Scotsman wait, would you?”

To my surprise, the clerk actually falls for it. After a heavy sigh, and a little fudging up the date on our documents, she directs us to head into the office and wait with the others. We take our seat between other couples who can’t possibly wait another moment until their union becomes official.

With the filled-in papers in my lap, I rest my head on his shoulder. There are no contracts this time. No ten million dollars or historic mansions. There is just us—two people who, by some slip of fate, ended up in the same place at the same time. It feels like a miracle, and I don’t intend to let go this time.

“Devereaux and Barclay,” the woman at the front calls.

Killian and I walk to the front together, smiling at the clerk as she reads us the same dull terms of our marriage she reads to everyone. And it might seem like the least romantic wedding inthe world, but no one here knows that we’ve already lived these vows.

Our love has survived the trials and come out the other side stronger for it. Like most relationships, we entered ours as two people who only cared about ourselves, but as marriage tends to do, we learned to put each other first. It’s no longer about him or me, but us.

“Ms. Devereaux,” the clerk says to me. “Do you promise to uphold the vows of this marriage and keep this man for the rest of your life?”

“Do you, darling?” Killian murmurs with a lopsided smirk. “Do you promise to keep me?”

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