Page 21 of Iron Bride

I caressed her skin, and she gasped, her eyes fluttering closed with a reciprocated lust.

I deserved a little honeymoon.Wedeserved it.

“Let us be allies, you and I.” I gently pushed her onto her back and kissed the pretty valley between her breasts.

“We can’t be,” she whispered.

“Why not?” I’d be disappointed. Hell, I might even feelhurtif her words had any teeth.

She liked my kisses, and my touch. She liked my voice, and my words, the same as I liked hers.

What more does one need in an arranged marriage?

“Because vendetta is an Italian word,” she whispered.

“That has nothing to do with us,” I told her. “The past is the past.”

“And the future can only have one victor.”

I kissed her nipple, chuckling, as my breath traced over the delicate skin. “Rubbish.”

I sucked the hardened nipple into my mouth, tasting it like it was the most delicious morsel. I spent the darkened hours of night between my wife’s thighs, kissing, tasting, fucking. No words, just gasps and whimpers, intertwining until we couldn’t move.

We slept the morning of Christmas Eve, fingers and legs locked together.

Vendetta might be an Italian word. But we were in New York City. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we were born here. The past belonged in another land, and the future was whatever I decided it would be.

Chapter eight

We Lost Everything

Gia

Ididn’t hate being a wife. I didn’t anticipate Cillian being an attentive husband. When I was too sore and tired to do my “wifely duties”, he picked me up, and placed me in a warm bath. Sitting in the clawfoot tub, he held me up above the bubbles as he tenderly cleaned my skin, and washed my hair.

He took his role as a husband seriously, and with far more devotion than I would have guessed.

It was almost painful, how much his attention softened every part of me.

How could I keep my defenses up? How could I stick with the plan? The fate that was laid out for me the moment my father’s severed head was thrown at our feet all those years ago?

Why did the son of my enemy have to be so human? He wasn’t a reptile. He wasn’t cold blooded.

He was warm and soft. His fingers, his lips… he wielded with a lethality more damning than those iron blades they carried with them.

He kept me in a lusty trance.

I thought that I had missed Christmas until he rolled out of bed, stretched, and cracked his muscular back.

“Pick a dress, love,” he whispered over his shoulder. “We’re having Christmas in my parents’ suite. Your mum will be there.”

His naked body was something to behold. Like a Michelangelo sculpture, but far more well-endowed.

I looked at my hands and saw the dried blood beneath my fingernails. Had I done that? I must have.

My body heated at the memory of holding on to him. Of throwing my arms around his back and clawing to get closer and closer. I had marked him with my claws while he had marked me with his teeth. I was a hawk, and he was the serpent, and we clashed even when intertwined.

“Darling?” He looked at me with amusement. “Did you hear me?”

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