Keep Me (Sinful Manor #1)

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-One

Killian is outstretched on my bed, naked on his stomach, and I can’t seem to stop staring at him. He’s really here. It feels impossible but incredible at the same time.

“Stop watching me sleep. It’s creepy,” he mumbles into the pillow.

“Get over it,” I reply.

“Were you really that surprised?” he asks, sounding half asleep.

“Yes,” I say emphatically. “It’s been so long I was starting to assume you were just trying to figure out a nice way to get rid of me.”

He groans as he hooks an arm around my waist and tugs me nearer to him. “You’re still my wife, Sylvie. I’m not just going to get rid of you .”

“Technically…” I start, about to point out the fact that we are neither real nor fake married anymore.

“Don’t say it,” he groans. “We will be fixing that as soon as I recover from this bloody jet lag.”

“What?” I snap, staring at him in shock. “Getting married?”

“Yes,” he mumbles.

I let out a gasp as I try to move away. “You’re not even going to ask me first?”

“I don’t need to ask you,” he complains.

“Why not?” I shriek.

“Because I know what you’ll say. What the fuck is the point of asking?”

“To be romantic!” I try to climb off the bed, but he doesn’t let me get far. Holding me around my waist, he pins me down to the bed, shifting his weight on top of me. I let out a howl of laughter as I struggle to get away, but he’s too strong.

“Since when are you and I romantic, wench?” Putting his face in the crook of my neck, he growls, making me yelp as goose bumps erupt all over my skin.

“Fine. I’ll marry you again, but you have to stop calling me names like cow and wench ,” I say with a moan as his growls turn into kisses.

“No deal,” he replies curtly.

My arms wrap around him as I smile. Then I find my mind going back to the house as it so often does. “So…” I start. “Did you really give the house to your aunt?”

“Yes,” he says on an exhale.

“And you’re okay with that?”

“It’s just a house. If it means that much to her, she can have it.”

“Where will you live?” I ask, although I already know the answer.

“With my wife, of course,” he replies, nuzzling closer to my body.

With his face buried in the pillow and his hair strewn in a mess around him, I stare at him and try to find the differences from the man I knew at the manor. But I don’t see anything. It’s just him in a different setting.

He does seem at ease now. And not the same sort of at ease I thought I saw before when I tried to tell myself he was fine. Now, he seems free.

“How are you feeling?” I ask, brushing his hair out of his face to plant a kiss to his bearded cheek.

“I’m fine,” he groans.

“And you won’t lie to me?” I ask, biting my lip. “If you’re not fine, you’ll tell me?”

He lets out a sigh and rolls onto his back. “Yes, mo ghràidh. If I start to feel anything, I’ll tell ye. But I promise, I didn’t make this trip until I was sure I could do it without worrying you.”

A tight smile pulls at my lips as I set my cheek on his chest and wrap my arms around his midsection.

“I’m proud of you,” I whisper, feeling him kiss the top of my head.

“Thank you,” he replies softly.

***

I wake up early the next morning, and Killian is already sitting up in the bed next to me.

“How long have you been up?” I ask groggily.

In nothing but his tight boxer briefs, he holds up the green book in his hands, and it takes me a moment to recognize it as my own. “Long enough to read this again. My cell phone doesn’t seem to work here.”

“I can’t believe you’re reading that again. I own other books, you know?”

He shrugs. “This is my favorite.”

I smile to myself as he continues to read. Then he looks down at me as he adds, “Do you have anything new?”

“It’s not done yet.”

“Are you going to publish this one?” he asks, stroking my hair.

“Nope.”

With a smirk, he leans down and kisses my temple. Thinking about writing makes me think of my mom and the weird encounter yesterday. “My mom came and saw me yesterday,” I say, making him tense immediately.

“Did she stop by to compliment your furniture?” he asks sarcastically.

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 he showed 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 in the 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?”

With a smile on my face and his hands held in mine, I gaze into his eyes as I graciously reply.

“I do.”