This woman is my wife.
My mate and my wife.
Images of her swarmed his mind. Roksana fierce and vulnerable in the Brooklyn alley, a stake clutched in her hand, Roksana dancing with abandon on the Vegas strip, running toward him in the bar, sparring with him in the vampire hold.
Becoming a vampire wasn’t the only thing that made him immortal. His union with Roksana was even more substantial than some silencing of organs. Or ceasing to age. His love for her was eternal, enduring, a ripple across time that would continue uninterrupted, no matter what happened.
“You’re kind of an old-fashioned romantic, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. We’re finding that out at the same time,” he muttered, walking them into the cabin and setting Roksana on her feet in front of the fire.
“I already knew.” Eyes locked on his, her fingers slowly undid the buttons of his coat, pushing it off his shoulders. “But you don’t fit any mold exactly. You’d bring a girl to a fancy bar and not bat an eyelash when she orders a chocolate martini.”
A hoarse sound left him, but he disguised it with a cough. Fuck, he would do anything to tell Roksana he remembered their first night together. That he not only remembered it, but he replayed it endlessly, cherished it, counted it as the start of the most important chapter in his life: After Roksana. But with a reckoning bearing down on them faster than a speeding bullet, he couldn’t risk an implosion between them. More importantly, he couldn’t risk her life. Having an untruth between them was agonizing, but for now, leaving it there kept her protected.
Worried he was betraying too much on his face, Elias moved around Roksana and stopped in front of a small table for two, fishing the champagne bottle out of the ice. “It might not be chocolate, but it’ll do the trick. You want a glass?”
Her hands coasted up his back and he dropped the bottle back into the bucket with a loud rattle. “I only want my wedding night,” she said, kissing his shoulder through his shirt. “I don’t want to think about tomorrow. Don’t let me.”
Lust stiffened his cock, beginning a pulsating pressure he associated with his wife, but he didn’t immediately turn and take her in his arms. Back at the church, when she’d said the words that sealed them as husband and wife, something primal and old as time had been unearthed. It howled inside of him to be released, a wildness wanting to complete the ritual of ownership. Possession. To have Roksana underneath him and make her understand he’d be her first, last, forever. To impress that fact on her while she screamed.
But he wasn’t all beast. He’d been teeming with love for Roksana since before their matehood was even known. And she was a human girl who deserved better than a vampire giving in to the call to claim and own and fuck.
“Let me get myself under control,” he rasped, gripping the edge of the table and trying not to snap it. “This isn’t going to be some down and dirty hookup in a dressing room.”
“Don’t blaspheme the dressing room hookup,” she murmured in mock outrage, her hands busy untucking his shirt from his pants. “It was life changing. I can speak Spanish now and I couldn’t before.”
A laugh caught Elias off-guard, but it faded as quickly as it started. “I don’t want to be…mean with you. Not every time. Especially not this time.”
“I think we have differing definitions of mean, vampire—”
“Husband.”
Still facing away from Roksana, he heard her breath catch. “Husband.”
The ripple of his growl vibrated the air around them.
Several yards away, a picture hung on the wall and in the glass’s reflection, he watched Roksana step back and peel the black, leather dress down her body, reappearing when she’d worked it free of her feet and cast it aside. With his mate, his wife standing so close in nothing but panties, Elias obeyed his desperation and turned, devouring the sight of her excited nipples, the slopes of her sides, the lithe strength of her thighs.
Hunger bashed into his self-control like a battering ram, visions of her hair wrapped around his fist, their hips slapping together, trying to usurp his resolve—but he wouldn’t let it. Instead, he stripped off his shirt slowly, focusing on the way the firelight picked out white strands of her hair, made her skin look twice as soft, if such a thing were possible.
“Wife,” he managed around the stick in his throat. “My incredible…hot, little wife.”
“You rang?” Roksana said breathlessly, her tits heaving slowly.
Elias dropped his shirt on the floor and started undoing the fly of his pants. “I bet you’re going to taste even sweeter with a ring on your finger.”
She backed toward the fireplace, the buds of her nipples darkening a shade and Christ, he almost spilled his seed, right then and there. “Good question. H-how are you going to find out?”