Chapter 107 Marry Me
Nico POV
Now I have a baby to worry about.
Frustration ticked in my jaw, anger simmering inside my veins as I pulled my fingers through my hair, suppressing the need to scream.
Pregnant? What the fuck was the universe trying to do? How in God’s name did we manage to create a life when we were surrounded by death and lies from the start? All the plans I had for her, for us, no longer mattered. A few simple words and everything changed.
I leaned back against the door, and I could hear her whimpering from inside the room. The sound of her sadness tamed my anger, and for a second I tried to think about how she was feeling. That’s what people do when they love each other, right?
Of course she would be afraid to tell me. If it were me, I’d be afraid too. This was a whole new world for her, a world I’d been in all my life, and she’d only been here for a short while snd then finding out she was pregnant by the man that at first wanted her dead? I couldn’t blame her.
I closed my eyes trying to imagine a baby, our baby. It wasn’t something I ever thought about wanting. A family, I’d been living with a dark depravity inside me for so long, I didn’t think a family of my own would be possible for someone like me but dear God, here I was with a woman I had fallen completely in love with, and she was carrying my baby. There was a life growing inside her, a life that was half her, half me. Jesus Christ. We were having a baby!
“Fuck!” I turned, unlocked the door, and stormed inside, kicking the door closed behind me.
Lila was sitting on the bed, still naked, and crying. She had loosened the ponytail in her hair, and golden strands covered her face like a veil. “You’re pregnant,” I stated the obvious.
She nodded, her soft sobs filling the room.
“You’re pregnant,” I repeated to myself.
She looked up, and when I saw her tear-stained face, the emotional pain radiating from her crystal blue eyes, it pierced straight through my chest, shattering my heart into a million pieces.
I launched forward, pushed her down on the bed, pinned her arms above her head, and straddled her.
I forced her to look up at me. “You need to listen to me very carefully.” I tightened my grip around her wrists. “This ends today, you will no longer dwell in the past. You will no longer think of yourself as a victim so you can have a reason to doubt me, to doubt how I feel about you. Yes, you’ve been through hell. Yes, I didn’t do right by you in the beginning. Yes, you lost something but I’m trying my fucking best to make it right. And this” I grabbed her arm with the tattoo “is a vow I had imprinted into your goddamn skin. This was my way of saying no more lies, just vows.”
“Nico”
“Stop allowing the past to weaken you. Stop using it as an excuse to not trust what is happening between us. I love you. I love you so much it fucking hurts. Nothing will change that. You are mine, and you always will be.”
I leaned down, allowing my hand to travel from her neck to her breast, all the way down to her belly. “And now that you’re carrying my child, you have no choice.”
“I told you earlier, I choose to be here with you.”
“You did but now I can’t help but wonder, is it because you want to be here, or because I managed to plant my seed inside you?”
I watched as her throat bobbed, her chest rising and falling. Her crying had stopped, and determination replaced the tears. “No more lies?”
I nodded, doubt momentarily rendering me incapable of breathing.
She sat up on her elbows. “The moment you killed your mother to save me, that was the moment you ripped my heart from my chest and made it yours.”
This time it was my turn to swallow hard, her words taking all the jumbled thoughts inside my head, forming one single, most important thought and decision of my life.
No more lies, just vows.
“Marry me, marry me, Lila.”
And then she knocked my feet right from under me and without a single moment’s hesitation, she answered a loud and clear, unmistakable…“Yes.”
With that one word, she had managed to make me feel like the most powerful man in the world. I had all the money one man would ever need. I had all the influence I needed to build an empire, yet with a single word she made all of it seem irrelevant.
I kissed her. I kissed her like a man in love. The need to possess her wasn’t there pounding against my ribs. The only thing I wanted to do was love her. I wanted my love for her to be present in the way I touched her. No toys, no whips, no chains or knives only me. I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to make her bleed. The only thing that was bleeding was my goddamn heart.
The saltiness of her tears invaded our kiss, making me more determined to show her how she had managed to turn my obsession with her into a love that had the power to bring me to my knees. After all this time of me trying to own her, she was the one who ultimately ended up owning me.
I moved, settling between her legs. My cock was ready not to claim, but to forge our bodies into one.
My lips travelled down her neck, my tongue dipping in the hollow below her throat. “Let me love you, Lila. Let me love you for the rest of my life.”
She weaved her fingers through the hair at the back of my neck. “Only if you let me love you back.”
My mouth was back on hers the second those words rolled over her lips. A soft moan poured from her mouth to mine, our tongues dancing and seducing, refusing to stop.
The way her hard nipples pressed against my chest, her skin like velvet against mine, felt better than any whip or spanking better than any burn against my palm.