I touch my mouth to hers again. I need a small taste. Slipping my tongue out, I slide it along the seam of her lips before I take a step backward. I watch as she lifts her fingers to her lips, touching where I just kissed her.
“I love you, too, Lainey. I’m claiming you, and I will marry you one day. I want to be very clear that this is the beginning of us. No more hiding, no more secrets. We are together from this fucking moment on.”
Her hand falls away from her mouth, and her teeth sink into her bottom lip as her eyes search mine, sparkling. Fuck. I can’t believe this is real. She’s here in the clubhouse, she’s mine, and I’m going to keep her.
It doesn’t feel wrong, either.
It doesn’t feel like betrayal.
Instead, it feels like wild love—perfect love. Meant-to-fucking-be, should-have-always-been love.
“Go,” she urges. “So you can come home.”
Home.
Spinning around, I walk out of the clubhouse without another word. She’s right. I need to go so I can come back to her. Come home. Because that’s what she is.
My home.
The love of my fucking life. It just took me forty years to find her and accept the fact that I could have the club and her. I didn’t have to choose. I walk out to my bike, climb on, and start the engine before I take off back toward the wedding venue.
LAINEY
I watch him walk away, and I wonder what he’s really walking into. I wish I could go with him. I feel like I need to protect him, although I’m not sure how I could do that. But it feels as if my heart is being ripped out of my chest and following behind him.
“You are so gone for that man,” a voice beside me whispers.
Turning my head, I smile at the sight of Heidi standing next to me. She’s wearing a sexy-as-shit dress that shows off her figure without being too much.
“I am,” I confess.
“I’m glad he got his head out of his ass,” Millie states. “Now he’s just got to confess to your brother he’s in love with you, which Axton already knows, so I’m sure he’ll fuck with him about it.”
“He does?” I ask.
It’s a stupid question.
I’m not sure how anyone could miss the fact that Gunnar and I have feelings for one another. We may have been trying to hidethem from each other, from ourselves, but there is no way we were doing a very good job of it.
“Everyone knew. It was painful to watch that wedding today,” Cidney murmurs. “But we’re glad that the outcome seems to be much less painful.”
I think about Paul and how he’s not going to survive any of this, especially if what Gunnar told me about him and Lorenzo’s wife and the way they were looking at one another is true. If they are having an affair, there is no way a man like Lorenzo is going to let Paul live.
“I would have done anything for my family,” I announce.
“We know,” Millie states. She closes the distance between us, and then I feel her arms wrap around me before she whispers, “Even live a life of misery.”
And it would have been miserable. As much as I tried to tell myself—to talk myself into believing that I could be happy—that marrying Paul was the best thing for the club, for my family, and everyone I loved, I knew deep down that I would have lived every day in complete and total misery.
“We’re all happy to have you home,” she says. “Exactly where you’ve always been meant to be.”
The room, though not as full as it usually is, erupts in applause and laughter. “Let’s get Lainey a drink and toast to a failed wedding day.”
“The best failed wedding day that could have ever happened,” I call out as Millie takes a step back, her hands falling from me.
She’s smiling as she watches me, and I swear, from earlier today to now, a weight has been lifted, and I realize my marriage was the weight, and I feel bad.
The last thing I ever wanted to do was upset my family. But that’s what I did. I upset them, I weighed them down, andI stressed them out—when all I wanted to do was everything except that.