Page 82 of Claimed By the Villain

Jackie

I can’t move. He’s holding me tight against him.

To say how much I love him like this feels even more intimate, stripping me bare. I turn my head slightly, looking at him as best I can. I ready myself to give my soul to my fallen angel.

Lucifer’s eyes are serious but less shadowed than before.

Was it me who did that? Who pulled him a little closer to the light?

Encouraged by the thought, I brush my fingers along his jaw. “It’s always been you. I love you, and I’m not letting you go. Not in five years, not ever. I want everything, and I want it with you.”

Chapter 42

New Orleans

Days Later

“How are you feeling in your first days as a married woman?”

I smile at Amber, Beau’s wife, wondering how to answer.

How do I say, without sounding pathetically in love, that it still hasn’t sunk in? How do I explain that sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and when I feel his arms around me, I still think I’m dreaming, that any second now I’ll wake up alone in my apartment?

I don’t care if my dreams aren’t like other girls’.

Or if the man I love could never be called a prince.

Lucifer is mine, with all his rough edges and his broken past. With all the bitterness I know still lingers from his childhood. With his hunger for revenge against his enemies.

I choose honesty. “I still don’t know. We haven’t had a normal routine, and I don’t even know if we ever will.”

“I understand. But do you love him?”

“I’ll answer it the other way: I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. Even when I was little, when it was more of a brotherly kind of love, it was still love.”

“I’ve known him for a few years. He seems more at ease when you’re around.”

“At ease?”

I know Lucifer sometimes comes down to Louisiana to visit Beau and his family. It didn’t take me long to realize the Carmouche-LeBlancs are the only family, aside from me, that my husband has.

“I don’t think I explained it right. First, because Lucifer will never completely relax. Men like him and Beau sleep with one eye open. And second, because maybe I’m not the one who should say what I’ve noticed in him since you arrived.”

We’ve been in New Orleans for a week now, and little by little, after the chaos of New York, I feel like, for the first time, our life together has started to gain some sense of normalcy.

Maybe it’s because their house is full of children. I’ve never been around so many at once. They have four.

Unlike Lucifer’s apartment, Beau and Amber’s house has toys scattered everywhere, kids’ books, pink hairbrushes, and little glittery clips left on the furniture in the most unexpected places.

I have no doubt Beau is in the same business as Lucifer—or something very close to it—because no man, no matter how wealthy, needs that many guards watching over him.

Their house is a fortress.

Tonight, we’re visiting one of the nightclubs from the chain Lucifer will soon own, and while we walk through the private lounge, watching the crowd down on the main floor, we talk.

In a way, my reaction to Amber was a little like how I felt about Taylor, whom I liked the very first moment I saw her.She’s a bit standoffish at first, but you can tell right away from her face whether she likes you or not.

Thinking of Taylor makes my chest tighten. I called her after I got here, but not being able to tell her I’m married makes me terribly sad. Still, rationally, I know I can’t drag my pregnant friend into the crossfire my life has become.