Bingo.
Zephyr shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. My point is you saying that will give people the impression that we’re in some kind of open relationship here—”
His free, scarred right hand came to her chin, interrupting her as his golden gaze seared her. “This is not an open marriage. I don't share.”
Oh, she liked that.
“Great. I don't want to be shared,” she nodded profusely and threw her hands out. “But they don’t know that. Not with the way you’ve been acting. I’ve already had someone flirt with me—” his grip tightened on her chin “—and if you don’t make it clear that I’m taken, I think it’ll just escalate, me being so irresistible and all. Someone might even risk your wrath and steal me away like we’re in some B-grade crime movie—”
Before she knew what was happening, she was up and over his shoulder, her world tilted upside down, blood rushing to her head, her leggings stretching over her ass as his palm covered it.
“You talk to my wife, you die,” he announced coldly.
Dante whistled in the distance, and Zephyr flushed. That was the most 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' thing she'd ever seen in her life. She was as taken as she could get.
He declared to the men lingering on the ground and simply carried her to their room to get ready for the wedding. Zephyr shut up after that, satisfied that his possessive streak still existed somewhere deep down, and while he was being cold, he wasn’t unaffected by her. If the last 24 hours had been any indication, it was a long, long road ahead of her. But today began with a win, and she’d take that.
Happy as a clam, she hung over his shoulder as he carried her away.
***
Dante and Amara’s wedding was beautiful. Not just the setting and the day itself, but the couple. She didn’t even know them but she cried when Amara came out on with little Tempest on her hip. Zephyr looked at the way Dante gazed at her, the love so visceral in his look it reminded her of a time long ago when the man at her side had looked at her like that. And it wasn’t just Dante, but the dangerous-looking man at his side looking at the spectacled woman beside Amara. What the hell did these guys eat up here? She needed to bottle that love. Maybe she could sell it on the black market and become a mafia lordess. Lordess? Was that even a word? It should be. She wondered if her husband ever would look at her like that again, and that made her sniffle.
He handed her a tissue silently, sitting in a white formal shirt that she was sure he'd had tailored because there was absolutely no way they made it in his size. The shirt was left open at the collar, the fabric taut over his chest, a smart navy jacket covering the rest of him. His short beard was trimmed, his hair pushed back, and damn he cleaned up so well. And why he had tissues in his pocket, she didn't know, but Zephyr took it, blowing her nose as delicately as she could.
“You cry a lot,” a young voice from her side made her look down at a boy with blue eyes who just sat down at her side. He was around ten years but the way he was studying her made him seem older.
Zephyr wiped her nose with the tissue. “I’m an emotional girl.”
The boy kept staring at her unnervingly for his age. “How do you do that? Cry?”
Zephyr focused on her little companion, intrigued by his line of questioning. “I just feel it, and tears come out. You don’t cry?”
The boy shook his head.
Damn. “Do you want to?”
He gave a nod.
Poor baby.
“Tell you what,” she leaned closer to him to whisper. “I’ll cry for you, so that way you don’t have to waste your tears. What do you say?”
He blinked, his leg restlessly moving up-down. “Someone else can cry for me?”
That was a weird question. Before she could reply, Tempest’s grandmother came to take the boy. “Come, Xander. We have to sit up in the front.”
The boy left to go to the front from the seating area, and Zephyr turned to the wedding too, momentarily distracted by musing about what kind of a world she’d stepped into where little kids didn’t know how to cry. It reminded her of seeing Alpha that first time, roaring with the pain of losing his mother. She looked at him now, sitting still with a permanent scowl on his face, and it made her wonder if this world had killed that boy completely or if he still existed somewhere inside the one-eyed beast he’d become.