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Everyone was welcome here, enfolded into the culture without being asked to assimilate. In Blue Moon, you were good enough just because you existed.
How could he have such strong feelings for a woman he barely knew?
It wasn’t possible, but that didn’t change the fact that it was
“Don’t be afraid of pain, or less-than-perfect, daughter of mine. That’s where the real joy comes from. Life gets its color from challenges and adversity. You can’t plan your way to happiness, you know.”
“You aren’t your parents any more than any of us are. My mom left, too. And I take great pleasure in not being her. It doesn’t matter who made you. It matters what you choose to be.”
You’re not just gorgeous on the outside. You’re beautiful on the inside, too, and I’d be an idiot to not take advantage of whatever time we have together.” “Jesus, Emma. You gut me,” he said, resting his forehead on hers. “Nikolai, you’re going to feel a lot more than gutted when I’m done with you.”
She should be glad Niko mattered to her. It should make intimacy with him easier. In the past, she’d often found it difficult to completely open up to men, always holding a few pieces of herself back. It was safer that way. But Nikolai wasn’t one to settle for part of anything. Though they had no future together, she imagined his demands on her in the present would be total.
“Let’s just get this out of the way so we can both stop thinking about it.”
He meant to just kiss her. He’d thought of nothing else since last night when Emma launched herself at him. He was hard before she even answered the door. That’s what she did to him. Her mouth on his had almost leveled him, nearly stripping him of his control, and he wanted the experience again. He’d kissed and been kissed but not like that. Never like that.
She responded to him as if he were the sun and she a flower blossom. Opening and blooming under him, she came to life and stole his breath with the beauty of her need for him.
It was supposed to be just a kiss. And it was anything but that.
“If you like this dress, you need to get out of it in the next two seconds, or it’s going to be destroyed,” he warned her.
He wanted to capture her like this, wearing power and need like an aura, a halo. She was a goddess made with the sole purpose of rendering him speechless.
“I’ve got to catch up.” And calm down. If he let himself loose now, he’d take her here on the floor.
When she reached for his zipper, Niko stilled her hands with his. “Bedroom, Emma. I want you in a bed this first time.”
She arched up, sliding the straps off her shoulders. Niko reached under her and released the clasp with one hand. “Show off,” she teased. “Baby, just you wait.”
He was so hard, so ready, he thought he might go with her just from the sound of her voice breaking on a sob. He should have felt a dose of pride for bringing her here, for making her sob his name. But all he felt was need. He needed to be inside her, to claim her, to feel her come around him.
She was going to kill him. He was going to die right here with his cock in her mouth without ever having fully had her.
He wanted to remember this moment forever, commit it to memory, capture it on screen so he could relive it again and again. The moment Emmaline became his.
He was hanging on by a fine silver thread when he felt her begin to quicken around him. “Yes, baby. My Emma,” he breathed into her. He shifted just slightly, changing the angle of his thrusts and let them both go.
God, she was going to have to get a new bed when Niko left Blue Moon. Hell, she was going to need a house that didn’t carry the ghosts of sexual perfection.
What happened here tonight had changed everything for him, and he needed time to process, adapt, refocus. He’d lost himself in her and in that loss had found something bigger and more essential than what he’d known before. It was love between them, of that he was certain. He didn’t understand what it meant, yet. But he did know he wasn’t letting this woman out of his arms.
“What exactly is the Beautification Committee?” Eva asked. “It’s a secret committee that spends their free time trying to pair off unwilling townsfolk to create the illusion of happiness and stability.”
In some ways, he’d expected his father to always remain faithful to the memory of his mother. But he was beginning to understand that life inevitably carried on and though new beginnings explored undiscovered paths, the past didn’t have to be forgotten.
was
“I believe in the kind of feeling that stops you dead in your tracks and changes everything you ever believed. I believe in a love so swift and sure that it knocks the wind right out of you and leaves you lying on your back staring up at the sky wondering what just hit you.” Her lips parted, but no words came out. “I believe in an ever after that isn’t even a choice because you can’t imagine your life without the woman in front of you.”
“I’m glad I ran into you, Emma. Gordon mentioned you were interested in looking for a place to call your own, and the whole town is just thrilled to death that you’re staying. Now is the time to buy. It’s a buyer’s market in Blue Moon, and there are so many wonderful properties available. I took the liberty of speaking to Rainbow at the bank, and she assures me a loan would be no issue. And to top it off, I have the perfect property for you. It just came on the market yesterday.”
I’m not a fan of the BC but it’s bothered me less this time through the books. But this kind of invasion of privacy and personal space is the stuff that really bothers me.
Doesn’t diminish my love of Niko and Emma’s love story though.
Niko was looking at Emma the way his father had looked at his mother in those quiet, private moments when they thought no one else was watching. It was love. The realization hit him harder than a ton of bricks dropped from above. He was leveled. He’d known he had feelings for her, strong ones. He just hadn’t realized until this second what those feelings were.
She thought he’d lose himself to the speed and the craving for fulfillment. Thought they would race to the finish, but instead Niko took his time worshipping her body with his. He brushed his lips over her forehead and cheeks and jaw, skimming a hand over the curve of her breast and hip while stroking in and out of her with something that glowed like… love.
It took her pleasure to new levels, feeling him fill her, and she went blind again as she came and came and came, shattering around his release until they were coming as one.
She’d hit him harder and brighter than a bolt of lightning, and what he’d thought had been a case of lust at first sight had quickly transformed into a love he’d never imagined.
“What do you think?” Behind her, his voice purred low and raw. She didn’t turn away from the photo but brought her fingers to her lips. “I don’t know what to say, Niko. These all are so wonderful, so beautiful. It’s like… it’s like you love us.” He turned her then, gently forcing her to face him, nudging her chin up until she met his gaze. “I do.”
“No, you’re batshit crazy. Don’t try to pull me into your delusion. You can have a mortgage and a retirement with literally anyone with a pulse. Now, Paris? You only get that once in a lifetime, and you just ran away from that. Team Niko,” Joey decided.
“Baby, you deserve a life of love and passion and adventure. Not some coma of boredom. I can give you what you need, what you’ve been telling yourself is wrong and scary. And I can still protect you. Let me give you what you need. Let me love you, Emma.”
“You need to run away. Again. You need to walk out when the going gets tough. Now who reminds you of her?” Nikolai said the words quietly, but that didn’t dispel their force. Nor did it dull the pain they inflicted.
It was the intimacy of the moment that had Niko opening his camera app and taking one quick shot. The first moment that she realized she had a family. The first moment that she really let herself believe. It went straight to his gut.
Niko shifted just a little to add Joey to the frame and clicked again. They were connected, the two adults who chose each other and a girl who’d found her way to them.
Family wasn’t just blood and biology it was a commitment. A hard-headed refusal to accept anything but the best for the ones you chose and the ones you were gifted.
“And that’s love. It can and should be the source of your greatest strength, not your biggest fear.
She wasn’t her mother, and she sure as hell wasn’t a coward. She was steady, stable. She didn’t run away. Except she had. The thought stopped her in her tracks. Hadn’t she? After all, she’d been the one to walk away.
Nikolai Vulkov was the bad guy. Unbidden, a hundred memories of his heart, his kindness, his creative genius swamped her. But she fought them off. It had to be him. She needed him to be wrong. It couldn’t be her.
She was right. She needed to be right or else she’d just made the most unforgiveable mistake of all.
“You look like you just accidentally murdered your best friend. I take it you and Niko didn’t make up,” Gia said. Emma shocked herself and her sisters by bursting into tears.
Eva and Gia shared another look. “If you two don’t stop with the mental telepathy thing and spill, I’m going to add you to the list of people who have really pissed me off today.”
She loved him so much it hurt her to breathe. “He snuck up on me with the whole ‘we’re friends’ thing. But that doesn’t mean that love is enough of a foundation for a life together.”
“Love is the foundation of everything, dumbass,” Gia snorted in very un-yoga-teacher-like fashion.
“Oh, so you think I have control issues, too?” Emma demanded. “Yes!” her sisters shouted back.
“You stepped up as the mom we deserved,” Gia said softly. “And it kills us to see you push something real and beautiful away just because it makes you feel.” “Fuck.” Gia and Eva nodded in agreement. She did the walking away so she wouldn’t get hurt. It wasn’t any better than what her mother had done, walking away because she got bored.
“I want to choose you every damn day. Even when it’s hard. Even if one of us wants to give up. I want to fight and win and love you. I want to do this every day for the rest of my life.”
“I don’t have the words for how happy you’ve made me, Emmaline. But I think I can show you.”
