Claire: The Forced Virgin Of The Billionaire

Azriel’s POV

We got married at sunset on a beach in Costa Rica with our family around us. We were both dressed in white. I danced with her to our song and she put on the ring with the gold and black knots.

And I was in heaven for she was truly mine at last.

I didn’t deserve her but she gave herself to me anyway. She’d stared into my eyes and promised to love, honor and obey, which made me smirk, which then made her smirk.

I gave her a look of promise and her gaze went heated and the justice of the peace that married us had to clear his throat to get our attention back on the ceremony.

When the song ended and another one began, I whispered into her ear,

“Wife, when your husband takes you to bed to consummate our marriage, he’s going to rip that f*****g vanilla dress off you and f**k you like you’ve never been f****d.”

I continued, but looked into her eyes, they were huge and she was panting,

“I’ve got handcuffs and a spreader bar, some toys, and a tub of blackjack berry thunder ice cream.”

She had a full body shiver.

I’d gotten a local chef to recreate it from the approximate recipe of the brand back home.

I was ready for our life together to truly begin and while I had a long way to go with therapy and making sure that I never went overboard with her again and while I’d given up my birthright as mafia crime boss, I had not given up the right for my life to have flavor.

Azriel’s POV

“Spread,” I demanded.

She complied.

Miles of white fabric kept her hidden from me. And that wouldn’t do, so I shoved the dress up above her waist, exposing tiny white silky panties that were covered in cherries.

f*****g cherries.

That thing in my chest flared. That Claire thing.

She smiled shyly. Shyly. f**k. My baby girl. She wore these for me. She did so f*****g much for me.

She looked so f*****g beautiful today. On her wedding day.

“Who do you belong to?” I demanded to know, as I fastened her ankles to the spreader bar.

She looked completely submissive in that wedding gown, looking beautiful, eyes shining with love.

With trust.

My wife.

Lying in a bed of rose petals.

Mine.

“I belong to my husband,” she answered, tears shimmering in her beautiful jade green eyes.

I shut my eyes and let that wash through me.

Never knew getting married would mean so much.

Never knew that my perfect other half was out there.

All I had to do was claim her. Had no clue how different it’d feel knowing she wasn’t just mine because I said so, she was also mine before the law, God, the world.

Yeah, it’s been a bumpy road, and yeah, I took someone and claimed her as mine, as much as she resisted in the early days.

Naw, it was far from moral, since she probably only opened up to me because I saved her from a fate worse than me in Mexico, but we were here.

I claimed her, and it would be on the highlight reel of my life, that moment in a bathroom in a hotel in Las Vegas when she first declared that she belonged to me.

Not only did I claim her, absolutely willing to hold onto her whether she wanted me or not, but she surrendered.

And she isn’t broken.

My Claire is stronger, stronger and wiser, than anyone looking at her might expect a young beautiful girl to be.

And here in paradise, in the sand by a house I rented for us, we made it legal in front of God, and my family.

And now it was time to consummate our marriage.

My thoughts flashed to my uncle, and not for the first time today. Uncle would’ve wanted a full catholic mass.

Uncle would’ve wanted four hundred plus guests, including his business associates and everyone else who bowed down to him, slapped his back and were ready to suck his d**k if he so much as gave the word.

He would not have been pleased with the type of wedding I had instead.

Then again, Uncle threatened to hurt her by having a bloody wedding dress left outside my bedroom balcony door when I began to defy him.

A signature Tom Clarke warning.

Dare found it and got rid of it before Claire saw it that night, but I saw it after the fact. And it was imprinted on my brain, present in my night terrors.

And then my uncle shattered my loyalty to him by taking her from me, knowing full f*****g well what she meant to me.

Uncle would not factor here on our wedding night.

I wanted, no needed, this beautiful f*****g dress off her.

*Story Rewind – Aruba*

Claire’s POV

We were taking time away after the trying weeks we’d endured. Heck, after the whirlwind that been our relationship so far.

Kidnappings – me twice, not including my initial abduction in Paris by the man of my life himself. Him once.

B***d.

Murder – murder of enemies. Murder of family members.

Funerals.

Angst. So much angst.

Azriel decided we’d get a chance to catch our breath before the wedding. But, not much of a chance, because he insisted he was marrying me at the “first f*****g opportunity”.

Everything was piling up on him. And of course it was, after all we’d endured.

He’d say he was fine, shrug off my concerns, but I could see it in the clench in his jaw, the hardness in his whisky eyes. I could hear it in the mild irritation that always seemed to be in his voice.

And I felt it in the way he did not rest easy beside me or under me at night.

He spent a lot of time with his heavy bag. The day before we finished packing up the house was not a good day, and I could feel his frustration with life in the air around him.

I found him in the basement, not punching the bag, instead in a pose that reeked of distress, body glistening with sweat, gloves on his hands, but his arms were wrapped around the bag in an embrace, his face buried in the Everlast logo.

I wanted to go in and put my arms around him, comfort him, but I knew he wouldn’t have wanted me to see him like that, so instead, I backed away and went back upstairs with a heavy heart.

Would a holiday help after all he’d been through lately?

Planning and then attending Tom’s funeral.

Watching Tessa exist, subsist, in the depths of despair over losing James, then her father.

Having Lisa go from catatonic for days to suddenly acting like everything was just fine despite the murder of her husband, which she was told was the fault of enemies and that they’d been dealt with.

Rosita said that Lisa she hadn’t even shed a tear at the news. She just went perfectly still. Statue-like. For hours.

It was concerning, to say the least.

This was followed by her being quiet and hiding out in her bedroom for days.

We saw her armor slip for just a nanosecond when she announced to all of us, during lunch at the house while we were planning the funeral, that she was pregnant.

She was hanging onto this pregnancy as a coping mechanism, it seemed.

The timing was probably a blessing. She’d lost her husband, but had something to look forward to. She got to keep this piece of him, of their love.

As twisted as he was, it was obvious he was something else for Lisa.

People could say the same about Azriel and me. They likely did.

Luciana was emanating her feelings of powerlessness like a big beacon, and struggling with how to deal with it all.

She had a new baby and a dead father, a broken sister, dead brother-in-law, and angry brooding big brothers.

You could feel it in the air around her… her despair, her desire yet inability to fix things.

She was coping by trying to mother everyone, even though she was the baby of the family. She did the bulk of the planning with Rosita for the celebration of life and funeral.

Dario was stepping up in a big way. He encouraged us to go away and enjoy our vacation, then plan our wedding; plan our happily ever after.

He and Azriel had a heart-to-heart at some stage while they were planning Tom’s funeral and Azriel told me they’d decided that Dario would be staying back and working with a consulting firm to get the bulk of the Clarke business holdings ready to be sold.

Life would be moving forward. Azriel wanted something away from the world of crime, if at all possible.

He had said he wasn’t sure how possible it would be, though. He told me we’d have to wait and see.

His biggest priority was getting me out of the country. He told me he just didn’t feel safe at home after all that had happened.

First Aruba. A vacation with just us.

I chose it because the owner of the French restaurant Azriel and I had dined at in Paris had said that he had gone for his honeymoon there and said it had hundreds of beaches — enough to see a different one every day of the year.

I loved the idea of visiting a lot of beaches and then maybe having a beach wedding.

Azriel arranged the trip and said we’d be meeting the family in Costa Rica for our wedding, there.

He’d rent us a big beach house and it’d be a happy occasion.

For all of us.

From there, I had no idea what would be next. Azriel had the wheel, the GPS, and the keys. I was along for the ride, trusting him to take care of us.

But, I really wanted to take care of him, too.

He had on a brave face, wasn’t talking about what’d happened with his uncle. But, he wasn’t sleeping well and I knew that things were weighing heavily on him.

Aruba was meant to give us a minute to breathe.

And Aruba stole my breath.

***

“I think I could happily stay here forever,” I told him, on the drive to the hotel from the airport, taking in the beauty of the island through the windows of the taxicab.

He smiled at me, but only with his mouth, not with his beautiful whisky eyes. “We’ll see what happens.”

There was stress, the dark circles of unrest, and uncertainty all over his features, and it’d all been there since the day Tom died.

And anger. He was definitely angry about being in this position, about his uncle putting him in the position where he was forced to choose between free will and Tom’s definition of loyalty.

He didn’t want to talk about it; he wanted to put my mind at ease when I asked questions.

A few times, he got snippy, such as on the way to Aruba, when I was asking questions while we sat in the waiting lounge at the airport.

I’d pushed for information about our long-term plans.

“What? You don’t trust me to keep you safe?” He glared at me.

“What? No. That’s not what I’m—”

“Leave it all to me.”

“I don’t think it’s wrong of me to ask about our future, Azriel.”

“I’m tryin’ to fuckin’ figure out our future, Claire.”

“You don’t have to do that alone.” And he shouldn’t expect to do it alone. I should have input.

I should be a part of the conversation — that wasn’t a conversation, just inner dialogue I wasn’t participating in.

“Oh. My mistake. You know how to deal with wise-guy kingpins who’ll want you taken out if they suspect you killed your uncle?

By all means, tell me what you think I should do about that. Help me. What gave you got?”

“Touché.”

The emotion and misery in his eyes whenever he referred to killing his uncle? It hurt me to see.

I knew he was wishing there had been another way. I knew it had to absolutely kill him to have to make that choice there in that moment, of whether or not to kill his uncle when there was a gun pointed at me.

I couldn’t imagine taking my own father’s life. It was almost the same thing because Azriel’s uncle was much like his father.

Of course I didn’t want to say that to him, to make him feel worse.

But, I belonged to a man who I knew had taken multiple lives. I didn’t know how many, wouldn’t ask, but I knew he would not hesitate to do it again to protect me.

He was who his upbringing coupled with circumstances and his personality had forced him to be.

He took his uncle ’s life out of love for me.

Bottom line: he picked me over the man he had been groomed to be loyal to for almost 2 decades.

And beyond that, I think he picked himself, too. My guess? He had spent his life trying to live up to and even to exceed his Uncle’s ’s expectations.

He was drawing a line in the sand around the time Tom got shot and Tom’s reaction and subsequent actions backed Azriel into a corner.

He had to stand his ground, exert himself as a dominant man who was not about to live under anyone’s thumb.

There was a point when Azriel realized that his Uncle’s grooming of him was done and it was more about control.

Azriel had control issues of his own, so was certainly going to buck against someone else trying to control him.

***

We were at our own private villa in a lush resort, and it was absolute paradise.

This wasn’t a party resort; it was a place where you had your own beach, servants at your beck and call, blue skies above, blue water around you, picture-perfect weather, and privacy. This was a resort for people with money who wanted privacy and to be catered to.

I was going to be a person of means. After a lifetime of having no money, it was still a foreign concept to me.

All we had to do was relax. That’s what this place was for.

But, he didn’t seem relaxed. I wanted to see the stress of the past few weeks melt away. Badly. He woke last night with a jolt and when I turned on the light, he looked disoriented.

“Are you okay?” I’d asked.

He was huffing and puffing with fists clenching and unclenching. A battle stance. It was kind of scary.

He stepped outside and paced a minute, then did about a dozen laps in our pool.

I listened to the swish of the water and waited for him to come back to bed.

When he finally did, I tried to initiate s*x, to see if it’d help, but he just grabbed my hand to pull it away from his d**k and held onto it. His heart was beating so fast.

He pulled me close and when his heartrate felt like it was returning to normal, I’d fallen back to sleep.

I knew it would take time. I just wish I knew how to ease his pain or at least take it away for a little while.

I woke up this morning to sweet lovemaking and gentle k****s from him, his eyes filled with love. He made slow, sweet love to me, reverently worshipping my body.

He was sorry for his moods. I knew it.

I caressed his face and kissed him softly afterwards, then traced the ink on his chest and arm with my fingertip, enjoying a quiet moment together where he looked stress-free.

But, a few hours later, I saw him again wearing all that tension on his face. I felt it.

I’ve decided to try to do something that might help a little, even if it might be considered an unhealthy coping mechanism.

Break one of his rules. Just a little nudge. Not enough to fully engage the beast in him; just enough to show him I wanted the beast off the leash a little bit.

If I broke a rule, he’d have an opportunity to take out some frustration on my body. It might help.

And it wasn’t entirely altruistic, either, because I got my release, too. And I needed it.

Being with him, being affected by his dominating energy … I needed it unleashed on me. I needed to feel release from all the tension.

Feeling his release had become braided with something of mine, something I got specifically when he got his. The build-up as he was about to blow affected us both.

Adrenaline would pump. Anticipation would build.

And then the absolute rush, that freeing sensation of letting go…

The freeing sensation was something I craved now.

These days, my shoulders were often bunched up. My stomach was constantly in knots. And it was creating a ripple effect, because I could see it annoyed him to see me like that.

He was already feeling bad, feeling tense, and my reaction to it was ratcheting it up notch by notch.

Our relationship had become a vicious cycle of stress for us both and I wanted, badly, to fix it.