Jace chuckled along with his wedding guests, but he turned to look at the priest. “Proceed. I’ll save most of my fondling for later.”
When the priest turned back to his Bible to continue, Jace lowered his hands and gave Aggie’s ass a firm squeeze. She squeaked in surprise.
“I said most,” he whispered.
“Do you know what I do to naughty boys?” Aggie whispered in his ear. She wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to the formality of the priest’s speech either.
“Mmm hmm,” he murmured, doing his damnedest to listen to the priest’s inspired words and not let his mind wander to all sinful things he knew Aggie did to naughty boys.
Jace was lost in a haze of possibility when the priest said, “Do you have any words you’d like to share with each other?”
Jace froze, his heart rate doubling in an instant. Aggie looked at him expectantly, and he couldn’t remember the words he’d wanted to say to her. Not a one. Luckily, she knew him well. While the priest rubbed the edges of his Bible impatiently and the crowd shifted in their seats and the wedding party drummed their fingers and twiddled their thumbs, Aggie patiently waited for him to find his voice.
The priest cleared his throat. “I could—”
“Shh,” Aggie interrupted the priest’s attempt to move the ceremony forward. “Wait.”
Jace concentrated on her face, allowing everything but her to fade into the background. It wasn’t difficult; she was more radiant than the sun. All things paled in comparison. As he stared at her, his pulse slowed, his thoughts focused, and he found himself in that perfect headspace that at one time he’d only been able to find after he’d suffered enough physical pain to blot out the emotional agony he didn’t think he’d ever escape. But he had escaped it. And he had to tell her how much that meant to him—how much she meant to him. He took a deep breath and forced the words from that wounded place inside him that he’d never revealed to anyone but her.
Chapter Thirteen
Aggie could see that Jace was struggling to find his voice. And she was struggling with a powerful protective instinct—the one that no one brought out in her more than Jace did. Part of her wanted to let him off the hook and not make him say whatever he’d thought it was she should hear from him on their wedding day. But the wiser part of her knew he needed to do this for himself more than for her.
She couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d met her halfway down the aisle. She wasn’t even sure if those dozen steps in her direction held the same significance to him that they did to her. They were partners. Lovers. Friends. They always met in the middle. That’s why when he’d looked at her, kissed her, and touched her in the middle of the aisle with absolute reverence, she’d fallen to emotional pieces. As a dominatrix, she was used to men worshipping her, but in her head and her heart, Jace had always been her equal. So when he showed utter adoration in front of a hundred witnesses, the gesture meant something. Hell, it meant everything. She still had a fucking knot in her throat.
“I’ve been trying to find the right thing to say to you for months,” he said at last. “I never did find perfect words, but I ran out of time to come up with something better, so you’ll have to forgive me if I botch this.”
She wanted to tell him she knew whatever he said would be perfect to her, but was afraid if she interrupted, he’d stop talking.
“My entire life people have only see pieces of me,” he said, his voice strong and unwavering. “Some see what they want to see. My mother only saw the parts of me that stood in the way of her dreams. My father looked at me and saw nothing but loss and pain and rebellion. My first love, Kara…” He swallowed. “Kara saw adventure and recklessness, the bad boy in me.”
These were all people Jace had lost before he’d become a man, but Aggie knew how much they’d shaped him. Correction: had shaped pieces of him. But not the whole of him. The whole of him was amazingly resilient and talented and compassionate and loving. And hers.
Jace pushed on. “Some see what I let them see. My boxing coaches see the violence that needs an outlet. Past dommes saw the perversion that twists my perceptions of pain and of pleasure. Fans, they see the music that burns within. To my band, I’m still the new guy who just wants to be accepted as one of them and can’t help but worship them to this day. To my cat, I’m a provider and a somewhat entertaining plaything. But you, Aggie, you’re different. You see all of me. The best pieces and the worst. Everything in between. You worked so hard to get all my pieces to fit together like the world’s most frustrating puzzle.”
She smiled. That was exactly what he’d been like at the beginning, and his insight amazed her.
“I didn’t think I was worth the trouble. I was so damaged. So broken. And I didn’t even realize it.”
She shook her head and squeezed his hands. She’d never seen him that way. Lost. Confused. Hurt. But not broken.
“Despite my best defenses, you persisted relentlessly to make me whole. And you could. You could. Do you know why?”
Not trusting her voice, she shook her head.
“Because you saw all the pieces. Even the pieces I didn’t want you to see. You saw them all and accepted them. You put me back together one piece at a time until I realized there was only one piece missing. The piece that holds all the rest together.”
She stared at him wide-eyed as she steeled herself for whatever bombshell he was about to drop on her. Something he’d managed to hide from her all this time. She was sure whatever it was, she could handle it. She just wished he’d picked a better place to tell her about that one missing piece.