Chapter 1024: Mother-in-law Tempress: "Come Right to Me"

I looked at her standing there in that black lace robe, the late afternoon light slicing through the sheer fabric like a cinematographer who actively hated my self-control.

Every golden beam highlighted exactly what it was supposed to hide — the

heavy, full curve

of her

breasts,

the dark, hardened

peaks

of her

nipples

pressing insistently and invitingly against the delicate pattern, the soft dip of her navel, and the shadowed promise of ruin between her thighs where the robe had parted just enough to tease bare skin.

"I think we should take this to the living room,"

I said, forcing my voice to stay casual.

"What do you think?"

She tilted her head, a small, deliberate movement that made the robe shift again.

The lace whispered against her skin, one side slipping another fraction lower so the inner swell of her left breast was now fully visible to my so much kin eyes, the weight of it soft and inviting under the golden light.

A single water droplet still clung stubbornly to the upper curve, slowly tracing downward.

"Why?"

she asked, voice warm and unhurried. "I’m just about to rest. Unless you’re planning for a long chat, here would be just enough."

I didn’t say what I was really thinking at this moment with my mother-in-law presented in that.

Couldn’t really.

Because she was so fucking distracting it was making my brain short-circuit.

It didn’t matter how many women I’d already had today or that I’d just been buried deep inside her daughter barely an hour ago.

If anything, that made it worse. The

Bloodline Tension

hadn’t faded. Hadn’t cooled.

Hadn’t done me the courtesy of shutting the fuck off once I left the changing room and honestly, I liked it that way.

It was still humming in my veins like a low, traitous filthy frequency tuned specifically to the woman standing barefoot on cold marble in a black lace robe she had very deliberately chosen — and we both knew it.

She knew exactly what she was wearing. She knew exactly what it showed — the way the sheer lace clung damply to her full breasts, outlining every detail, the way it barely covered the smooth flare of her hips, the way it left her long, bare legs exposed from mid-thigh down.

And she had answered the door in it anyway.

Which meant one of two things:

either she’d genuinely been about to rest and hadn’t considered the

implications...

or she had considered them very thoroughly and decided the implications

were the point.

I love it if it were the latter.

Twenty years of celibacy didn’t kill a woman’s understanding of what black lace communicated. It had sharpened it into something dangerous.

I walked over to the couch and sat down. She settled on the bed across from me, legs folding gracefully beneath her.

The robe shifted with the movement, the lace doing sinful things I refused to stare at directly — because if I let my eyes linger on the way the fabric rode up her thighs, on the dark shadow where her legs met, on the way her nipples tightened further from the cool air or from my gaze, this conversation would be over before it started.

Six feet of marble floor and warm, scented air separated us. Six feet that felt like six inches and six

miles

at the same time.

"I’m just here to apologize,"

I said.

She blinked. Whatever she’d expected, it clearly wasn’t that. Her posture shifted — a tiny micro-adjustment, the straightening of someone who’d been bracing for an entirely different kind of conversation and was now recalibrating.

"I’m afraid I won’t be here for another day. I’m going to Paris tonight and I’ll be there for two and a half months,

minimum."

I leaned back into the couch, hands resting openly on my knees, keeping my posture relaxed and honest.

"Just wanted to inform you before I go."

She shrugged — one elegant shoulder. The movement made the robe slip another dangerous inch, exposing more of the soft, heavy curve of her breast and the dark edge of her areola pressing against the lace.

"It’s fine.

Thank you. You didn’t have to."

"Yeah, I did. Would’ve been rude to just disappear without telling my mother-in-law who came all this way to visit me."

Her eyes narrowed. The word

mother-in-law

landed exactly as I intended — a reminder, a boundary, a deliberate frame around whatever charged electricity was crackling in this room.

It said:

this is what we are, officially, on paper... regardless of what your robe is doing to the air between us.

She held the narrowed gaze for a beat longer than comfortable, processing the word, tasting it, deciding whether it was a shield or a provocation.

With me, it could easily be both, and she was beginning to figure that out.

I stood up.

"Please excuse me."

I started walking toward the door. Got three steps before I turned my head over my shoulder.

"Be safe while I’m gone," I said. "And thank you for the game today.

I had fun

." A beat. "I hope you reconsider your stance about my relationship with Luna."

I turned back toward the door and kept walking.

"Peter."

Her voice. My name. It sounded different this time — stripped of armor, stripped of performance, stripped of clinical distance or maternal authority.

Just a woman saying a man’s name because she needed him to stop.

I stopped.

"Why do you love Luna?"

The question hung heavy in the air between my back and her voice. I could hear her breathing — shallow, carefully controlled, the rhythm of a woman who was asking something that cost her.

I didn’t turn around.

"Also

— I understand

teenagers,"

she continued, her voice shifting into something more careful now, picking through words like she was handling fragile glass.

"I’ll admit

nothing

about you

makes sense to me. I can’t say I understand you at all. But I understand teenagers and their

obsessions

with

older women

. It’s hormones. It’s novelty. It’s the thrill of something forbidden." A pause.

"But after playing with all these women... what’s next? Are you just going to walk away from her or them eventually?"

I still didn’t turn. "It seems like even after being here for a few hours, you still don’t understand anything at all."

"Would you?"

she asked, and the question carried real weight — the kind that came from a woman who wasn’t attacking, but genuinely wanted to know. "If you were in my place. Would you understand?"

"Fair enough."

I said it with no intention of explaining. I was done building cases, done presenting evidence, done auditioning for approval from a woman who had made her verdict long before she ever walked through my door.

It didn’t matter.

She couldn’t take Luna from me — Luna was grown, Luna had chosen, Luna was mine in a way that transcended whatever moral framework Maria was trying to apply.

If she wanted to disapprove, she could do it from the other side of an ocean while I was in Paris and Luna was warm and willing in my bed.

"Doesn’t it bother you?" she asked, her voice quieter now. "The

incest.

The

taboo.

The

morals

and

ethics

of all of it."

That... wasn’t judgment... wasn’t criticism.

Wasn’t a mother loading ammunition.

It was quiet. Genuine.

She was asking because the answer actually mattered to something she was working through inside herself — something that had nothing to do with Luna and everything to do with the mirror in that changing room, the door she had almost run through, and the robe she was still wearing.

I heard the shift. The thing underneath the question. It was about her. About what she’d been feeling.

About what she’d almost done. About the robe, the shower, and the door she’d let open knowing exactly who was on the other side.

She was asking me for permission. Not directly or even consciously, perhaps.

But the entire architecture of the question —

doesn’t it bother you, the taboo, the morals

— was a woman testing the water with someone else’s foot before she dared put her own in.

I shook my head.

"No."

Silence stretched.

Long enough that I almost started walking again.

Long enough to hear the air conditioning cycle on and off — and the soft whisper of lace, her body leaning slightly forward or uncrossing her legs or doing something I couldn’t see because my back was still to her and every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to turn around.

"Can you keep a secret?"

she asked.

Something in my chest shifted.

Her voice had dropped lower into that intimate register that lived below normal conversation and above confession — the exact frequency women used when they were about to say something they could never take back, and had decided to say it anyway.

"As long as you need me to,"

I said.

The room went perfectly still.

The air conditioner stopped cycling. The golden light through the window held its angle.

The shadows on the marble floor froze.

Even the faint ambient hum of the guest mansion — all of it receded until there was nothing left in this room except her breathing, mine, and the six feet of warm, charged air between us that had been steadily shrinking since the moment I walked through the door.

"Then come back here,"

Maria said, her voice low, husky, and unmistakably inviting.

"Come right to me."