Handy for you, p.20
Handy for You, page 20
“Oh, God.” She swallowed, her eyelids fluttering as he continued to tease. Her knees trembled again and he chuckled, pressing another kiss to her clit.
“Can your knees hold you if I bend you over the bed?”
Kari started to answer, found her voice gone, cleared her throat and tried again. “I think so. Would you like that?”
“I would really like that.”
Rob rose from his knees, wincing a bit. Nothing like kneeling on a hardwood floor to remind him of his age. But Kari’s hazy, pleasure-ridden expression made him forget all of his discomfort. He took her hand and led her toward the bed, pulling her against him for a long, exploratory kiss. His dick, sandwiched between both of their bellies, throbbed with want. More heat, more contact, more…
He remembered that she’d needed help before. He drew back a little. “Where’s your lube?” She wordlessly pointed at the bedside table. He turned and pulled the drawer open.
Interesting. A small blue-green object like a large, silicone covered bullet sat next to a larger purple object shaped a bit like a curved barbell with teardrop-shaped ends. What the…Oh. He thought back to their earlier sexual encounter, what she had said about why she needed lube, and comprehension flooded through him. He grabbed the container of lube and the bullet, holding it up.
“You said you wanted to play?”
Her eyes widened and her already pink cheeks flushed a deeper hue, the color spreading down her neck to her collarbones. Her tongue darted out across her lips and she swallowed.
“Your choice,” he said, not sure if her reaction was embarrassment, arousal, or some combination of the two.
Her chin dipped twice in a jerky nod, her gaze skimming from his hand to his dick and then up to his face. Only then did a tiny, feral smile chase over her lips.
“Well then.” He wasn’t sure how to begin. He’d never even held a vibrator before. All his previous ideas about them had been more…explicitly phallic. Obscene, even. But this little object was almost a cipher of industrial design. The non-business end was silver and had the universal power symbol stamped into it. He pressed his thumb down on it and it jumped to life, emitting a soft buzz as it vibrated. He almost dropped it. “Yikes. This thing is powerful.”
Kari nodded. “Be gentle with it. With me.” She took it from his hands, turning it off, and led him back to the bed, dropping the vibrator to the coverlet and cupping his jaw in her warm hands. Her lips skimmed across one cheekbone, then the other, then landed warm and sure on his mouth, tongue slipping inside, taking what she wanted and giving him a delicious feeling of being desired. She broke the kiss and breathed in his ear, “How do you want me?”
Dear lord, but this was giving him flashbacks to being a kid, hunched over a skin magazine, reading in a furtive haste. I never thought it would happen to me, but… “Turn around,” he said, putting his hands on his waist and rotating her toward the bed. Her torso sank forward without his urging, her palms coming to rest flat on the coverlet. The movement made her hips tilt up and Rob drew in a breath. The almost innocent-seeming eroticism of her baring herself to him was going to make his head explode.
He opened the tube, dribbling lube onto his fingers and stroking them over her sex. She hissed.
“Was that bad?”
“Just a little chilly.”
“Ah. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just fuck me.”
Rob wasn’t a guy who needed to be asked to do a thing twice. Especially when it was a thing he was dying to do. “Legs further apart,” he said. She shifted and he picked up the bullet before he guided his dick into her. He groaned as he slid home, then groaned again when she clenched around him, just the faintest increase of pressure, but enough to make his nerves almost override his desire to go slow, to give Kari her climax first. He leaned to wrap his arm around her, guiding the humming silicone to her clit.
She hissed again. “Not that hard.” And then, “Yes. Oh. Yes,” as he moved it, experimenting at the same time as he began to pump his hips. He could feel the vibration faintly, creating an extra delicious shiver in his own body. He forced himself to breathe deeply, to not plunge into her, to not get lost in her.
Not yet.
Not that the limitations forced on him by the application of the vibrator meant he could go crazy. His arm was only so long and he wasn’t Stretch Armstrong. He kept his strokes short and circled the vibrator until Kari’s body was bowstring-taut and shaking. He pulsed into her and circled the vibrator again. Once, twice. She gave a strained, needy little sound. A third time. As it circled down again, she let out a shuddering cry, pulsing around him so hard it only took a couple of short strokes for him to lose himself entirely, his hips pressing into her as if they were becoming a single being, his dick throbbing, ecstasy and a sharp, warm, needy feeling flooding his body.
He was hardly aware of her taking the still-vibrating bullet from his limp fingers and turning it off. The sudden silence boomed in his ears.
Kari dropped the vibrator and rested her weight on her hands. Rob stroked her back, her rear, and down her thighs before withdrawing slowly.
“God. I didn’t want that to end,” he said.
Kari straightened and turned, wetness trickling down the insides of her thighs. “Any longer and my knees might have given out.”
“I would have caught you,” he said, his voice a little rough.
“That’s a lot to promise,” she said.
“No. No it’s not.” His eyes were hooded, darker than usual in the soft light. Serious and intense.
“Is something wrong?”
One corner of his mouth kicked up and the serious look was replaced by warmth. The intensity remained, though. “The opposite.”
More moisture trickling down her legs. “I…” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the bathroom.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be here.”
Something about that simple statement hit her square in the chest. She blinked.
“That is, if you want me to be.” He half-raised one hand as if to touch her, let it drop.
She reached out, grasped his hand with both of hers. “I do.”
His fingers curled around hers, the briefest pressure. “Go get cleaned up.”
Kari let go of his hand and cupped Rob’s chin, giving him a fast, firm kiss.
“You’re a good man, Rob Fox.”
Rob watched Kari’s retreating back, pale in the low light, feeling stunned.
That electric bolt of…whatever he had felt as he lost himself inside her was entirely new. He felt raw, exposed. Eustace Scrubb from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with his dragon body peeled away, bare and vulnerable as a willow switch.
Okay, nerd. Dial it back.
He rubbed his face. He didn’t know what this pounding, needy feeling was, but he knew he should clean himself up a bit. Snatching a few tissues, he dried himself off and dropped the waste in a basket in the corner.
Returning to the bed, he picked up the vibrator and container of lube, setting them down on her bedside table. “I salute you, sir,” he whispered to the vibrator. If someone had asked him a few weeks ago if he would have been okay using a device to help get his lover off, he would have been offended. He could do it himself, he would have thought. To do anything else was a failure as a man.
But tonight had turned all that upside down. The vibrator hadn’t seemed like a challenge to his masculinity, it had been a way of making Kari keen and shake and lose herself. Of making her feel as good as she could.
And he had certainly reaped the rewards as well. Kari clenching and spasming around his dick was…well. It nearly made his eyeballs roll up into his head just thinking about it.
She returned then, hesitating in the doorway. He held out a hand and she came to him, letting him pull her against his body. This was nice too, the skin to skin contact, her body’s softness pressing against him.
“Let’s go to bed,” he murmured.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rob wasn’t falling asleep.
Kari wanted to sleep so badly. She craved the release into the dark abyss. She loved sleeping. Adored it. But now she lay on her side, her back cuddled to his front, waiting for his breath to deepen, for the arm around her middle to go slack.
It didn’t happen. Rob was quite definitely still awake. Her eyes flicked to the clock. They’d been lying here for two hours, neither of them sleeping. Kari was all too aware that the last time they’d made love she had fallen asleep soon after and Rob had spent a mostly sleepless night. This time, knowing that, she was unable to dive off sleep’s cliff headlong the way she usually did.
She bit her lip and turned in the circle of his arm. “You can’t sleep?” she whispered.
“You neither.” Yes. His voice was very clear, very awake.
“I can’t sleep because I know you couldn’t sleep before. Last time, I mean. I felt bad.”
“No reason for you to lose sleep just because I’m being an insomniac.”
She thought about this for a minute. “Are you usually an insomniac?”
A long pause. “No.”
Kari’s throat tightened. “Is this…about me?”
Rob’s arm tightened around her. “No. I just can’t sleep.”
Kari rolled over and reached out in the darkness, carefully letting her hand land on his face, caressing his cheek, running her fingertips through his hair. “Would you…would you feel better if you were sleeping in your own bed?”
“Do you want your bed to yourself?”
“This isn’t about me. I want you to get a good night’s sleep.” Not one hundred percent true. Kari was used to sprawling across her mattress, not needing to worry about crowding anyone else out.
“You’re not sleeping either.”
“Only because you’re not.”
He heaved to his elbow, his form more distinct now in the darkness. “I should go. You’d sleep better if I wasn’t here.”
Kari flopped to her back, looked up into the darkness. “You mean you’d sleep better in your own bed.”
A long pause. “Maybe.”
“Go. Sleep.”
He settled in beside her, his arm wrapping around her waist, his lips pressing her temple. “When will I see you again?” he whispered.
“I’m next door. Whenever you want.” Kari was unable to keep the acerbic rasp out of her voice.
“Are you okay? Is it okay if I go back to my place?”
He so clearly didn’t want to be here. Kari braced herself for offense, for feelings of rejection to overtake her.
Nothing.
She groped in the darkness until she found his face again, stroked his cheekbone with her thumb. “Go. Sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow. Or whenever.”
His lips found hers. A kiss that fired her bloodstream. She cupped his face with her hands and her body torqued with ache as he broke the kiss and got up. She lay and listened to the quiet rustle of him gathering his clothes in the dark. His hand caressed her cheek and his lips found hers again, fastening soft and sweet this time.
“Sleep well, Kari.”
“You too.”
She listened as he padded out, closing the bedroom door softly behind him, then the whipping cloth sound of his pants being drawn quickly up his legs, then his shod feet treading to the door, then finally the front door’s solid thunk as it closed behind him.
With a sigh, Kari sprawled across her mattress, arms and legs splaying towards all four corners and was out within minutes.
Rob’s shoulders started to relax as he closed his own front door behind him. He shambled to his room, chucking the shirt and undershirt he hadn’t bothered to put back on for his walk home at the laundry hamper in the corner. Toeing off his shoes, he staggered a little and put his hand on the wall to steady himself. Christ, he was tired. He shucked out of his pants and sent them the way of his shirt. He hadn’t been able to find his underwear in the dark, but he also hadn’t wanted to turn on the light and disturb Kari any more than she already was. Mia could never go back to sleep if he turned on a light when she was a little girl and the knowledge had never left him.
Guilt nagged at him as he stripped back the sheet and duvet and slid into his bed. His own bed felt right. He’d slept alone for a decade. But he had also loved the feel of Kari’s long body snugged up against his own. He had thought that maybe he’d be able to nod off if he felt her relax, her shallow waking breaths turning into deep, slumbrous ones. He had counted on that to soothe him into following her into dreamland.
Instead, she had been looking out for him, worried about him, unable to sleep because he couldn’t nod off. He wondered if she was still lying awake like he was, unable to relax.
He lay on his back and pushed his fingers through his hair. What kind of a jerk couldn’t sleep in the same bed with the woman he—no. He wouldn’t even think it. The feeling or emotion or whatever it was that had ripped through him with his orgasm might be something bigger. But more likely it was a side effect of physical release. Best not to prove Mia right and be impulsive and potentially ruin everything.
Glancing at the clock, he realized that yet again he was wound as tight as he had been in Kari’s bed. Tighter, maybe. Monday morning would come all too soon. He needed to sleep, but something nagged at him, as if he had forgotten something.
The heel of his hand crashed into his forehead. He had forgotten something. His phone was currently lying on Kari’s coffee table.
He would just have to go over there tomorrow morning and retrieve it. And hope Kari had been able to get a good night’s sleep.
The sun woke Kari before her alarm did. She rolled to her back, sending her arms and legs in all directions in a languorous stretch. She blinked and relaxed against the mattress, letting the world come back to her slowly. She’d slept soundly but for waking up in the middle of the night, released from a dream about not being able to find a bathroom, her subconscious’s way of fighting with her body’s desire to remain asleep when she desperately needed to pee.
The lovely, dull ache between her thighs recalled her mind to the previous evening, and when she glanced at the clock, her bullet vibrator and tube of lubricant on the nightstand brought back other memories that sent her lips curving in a smug little smile.
She sat up, surveying the room. Her clothes were scattered around the hardwood floor, her shoes lying at drunken angles where she’d kicked them.
The only thing missing was the man who’d caused the carnage.
She had clung to wakefulness, wanting to delay sleep until he proved to her that he could fall asleep beside her. Instead, he had remained awake and fled for his own bed at the first opportunity.
Another bed he couldn’t sleep in if she was in it.
Kari’s mouth twisted and she swung her feet out of the bed and onto the floor, standing and stretching again, yawning and blinking.
Well. She hoped he was as well rested as she was. She bent to pick up her dress and laughed as she realized Rob’s boxer briefs were resting on top. She tossed his underwear on her bed and gathered up the rest of her clothing from the night before, shoving the dress into the drop-off bag from her dry cleaner and the rest into the laundry basket in her closet. Snagging her robe and wrapping it around her, she grabbed Rob’s underwear and folded it into a neat bundle, tucking it into her pocket before she headed for the kitchen. Passing through the living room, she saw Rob’s phone on her coffee table.
Really.
Was the man congenitally forgetful or was he marking his territory?
Going into the kitchen, she started a pot of coffee and leaned on the counter, staring at her backyard, her brain ticking into planning mode. She had hazy ideas about a series of raised beds at one corner of the fence and she let her mind roam over the possibilities as the rich smell of brewing coffee filled the kitchen.
Her doorbell roused her from her gardening trance and she pushed herself off from the counter, fairly sure of who was ringing her bell. Gathering the phone off the coffee table, she walked to the front door and looked through the peephole.
Even distorted by the fisheye lens, Rob looked delicious. Kari opened the door and leaned against the frame, taking in his freshly shaved cheeks, shower-damp hair, and workday wear of khakis and button-down shirt, interchangeable with what he had worn to her little dinner party.
“Looking for these?” Kari offered the phone and produced the underwear from her pocket, pleased to see Rob’s cheekbones redden as he opened his hands.
“Thank you,” he said, receiving them.
“Coffee?” Kari asked.
“No thanks,” Rob said. “I have a staff meeting first thing. But—”
Kari’s heart hammered. “But?” He’d dashed out so quickly last night. Had he changed his mind?
He shifted uncomfortably and Kari realized she was holding her breath.
“I know it’s probably too much because we’ve already spent the entire weekend together, but would you have any interest in doing something tonight?”
“Something?” Her pulse didn’t seem to get the message that he wasn’t breaking up with her. Or maybe it did.
“Or nothing,” he added quickly. “Your place or mine. I just…enjoy your company. If you want to be alone, I get it.”
“No,” she said, realizing from the way his face fell that he’d misinterpreted her negative. “No, I mean I don’t want to be alone.”
His face split in an uncertain grin. “Great. I’ll see you when I get home, then.”
“Do me a favor and put my number in your phone?” she asked.
“Right.” His sudden off-kilter manner was adorable. She gave him her number and he typed it in with careful fingers.
