Heart of Darkness - A Standalone Bad Boy Romance Novel

by Gabi Moore

  Monique still didn’t know who the agency plant was inside the mansion, but someday she would learn.

  In the meantime, she had two men who satisfied her, and she loved her job. She hoped it would last forever, although nothing ever did.

  - THE END -

  STEAMY CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

  DAMAGED

  By Gabi Moore

  Chapter One

  “Alan! Oh my God, Alan! It’s happening!”

  My wife of 9 years, my beautiful, wonderful wife Tanya, was racing towards me with something small in her hand and a look of deep consternation on her face.

  If the last few weeks have been anything to go by, I could be mere moments away from having a heavy kitchen implement thrown at me, or else pinned down and shagged – or possibly both, in that order.

  Tanya is a woman who knows what she wants. And she wants a baby, preferably yesterday.

  Everything else had been checked off the list: I was one of the first items on the list as the handsome, successful husband, and soon after me followed the autumn wedding, the house with just the right tiles in the kitchen, the pair of beagles we named Bubble and Squeak, the coordinated bedspreads, and the yearly trips to Bali.

  I loved Tanya. With every (exhausted) fibre of my being. I gave her everything, and happily. And as I saw her rushing over, I had the distinct impression she wanted something, shall we say, very specific from me.

  She pushed a mound of papers aside and plonked herself down on my desk, square in front of me as her one, true and rightful project in life. She waggled a thermometer right in my face, looking very excitable indeed.

  “Look? See?”

  She had just woken up, and was still sleepy-haired and sweet and smelling like cotton pajamas. I loved her nearly half to death, this woman. But it was 6 in the morning, and I was bone tired. I rubbed my groggy eyes, trying to focus on what in god’s name she was showing me.

  “Plus! Egg whites. I have egg white mucous. Raised temperature, egg whites… this is it. It’s happening right now,” she said, leaning in very close and whispering this last part to my still slightly confused face.

  “You’re ovulating?” I said.

  Men are oblivious, I know. She had been going on and on about her… secretions for the past week now, and I, unsure about my manly part in what seemed so clearly “woman’s business” was trying to be supportive while hoping she wouldn’t ever quiz me on the difference in viscosity between Day 12 discharge and Day 20.

  I smiled weakly, trying to remember if “ovulation” is the part that involved blood or not. Before I could say anything, she had tossed the thermometer aside and had hoisted her butt onto the desk, plunking her two bare feet into my lap.

  “We should totally do it!”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes now, silly! The window is closing, Alan, even as we speak. And once it closes, that’s it for this particular egg, you know. Whoosh, gone, down the tubes, as it were.”

  I loved how she spoke like an indignant professor whenever she got pissy with something.

  I ran my hands up and down her thighs, probably soothing myself more than anything.

  “Alright, alright, but how long have we got?”

  “The egg is only viable for 12 to 24 hours. We can make it a few days before or after, but really now’s the time, now’s our best chance.”

  Egg? Viable? Was this the same woman who had once whispered dirty words in my ear in the back of a cinema when we were in High School? The same woman who had jerked me off under a picnic blanket at that festival that one time, the girl who had flashed her boobs at me in church at my niece’s wedding?

  I stared at the papers she had shoved aside – council tax, credit card statements, interest rate changes, bills for that damn broken boiler - and now here was beautiful, wonderful Tanya, reduced to another one of my chores, it seemed.

  My work schedule for the last while had been the same every day: work myself to the bone, try to fix up our piece-of-shit house, replace that broken tile in the bathroom, get Tanya pregnant.

  I was tired.

  She sat staring at me, legs slightly parted, a few wild strands of hair falling into her waiting face. Her hazel eyes, the soft curl of her lip, they were all as beautiful to me now as they had ever been. And yet…

  “Ok. Let’s do it,” I said, smiling.

  I would give this woman the world. And good god if she needed it, I would dig deep and find it in me to fuck her, right now, and give her all the damn babies she could handle. I lunged forward and grabbed both her legs, pulling her onto the desk and laying her down.

  “Ouch! Careful,” she mumbled, revealing a pointy paper weight she had landed on.

  She lay back and shot me a flirty smile. Oh yes. God yes. There it was. The gorgeous, sexy little thing I had married. Her hair fell onto the desk and her pajamas fell loosely open. The word mucous popped into my head.

  Shit.

  I leaned in and kissed her passionately, as though this would help dispel the thought. Ok, so if we started now, and it’s probably around 6 o’clock right now, or ten minutes past… so if we take 15 minutes to get this over with, I’d still have a chance for a quick shower and would make it to work if I left by 7… but what if we took longer than 15 minutes?

  I snapped my attention back to the moment and kissed her some more.

  “Ouch!” she said again, and tore her lips from mine to fuss behind her some more, the sound of bills crumpling beneath her.

  “You ok?” I asked.

  She smiled.

  “Yeah, sure, but uh...”

  “Shall we go upstairs instead?”

  “Uh, yeah, we could? I mean, let’s just--”

  “Yeah, you’re here now, now’s the time isn’t it?”

  “Yup, we should be spontaneous about it.”

  We looked at each other.

  I leaned in for another kiss, this one more strained than the last. I thought of her naughty, tanned brown legs under a sundress on our honeymoon, the way she had run away from me on the beach, laughing, the dress whipping all around her in the wind. The dim memory was stirring something down below, thank god. I pressed my cock against her; it was the beginning of an old, old dance I had been doing with Tanya for years now, the familiar choreography, the well-worn, happy ruts we had carved out for one another, affectionate patterns in both body and mind. I’m more or less an idiot with most things in life, but hell, I knew what turned this woman on.

  But somehow, here, spread on the desk, everything was wrong. Our lips were out of sync with one another. A cramp was growing in my calf as I try to balance myself over her (when was I going to go to the fucking gym already?) and she seemed to be distracted.

  She was suddenly pulling at my hair, tugging at clumps of it and manhandling my head as she kissed. She threw her head back and moaned,

  “Oh, yes, give it to me daddy!”

  What.

  I sat up straight, looking at her.

  “Daddy?”

  She flicked a lock of hair from her eyes, looking a little embarrassed.

  We struggled to make eye contact with each other for a few moments more, then she threw up her hands defensively, sending two pay slips to the floor.

  “Ok, I’m so sorry, jeez, I’m just …I’m just trying something new I guess, because of the …baby? I don’t know, just forget it.”

  She was turning a deep shade of red, and started to pull her nightdress down again.

  “No, no, it’s…” I started. The word “mucous” popped into my head again.“…it’s hot. I guess,” I said limply.

  She glared at me.

  I leaned in again for another kiss, but she shoved me away and jumped off the desk, looking angry.

  “Just forget it,” she said and made for the office door.

  Damn.

  She turned around in the doorway and looked at me with eyes full of daggers. “I’m going to the shops in a bit – do you need anything?”

  I loo
ked at her tired face. I wanted to curl up in bed with her right now, and forget all of this, and play Angry Birds with her under the covers with our own patented system of kiss penalties, like we had done only last year.

  “We need milk,” I said softly, with as much affection as I could muster.

  She turned and left.

  “And a baby would be nice,” I muttered to myself after she’d left.

  Chapter Two

  I’m what you’d call an old fashioned guy, I guess. If there’s anything they don’t make anymore, it’s guys like me. Think of every mildly sexist joke and groan-inducing stereotype about men and women and, well, you have a pretty accurate picture of who I am. I like big boobies and fast cars and movies with robots and dinosaurs in them… although not if they’re too long. So sue me.

  Every severely right-brained male specimen eventually gravitates to their own little niche, and my niche was engineering, where my other manly colleagues were more than happy for me to merely grunt at them for weeks, or come into work with the same shirt I did yesterday. I’m not too good with the written word, or social stuff, but I have a fair idea of how the world actually works, and what I know is that it needs people like me …especially when a part of it breaks.

  I’m the type who thinks that a perfectly reasonable response to “does this make me look fat?” is, “aren’t you always as fat as you actually are, though?” and I’ll admit I’m a bit miffed that the consensus seems to be against me in these cases.

  I understand machines. I can glance at an engine or a circuit board and see into its soul, but people… they’re a little trickier. My wife was something of a black box to me, although she was goofy and big-hearted enough to see my shoddy social skills for what they were: innocent. Figuring out the mysterious ins and outs of her unknowable female mind was an ongoing project for me, but after 9 years, I had made her happy, in the ways I knew how.

  And giving Tanya things was one of the greatest joys in my life.

  I hammered and filed down a penny to make her engagement ring and gave it to her in a box I chiselled myself. I gave her my secret recipe for chicken soup and made it for her whenever she was sick. We had bought a house together and every renovation, every new coat of paint, every nail and plank was for her. I wanted to build our life together, one piece at a time, with my own hands, and I wanted her right in the middle of it all.

  In school I had given her my math homework to copy. Behind the bicycle sheds, we gave each other our tongues and our secret, hopeful dreams. I gave her bunches of daffodils, pink socks, a locket with a tiny “T” on it. As we grew older, I gave her my body, and she accepted it, willingly, and gave me hers. Everything I am, everything that I will be, I wanted to lay it at her feet, to give it to her, to make her smile.

  And now, more than anything, she wanted this goddamn baby. And I had to find a way to give it to her. I sat at work all that day, chewing a pen to pieces and staring at my computer. Ovaries and cervical mucous were most certainly not my area of expertise, it was true. But if she wanted a little baby, well, then I would just have to find out how to give her one, wouldn’t I?

  Chapter Three

  It was a real bastard of a day. The kind of day where you work and work and get sweet fuck all to show at the end of it. I was grumpy, headachey and in no mood for… well, anything really.

  I came home a tiny bit later than usual, and Tanya had beat me to it. She was sweet, flitting around with dinner, chatting about this and that, but even I, oblivious as I am, could sense an extra tension, something like the weird change in air pressure you get before a big storm.

  We slipped easily into our weekly night routine, a routine that had been my home for all these years as much as these walls, this furniture. She cooked, we ate, we did that married people thing where we snuggled on the couch and watched stuff on TV, half carrying on conversations started hours or even days ago. I’m a simple guy, like I said. I guess to an outsider I must seem like some kind of caveman, pleased with his woman and his dinner and his warm couch and not thinking too much further than that.

  Something about this morning had scared me though.

  Was she really happy? Getting bored in a marriage always seemed like one of those things that other, less vigilant people have to worry about. People who never loved each other as much as we did. But… well, let’s just say this wasn’t the first time I had been surprised by how unhappy she really was.

  At work, I was most often the most competent person in the room, but when it came to Tanya… I hate to admit it, but there were times when I felt as though I’d been rudely awakened from a dream, where I’d hurt her without knowing, and part of the hurt was not realizing what I had done. She had stared hard at me on a drive home from her mother’s once, fighting back tears and eventually spitting out, “well?”

  Well, what? I didn’t know. In fact, I never figured that one out. Maybe I’m a little autistic. Maybe there are vast fields of emotional nuances pulsating all around me, hidden but woven all around and through my life while I sit oblivious… until it’s too late, of course.

  I looked at her now, tucking into a bowl of pasta. Did she blame me that we had failed to conceive? I looked at my own bowl of pasta. Was it my fault?

  She pushed her food away and smiled at me warmly.

  “I bought something new today. Wanna see?”

  I nodded, and she bounced off the couch and left the room, ponytail bobbing. When she came back a few minutes later, she was wearing a truly tiny pink lingerie set and nothing else. I could do nothing but stare for a few moments, a little stunned.

  It was in just the style I liked – the teeny kind with strings that tie on the side – and it fit her like a glove. The top was two little triangles that stretched over her high breasts, tied together with two similar strings at the back of her neck. A few wispy hairs at the nape of her neck had gotten tangled in the makeshift knot.

  I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “Wow. That’s… nice,” I said, standing up and reaching out to her.

  She raised her long arms up into the air and spun around, letting me grasp at her slight waist.

  She had a fantastic body.

  “It’s so nice, I almost want to just tear it off and throw it away, you know?” I said to her sleek flank as I lowered my head and began kissing her bare belly.

  Tanya had two modes: one was her summer form when she went brown as a biscuit, and speckled with freckles, and the other was her winter form when she turned so pale she was almost translucent, and you could make out tiny blue and purple thread veins on the tops of her pixie-like thighs, on her shoulders, on her inner ankle. She was in the latter mode, and extra pink in the slightly chill air, and her body was responding to my compliments with tight little goose bumps.

  “Throw it away? Ugh, you have no sense of art,” she said, and broke away from my grasp, striking a pose on the other side of the coffee table and then waggling a teasing hip in my direction.

  “Just look, it has tiny diamantes on it,” she said and turned around to show me some sparkly crap on the back strings.

  “Diamantes? Is that like… diamonds?” I said.

  She threw a cushion at me.

  “Brat!” I said and darted to catch her.

  She dashed off to the adjacent room, her pert little ass jiggling behind her.

  “Yes, like diamonds, but only not really.”

  I seized her again and pinned her against the living room wall, smiling triumphantly. “Not really huh? A bit like this is a serious, dignified bra, only not really.”

  I reached behind her and undid the knot, and the fabric went loose across her chest. She giggled as I kissed her, both of my hands still restraining her pale wrists above her. She arched her back off the wall, curling her full body up into mine.

  There is a whole catalogue I could write of all the things I loved to do to this lovely woman’s body, any number of filthy, beautiful things; one of my favorite was also the simplest: I loved taking her l
ittle chin in my hands as I kissed her, and I did this now, from there dragging my hands down her long neck and onto her belly, putting a finger just so inside the edge of this ridiculous G-string, pulling it ever so gently away from her body.

  She playfully slapped my hands away.

  “No, I think at least this should stay on…” and she looked deeply into my eyes.

  “This?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to keep it on?”

  “Yeah.”

  With a single, swift movement I picked her up, squealing, and carried her to the sofa, the flimsy triangle top falling to the floor as a casualty.

  She was light and a breeze to carry, easily half my weight, her little heart beating in her body like a rabbit’s. I flung her onto the sofa and pounced down onto her. Already, her quick hands had found their way to my zip and were yanking my pants off. My body responded easily to hers, our system of sexual shorthand refined over the years, after the countless nights spent here, learning about each other’s body’s just as we learnt about ever other thing in life. She was my home, this woman; her warm little breasts, her supple torso and downy white skin… her gorgeous cunt.

  I tore of my pants and shook them to the floor, and lay completely over here, nestled in her sweet-smelling hair. After 9 married years, our bodies were like easy puzzle pieces, and I could find my way into her in the dark by now (and frequently did, of course).

  The tip of my cock pressed gently against her belly, and she rose up to meet it, rubbing against me as we kissed and caressed one another. With slow, lazy strokes, I glided my hands over her and casually parted her legs; raising her limber knees high into the air, exposing her white rump and little pink rosebud pussy hidden behind the slight patch of fabric, also pink.