“Could you do that?” I whisper.
He smirks. “Don’t ask me questions like that, angel. I don’t fucking know. But I can try.”
“I guess it would limit it, huh?”
He nods. He doesn’t need to ask what it is. He knows I’m talking about our shared guilt.
“I can’t imagine us not spending time together while we’re stuck here.” He shrugs his massive shoulders. “So the only other option is for me to try and be a good boy… but that means you have to be a good girl too. No tempting me with that fine body of yours.”
Giggling, I shake my head. “I wouldn’t know how to tempt you if I tried.”
“Then you’re even sexier. You do it without trying.”
“I thought we said—”
“You’re right,” he growls. “I said no sex talk. Maybe you’d like to come and help me with something else instead then.”
“What?”
He gestures at Tanker, who stands just off to the side, head cocked and eyes moving between us as though he’s trying to understand. “I got him a new toy I haven’t tried yet. Should we give it a go?”
I can read his body, the way he throbs and pulses as though he’s gathering all his primal energy and getting ready to unleash it in one massive storm, even larger and more turbulent than the one crashing and destroying outside.
The bigger storm is in him, in me, in us, waiting to consume us.
But we have to play this game, pretend that we don’t want each other.
No more sex stuff. Dirty talk. Intimate stuff.
I try to tame the neediness writhing through me each moment, tempting me to leap at him, to wrap my legs around his waist in the confidence that he’d catch me when no other man would.
“Sure,” I say, nodding. “That sounds nice. What is it?”
Roman smirks, that special way his lips have of dancing like he knows the punchline to a joke and I can’t even guess at the setup. It’s the smirk that tells me he’s going to be an amazing father…
But he already is an amazing father. To Millie.
I know he’ll be the same to our children too.
Stop it, stop these thoughts, I scream silently, powerlessly.
“That would ruin the surprise.” He offers me his hand. “Let’s go.”
I should bat his hand away, push him to the side and tell him I’d never go anywhere with him. He’s Millie’s dad and that’s too big, too important, too full of potential destruction to let this go any further.
But instead, I hold tightly onto him, praying he’ll never let go, as he leads me from the room.
Chapter Sixteen
Roman
No more sex stuff.
Why the hell did I say that?
It’s like I’m trying to set myself up to fail as I kneel in the gym, where I stowed Tanker’s toy and fiddle with the mechanism. My Rayla sits on a bench as I work, her hands resting in her lap. At this angle I can gaze across and indulge in the way her breasts push together, making a beautiful picture of her cleavage.
Luckily the little man is bursting with excitement, running around me as I turn the screwdriver and slot in the batteries. By the time I’ve set the toy on the floor, he’s overflowing with energy, grinning and running in frantic circles around the room, darting between the treadmill and leaping over the rower.
“Easy, boy.”
I laugh, hearing Rayla’s laughter join mine from across the room, better than any song, flowing through me and making me want to paint pictures on her perfect body with my flaming swollen manhood.
“He’s gone mad.”
She giggles, making my base ache, as I imagine the same high-pitched squeaking while I’m drilling her tight pink hole.
Fuck.
I need to calm down. Right now. I can’t be this close to losing control already when we just made our promise.
“So you just put the ball in the middle?” Rayla walks over, looking down with her hands on her hips. She looks so wonderfully matronly, and yet curvy and sexy at the same time like she’s ready to bring our children into this world and sit down on my throbbing dick just as passionately. “And it throws itself?”
“Exactly.” I pick up the tennis ball, tossing it from hand to hand, causing Tanker’s gaze to snap back and forth with a light glimmering in his eyes. “What do you think, boy? You ready?”
Rayla laughs again. “I think he’s ready.”
I drop the ball into the toy and lean back. It whirs and then with a snap noise the ball shoots into the air, bouncing around the room and moving between the treadmill and the weight machine.
Tanker is on it in a second, darting down and trotting back with the ball in his mouth. He stares at me, head tilted, the same way he stared at me in that alleyway when I beat up those bastards.
It’s a look that says, What now, Daddy? What now?
“Come on, boy.” I reach over and pat the toy, pointing to the ball slot. “That’s it. Right there. That’s it, boy. Come on.”
He stares for a moment longer, and then makes a whining sound, dropping the ball.
“Come here, boy.”
Rayla’s voice is soft as she kneels down, coming to my level, bringing her scent with her. It’s a just-Rayla smell, as though her womb is throwing up pheromones, invitations into the air, tempting me more and more with each second.
She takes the ball and holds it out to him. Tanker harrumphs and takes it, as though out of pride.
“Look here. You clever boy. You see this?”
She picks up the toy and I watch, captivated, as her every gesture screams to me that she’s going to make the perfect mother. There’s something casually beautifully about the way she’s adopting this role, as though there is a part of her waiting to be called into action, waiting to love and care.
“Oh my God, that’s it.”
Her voice lilts and dances as Tanker creeps closer, getting nearer and nearer to the ball’s slot. He leans down and nuzzles at it, and then makes a yipping noise as the mechanism closes around it.
Leaping back, he stares at it as it whirs, his eyes alight.
“He’s so ready.”
Rayla’s giggling is a song, a welcome reprieve from the empty darkness of my own thoughts. But then that’s everything about her, a rainbow after a storm.
But will there be a rainbow after our storm?
Snap, the mechanism goes off, shooting the ball into the air. Tanker springs into action and leaps around the room, turning his snout this way and that as he searches for the ball.
He sprints back to the machine and eyes it warily, but he works out how to use it quicker this time, dropping it in and leaping back.
“You’re a good teacher,” I tell Rayla as I stand.
She smiles up at me, moving to stand as well. But part of me wants to keep her there, on her knees, looking up at me with her flushed cheeks and those big luminous eyes. She’s got the sort of eyes that are going to go wide and glow as I make her mine.
They might even fill with tears as I tame her tight virgin hole, as she wonders if she can fit all ten-some solid inches of me.
But by then her pussy will be hot and sopping and she’ll be begging and moaning and grinding against me.
Fuck.
Look at her kneeling there, with her tits beckoning me, her mouth half-open as though she’s awaiting my instructions.
Reaching down, I offer her my hands, pretending I’m a gentleman when really I’m trying to get my hands on her body anyway I can.
I haul her to her feet – as Tanker occupies himself with the toy, dropping the ball in and running around.
“Thanks,” Rayla murmurs, our hands still clasped as she rises up.
I squeeze her hands, letting her know I’m never going to leave her, letting her know it’s me and her for the rest of our lives. And yet it’s only through touch I can communicate the message because to bring it to life with words would lead to other conversations. We’d have to talk about Millie and the future
in concrete terms.
For now, all I can focus on is trying not to maul her, every second, every breath.
“Don’t worry about it,” I growl, letting her hands drop.
We walk over to the bench together. She drops down and glances briefly at me, her eyebrows quirked. “He seems to love it.”
I sit down next to her, nodding. We’re not touching but I’m close enough to feel her heat, to smell her scent, for her body to scream out to the primal beast inside of me. The two of them communicate endlessly, ignoring our chatter, roaring at us to claim each other.
“I hoped he would. I bought it a while ago, years ago, actually.”
“And you’re only using it now? Why?”
I let out a breath, clenching my fists, as her question bounces around my head painfully. It’s like a blunt object barreling through me, causing me harm.
I care now, far more than I ever did before, about everything. Tanker and Millie aside, not writing has deadened me somewhat, numbed my senses to the point I’m like a cold heartless robot. Or a broken savage.
Or something, anything other than the writer I was.
“I got the toy for when I was writing. Tanker always insisted on being in the room with me. He can be a little attention seeker sometimes. So I got the toy in the hopes it would distract him as I was hammering out the words.”
“Did it work?” she asks, so softly, so innocently, with no idea about the torrent consuming me.
“It’s difficult to say,” I reply, keeping my eyes aimed forward, at the toy, at Tanker, at the gym.
I know it will do savage things to me if I allow my gaze to turn when I address her. I won’t be able to stop myself from stripping her dress with my mind, tearing her clothes off, until her needy pink tipped nipples are on display and her creamy reddening skin is out for me. And then I’ll tit-fuck her until she’s croaking and gasping, ripping an orgasm from me at the sensation of my cock against her breasts alone.
“Roman?” she whispers. “What is it?”
“I bought him the toy the day before my writer’s block hit me. I bought him the toy the day I finished my last novel. And the next day, when I sat down to get to work, nothing would come. I was empty. I’d run out of words.”
Chapter Seventeen
Rayla
He stares across the room, not really looking at Tanker or the toy or any of it. It’s more like he’s looking into the past. His eyes are clouded, grim, his jaw set tight. Every part of him is even more tense than usual, his shoulders wide, his back flexed and tight, the tendons in his neck taut.
He’s like a mass of barely-contained explosives, pulsing against the surface of his hot skin.
Or maybe that’s just my desire pulsing through me, telling me to reach over and claw onto his shoulder.
Maybe I could lie to myself and say I’m doing it for comfort, and not so I can feel how solid his body is, how capable of protecting me and our family he is.
“Is that what it was like?” I murmur. “The writer’s block? Like it struck you?”
“Like lightning,” he snarls, shaking his head slowly, as Tanker’s toy whirs and then snaps. “I never used to believe in writer’s block. I’ve written so many books, some of them in a couple of months, caught up in the frenzy of creation. But then the frenzy wouldn’t come. I felt like a goddamn Viking berserker without his battle ax.”
He chuckles darkly, shaking his head, squeezing and releasing his hands into fists.
“Maybe that’s what I need...Like Mom and Dad. Drugs.”
“No,” I say fiercely. “You can do it, Roman. Let me help.”
I make the offer because it feels like the right thing to do, but the notion of what I can actually do to help doesn’t rise up inside of me. It’s more like my body is directing my lips, telling me to make him happy, to help him in any way I can.
He looks at me intensely. He moves so quickly, his gaze snapping to me, as though I’ve just offered the cure to an exotic illness.
“You might be able to,” he says, with a note of excitement thrumming in his voice.
It’s contagious and I find myself sitting forward, staring at him like he’s the only person in existence. Nobody else is real. Nothing else matters. Only this moment and this man.
“How?”
“I had this idea. Maybe it’s crazy. Maybe it doesn’t make any sense.”
“What is it?” I say, unable to hide my eagerness.
His lips twitch, and he reaches over, tucking hair behind my ear. Our eyes meet and we both know what he’s doing, how dangerously close he is to stomping over the no sex stuff rule.
But for a second we savor it, his hand on my cheek, as the rain drums and Tanker’s toy hums and the world keeps spinning.
But not for us, contained within this moment, this passing heaven. For us, time stands still as we stare into each other. Love, something like love, a breed of passion, commitment, and ownership flares awake inside of me.
I beat the word down.
Love, love. It can’t be that, not so soon…
And yet I wonder. I ache and contemplate.
He removes his hand, ending the timeless moment.
“I thought you could sit in the room as I try to write.”
“And do what?”
“That’s the thing.” I’ve never seen eyes so bright, so filled with immutable passion, as though there are little infernos contained within him. “You wouldn’t need to do anything. There’s something about being close to you, angel. There’s something… transformative about it. I know it sounds crazy. But this whole thing is crazy.”
“Transformative, how?” I murmur, unable to stop myself.
He chuckles. “Are you fishing for compliments?”
“Maybe.” I giggle, tilting my head at him, summoning up some sassiness. “Is that a bad thing?”
“No damn way,” he snarls. “You’ve transformed me. I can’t let myself get too worked up about it, because then I won’t be able to stop myself… to stick to our deal.”
I bite my lip, then quickly release it when I remember how passion-filled he became the last time I did it. It’s a new thing to get used to, how alert he is to every little thing I do.
“But you’ve changed me. Before I laid eyes on you, I didn’t know what I wanted with the future. I write – or try to write – because it’s what I’ve always done. It saved me when I was growing up. It gave me an escape. But other than that, I was blind to what was going to come…
“And I then I saw you, and everything solidified, as though my future was clay and suddenly it found its shape. It’s you, Rayla. The shape of you. Not just your looks, but your heart, your soul. Do you believe in souls?”
“I didn’t,” I say, laughing. “I mean, I’m not sure if I did. I never gave it much thought. But if you’d asked me, I probably would have said no.”
“And now? Because I’m starting to think I do. I know it’s crazy, but I’m starting to think this storm has trapped us here for a reason.” He shakes his head and chuckles at his own words. “I know how crazy that makes me sound.”
“Then I’ll be crazy with you.” Without stopping to question it, I dart my hands forward and clutch onto his, feeling his warmth and his strength and his agitation. “Because I feel exactly the same. We have to be careful not to cross any lines, obviously, but we can be honest about that.”
“About destiny,” he growls, leaning close.
He brings his face inches from mine, but he doesn’t kiss me. His hot breath hovers over my cheeks and my lips, igniting a thousand tiny bonfires all over my face, each of them sizzling.
Then somehow we separate, both of us pulling back.
“Shall we try your plan?” I ask.
He nods, but his eyes stay locked on me the whole time. “Let’s go.”
Together we rise – not touching, but my body aches for it – and walk through the cabin. Tanker stays in the gym with his toy. And even if we leave all the doors open, so he can return t
o us any time he wants, I still can’t stop the aching awareness.
We’re going to be alone again.
My heart thunders and my core throbs, tightly, wetly, when I remember how he claimed me once when we were alone, the way his tongue felt against my eager sex.
His office is a small bare room, with a carved oak desk looking out at a window and a brown dog bed in the corner, but not much else. I wander over to one of the three chairs, sitting up against the wall.
His lips do quirk almost like a smile as he stands at his desk, but there’s an edge to it, a wolf’s instinct trying to flash through the look. “I like to keep my offices as empty of distractions as I can,” he says huskily. “I hope that’s alright.”
I squint my eyes and pout playfully at him. “It’s fine. Stop procrastinating. You’ve got some writing to do.”
His gaze lingers on me for a time, his chest rising and falling softly. His eyes are filled with something like determination, his lips twisted now. For a second I think he’s going to turn and flee the room. But finally, he sits down, switching on his computer and tinkering with the mouse and keyboard.
“Okay, chapter one,” he says, sighing as he glances over at me.
I give him the best supportive smile I can muster, praying all my desires for him come through my expression. I can see how important this is to him, the seriousness with which he’s taking it gripping my wifely instincts.
That’s what it is. I feel like his life partner, tethered to him, and it’s my responsibility – my joy – to help him overcome his obstacles.
We sit like that for a time, Roman at the keyboard and me in the chair. He looks over at me several times, his face tight, his eyes narrowed as though he’s experiencing pain.
But then, finally, he sighs and his fingers start to move over the keyboard. His eyes flit over the screen as he reads what he’s written, and then he nods.
He nods over and over, like the force of his writing is pounding through him.
“Yes,” he whispers. “Oh, fuck, fuck. Yes. This is it, Rayla. I can feel it. It’s coming back!”
Trapped with My Best Friend's Dad: A Steamy Standalone Instalove Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 258) Page 8