by Emerson Rose
“What time is it?” she says, straightening up on my lap and rubbing her eyes like a little girl waking from a nap.
“Seven. We’ve only got an hour until we’re home.”
The car hits a rather large bump in the road, and she grabs my shoulders while I grab her waist at the same time for support. I groan when she nudges the straining bulge in my pants.
“Sorry I didn’t mean to . . .”
“You’re fine.”
“You’re not, though.” A slow, sly smile spreads across her lips as her hand slides between my legs to stroke my aching cock.
“Holland, no.” I’m not one for restraint or discipline when it comes to sex, and especially when it comes to sex with Holland, but her condition fluctuates by the hour, and I’m on foreign ground here.
“Sorry.” she says.
Fuck, she thinks I’m rejecting her, but I’d love nothing more than to strip her down right here, right now, and bury my face between her legs until she screams my name. But I can’t, I won’t.
I take her face in my hands and look into her eyes.
“Don’t apologize, baby. I just don’t think you’re up to it. Believe me, I want to. I really want to.”
Her big, stormy grey pools gaze up at me and she blinks slowly once . . . twice . . . I have no idea what she’s thinking—none at all—until she begins to loosen the drawstring of her linen pants. I can’t speak. I can’t even move. She is just that exquisite, the perfect balance of sensuality and innocence. Her eyes are full of wonder and curiosity, but her body speaks the language that mine understands. Wanton and shameless, she slips out of her thin pants and the tiny scrap of lace she calls panties. Who bought her those, anyway? Surely not her mother. Note to self: find out where she got those later.
Her eyes never leave mine as she returns to straddling my hips and unbuckles my belt. My hands are planted at my sides on the warm leather seats. She’s running the show, and I can’t make myself interrupt, even though I know I should.
She never kisses my mouth. her hands are still working my zipper down, but her eyes are already fucking me. She still doesn’t touch my aching cock, and I’m about to ask her to—or do it myself—when she shakes her head back and forth.
Her hands slide along the waistband of my pants and dip inside to my hips on both sides to help me push them down. I hold my breath as I watch her lean forward to grip the back of the seat on either side of my head. Her long tresses fall around us like a curtain blocking out the world. My cock is standing at full mast when she lifts up onto her knees and brushes her wet slit against the tip of my cock until she’s in the perfect position to slowly, torturously and deliciously sink down around me. My lungs burn when I release the breath I’ve been holding, and the thin tendrils of her hair flutter around her heart-shaped face. She stills when she’s entirely consumed me, and I drop my head back, moaning, and grip the seat. I have the almost uncontrollable urge to pump my hips up into her fiercely and work her over hard. But she’s the one setting the pace, so I watch as she glides up until I’m barely touching her wet folds with the tip of my cock. She pauses, looking deep into my eyes, before slowly impaling herself again. The sigh that escapes her lips has me holding on by a thread. God, I want to flip her over and lay her down on the seat and fuck her hard all the way home, but she deserves so much more than being mindlessly pounded. She deserves to be adored and glorified. She deserves so much more than me.
If it’s her plan to torture me slowly, she’s succeeding. She slowly rotates her hips in tiny, sexy little fucking circles, clenching around me as she rises and sighing when she sinks down, impaling herself over and over. How did she learn to do that? Oh my God, her sigh is driving me to the edge of my sanity. I’ve fucked in a limo many times—so many times that it’s practically passé—but not with Holland. Every damn thing with her is so much more erotic and sultry and . . . fucking hot. I want to come right now as badly as I don’t. This is so, so good. I plan on making it last as long as I can possibly hold out.
At last, she dips her face to kiss my parted lips, and I moan into her mouth. I haven’t touched her yet. I’ve been trying to let her have control, but the moment her mouth meets mine, my hands are on her ass, spreading her wider, lifting and pushing into the hot wetness that begs for more of me with every thrust.
My brain is scrambled at the sight of her parted lips, the sound of her panting against my mouth and my ear, her breath heating my cheek, her fingers digging into my shoulders when I give her what she wants and take what I need . . . she’s fucking exquisite. I love the way her breath huffs out softly when I push deep into her, and the way it catches in her throat when I hit that spot that brings her teetering to the edge. The sounds this woman makes could make a celibate monk come.
Suddenly, I’m not thinking about her nausea or the baby or the driver—who can’t hear or see us, but can probably feel the limo rocking. I’m not worried about our future, or her mother, or her music, or my drug business. The only thing I care about is making the woman in my arms feel good. I want to help her escape, if only for a little while, from all the pressures closing in on us.
I’m trying to hold off, but my body isn’t listening to my mind when I hook my hands behind her knees. I pull them up to my sides and enter her at an impossibly deep angle and pause . . . it’s the calm before the storm. Her hands are in my hair, her face is buried in my neck, and her heart is beating wildly against my chest—or is that mine? I can’t even tell us apart. I slide my hands up and curl them behind her shoulders, bracing myself for the orgasm of all fucking orgasms when she says,
“Wait.”
Wait? I’m plateauing . . . panting and frantic, on the edge of ecstasy, when I feel her smiling against my cheek and realize I’m being played. Played by the violinist. How fitting.
“What’s your plan here, baby?” I murmur in her hair, trying like hell not to blow my wad while she teases me.
“No . . . plan . . . just wanted to see if you could . . . wait,” she says between pants. Little vixen.
“I can wait, but the longer you sit there, the harder I’ll fuck you when you’ve decided to stop teasing.”
Her smile broadens. “Then I should hold still?”
“No,” I growl, changing positions to lay her down on the seat where I wanted her fifteen minutes ago to show her who the boss really is. Her hands ball into tiny fists against my chest, and laughter bubbles from her lips until I can’t take the beauty of her anymore, and I thrust into her hard and fast. I watch her transform from a playful kitten into a slinky, sensual puma. She has mind blowing natural instincts when it comes to sex. She follows every cue I give her until her eyes roll back in her head and she loses control.
This is it. This is what I’ve been waiting to see again for weeks. Her lips part and she arches against me, and we go there, to that place where heaven and hell mix for just a few seconds, combining purity and sin that explodes into the abyss.
She is absolutely the other half of me. If there were ever any doubt in my mind, there is none now. She’s fucking amazing, and she’s mine. Unspoiled, unpolluted and authentic, never touched or pleasured by another man’s hands, and never will be. As long as my heart beats and there is breath in my body, she is mine and mine alone.
Chapter 23
Holland
I curl into a ball on my side and snuggle deeper into a warm, peaceful haze of mint and spice. As the fog lifts from my brain, I peek out of one eye to see King laying in front of me, mirroring my position. He’s asleep. I close my eye and try to think . . . where am I . . . oh yes. Helicopter, beach, lunch . . . fainting, limo, and sex. Good Lord, the sex.
“Welcome back, sleepy head. I thought you’d never come around.” I open my eyes and find myself in King’s bed in his apartment. He trails his finger along the side of my cheek, ending with his hand cupping my face. The air around us is chilly. My nose is cold, and I swear I could probably see my breath if the lights were turned up brighter. The only warmth
is in our little cocoon under the covers. I scoot closer to him, and he turns me around to spoon the entire length of his body.
“You have something against heat?” I ask, and he kisses my ear.
“You’re cold?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s gotta be like forty degrees in here. My nose is running.” He feels my nose for drips and, finding none, he rubs his free hand up and down my arm in an attempt to warm me, but it’s useless. I’m a Popsicle.
“I like it cold. I’ll have Sebastián turn it up when you’re here, though, if you like, but I rather like keeping you warm myself.”
“Maybe a little bit of both.”
“I can live with that.” He rolls away for only a second to get his phone from the bedside table behind us, and I shiver when the cold air rushes between us. He’s back against me in seconds, which causes me to shiver again, but for different reasons. He props up on his elbow, and I listen to him have a brief conversation with Sebastián, instructing him to turn up the thermostat.
“You can’t do that? Run a thermostat, I mean?” If he tells me no, I’m going to lose faith in him as a man. My daddy has been teaching me practical things like that for years. I can change the oil in a car, flip a breaker switch when the power goes out, change the light bulb over the stove and in the fridge, and fix just about anything that can go wrong with a toilet. Daddy’s been into DIY ever since Mama made him figure out how to do electrical and plumbing work to save money. ‘That could be Juilliard money,’ she used to tell him when the sink was leaking and he wanted to call a plumber. I felt bad that he worked so hard at his job and got bossed around by Mama at home, so I pitched in and started helping.
Mama . . . ugh, God, the thought of her demanding that King pay for Juilliard and encourage me to have an abortion disgusts me. I hope he doesn’t want to talk about her anymore, because I don’t.
“You okay, baby?” His arms tighten around me and I feel so safe, so at home.
“Yeah, I’m just cold. It’s freezing in here,” I say, pulling the covers up over my shoulder. It’s a half lie. I am freezing, but more so, a piece of my heart is breaking over my mama. How could she be so awful? It’s a delay in my career, not the end of it. She’s always been pro-life, she taught me to be pro-life and she raised me in the Catholic Church. I can’t believe she blackmailed King into encouraging me to abort. Who asks a father to have his own child killed? I’m really starting to wonder if I know who she is at all.
“And yes, for the record, I am perfectly capable of running a thermostat, but the control is in the security room downstairs in the club, where they control the temperature throughout the building. I’ll keep you warm, though. Don’t worry.”
He wraps his long, lean muscles around my limbs, curling around me like a cat and nuzzling into my neck. His warm breath on my skin causes another shiver to race up my spine. Under the heavy gold and black duvet, he protects me from the chill in the air. It occurs to me that he protects me from so many things in my life right now—the critical eyes of the world, my mother, the Juilliard admissions board, and probably other things I don’t even want to know about. He is on my side all the way . . . or our side, I should say. All three of us.
“Well, that’s a relief. I thought I was going to have to find a replacement for you.” Braving the cold air, I slide my hand out from under the covers, along his scruffy jawline, and back into the soft curls on the nape of his neck.
“Oh, baby, no one can replace me. I’m the King. And I’m deeply wounded to know such an insignificant task would make you reconsider our relationship,” he says, nibbling my earlobe. I feel bad for teasing him.
“You’re right. You’re irreplaceable, and I love you too much to ever let you go—even when you try to freeze me to death.” I’ve never told him that before, but now seems like the right time to start, and he doesn’t miss a beat returning the sentiment.
“I love you too, sweet Holland, so, so much. You’ll never know just how much.”
“Thank you for having my back . . . with my mama, ya know, and the Juilliard people. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
“I’m more than happy to have your back anytime,” he says, pressing his thick length into my backside. “And your front.” His hand slinks up from my waist to cup my breast. “And all the parts in between,” he says, kissing my neck. Electricity zaps across the surface of my skin, igniting a fire in my core. Now I’m hot, but I don’t know if it’s from King’s heat kicking in or King’s heat kicking in.
“Are you trying to get me pregnant again?”
“Maybe.” His scruff plays against my cheek when he smiles against it.
“I don’t think I can handle more than one.” King plunges us into darkness when he pulls the duvet over our heads and rolls me underneath him.
“You’re not doing this alone, baby. You’ve got me, and I can do anything.” I believe him beyond a shadow of a doubt. We could have a litter of kids, and I think King would rise to the occasion—pun intended.
Four hours later, at home, on my back in my own bed, with my hands behind my head, I’m feeling opposite of how I did at King’s today. Funny how a place I’ve spent every day of my life in feels so irrelevant, and the place I’ve spent nearly no time in feels like home. It’s not the place, though. It’s the company. My parents are at each other all the time about my situation, as Mama calls it, and they’re miserable to be around.
They think they’re being sly and secretive, but I hear their slightly raised voices at night in the room next to mine, arguing about whether or not I should keep my baby. It’s not up to them. It’s my damn baby. Daddy isn’t happy about any of this, and what good father would be, but thankfully, he wants whatever I want. He says it’s my body and my life, and that God doesn’t make mistakes. He must have wanted me to have a baby, or he wouldn’t have given me one.
It’s a simple way of thinking, I suppose, but I believe it’s true. Mama, on the other hand, sounds like she’s going to have an aneurism or break her teeth off when she gets going about my future and my career and how hard she’s worked, how much she’s sacrificed, and what a waste it is to throw it all away for a baby. She even had the gall to say I could have a baby anytime, but I can only go to Juilliard now. To hear her talk about it, you’d think it was her own talent and career that’s being wasted.
I want to go back to King’s where I feel wanted and loved. King asked me to live with him today, and I happily accepted, but he thought it would be best to ease my parents into the idea. My birthday is next month, and I’ll be twenty. Twenty sounds so much better than nineteen when you’re talking about pregnancy. People are so judgmental about teen pregnancy. When a teenager gets pregnant, they say she got knocked up, but when it’s a twenty-year-old, she’s having a baby.
“Why aren’t you practicing?” Mama asks from my open door. One of her strange new rules is that I have to keep my door open at all times, so I didn’t even know she was standing there. I don’t know what the hell she thinks she’s going to accomplish with the new rule. I’m already pregnant. What else could happen?
“I was just resting. I’ll start now,” I say, slowly sitting up and swinging my legs over the edge of the bed without getting dizzy or nauseated. King was right. Moving slowly is much better. When I pick up my violin and raise my bow, I expect her to leave me alone, but she hangs back, pressing her hand against the door jamb and looking down at the floor.
“What did you two do today?” Her eyes never leave her feet. She’s nervous. She wants to know if he asked me to get an abortion. She still doesn’t know that I know that she’s trying to blackmail King, and I’m not telling her. I want to see her squirm.
“Nothing much. We had lunch and talked, that’s all.”
“Lunch . . . and talking,” she repeats.
“Yeah.”
Squirm, Mama, squirm.
“Did you talk about the . . . about . . .”
“The baby? No, we didn’t.” I drag my bow across t
he strings, playing the first notes of Brahms’s Lullaby just to irritate her. She looks up at me, wide-eyed, but she composes herself quickly. I blink innocently and begin playing scales to warm up, essentially dismissing her, but she doesn’t move.
I continue my scales, and when I’m finished, I switch to a piece of my favorite music, trying to get lost in it—but it’s impossible with her standing there, staring at me. I play louder and louder, trying to get my message across, and at some point she gets it and leaves. With my back to the door, I can’t see her go, but I don’t feel her eyes boring a hole in my back anymore. Only then am I able to let my fingers fly up and down the strings with the passion and determination of a person fighting for her life. I feel as though I’m fighting for my life lately, the life that I want with King and the life inside of me that my mama wants to smudge out.
Two hours later, I tuck my violin into its case. I’m exhausted after my long day with King, but if I hadn’t practiced for a little while, Mama would never have been satisfied.
I catch my reflection in the mirror over my dresser when I turn around. “You’re going to be a mother. You . . . Holland Bennett . . . a mama.” I turn to the side and smooth my hands over my belly. This doesn’t feel real. I mean, the nausea is real as hell, but the baby growing in there won’t be until I can see it. We have an appointment with the obstetrician later this week, and I’ll be having my first ultrasound. Maybe then it will feel real.
Twelve weeks, twenty weeks, thirty weeks, and now thirty-four. It’s January and I’m freezing. My teeth are chattering as I wait on the sidewalk in front of STRINGS for Sebastián to pull the car around. It’s forty degrees, which isn’t cold by most people’s standards, but when you’re used to sixty degree highs, forty is damn near arctic.
I couldn’t see my toes anymore if I tried. My eight-and-a-half-month pregnant belly blocks my view of anything below my waist. King assures me my shoes match when he helps me dress every day. He tends to me tirelessly every day, picking things up off the floor that I’ve dropped and making sure I don’t slip getting into the tub. He even painted my toenails once, but he ended up taking me for a pedicure the next day because he messed them up so badly. I would have never known they were a mess except that he laid me down in bed and lifted my foot up high to show me.