MURPHY’S LAW
By
Lisa Marie Rice
To all my friends in Italy
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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MURPHY’S LAW
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Marie Rice
www.lisamariericebooks.com
Cover Design by Kelly Crimi
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Published by The Story Vault
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Chapter One
Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.
Boston
June 30th
“Ah!” Faith Murphy’s back hit the wall, knocking the breath out of her, a split second before 6’2” and 240 pounds of pure male muscle slammed into her. She couldn’t breathe.
Nick Rossi’s mouth came down on hers and she figured breathing was overrated.
Oh God, his mouth. The man knew how to kiss. True, kissing Nick Rossi had been her secret dream this past year, something as unattainable as winning the Nobel Prize, but in her wildest fantasies late at night when no one could see her, she’d dreamed about him kissing her. But nothing, nothing she dreamed of could come even close to the reality. Of. Nick. Rossi. Kissing. Her.
His mouth was warm, tasting strongly of the several whiskies she’d seen him down at the club, and he’d already been half pissed when they’d crossed paths outside her apartment.
He licked inside her mouth and she drew in a sharp breath, taking in whiskey fumes, and felt dizzy. His tongue stroked hers and, shockingly, her vagina contracted. Just like in the books. Oh God! Female arousal! In the flesh! Unprovoked by reading material!
For a brief second she remembered the other male tongue that had been in her mouth recently, then banished the thought. Tim Gresham’s tongue had been like a slimy slug and she’d barely refrained from gagging when he made it a spear and stabbed her with it.
No thinking of Tim Gresham tonight. Nick Rossi was as far from Tim Gresham as it was possible to be. They were barely of the same gender. Barely of the same species.
“Oh baby,” Nick crooned, and licked into her mouth again and all thoughts fled. That was really unusual for her. Her head was always filled with thoughts, most of them not particularly happy ones, many of them mathematical. She had never learned the knack of turning her head off. There was a strongly ironic voice in her head, had been there for as long as she could remember, like a running commentary on her life.
Not a friendly one.
That voice in her head? Switched off like a light, the second time Nick’s tongue touched hers. From that moment on she was instinct and sensations, her entire intelligence situated in her skin, in her breasts, between her thighs.
If that snarky voice was commenting, it was drowned out by heat and sensation. She couldn’t think, but oh—she could feel.
Nick’s face bent down to her, his mouth moving slowly over hers as if he had all the time in the world, licking and sucking and breathing for her. He had a heavy beard. Late at night, if he’d forgotten to shave, it made him look like an adorable thug, with that lantern jaw of his. The slight beard had a bite to it as he moved his mouth on hers, lifting, shifting, closing the distance between them. Over and over.
One huge hand held the back of her head, nearly covering it as his mouth moved on hers, his hand held her head still for him. Such a delicious retrograde sensation—being held still for a man’s kiss.
His other hand cupped her waist, his hand so large it spanned her back, cushioning her against the wall.
His hugely muscled thighs pressed against hers, hot and hard, almost as hard as the steel brace covering his knee. He’d suffered yet another hockey injury, one of the many over the course of the past winter. She’d counted four broken bones, a sprained ankle, a cracked rib and a separated shoulder.
That was this year.
He was wearing lightweight clothes. If you’d held a gun to her head she wouldn’t be able to say exactly what he was wearing—she wouldn’t have been able to say what she herself was wearing—and she could feel every single muscle in his huge body. Including the biggie pressing against her belly.
Whoa. Huge and hard and…moving. Lengthening, pulsing with every touch of his tongue to hers. Tim had had this marshmallow…no. Don’t even think that.
This moment was so incredibly delicious. Nick pressed against her sensuously and everything in her pressed back, including her hips against his. It was like pressing against a warm, live steel rod. Her vagina contracted, then contracted again. It was almost like having an orgasm. A very slow orgasm.
“Baby, you’re hot.” Nick lifted his mouth from hers, the smell of whiskey washing over her face. On him it smelled wonderful. He smiled down at her, more impossibly handsome than any man had a right to be. His eyes were sleepy, narrowed, that brilliant cobalt blue a mere shard between long, black thick lashes. He had a lazy smile, handsome face filling her entire field of vision. “I am?” she breathed. She was a lot of things, but…hot?
“Oh yeah.” Another lazy smile and her heart simply turned over in her chest.
This was Nick. Her best friend’s brother and probably the single most lusted after man in Boston. His huge frame, made huger by all that hockey padding, had graced just about every magazine cover in New England. A couple of shots were of him playing. Someone had said that Nick was so fast on the ice photographers needed high-speed cameras.
A shot of a shirtless Nick on the cover of Vanity Fair, shoulders barely contained by the page, hockey pants riding low on lean hips on the cover of Vanity Fair had sold a million copies. That poster was in thousands of dorm rooms.
If you were female, and between the ages of 15 and 65, you probably had a wet dream of Nick Rossi.
Who was right here, right now, lazily grinning at her, calling her hot.
He bent low, a lock of blue-black hair falling forward, and touched his forehead to hers.
“So, baby, how about it?”
Her mind shorted. Faith’s mind was a very good one, normally. But the heat in her body slowed it down and she had to repeat the phrase in her mind a couple of times, wondering what he meant, when all of a sudden a touch of clarity opened up in the clouds of steam in her head.
He was asking her to have sex with him.
Well, duh.
She opened her mouth to say yes but there wasn’t enough air i
n her lungs to get the word out. He was leaning heavily against her and all that heat had evaporated the oxygen, and she couldn’t talk. So she nodded.
Everyone joked about Nick’s brains, including his sister Lou, Faith’s best friend. But Nick wasn’t dumb. That lazy smile turned dazzling and his arms dropped, he bent his knees…and froze. One knee clearly wasn’t bending.
He gave a half laugh, watching her with those gorgeous deep blue eyes. “Wanted to carry you to bed, baby, but I can’t. Sorry. You’ll have to come on your own two legs.”
Oh yeah. Faith would crawl over broken glass to his bedroom. Walking there was nothing. Except…oh God. Her knees were weak and she didn’t even have the excuse of a busted meniscus. Her only excuse was that she was about a second away from an orgasm and if she moved, she’d blow up.
Think unsexy thoughts.
She thought of the all-male faculty of the Math Department at UM Southbury, where she was a lowly adjunct professor, all supremely undesirable, and the orgasmic moment passed. It would come back because she was close to Nick who could give women orgasms from across a room. But at least now she could walk.
Nick hooked a big arm around her back and led her across his living room. It took some time. Granted, he had a bum knee and Faith’s own knees were weak, but it was also true that you could grow corn in Nick’s living room/entertainment den.
Nick was seriously rich but his sister took his money away from him and forced him to invest in real estate, including this luxurious penthouse apartment suitable for a family of twelve, plus the help. Faith had only been here once before, with Lou, and had gaped at the size of it, highlighted by its emptiness. Nick belonged to the minimalist school of decoration. The enormous living room had a large Italian leather couch set, the largest TV she’d ever seen, a Bose stereo system and crossed hockey sticks over the ten-foot wide gas fireplace.
That was it.
So Nick didn’t have to worry about tripping over anything as he steered her toward his bedroom. Across that huge space, down a huge corridor and there they were—in another enormous room with a massive bed on the other side.
The massive bed where they’d have sex in just a minute. If Nick didn’t fall down first. He was swaying, his injured knee obviously about ready to go. The whiskies probably didn’t help either. So Faith put her arm around his lean waist.
It was ridiculous. Nick was the strongest man she’d ever seen. He was a world-class athlete, made up entirely of muscle. Including between his ears, his sister often said. There was no way Faith could hold him up. She wasn’t an athlete and she weighed a hundred pounds less than he did. But if he was having trouble standing up, she wanted to help.
So she squeezed his waist and tried to take a little of his weight onto herself and by some miracle they hobbled over to his enormous bed and fell down on it. Nick didn’t seem to have any problems whatsoever once he got horizontal. In a second, he had her clothes off and his off and, oh God…
He was even more beautiful naked. Dense, lean muscles without an ounce of fat, long clean lines, that beautiful face smiling down at her. Her heart skipped a beat and she knew it wasn’t arrhythmia. She had had a checkup lately and her heart was in excellent condition. It just wasn’t prepared for an event like a naked Nick Rossi lying in her arms. So it went haywire. Perfectly understandable.
Nick was kissing her as if there would be no tomorrow, as if he had all the time in the world and as if her mouth held the key to something important. Without stopping, without letting her up for air, his big hands touched her all over. One hand cupped her shoulder, lightly ran down her arm, and laced her fingers with his. The other caressed a breast and she forgot to breathe when his thumb circled her nipple. Nerve endings sprang up, made her skin rise in goose bumps, made her vagina contract again when he rubbed his thumb over her nipple, again and again.
The sensations were so intense she shivered. He lifted his head, smiled at her, then shifted so he could kiss her there. When he sucked at her nipple, her back arched and her torso lifted from the bed. His hands pushed at her shoulders, settling her back down, gave another hard pull, a lick and then he was kissing her mouth again.
Hard. Everything suddenly became hard—his breathing, his mouth, the clasp of his hands around her head. His penis somehow became even harder though she’d have thought that impossible.
She was tingling from head to toe, so excited it was as if her entire body was an erogenous zone. She was hot all over, every inch of skin super sensitized. She was particularly hot between her legs, a pale simulacra of the times she tried to give herself pleasure, when she’d been lukewarm between her legs. Now it felt like a sun blossomed there.
Nick gave her small kisses across her jawline, down under her ear, to a secret place apparently only he knew about, exactly where her neck met her shoulder. He licked her there and she shuddered deeply, a pang of pleasure so intense she couldn’t even recognize her own body’s reactions.
Something crackled. He turned away from her for a second, his hand moved, then he turned back to her, his mouth at her neck again.
Then he nipped her, a sharp little bite, and her back arched again, her arms and legs fell away, and he shifted his hips and entered her, hard and fast.
It was too much, simply too much. She clenched hard around him, then began contracting in electric spurts, every cell of her being awash in something that was almost too intense to be pleasure but wasn’t quite pain.
But Nick had reared up on his forearms and he wasn’t looking happy.
Oh God! Had she done something wrong? Or not done something she should have done? How could he look so stern when she was drenched in delight?
“Hey,” he said, black eyebrows drawn together over the blade of his nose. Hell, even his eyebrows were gorgeous. “You’re not a virgin, are you?”
A lifetime of suppressing her emotions came to Faith’s rescue, because he was close enough to the truth to be embarrassing.
“Of course not!” Faith rolled her eyes and blew her breath out, making a little disparaging phhht! sound. “How can you say that?”
The sternness left his face, his eyelids drooped sexily. “’Cause you’re tight, baby.” He pulled almost all of the way out, then slid back in. Faith’s breath stopped in her chest. Nick’s head dropped back to her neck as he repeated the motion. “But it’s working.”
I’ll say. She didn’t say the words but her body spoke for her. She wrapped herself around Nick’s body like ivy around a tree, fingers clenched hard on his shoulder muscles, legs wrapped around his. He felt like a tree trunk, only smooth and sleek. But there was that feeling of something elemental, grounded in the earth that made her forget everything as he started moving fast, then faster.
Each thrust was like lightning and she moved into another orgasm before having finished the first one. He was moving so fast, so strongly the bed creaked, the headboard beating against the wall, a hard fast rhythm that echoed her heartbeat until she couldn’t distinguish between the two. Until the entire world was reduced to that thumping rhythm inside and outside and she had to cling to Nick because everything else was dark and out of control. There was a wild noise in the darkness and it took her a long minute to realize it came from her throat. It only stopped when Nick covered her mouth with his, stifling her cries in his own mouth.
Something changed in him. The muscles under her hands were straining so hard she could feel his sinews, his breathing speeded up, a rough sound coming from deep in his throat and he stiffened, gasping, moving in her in hard little jerks, so unlike the smooth piston-like movements of before.
And then it was over.
Nick fell on her with all his weight, as if he’d been felled by a blow and exhaled loudly.
Faith stared up at the ceiling, a changed woman. So this was sex. No wonder people thought about it, fought about it, sought it out. If she’d known she’d have tried harder. But who knew?
The pleasure was just…mind boggling. Amazing.
&nbs
p; And, this was Nick. Nick who’d made love to her. She’d spent all winter in his entourage, watching him date girl after girl, but the constants were always Faith and his sister Lou.
And now, she’d landed him. God. It was almost an abundance of bounty. He was so gorgeous, so charming, and so much fun. Being around him was like being at the circus. If she was going to be his girlfriend, though, she’d have to up her game. Buy new clothes. Maybe go to a hairdresser. Learn how to apply make-up.
It all felt daunting, but Nick was totally worth it. They would have fun all the time and then come home and do this. Oh God.
A whole new vista of her life opened up and she contemplated all the new delights in store for her. In a sudden frenzy of happiness, she clutched him hard and kissed his shoulder, his neck, every bit of him she could reach, while pinned beneath him. He felt so wonderful. He even tasted wonderful, she found when she licked him. Salty and sweet at the same time.
Well, of course. He was Nick Rossi. Who was so gorgeous and attractive.
But heavy. Really, really heavy. She had to wheeze to breathe. Faith tried to wiggle her way out from under him but it was impossible. He weighed a ton.
“Nick?” she whispered. “Could you move a little?”
Silence.
“Nick?” She spoke a little more loudly.
There was a rhinoceros snort next to her ear and Nick began snoring. Very loudly. She could feel his chest vibrating.
It looked like waking him up briefly to ask whether he could move wasn’t an option. She shifted her chest out a bit from under his so she could at least breathe and with one last sniff of his luscious skin, she fell smiling into a deep, luscious sleep.
The telephone rang.
Nick Rossi wanted to groan and roll over in bed but didn’t. The noise of the bell had nearly taken the top of his head off. Moving might break bones.
Through the greasily nauseous roiling going on inside, he tried to take stock, but it wasn’t pretty.
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