Jasper

by Vivian Gray

  Then, he ran his hand down my chest, across my stomach, and down into my pants, leaving warm trails behind him. His finger found my entrance immediately, and he pushed inside of me.

  I moaned against his mouth as he slid into me. I was already wet and ready. I had been thinking about and waiting for this moment for days.

  He pulsed in and out of me, pushing in as I slid my hand from the tip of his penis to the base, and then pulling out of me as I slid my hand up and off of him. We pushed each other closer and closer to the edge, staring into each other’s eyes as we worked in tandem. He began thrusting into the circle of my hand, and I was bucking my hips against his fingers, begging for more.

  Finally, Jasper pulled his fingers out of me and rolled me over onto my back. He slid out of his sweats, and then pulled my pajama shorts and panties off in one swift move. I was waiting for him to lift my legs over his shoulders or roll me over so he could enter me from behind, but instead, he just pushed my legs apart and hovered over me, his weight warm and reassuring on top of me.

  We didn’t need any special positions or twists. The connection between us was hot enough on its own. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and then he pushed himself into me. I threw my head back and moaned as my body accepted him inch by inch. He stretched me in all the best ways, and I used my legs wrapped around him to pull him into me further.

  Finally, our bodies were flush with one another, and Jasper pulled back and looked down at me, his pupils blown wide with passion. He looked animalistic and wild, but then his head turned to the side, and he studied me, roving over my face and my body.

  “Will you marry me, Marin?”

  I didn’t know what I expected him to say, but it certainly wasn’t that. Jasper wasn’t the kind of man who casually proposed marriage. We would talk about it, plan it out, work out every detail to ensure it was a good idea. I stared up at him, wondering whether I’d imagined the whole thing, but then he repeated himself.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “What?” I asked, eyebrows pulled together, needing a longer explanation. I needed him to tell me what the catch was. Why was he doing this?

  “Marry me,” he said, his lips pressed against my mouth, though I noticed it was no longer a question.

  My body was aching for him. I wanted to feel his length sliding in and out of me, I wanted our bodies to slap together until we were both shaking with pleasure.

  “Can we talk about this later?” I asked. “We’re kind of in the middle of something.”

  He smiled. “I won’t finish until you answer me.”

  “You won’t finish?”

  He nodded. “No more sex until you answer me.”

  “You’re joking, right?” Horniness was making me cranky. I’d been waiting for this moment for days, and suddenly he was holding out on me. I raised an eyebrow at him and then quickly jerked my hips against him to force him into continuing, but he was too fast. He slipped out of me, leaving my body empty and hungry. I whined. “This isn’t fair.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t really mean it. This is just because I’m pregnant, right? I already told you there is no pressure. You don’t have to commit to me just because I’m carrying your baby.”

  Jasper rolled over, opened the drawer of his bedside table, and pulled out a tiny velvet box. He opened it in front of my face, revealing the largest, most magnificent diamond ring I had ever seen. It was a large circular-cut stone, surrounded by smaller stones on a thin, white gold band.

  My mouth fell open. “How long have you had that?”

  He grinned. “Remember when I ran out for ice cream last night?”

  “When you took three hours finding ‘the perfect mint chocolate chip’?” I had wondered when he’d suddenly become so specific about his ice cream. He had actually been buying a wedding ring.

  He set the ring back in the drawer and hovered over my naked body. “Marry me.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, my heart pounding against my rib cage.

  He pressed himself against my opening but didn’t push inside of me. “I want this, Marin. I almost lost you, and it made me realize I didn’t want to spend another day without you. I’m excited about the baby, but this isn’t about that. This is about you and me. Marry. Me.”

  “You are really serious? You’ve thought this all the way through?” I asked, desperately trying to keep myself from thrusting my hips against him. I wanted him, badly. I needed to feel his length inside of me.

  “You know you want me,” he said in a deliciously seductive tone. “Answer, and I’m all yours.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to clear my head. Did I want to marry Jasper? Well, of course I did. But now? He reached down and rubbed my sensitive spot with his thumb, forcing a groan out of me. My body was flushed and aching for him. It was impossible to think straight with him naked and sweaty on top of me.

  “Marry me, Marin. Say yes,” he purred out in my ear.

  I bit my lower lip. Then, he rubbed himself along my slit, toying with me. My back arched and I pressed myself harder against him, begging for it. My mind was turning the possibilities over and over, working to decide what I should say, and then all at once, Jasper pushed inside of me.

  Pleasure exploded, warm, sexy pain lancing through me, and I clawed at his back in ecstasy.

  “Yes,” I moaned out. He slid out of me and slammed in again, his hips flat against mine. “God, Jasper. Yes.”

  Jasper stopped, still inside of me, and grabbed my left hand. He reached for the velvet box and pulled the ring out, sliding it on my finger. “You said yes.”

  I wanted to argue that he’d tricked me, but suddenly he was pumping in and out of me, and I no longer cared. He pushed himself all the way into me and then slid all the way back out before doing it all over again. Warmth built like a bonfire in my chest, growing hotter and hotter by the second, flames of pleasure licking down my limbs and up my spine.

  My whole body was shaking as he grabbed my hips for more leverage and pounded into me. Then, his hand slid from my hip to my center, and the second his thumb massaged me, I broke into a pile of useless limbs. I threw my head back, my arms draped over my face. Jasper thrust into me at a crushing rhythm, and my orgasm clenched and unclenched my muscles. Suddenly, he was groaning, too. His pace slowed, and I felt his warmth flooding inside of me.

  When he finished, he rolled to the side and kissed my left hand. “That was incredible, Mrs. Black.”

  I wanted to tell him that I needed more time to think about it, that I wasn’t ready yet, but hearing him call me Mrs. Black pushed the thought from my mind. I wanted to be his wife. I wanted to wake up next to him every morning and fall asleep next to him every evening. I wanted him to be the person who unwound me, who made me cry out with pleasure, who broke me apart and built me back up.

  I wanted Jasper Black to be my husband.

  “You weren’t so bad yourself, Mr. Black.”

  He kissed my forehead and pressed my left hand into the flesh above his heart.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jasper

  The media followed us everywhere we went. I’d wanted a new reputation, and Marin had certainly delivered on that. I was now the boyfriend of a kidnapping victim. Every image snapped of us where I was holding her hand, palm pressed into her back to direct her away from the photographers, had a caption above it that read something along the lines of:

  Local Business owner, Jasper Black, Focuses on Helping Fiancée, Marin Wagner, Recover from Harrowing Ordeal

  It had only taken a few days for the press to pick up on our engagement. Marin refused to take the ring off, so some plucky photographer caught a snap of it, and now, in addition to rehashing the harrowing details of Marin’s kidnapping, the gossip blogs were also talking about the price of the ring, whether it was made from blood diamonds, and how soon we would get married.

  One blogger had even begun to speculate that Marin was pregna
nt. However, everyone in the comments loved Marin and berated the woman for making baseless accusations during what was already an incredibly stressful time for us.

  Even though Angel was behind bars, Marin had nightmares most nights. She would wake up in a puddle of sweat, screaming. I would pull her into my side and massage her back as she slept, wishing I could take away the memory of what happened to her. Angel told her he had the police on his side, and Marin was terrified he would be able to command them from behind bars.

  “What if he tells them about some of the things you’ve done? What if you go to prison? What if I go as an accessory?” She placed her hand on her stomach, eyes wide with panic. “What would happen to our baby?”

  I massaged a finger down the bridge of her nose, smoothing the wrinkles from between her eyebrows. “We aren’t going to go to prison. Angel may have friends in high places, but so do I.”

  It was true. I’d been in contact with several of the responding officers from that day, and many of them had been trying to bust Angel for months. Organized crime was a big problem in large cities, but Angel took it to a new level. He was crazy, unpredictable. He left a trail of chaos wherever he went. He was the kind of guy who needed to be put behind bars and never released. The fact that I was able to help the police do that earned me a lot of favors.

  Really, though, I only wanted to use those favors to keep Marin safe. At one time in my life, I would have asked the officers to turn a blind eye to one illegal deal or another, but now, I wanted to live right for Marin and the baby. I wanted to get my life together and take care of them. I didn’t want my good reputation to be just a false front I showed to the world. I wanted it to be the truth. Marrying Marin was the first step in making that happen. The rest involved pulling back from the Hellions.

  “But you love the Hellions!” Marin argued, mouth hanging open in shock as I laid out my plan to step down as leader of the MC.

  “Of course I do. But I love you more. And you need a reliable husband and father for your child. You don’t need a biker who is tangled up in illegal business deals and MC wars. You need me to be entirely dedicated to raising our child and loving you, and I’m okay with that.”

  “I don’t want to change you. I thought I did at first. I thought I wanted you to become this whole new person after you met me, but I realize now that I love you for who you are. You don’t need to change for me.”

  “I’m not changing,” I assured her. “I’m improving. There’s a difference.”

  I truly believed that. Seeing Marin tied up in that abandoned store, watching her suffer through nightmares and flashbacks was enough reason for me to leave that life behind. I never wanted anyone to use my family against me the way Angel had. I didn’t want anyone to have a reason to do something like that to me. I wanted to expand my business, start a few more Jasper’s Grills around the country, and support my family in a legal way.

  When I told the Hellions about my plan to step down, they almost rioted.

  “You can’t leave!” Tats screamed. He had been having an especially difficult time since Bear’s murder, and I knew my stepping down would upset him most.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” I said. “I can’t stay involved with drug deals and theft and murder. I have to get myself on the straight and narrow for Marin and the baby.”

  “We don’t have to be involved in those things, either,” Tats said. “We can clean up our act.”

  Of course, Tats would say that. He would have said almost anything to keep me as leader of the Hellions, but surely the rest of the guys would disagree. They wouldn’t want to give up their lifestyle for me. However, I looked around the room and realized everyone was nodding.

  “Spike and Tracks have been building up their construction business this last year,” Tats explained. “And you have the restaurants. The money we make from the illegal stuff would be easy to make up if we focused on the legal businesses.”

  “I don’t expect any of you to give up your lives for me,” I said.

  “Running drugs isn’t our life,” Tats said. “Being a part of the Hellions, being together – that’s our life. And we can’t have you running out and deserting us.”

  If I hadn’t been standing in front of a group of tatted up, bearded, muscly men, I possibly would have cried. But, of course, I didn’t. I held it in, tightened my lower lip, and nodded. “Then let’s do it.”

  And we did. Slowly, the illegal businesses were phased out, and the Hellions became a totally above-board motorcycle club. We still made a rather scary showing when we pulled up anywhere on our bikes with our kuttes on, but trouble no longer followed us like a shadow. There were still parties all the time – I couldn’t expect the guys to give up everything for me. They drank and got high and had their fair share of club girls, but they were upstanding citizens during the day.

  It was the best thing that ever happened to my reputation. I opened new grills in Austin, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix, and made more money than ever. Marin’s charity budget doubled, and after months of research and planning, she got to watch as the construction crew Spike and Tracks owned broke ground on a new community center.

  Marin wanted kids like her siblings to have a place to hang out during the day. And she wanted women like her mother to have a safe space to go where she could use the computers and find a steady job. The center featured two full-size basketball courts, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a computer room, an outdoor playground, and a soccer field. Marin called it the RJB Eastside Community Center.

  We didn’t yet know whether the baby would be a boy or a girl because we decided to let it be a surprise, but we had chosen names already: Rose Josephine Black for a girl or Roderick Joseph Black for a boy.

  Angel was convicted on every single one of the dozens of charges lodged against him – murder, kidnapping, assault, possession of illegal narcotics, intent to sell illegal narcotics, and a whole host of others. It was rare to ever involve the police in motorcycle club business, so the press had a field day running the stories – talking about the dark underbelly of the city and life inside a motorcycle club. Tats did a few interviews for local news stations, talking about his life before “reinventing himself”.

  I went to the courthouse every day of his trial, so I could look him in the eyes and remind him that he didn’t win. That he would rot in prison while I was free to marry a gorgeous woman and raise my child. Marin only went on the few days she had to testify against him; otherwise, she wanted to pretend as if the whole thing weren’t happening.

  She was gorgeous on the stand –composed and glowing, her pregnant belly a few weeks from popping. I could not have been prouder of her. She stayed strong while telling her story, though she broke down once at home. I cradled her in my arms and promised her it would be okay, that Angel would spend the rest of his life in prison, never able to walk free and hurt her.

  A few weeks after Angel was formally sentence – seventy-six years in prison without the possibility for parole – Marin went into labor.

  “Is this a false labor pain?” I asked, standing in the bedroom doorway, completely shell-shocked.

  Marin leaned forward, clutching her round stomach and groaning. “Does this look like a false labor pain? My water broke an hour ago, Jasper! This is real. Stop trying to tell me it isn’t.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, spinning in a small circle, looking for the hospital bags Marin had packed the weekend before in preparation.

  “In the hall closet,” she huffed out.

  Her water broke during her afternoon nap – the last trimester of pregnancy had included plenty of naps and a lot of pink frosted donuts – but she’d wanted to stay at home and labor as long as possible before getting to the hospital.

  “If I got to the hospital, I’d want an epidural, and I want to try and give birth naturally. So, the longer I stay here, the higher the chance is that it will be too late for an epidural by the time I get to the hospital.”

  “That doesn’t ma
ke any sense,” I said again. Marin had tried to explain her reasoning to me on multiple occasions, but every time I just shook my head. “If you’ll want an epidural, then why don’t we just take you to the hospital as soon as you go into labor and you can get one.”

  She sighed and explained everything again, emphasizing how much she wanted a natural birth.

  “But why?”

  Finally, she gave up on me, and we agreed to disagree on the topic. As we drove to the hospital, though, Marin clinging to the handle in the ceiling, shouting at me to run through stop signs and red lights, I brought it up again.

  “If you’d let me take you to the hospital an hour ago, this wouldn’t be happening,” I said.

  She stopped groaning long enough to glare at me, her eyes deadly. “I want a natural labor!”

  “Sure, because it looks so much nicer than a labor with pain medication.”

  She was sweating, her face contorted in pain with another contraction. As soon as the contraction was over, she lashed out at me, punching me in the shoulder. “Just drive and stop commenting on things you don’t understand.”

  As stressful as the drive to the hospital was, it finally felt like we were a normal couple. Me, the hapless man, and Marin, the in-control woman. It was like starring in a television sitcom. I loved it.

  Half an hour after arriving at the hospital, Marin got an epidural. The nurse pushed me out of the room, insisting the needle plunging into her spine would be more disturbing than watching her give birth. I didn’t question whether that was true or not.

  When I got back to the room, Marin narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t say a word.”

  I smiled. “I would never.”