Pushing all the way onto her toes, Gina smothered her face against the chair to muffle her screams. He had her coming, wetting his face with her release, her entire body taut and vibrating as she continued screaming and clenching.
When he stepped back instead of pushing her to the finish, she turned on him.
Somewhere along the way, he had shed his shirt. She grabbed the waist band of his black leather pants and twisted, surprising him enough that she threw him off balance and forced him onto the chair. She clawed at the zipper until he helped her free his cock and then she slammed down hard on the thick shaft to take him instead of allowing him to take her.
Her moan punctured the air, everything in the room freezing for an instant as her hungry body finally had him inside her, big and pounding with the blood that coursed through him. She rocked forward, planted her palms against his chest and dug her nails into the skin covering his collar bone. Her wild gaze warned him that if he tried to reverse their position or even dared to move, she would shred him.
Ignoring the threat, Austin wrapped his hands around her hips, trying to slow the pace at which she whipped along the length of his cock, her body lifting until just the tip remained inside her before slamming down to take him whole again, balls deep, her pussy wet and tight but accommodating after all the need he had built inside her.
"Baby, if you don't slow down, I'm going to come," he warned, sweat popping along his brow as his teeth savaged his bottom lip.
Oh, he damn well was going to come. She wouldn't stop until he did. He might be big and bad and made of everything that drove her crazy and nothing she could deny, but he couldn't always be in control.
Bringing her legs up, she locked her ankles behind her. With her back arched, all her weight bore down on that one point—his cock, in her pussy, her muscles sucking at him, squeezing with each forward and backward rock against him.
Her head dipped. Biting at his lips, she growled. "You don't come until I tell you. Are we clear?"
"Love, you didn't give me time for a condom," he warned, his hands abandoning her hips to hold her face and force her to meet his gaze. "If you don't stop, I'm going to fill you with my come, so much it's going to be bubbling out of you. Then it will be you on your back while I lick every last drop out."
The threat only made her ride Austin harder, steamrolling up and down his fat shaft, her wild stare daring him to prove he was stronger, to prove that he wouldn't yield as easily as she had.
He lost the dare, a groan and upward thrust of his hips signaling defeat. The pulsing jet of his release triggered Gina's climax. She collapsed on top of him, her fingers clutching the underside of the chair so that she could keep herself tightly pressed against his hard body. He wrapped his arms around her, cinching her so close their bones flattened flesh to grind against each other.
Finished, she stayed in place, all her strength exhausted by that one act of defiance.
"I warned you what would happen, love."
Before she could process Austin's words, he had her on her back. With their positions flipped, he slid off the chair and hauled her ass up the higher curve so that her bottom was near the top of the crest and her head filling the dip. Blood rushed to her brain as Austin started to lick.
Right, no condom. He didn't want a pregnancy any more than she did...
Only the position was all wrong to prevent conception. And his tongue wasn't curling to scoop his come from her pussy. He was pushing it in, stuffing his seed deeper, sucking at her clit when she tried to squirm away until the pleasure paralyzed all but the muscles that pulled his release deeper inward.
Another climax threatening to over take her, Gina pushed at his forehead.
"I can't," she pleaded.
Austin tried to silence her with another swipe of his tongue over her burning flesh.
"No," she persisted. "I can't afford an accident. I can't—"
She didn't need to keep begging because Austin froze.
Accident...
The word seemed to hit him like a bucket of ice water. His gaze narrowed and he lifted his lips from her sex.
"Would you terminate?"
The question, the hard edge to his voice—those things burrowed deeper than any toy he might apply to her flesh. How could he think she had it in her to do that?
"You really think I could?" she asked, tears filling her eyes.
"That's not an answer," he pressed, his voice growing even colder.
Finding that his hands no longer gripped her, Gina twisted and rolled onto the floor. She didn't have the strength to stand. Folding her arms atop the chair, she buried her face against her flesh as she answered.
"No, I wouldn't. My mother wanted to be a nurse, but she had me her senior year of high school." Gina paused and waited for some sound, some indicator that Austin had stopped glaring at her, that his muscles had relaxed the slightest bit and he was no longer furious, no longer wondering whether she might be so transactional as to predetermine the outcome of a pregnancy.
She heard nothing. Heart turning to lead inside her chest, she pressed on.
"Maybe if Mama had just had me, she could have gone to school when I started kindergarten. Or maybe if my dad hadn't died. But it's just like on the highway—one accident triggers the next one and the next. Me, my sister Nicole..."
Finally lifting her head, Gina looked at Austin.
His face was pure stone, impassive and uncaring. She couldn't bring herself to finish, to tell him how her mother had thought Gina's life and Nicole's were more precious than the dreams she had, how her mother had kept on changing bed pans and doing all the things a nursing assistant might do during her shift, working doubles and triples so that she could get Gina through undergrad studies and then she and Gina working to get Nicole through college, how Nicole would finish her clinicals at the end of the school year and sit for her nursing exam, their mother's dream finally, if only vicariously, fulfilled through her younger daughter.
He wouldn't care, couldn't see past his own ego and how she might have thought of any baby he put in her as an accident. He couldn't comprehend how fiercely she would love the child or how deeply she would sacrifice to make the child's dreams come true—just as her mother had.
Numb, Gina turned away, crawling toward the bed so that she could haul herself onto her feet, dress and leave. Leave for good, if she had to. She couldn't imagine returning to work for Long knowing what he thought of her.
She didn't make it to the bed. Hands wrapped around her waist, lifted her up. For one flashing second, she thought he might cradle her, tell her she was wrong to think so poorly of him or to think he had misunderstood her so badly. But he didn't hold her to him, just placed her in the center of the bed and drew the covers up to her chin.
She fell asleep almost instantly, the sweet oblivion of slumber her body's only defense to the emotions warring inside her.
In the morning, when Gina woke, Austin was gone.
15
Just like that, it was obvious that Austin Long was done with her.
Months passed with no attempted contact. At the end of the second week following her trip to Miami, she had the dress and jade necklace boxed and delivered to his residence. She refused to care why he had abandoned her at the hotel. The way she figured it, she had dodged a bullet aimed dead center at her heart.
She lucked out, she reminded herself more than once, and regret had nothing to do with her obsessively studying for the bar exam, her nose buried deep up the spine of some prep guide when she wasn't drowning under a pile of reports and studies for the Skipjack Bay expansion or on the verge of a brawl with the project's offshore installation manager.
Life kept Gina too busy to think about Austin, which was a good thing because he obviously wasn't thinking about her. Less than a month went by before she discovered he had a new woman in his life. A quick flip through the newspaper in search of a replacement vehicle for her dying car offered confirmation that Austin really had moved on. A
picture of the couple was splashed across the front of the lifestyle section—some charity ball or other.
She didn't bother reading, didn't want to know the woman's name. All she needed to see was the way he looked at the curvy, vacant eyed blonde with genuine affection.
The bar she studied for became the bar she passed. Somehow, her score must have gotten around to some of the larger law firms in the state because she started getting congratulatory calls and requests to interview from places that had already dumped her resume in the trash bin during the last recruiting season.
They all wanted bragging rights on having a first-year associate with the state's highest score in the last decade.
At least she prayed that's what they wanted. She still woke in a cold sweat some nights, fragments of a dream flashing in her head of her interviewing, the usual round table of partners interrogating her about whether she wanted to practice agency law for the next thirty years until one of them pulled out a ball gag and asked about her time with the Long Shore Oil Development Company.
Thankfully, for all his bad traits, Austin seemed to have the redeeming quality of being discreet. Not once had she stepped onto one of the platforms or walked down the hall of the headquarters building and felt a reason to believe that someone knew even a fraction of the dirty details of her sexual submission to the CEO.
And she desperately needed to believe no one knew. The rig crews would make her life a living hell if they found out. It was hard enough to get them to show any respect for her authority as the project's environmental compliance officer. She had to shout, had to get up in their faces more than once, her body trembling with anger over their lapses in safety protocols.
There was no way Gina would let them get away with failing to respect her or follow the plan she had laid out. She'd lost most of her pride to get the job of protecting the bay and the families that called it home. The crews damn well would not render her sacrifice meaningless with a spill.
That dedication was how she found herself on the platform late on a Thursday evening arguing with the Offshore Installation Manager. A tropical storm was headed for the bay, the fluctuating winds threatening to bump the system up to a Category 1 hurricane. The OIM didn't think Gina fully appreciated the danger.
She did. But the storm was still a day off. If they started the shut down protocol immediately, the platform's operations would be stable when the winds and waves reached a critical level and all the crew would be safely ashore. But the OIM wanted to drill until the last minute possible then perform a half-assed shut down that would leave the bay exposed.
So Gina stayed on the platform when all the crew but the safety engineers and the OIM had left. She shadowed the engineers, watched them wrestling with the high pressure equipment as they followed her protocol. She paused only when the OIM cornered her for what had to be the fifth ass-chewing session of the day.
She watched him, quietly enduring the verbal assault and thinking the throbbing vein in his left temple would explode before she'd finished her first year working with him.
The explosion Gina expected wasn't the one she got.
In terms of safety failures, the crew was lucky. Just one injury beyond a few first degree burns from the steam. The nurse had the men bandaged and off the platform before the rescue helicopter landed at the hospital with only one critical victim…
Gina strapped down to a gurney, unconscious and bleeding from her head.
16
Unfamiliar sensations filtered in as Gina slowly surfaced from a lead-filled sleep.
Her eyes refused to open, but light penetrated the closed lids. Antiseptic odors stung her nose and parched throat. Cold, oily skin—her own—made her cringe. Electronics beeped steadily. Air filtered through vents. Something firm but cushioned supported her body.
She expected cold metal, humid air, the myriad smells that came with an offshore platform—fish, salt, engine grease. Trying to get her eyes to open, Gina wrinkled her forehead.
Pain erupted with a piercing spike. She cried out.
"Nurse!"
The voice calling out didn't belong to Gina.
She couldn't make words, not out loud, not really inside her throbbing head. Her own outcry had been just that—filled with pain with no real shape to the sounds clawing past her lips.
A hand wrapped around her wrist. She didn't need her uncooperative eyes opened to know it was a man's warm, calloused hand, or who that man was.
"If you're awake, look at me, baby.”
"Can't," she croaked. Her free arm lifted weakly from the bed. "Water."
"Not until the nurse okays it," Austin answered before yelling loudly once more. "Nurse!"
Gina winced, a fresh spike of pain penetrating her skull then hooking deep into her brain.
“Please don't do that again,” she protested softly
"Sorry." For once, Austin Long sounded truly apologetic. Or maybe he was just as thirsty as she was and that had turned the word all gravelly.
His hands rooted around the sheet covering her and then she heard a click-click-click that she assumed was the call button for the nurses' station.
With Austin no longer holding her wrist captive, she tried to raise her hand to the spot on her head where the shooting pain had receded to a dull, but deep, throb.
"Here." Supporting Gina's arm, Austin guided her fingers to a spot slightly up and forward from her right temple. "Be careful."
Careful was her intent, but her fingers were as belligerent as her eyes. One second she felt the cloth bandage and the next she was pressing down too hard and crying out.
"Let's not do any more of that,” a woman's voice admonished.
Gina heard the rustle of clothes and Austin's impatient snort and then a more feminine touch landed on Gina's arm and lowered it to the bed. A thumb pressed gently against her eyelid, lifted it then blinded Gina with a narrow beam of light.
The woman repeated the process with the other eye. When the blinding light disappeared, Gina found that she could manage to squint. She saw the woman's name tag—a nurse practitioner with an unpronounceable Eastern European name.
"She's thirsty."
When the woman looked in Gina's ears instead of responding to Austin's statement, he circled the hospital bed, dropped the rail on his side then grabbed the pitcher on the bed stand and poured two inches of water into a paper cup.
The nurse practitioner frowned, but gave a slight nod. "No more than that until we do another CT scan."
Austin plucked a straw from the tray, popped it in the paper cup and held it to Gina's mouth. She drank without looking at him. But, if she could have glared at him at that moment, she would have. It didn't matter that he might have extended the same care to a complete stranger. She and he were far from strangers, at least in a physical sense. And from the random stories that kept crossing her path, someone else had a claim to his loving care—someone blond and several years younger, with a vapid gaze and a constant smile.
While Gina sipped at the water, the nurse practitioner scribbled on the medical record. Finished, she attached the clipboard to the end of the bed.
"I'll schedule a scan now," she said, pocketing her pen. "We're overstaffed today in anticipation of the storm, so the wait won't be long. A technician should be by in half an hour or so to collect you."
Knowing even the slightest nod would feel like she was banging her head against a cement wall, Gina lifted a hand in acknowledgement.
With the woman gone and the water finished, Austin leaned over Gina's body and planted a palm on each side of her. She eased her head against the pillow until she had just enough of a tilt to glance up at him.
He looked furious.
She didn't have the time or stamina for his anger, but she knew she would have to engage him, if only for the time it took for him to answer a few questions.
"Are the crew okay?"
His lips moved side-to-side as if chewing over the answer. He gave a sharp nod. "Other than you, y
es. A few steam burns that were taken care of onsite before the platform was evacuated."
"So no system failure—"
His lips mashed together. The sheet beneath her grew taut as Austin fisted the fabric.
"Did they do a full shut down?"
She whipped the question out, her voice growing as hot and impatient as Austin's. He had no right to be angry at her, although he obviously was. She hadn't caused the accident, had only been unlucky enough to be in the path of flying metal.
"Yes," he whipped back. "Just as they would have done if you had left with the drill crew and other incidental personnel."
Other incidental personnel...is that how he saw her?
"I'm not at fault for the explosion," she said, her teeth tightly clenched.
Austin said nothing. Didn't agree or argue her claim, just stared intently at her, nostrils flaring and a cold light starting to burn in his gaze.
Gina knew then that he wasn't going to allow her back onto the rig. She slowly shook her head, the slight movement enough to make the pain in her head flare and her stomach churn from a sudden dizziness.
"You are not taking this from me!" Tears flooded her eyes as she weakly struck Austin's chest with her closed fist. "I did what you wanted, the job is mine. You damn well will not fire me."
"No, I won't."
He answered too smoothly for her to think he had relented.
"You're going to resign."
"No!" She took another swing at him, this one landing closer to his face but just as weak.
"You will," he continued, grabbing both her wrists and squeezing. "You'll pick your replacement by next Friday and then you'll resign. Your severance package will be more than generous and you'll have your pick of several job offers."
The bastard didn't know she already had her pick of job offers. She had no intention of enlightening him. If she did, he might make those offers disappear just because he could.
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