by Ann Jacobs
What was left of him. It fuckin’ wasn’t enough. He was hardly a dominant male now, and she’d made no secret that was what she needed. But maybe….he’d thought she only wanted closure, but she’d seemed honest about wanting him, not put off by his scars, his damn near useless legs…
No. Damn it, he still had some pride. Too much to offer her an open marriage where she’d be free to seek the excitement, the physical dominance he knew from experience that she needed but which he couldn’t provide. Even for the pleasure of sleeping in her embrace and remembering when he was whole. There was enough of the alpha male left in him to want to be the only man to satisfy his woman.
Gray inhaled deeply, savoring the smell of sex and sweat that surrounded them. His cock stirred, obviously anticipating a repeat performance that wasn’t going to happen. Not anytime soon. Probably not ever. Andi would most likely come to her senses when she woke up and saw him in daylight.
The storm outside had subsided, leaving gentle rain splashing crystal drops against the windowpanes. Andi slept on, her fingers tangling in his chest hair. Contented. More likely she was exhausted from dragging beach chairs and umbrellas and their child while he’d barely managed to haul his sorry ass to and from the beach…carrying the total responsibility for Brett, responsibility he could share only with his checkbook and his time. She had every reason to pass out, because she, not he, had just fucked them both to a shattering climax.
He was one worthless SOB. Too damn helpless even to get up and run away. Closing his eye, he tried to ignore Andi and go to sleep.
* * * * *
“Come on to bed now. No more teasing.” Gray couldn’t remember ever having had so much fun as he’d been having the past night and day with this smart-mouthed redheaded lawyer from the wrong side of Tampa’s social register. Compared with the cool, collected debs his mom kept trying to match him up with, Andi Young came out miles ahead. Compared with any woman he’d ever laid, she came out way ahead, come to think of it. He allowed it just might be his cock doing his thinking when it twitched with anticipation for more erotic games.
“Make me.” Naked, hands on hips, she met his gaze, licking her full lips that had just been occupied with sucking his balls in the kitchen while he’d finished off some cold pizza for breakfast.
“You’ll be sorry, sassy lady. Behave or I’ll cuff you to the bed and take my belt to your round, pink little ass.”
“Promises, promises,” she taunted, but when he grabbed her and tossed her face down on the bed, she inhaled sharply as though the rough treatment really turned her on. “I’ve been a bad girl. Are you gonna spank me or fuck me?”
“Both.” He came down behind her, nipping her rounded ass cheeks with his teeth, hard enough to draw a squeal of delight. The several resounding whacks that followed left her butt rosy and warm, imprinted with the shapes of his palms. Her puckered asshole, still glistening from her pussy juices and the KY jelly he’d used to lubricate her, beckoned him.
“Want this?” Grasping his cock, he rubbed it along her sopping slit, entering her cunt the slightest bit before nudging her tight little anus and pulling back even as she strained backward, obviously wanting more of him. “Not yet, baby. Have you ever taken a man’s cock up your pretty ass?”
“No…” She was sassy submission personified. If he could paint, he’d paint a picture of her like this and call it that. With her pretty ass in the air, face down, red-gold hair spread out on the black bed linens, tempting him to pause in taking her and crush the silky strands between his fingers. Hell, he’d even find some way to depict her husky talk about this scenario she apparently found so damn arousing.
“But you’ve always wondered how it would feel, haven’t you?” He wet his fingers in her sopping cunt, then pulled out and worked his middle finger past her anal sphincter, found it incredibly tight. Incredibly arousing. “That’s why you came three times while I finger-fucked your ass. Why you kept asking me for more until I had three fingers rammed inside that tight little hole.”
“I’ve wondered. Are you going to show me?”
“Right now I want to cool off your hot little cunt.” Reaching for the glass dildo he’d taken from the freezer while they had breakfast, he slid it between her glistening labia. Found her cunt and slid the dildo home. “Feel good?”
“C-cold.” Her shiver rocked the bed.
Rocked him. “You’ll melt it quick enough.”
“I want your cock. Please.”
He finished rolling on a lubricated condom, then rubbed his cockhead around her quivering asshole. “Want it here, baby?”
“Oh, yesss. I’m so damn cold.”
“Hold on. I’ll warm you.”
On his knees behind her, he positioned his cock and pressed forward. Gently. Carefully. God, her ass was so tight. He’d hurt her. Maybe he shouldn’t…
“Oooh. Don’t stop.”
“Baby, it’s going to hurt you. I don’t want—”
“I do.” Levering herself backward, she took his cockhead past her anal sphincter, then stopped. “It hurts, but it feels good, too. I feel like I’m gonna split apart. But like I’m gonna come, too. More. Oh, yesss.”
Rocking his hips gently back and forth, he edged more of his cock into her rear passage, spurred on by her little whimpers and moans when his balls lodged between her swollen, wet labia. “Like this?” he asked, giving her more than he thought any woman could take.
“Oh, yesss. Oh God.” His cock vibrated in time with her cunt contracting around the dildo. Each wave that hit him as it traveled through the thin wall of flesh that separated her two passages, was fucking incredible. Pressure built in his balls, traveled down his shaft, and shattered in his cockhead when he let go and shot his load.
When her tremors ceased he withdrew his cock and the dildo, now as hot as her dripping cunt. Trembling, strangely vulnerable, she held the position he’d set her in until he lay back and dragged her down until they lay on their sides like two big spoons, her quivering ass nestled in the cradle of his hips.
A sharp, cramping pain in Gray’s right leg woke him, made him clench his teeth to avoid crying out and waking Andi. Blinking, he saw the trapeze above his head, realized he still lay on his back just as he’d positioned himself hours earlier. Amazingly, Andi had snuggled up close to his decimated right side.
The incredible sex they’d just enjoyed had only been a dream. His reality was the trapeze…and passive fucking by any woman kind enough to accommodate him. Shit, his captors might just as well have finished him off.
“Daddy? Where’s Mommy?”
Brett’s plaintive voice outside his bedroom door reminded Gray why he was glad he didn’t die. He ignored the muscle still spasming in his thigh and dragged the covers up. “In here, son.”
Chapter Five
“Mommy? Daddy?”
“Yeah.” The look of pure delight on Brett’s face when he looked down at Gray and Andi made Gray recall his conversation with Andi last night about the little boy’s expectations.
“Can I go watch cartoons?” Brett asked.
“Uh-sure. You want me to come turn on the TV?” How the hell he was going to manage that without giving Brett an eyeful he didn’t know, but damn it, Gray didn’t want to disturb Andi’s sleep. And he really didn’t want his son to think him incapable of performing the simplest of physical tasks.
Brett shook his head. “I can do it. I watched you last night. You and Mommy sleep in. That’s what mommies and daddies do on weekends. Stay in bed and cuddle up like you’re doing now. Tony told me all about mommies and daddies needing private time when I stayed with him and Kristine. They’re going to have a baby real soon.”
Score another one for Landry. Now he owed his boss for more than his job and the careful tutelage he’d been receiving during the first week of his career as a criminal defense attorney.
“May I?”
“Yeah, sure. If you’re hungry, there’s a box of doughnuts on the kitchen table. Milk and jui
ce are in the refrigerator. Your mom and I will join you in a little while.” After they had a serious talk. Gray pasted a smile on his face and watched Brett bound out of the room and down the hall toward the living room.
Andi stirred when he started to maneuver toward the edge of the bed. Snuggling closer, she tangled her legs with his, effectively pinning him where he lay. “Where’s my good-morning kiss?”
He levered himself up on one elbow and looked down at her. “Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Indulge me.”
Her reddish-brown eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks as he leaned down and brushed his lips across hers. “That was no kiss,” she said, cupping her hands behind his head and taking his mouth the way a lover would.
“Andi,” he said when she came up for air.
“Hmmm?” She stretched, like a contented kitten might.
“Brett saw us.”
“When?”
“A few minutes ago. He came in to ask if he could go in the living room and watch cartoons.”
Near-panic in her aqua gaze, she looked down at their entwined bodies. “At least we were under the covers.”
“Barely. I managed to jerk them up as he was opening the bedroom door.”
She wrinkled her brow, then grinned. “Well, next time we won’t risk giving him a shock. We’ll just have to lock the door.”
Next time? Gray couldn’t believe she said that. After seeing him in broad daylight, she couldn’t help but know he was anything but the guy who’d fucked her brains out in another lifetime. She couldn’t possibly miss his scars or ignore his useless legs. Did she love her son—his, too, he reminded himself—so much she’d saddle herself with a cripple just to give the boy what he apparently expected?
Well, if she did, then so did he. “Want to make it legal?” he asked lightly, wondering how he’d survive when she realized she’d be sentencing herself to plain vanilla sex with a partner who could barely get around and looked too fucking much like Frankenstein’s monster.
“You mean it?”
“Wouldn’t have asked you if I weren’t willing. After all, there’s no question that I’d be getting the best of the bargain.” He forced a grin, tried to swallow the fear that threatened to choke off his ability to speak…think. Damn it, he couldn’t figure out whether he was scared shitless she’d say yes—or desperately afraid she’d say no.
What had gotten into him? What he ought to be doing was standing back, letting her go so she could find a man who could give her everything he couldn’t. It wasn’t as if they’d had time to fall in love last night or during that fantasy weekend a lifetime ago. Hell, that was bullshit. He’d held on to her for eight long years, spent nights in her arms, in his dreams. He might be fucking selfish but he wasn’t letting her go without a fight.
Andi reached up and stroked his scarred cheek, her fingers trembling. Her eyes glistened with tears—and something else. Affection? Hope? Gray imagined it probably was something akin to horror.
Then she smiled. “I’ll marry you if you’re sure that’s what you want. But it damn well will be real, including regular sex. I’ve done mostly without for eight long years. It’s pretty hard to do the dating scene when you’ve got a job and a child to take care of, not to mention that you were a damn hard act for any man to follow. If we’re going to marry, I’m not about to let you shrink away from me. Or get by with lights out and no touching.”
Gray swallowed hard. “If you can stand looking at me, then I suppose I can live with letting you look your fill. I know I like you touching me any way you want to. But I remember you liked your sex hot and you liked it rough. The fucking you got last night pretty much exhausted my entire repertoire. If you want it, I’m certainly not going to turn it down, because baby…I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with nothing but memories of what your pussy feels like around my cock.”
“All right. Come on. Show me what you think will have me screaming in terror.” Sitting up, Andi started to drag the covers down.
He had to give her credit. She didn’t scream, and she didn’t bolt from the bed and run. Her gaze raked his legs, lingered briefly on the scars that crisscrossed the right side of his trunk, and settled on the ugliest scar of all—the one he hid under the eye patch.
“Don’t you ever take it off?” she asked.
“To bathe. And to shave. Trust me, you don’t want to see what’s underneath it.”
Very gently, she touched the patch. “Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes. Not as much as it did for years, until a surgeon cleaned up the mess as best he could.”
When she slid a finger under the elastic, he reached up and pulled her hand away. “I told you, you don’t want to go there. What you should want to do before committing yourself to living with me is watch what I have to do to get mobile. And get a good look at my back.”
Reaching up, he grabbed the trapeze and heaved himself into a sitting position. “Take a look. Do you want a man they whipped like a dog every day for months before one of the bastards gouged his eye out?”
Raised scars, some as thick as Andi’s finger, took her attention from bulging biceps and triceps as powerful-looking as she remembered. The healed welts striped his back from shoulders to ass. Evidence of old infection marred pale skin she remembered being smooth, tanned, and fit. “They caused the back injury by doing this, didn’t they?”
Gray nodded. “It just got exacerbated by the fall I told Brett about. There’s a cyst that formed after one of the beatings. It’s pressing on the spinal column and interfering with the nerves that make my legs work. The spinal cord itself is intact, or so they tell me. I opted not to have the cyst removed because there’s a substantial risk that the surgery might leave me a paraplegic, for real.”
He grabbed the bar again and swung himself into the wheelchair beside the bed. “Think you can stand it, baby? Living with a wreck of a guy like me? “
“I can take it. Your scars bother you a hell of a lot worse than they bother me, baby. Now let’s put on some clothes and go see what our son is doing.”
* * * * *
“He’s thrilled,” Andi said that night after they left Brett nodding off to sleep in Gray’s guest room. “Thank you.”
Gray smiled. “I think I’m the one who ought to be thanking you. I never dreamed when I decided to come home that I’d find myself a ready-made family. One I’d actually taken part in creating. You ready to clue me in on what to do to stay on judges’ good sides?”
“Sure, though I don’t know why I should be helping the competition.”
“So I don’t embarrass you, maybe?” His lopsided grin made her think of things far more fun to do than talk about the Hillsborough County circuit court judges and their eccentricities.
“There is that. Come on, let’s snuggle up on the sofa and I’ll give you some pointers.” A very few pointers. What Andi wanted was to get close to Gray, not talk about judges or cases or anything but them. She wanted to show him…wipe away his obvious worry that she found him less than he’d been before.
She needed to make him realize she found him more than the hot young DEA operative who’d known every move…how to use his agile mind and powerful body to turn her every way but loose. More than the cocky, self-assured lover who’d promised to call her when he came home.
Much, much more. The Gray Syzmanski she’d fallen in lust with had grown up…aged like fine wine. Mellowed. The old Gray wouldn’t have wanted to spend an entire day entertaining his son, and he wouldn’t have gotten all choked up over the beauty of a spectacular sunset. Though he still made her pussy water the way her mouth did at the sight of fine, imported chocolate, now he also touched her heart.
As she watched his expression darken while he fought to unlock his braces, Andi realized she had a tough, tough job ahead if she wanted to win his love. Tougher than any case she’d ever argued. But more important, too.
For herself. For him. And for their little boy.
What the hell had she gotten herself into?
Andi’s family thought she was nuts. Her boss and most of her coworkers thought she’d taken leave of her senses. And sometimes when she thought about it, she was none too sure they weren’t absolutely right.
It had seemed so simple to say yes to Gray’s offhand proposal two weeks ago, so right to tell Brett they were getting married. Wrong.
Today she’d had to listen to her boss’s tirade. Harper couldn’t have cared less if she married Godzilla so long as he didn’t work for Winston Roe. Gray did, however, which meant she wouldn’t be allowed to prosecute anybody that any of that firm’s lawyers was defending. So far Harper had jerked her off three meaty cases she’d been looking forward to trying. Too bad Landry and his team’s track record was so good that it attracted the cream of the well-heeled criminal population.
Her parents and siblings had reminded her how Gray’s mother had treated her before Brett was born. They’d hinted—hell, they’d said it flat-out—that the only reason the blue-blooded bastard was willing to marry her now was because no one else would be likely to have him, considering the extent of his disabilities. They’d shrieked when she told them they’d be living in the house his mother had left him, scoffed at the idea that her bungalow was too small for them to modify to fit Gray’s special needs. Andi hadn’t been too happy about moving to Gray’s childhood home, either, but it would beat commuting every day from the beachfront condo.
The huge diamond solitaire Gray had put on her finger last weekend winked up at her, mocking her. Reminding her he might be a lowly associate at Winston Roe for the moment, but he came from big Tampa money, big society. Reminding her she’d first seen it on his mother’s finger, catching sunlight when the woman had stood in the doorway of that big house and told Andi very politely to fuck off.
Now, following the day from hell, she had to grit her teeth and go with Gray to decide what they needed to buy to make that white elephant monstrosity on Bayshore Drive seem like home. Home, indeed. The farthest she’d been inside it before yesterday had been the elegant entry foyer, where she’d stood briefly eight years ago. Closing her briefcase, Andi left her office and hurried downstairs to meet the man she was going to marry in three more days.