Then he started thrusting. His cock pulled out of her and back into her in quick rhythmic thrusts, while his thumb stroked her clit slowly, pulling her slowly towards the edge of an orgasm.
“Don’t even think about it!” he said through gritted teeth when Ivy’s body shuddered.
She was biting down hard on her lip, trying to not cry out as he thrust in and out of her. She could feel his balls crashing against her butt as he drilled into her with force. She couldn’t hold back any longer, her hands fisted, wriggling and trying to break free from the handcuffs.
“Come for me, Ivy.”
His voice slid smoothly into her ears.
She cried out with a shuddering moan as she released. Her juices trickled out of her as her body spasmed hard.
Her toes curled and she didn’t stop moaning. It felt like her soul was lifted out of her body and came crashing back again, her jaws were tight, her breasts heaved and she orgasmed violently.
She heard him grunt and then growl as he released too.
His cock kept thrusting into her as she felt his seed shoot and she moaned even louder. Travis leaned in on her, wrapping his arms around her bare torso as he thrust, slower and slower each time now. She could feel his hot breath on her face, hear the sound of his harsh breathing.
It wasn’t until several moments later, that she felt his hands reach for the knot at the back of her head. He untied it and she blinked wildly till her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the room. Travis was stretched out over her, and now he reached over to unclasp the handcuffs from the headrest.
She looked up in awe at the powerful muscles of his arms as he expertly undid them. When her hands were released, her first instinct was to touch him. She ran her fingers over the chiseled muscles of his torso. He was completely naked too, and now she could finally see him.
Their breaths were still ragged and harsh. Ivy wondered if her breathing would ever go back to normal. Travis wrapped his arms around her again, and to her surprise, he placed a soft kiss on her forehead. Ivy sighed, unable to control the rush of emotions surging through her body.
She had never imagined that Travis Dunn would be capable of this kind of tenderness.
He was looking at her again, his eyes searching hers, a soft grin tugging the corners of his lips.
“Are you all right?” he asked, in a kinder calmer voice. Ivy wanted to scream out with glee.
She could feel the adrenaline coursing through her veins. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, laugh and giggle and roll with him on the bed. She wanted him to know just how good it had been.
She only nodded her head instead. It seemed like the most appropriate response for the moment.
“Okay,” he said, in a quiet voice, searching her eyes and her face still.
They were lying entangled in each other, trying to calm their breathing and she felt like she could have drowned in his eyes. It was more than just the sex, more than what he had made her feel.
It was a deep thrilling connection that she felt with him in that moment. The more he looked into her eyes, the more she felt like he truly did see her. Like he was trying to understand her, and she was trying to understand him in the silence of the room. He is genuine. He really did—no, does—want to get to know me.
When Travis moved, Ivy felt her heart drop. He was sliding his arms away from under her and Ivy watched with bated breath as he swung his powerfully muscular legs off the bed and stood up. Her throat ran dry again, she licked her lips and slowly, she tried to sit up.
She could still feel the throbbing force with which he had driven into her. It was like he was still inside her, and in silence, she watched as he walked around the room, pulling out cotton towels out of the drawers. He walked back to her, holding two of them out for her.
“Here, you can use these,” he said. With trembling hands, she took them from him.
He was wiping himself as well. The tied up condom lay on the floor next to his feet, and Ivy gulped again. Her pussy was still damp, still throbbing to the touch as she wiped herself between her legs. It was like her skin radiated with the scent of him.
“You’re welcome to have a shower if you want,” he said and she looked up at him again.
How was she supposed to explain to him that she never wanted his touch to wash away from her body?
“No, I’ll wait till I get home,” Ivy said and Travis turned from her.
He was picking his clothes up off the floor now, ready to start dressing again. She couldn’t stop her heart from thudding against her chest. She couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen next.
And then, the thoughts turned from unwaveringly positive and hopeful to despairing.
She thought of all of the things she had read online. All of the photos of him with women. How, aside from the first one, he never had the same woman in any photos.
Judging by his track record, she got the feeling that this meant the end of their blink-and-miss relationship. If this was the end…
“So if this isn’t your bedroom, is this where you bring all your women then?” she asked.
You idiot! Why? Why did you ask that?!?
Travis’ back was still turned to her, but she saw the muscles on his shoulders and back stiffen. He turned his head to her, not enough for her to see the expression in his eyes.
“No, it is not, Ivy,” he said as she bent herself down to pick up her lingerie from the floor.
“Of course not, you have enough rooms in this house to mix it up,” she said, surprised by the envy dripping from her voice. What are you doing, Ivy? You got what you wanted, just trust him! Don’t worry about the past.
Travis turned to her now, as he slid his pants up to his waist. He had his jaws clenched and was glaring at her.
“You have the wrong impression of me,” he said and Ivy threw him a half-baked smile.
“I have no impression of you since I don’t know you at all,” she said.
Travis sighed and then shook his head like he was utterly disappointed with her. Ivy hated that the words tumbled out of her like so. She realized that as flawed as Travis seemed, she had her own unmistakable failings, too. She just hoped she hadn’t ruined it for good.
“There are no other women, Ivy,” Travis said. Ivy forced herself not to respond. “I haven’t been with anyone in over three years,”
Ivy stopped, in the middle of hooking her bra. Her lips parted in surprise and she tried to get some words out but Travis had turned from her again. He had walked over to the mantelpiece where he’d left his cuff links earlier.
“That…I…” she tried to say. “Really?
“Find that hard to believe?” Travis asked, fixing his clothing.
Ivy pursed her lips together, and her face fell in a frown. Her mistake really had cost her, and she hated it.
“You should know better than to believe everything you read in the tabloids, Ivy,” he said as he flipped his tie over his head.
Without the need of looking in the mirror, he started knotting his tie expertly and she watched him for several moments in silence. She hadn’t even begun to dress, and he was nearly back to looking his perfect self again.
“I’ve seen photographs…with those women…” she said.
Travis shook his head and grinned. She knew by now she should just shut up.
And so, perhaps far too late, she did.
“So what?” Travis said with unexpected cheerfulness. “I go to a lot of parties. I have a lot of friends. I like to socialize. But that doesn’t mean that I sleep with all of them.”
He walked over to put his jacket back on. Ivy felt confused and she followed his every movement with her eyes. He was in his clothes, not a crease on any of the fabric. His tie looked neat and perfectly put on. Travis proceeded to thrust his hands into his pockets again.
Mercifully, this time, Ivy kept quiet, giving Travis a chance to explain his side.
“You asked me what was wrong with you, Ivy, and the truthful answer is t
hat there is everything right with you. I wanted you from the moment I saw you, and the more you couldn’t stay away from me, the wilder my desire for you grew,” he said. Ivy felt a shiver run down her spine. She couldn’t believe any of this that she was hearing. “But I didn’t want to spoil it. I didn’t want to spoil your first time.”
She shook her head. The exact opposite had happened. If anything, she had to laugh at the notion that it would be all downhill from here.
“You didn’t, Travis. This was amazing, it was more than I could have hoped for.”
She stopped herself just in time from thanking him. He grinned and shook his head.
“No, I meant spoil your memory of it. You won’t forget your first time and I didn’t want your first time to be with me,” he said in a dry deep voice.
Ivy wanted to cry out. She wished she had the courage to tell him that she wouldn’t forget him anyway. Even if he hadn’t made love to her, she wouldn’t have forgotten him. Now I want to have the words…
“This is what I wanted,” she said instead.
“And I gave it to you, so now we can move on,” he said.
Ivy felt a cry rising up her throat. It wasn’t that she had expected anything else from him, but for him to actually say it… to actually say that they had to move on… was too much to bear. What had they done this for if not to move forward, not on? What in the world was going on with Travis Dunn?
What did that kiss on the forehead mean?
He turned from her again, and Ivy felt a panic rising in her. She had to ask.
“I know about Mia,” she cried out.
Travis stopped in his tracks. He straightened his back but didn’t turn to look at her.
“I know what happened to her, what happened to you. I—”
“Why are you bringing it up then?” she heard him ask.
His voice had dropped to a fevered low pitch again and she was afraid that he was going to be mad at her. But while she had moved past the point of believing that he was playing games with her, she had come to the point where she knew he needed to confront some emotional truths.
“Because I want you to know that I understand why you can’t give me more than this,” Ivy said softly and even with his face turned, she could sense that he had clenched his jaw.
“I see a lot of her in you, how I remember her, and I wanted to stay away from that,” he said.
Ivy felt the prick of hot tears at the back of her eyelids. There was much she could overcome, but she could not overcome this. Not her reminding him of his deceased future wife.
“I understand,” she said quietly.
He breathed in deeply. What Ivy had said wasn’t the truth, for she didn’t really understand because she had no way of knowing how he felt, how he had been feeling for all these years. What she did know, however, was that she didn’t want to ask him to give her what he couldn’t. No matter how much it stung her. No matter how she felt about him.
Ironically, and sadly, her care for Travis was what would prevent her from being with him.
But before she could let him go, she needed to know more.
“But Travis, what happened? I mean, what’s the story with her?”
Travis still did not turn to face her. In the moments of silence, Ivy thought of the normal human qualities that Mia had possessed, and how she seemed so real. The green eyes, the smile, the lack of makeup. It made her wonder how Travis looked before he became wealthy. Given he was in the Marines, he was probably fit as could be and extremely healthy back in the day, but could he have afforded to dress as well as he did now? How had wealth changed him?
“I met her just before I started ROTC in college,” he said. His voice sounded cold, but not to her—rather, it seemed like a useful method of self-defense against his own barrage of emotions. “I immediately became attracted to her and decided I wanted to make her my girlfriend. She did just that almost immediately. For a while, we were in heaven. We graduated and I learned that as part of me joining the ROTC, I had to go do a tour in Iraq.”
His voice wavered just a tad there—not enough for Ivy to comment on it, but certainly enough to notice.
“And so I proposed to her.”
He laughed. Ivy didn’t ask why.
“I proposed to her. She said yes. It was good. No, it was great. Life felt so perfect, and we were set for life. I would do my tour, and then I would come back.”
He sighed.
“You know the rest.”
“I know what happened to her,” Ivy said, and though she felt unsure of asking her next question, she couldn’t help herself. “But I want to know what happened to you.”
Travis just shrugged before speaking slowly.
“I shut out the world for a long, long time,” he said. “I actually slid into a depression and a dark place. I got big. I didn’t work much, relying on my military pension for money. I would stay in my father’s house, doing nothing but binge eating and getting fat and watching stupid television shows. My dad finally got me out of my spell when he said that she…”
He looked like he wanted to say her name, but he did not.
“She would’ve hated what I turned into. And so I went to the other extreme. I became a workaholic. Like you said earlier when you first came into my office, I turned into the kind of man who treated everything as a transaction, a dollar to be gained, an investment to make. In some respects, I guess you could say it worked. But in other ways, well, look at me. It took until you came around for me to get out of this mess, and even then, I nearly screwed it up.”
Finally, he turned to face her. Ivy could see his eyes watering, but he had too good of self-control to let himself cry.
“The reason I haven’t gotten close to anyone, including you, is that you can’t lose what you never had,” he said. “If I don’t have you, then I can’t lose you. I’m deathly afraid of loss—ironic, considering I served in the military. I’m afraid of losing you, I’m afraid of losing my wealth, and I’m afraid of losing my life. So I try not to get close.”
Ivy had not expected such strong words and such compelling emotions. She wanted to reach out and touch his heart to bring close to her. She wanted to show him that he had nothing to fear.
But all she could get out was his name.
“Travis…”
The rest of her words eluded her. She had nothing that she could say that would bring him in close. No matter what she tried, it would not work.
And as Travis turned, she knew that she could not change that.
“Goodbye, Ivy. I have to get back to the office. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, just close this door behind you when you leave,” he said.
And then, just like that, he was gone. Ivy heard the click of the door shutting behind him and then the fading sound of his footsteps.
She sank back into the bed, still only in her lingerie. She allowed the tears to roll down her cheeks. She bit down on her lip, trying to hold the cries in as she lay back down on the soft springy bed.
Ivy stared up at the ceiling, trying to envelope herself in the scent of Travis for as long as she could, trying to soak him in as much as she could. She would never get to do this again, and she knew someday she would look back on the moment with gratitude and appreciation.
For now, though, she just felt grief it would never happen again.
An hour passed before she finally dressed. Without bothering to check herself in the mirror, she left the room and shut the door behind her. She walked through the house, too distracted to admire any of the decors anymore. Finally, she was out of the front door.
The stretch limo was waiting for her this time as well, and Ivy got in for what she presumed was the last time.
The days that followed carried a very different feel for Ivy than they did before. Rather than feeling confused about whether she should give Travis another chance and rather than feeling anger and confusion that she wanted him even when he acted callously, now, she just wanted a chance to see h
im again.
The days did not carry so much despair and anger as they did sad disappointment. Her encounter with Travis was special and hot, yes, but it was touching. The kiss on the forehead that he had planted after finishing was exactly the kind of tender, sweet gesture that Ivy had always hoped would happen in her first encounter. She had gotten it, and her reward was… that Travis seemingly never wanted to talk to her again.
She’d screwed up asking him about his previous women, she knew. Even if it gave her an answer that somehow lifted her spirits, it had probably portrayed her as a distrusting woman that became easily jealous. She knew she had to work on she came across.
But still… for how intimate that moment had felt, for how tender it felt, and for how Travis’ eyes looked when it all happened, she couldn’t possibly believe that it was over.
No, Travis would come back. He had to.
But in the days that followed, Travis never showed up at the coffee shop. More than once, Ivy went to clean the tables outside, hoping that she might catch a sight of the man who had become more difficult to find than Sasquatch.
But he never showed up.
After a few days, she became frustrated enough that she decided to do something bold she hadn’t considered in quite some time. It was a move she’d pulled once before and it had landed her in a lot of drama, but she decided to go for it.
Taking his Grande Dark Roast on her lunch break, she walked down the street, looking to the sky at the magnificent Dunn Inc building to guide her to its lobby. The last time she’d walked in, she’d felt like a bumbling hot mess, something of an embarrassment to those who saw her walk in.
Today, though? She felt certain. She walked in as she imagined Travis might. She moved with a confidence that if she came to his work place, he could not ignore her there.
She opened the door, cognizant of those dressed in business attire but ignoring them for the most part. She was somewhat relieved to see that the receptionist was not the same girl whom she had seen the last time she had come here—she was a bit paranoid that that receptionist would judge her and find a way to deflect her. This time, an older looking woman awaited her with a comforting smile.
His Royal Majesty : A Royal Wedding Romance Page 39