I had to have her.
Then.
Right. Then.
Bending my knees and hefting her up higher into my arms, I pulled and maneuvered my hips until my cock finally notched at her entrance without any help from me.
Then I slowly started to push inside.
It was only when I felt how tight she was that I realized another truth. She’d given me not only her future but also her virginity.
Two impossible gifts that I could never hope to repay.
My eyes flashed open, and I stared into her eyes, only then realizing that her eyes were centered directly on me.
“You’re killing me, baby,” I whispered.
Her eyes flicked down to my mouth, and then she licked her lips before softly smiling.
I groaned, and my hips jerked, my cock so hard that it hurt.
Her eyes widened, but not in pain.
In something else entirely—pleasure.
I growled and pushed inside a little farther, feeling the barrier of her virginity break just like that.
She didn’t cry, though.
She smiled.
Then she clenched, and I lost my desire to breathe.
If I could drown in her eyes, I would.
They were so freakin’ beautiful, and with her hair slicked back and giving me less to focus on, I realized that the striations in her left eye were a shade of bluish green while her right sported a shade of greenish brown.
You couldn’t tell until you were close just how different they were.
I paused with my cock half in, half out of her.
She was panting, her breasts rising and falling with her accelerated breathing.
The tips of her nipples scraped lightly against my pectorals each time she inhaled.
“Please,” she croaked.
I pushed in just a little bit farther, so fucking scared that if I went fast, I’d hurt her.
If there was one thing on this entire planet that I didn’t want to do, it was to cause her pain.
I’d rather chop my arm off at the elbow than ever see her hurt.
She’d done so fuckin’ much and given me more.
I would not fail her.
Which led me to doing the impossible as I filled her at a glacial pace, ensuring that I took her slowly so that I didn’t hurt her.
By the time I’d rocked myself into her to the hilt, she was on the verge of tears.
And those tears made my heart clench.
“Henley,” I asked, worried now.
My balls were well on the way to imploding, and I’d never felt something as tight as her sheath wrapped around my cock.
“I’m perfectly fine,” she promised, wiggling a little. “Can you move yet, or are you going to break if you do?”
I found myself grinning despite the seriousness of the situation.
“Oh, I can move,” I teased. “I was just waiting for you to take me before I got too rough and lost control.”
Her hands came up and rested on my bearded chin—each hand framing my face perfectly—and urged me closer.
Then, she whispered words in my ear that I had a hard time discerning for a few long seconds. And when I did finally realize what she’d said, she’d pulled back far enough so that I could see the wicked grin on her face that proved she was one hundred percent serious.
“Take me hard. It’s always been my fantasy to be fucked up against a wall while my man loses control.”
I pulled out of her half an inch, then pushed back inside.
When she took that well, I pulled back, then tilted my hips up as I rocked back inside.
That time, she gasped.
I followed the same movements, pulling farther and farther out each time until I finally had nothing but my cock at her entrance when I viciously slammed back inside.
Each movement of my hips caused her entire body to jolt. She was sweating due to the steam, and droplets of perspiration was forming at her brows.
Her breasts jiggled, jumping with our mutual movements, and her eyes continued to stay locked on me.
I took her roughly for a few long minutes, careful to keep my movements just this side of too hard.
But when she started to clench around me in impending orgasm, I pulled away, looking down to see her pussy look like it was grasping my cock and hating every second of my retreat.
Her pussy was swollen, and there were traces of blood on my shaft.
That didn’t turn me off.
In fact, it did quite the opposite.
Seeing her virginity on my cock as well as our mingled juices was enough to make my balls draw up in anticipation.
I blindly reached for the shower knobs and turned them off.
Once they were shut off, I let her legs fall to the ground.
“What?” she asked, somewhat too loudly.
Instead of answering, I pulled her out of the shower and forwent the towel, going straight for the bed.
We were about to get the blankets messy. It didn’t matter if they were wet on top of that.
I reached for her transmitter the moment that I’d gotten her down on her back in the middle of the bed, and then fitted them in place, waiting for confirmation that they were on and working before I pulled away.
“Why?” she breathed.
I rolled her over onto her belly, and then pulled her hips up in the bed, her ass swaying with her need.
“Because,” I said, lining my still rock-hard cock up with her entrance. “When I come, I want you to hear every single word, grunt, and yell as my orgasm leaves my body and enters yours.”
She looked at me with wide eyes over her shoulder, but then a small smile overtook her face moments later.
“Do it.”
I did it.
And in the end, we were both yelling.
Chapter 20
How do you spell muscle? You don’t spell muscle, you flex it.
-T-shirt
Rhys
“What can you do for me?” I asked, handing the man that cleaned our uniforms Henley’s dress.
He looked at it with a raised eyebrow.
“If you can get grass and dirt stains, as well as blood stains, out of white jerseys, I’m pretty sure you can handle this,” I teased him in reply to his skepticism.
He grunted. “I’ll see what can do,” he replied in his thickly accented English.
Roddie, originally from Venezuela, was still learning to communicate, so sometimes it was slow going. He seemed to get what I wanted, though and nodded before placing the dress on top of the other uniforms.
“I fix.”
I gave him a high five and headed out to practice, a spring in my usually sedate step.
Today was going to be a good goddamn day. I guaranteed it.
***
Two hours later, I found myself trying to hold off a headache—and I was failing.
“Why do you have a dress hanging up in your locker?”
I grinned and pulled it out, inspecting it for any lingering stains that may be there.
There wasn’t any.
“My wife got all that blood on it after the game. I gave it to Roddie to see if he could get all of the stains out,” I explained, then turned to Gentry. “What’s it to you?”
Gentry held his hands up. “Nothing. I was just curious. I mean, it’s not every day a person has a dress hanging in a locker of an all men’s locker room.”
That was true.
“Fine,” I said, slightly stilted. “Sorry, I’m having a bad day.”
And I was. I’d been doing well until about halfway through practice when my sister had called with the news that she thought she was in labor. That was when the headache had magnified.
“Why, because the media found out about your bride, and they’re questioning why a man like you would be interested in a simpleton like her?” Came Manny’s question.
I looked over, anger starting
to roll off of me in waves, and stared at the little prick.
The asshole was holding up a newspaper, and he was reading it.
When he realized that he’d caught my attention, he turned the paper around and showed me what he was looking at.
I gritted my teeth when I saw Henley on the front page of the sports section.
What saved Manny’s pretty face was the fact that he was reading, verbatim, what was quoted in the newspaper.
“Who wrote that article?” I asked, quiet and controlled.
Manny flipped the page, then said, “Says ‘Dodger Field.’”
Dodger Field.
That motherfucker!
“Hmm,” I said as I carefully hung the dress back up, so I didn’t completely shred it in my anger. “Is he the one that wrote that article on your wife?”
I looked over at Furious George, and he nodded. “One and the same. Also happens to be my goddamn brother-in-law.”
The article I was referring to was one that decided the public needed to know exactly why George and his wife had divorced and then had continued a three-part serial on the two of them getting back together, and explaining how they wouldn’t last.
“Wrote an article on Sway, too,” Parts murmured. “The little fucker was lucky I didn’t plant my fist in his face when I saw him at the baseball banquet last year.”
That was true.
But I knew I wouldn’t be refraining if I ever saw him again.
“They had to dig deep to find an unflattering photo of her, though,” Manny said as he studied the picture with hard eyes. “Honestly, I’m damn impressed that she can hold three boxes of mail. I don’t think any woman I know could lift that much.”
That was true. The boxes she was holding were filled to the brim with letters, and she was moving them from a bigger eighteen-wheeler mail truck to a smaller delivery truck. I could see her bicep muscles in each arm as she easily carried the boxes.
In fact, seeing her able to lift something that heavy was really turning me on.
Just as I was about to contemplate things other than my headache—like my raging dick—my phone rang, reminding me of not only my sister’s earlier calls, but the stupid news article that included how pissed off my sister was that she hadn’t been there for the wedding.
“Hello?” I answered, avoiding the calls long enough.
“You better get down here within the next four hours, or your niece will be born without you…and your sister’s freaking out. Apparently, you made her a promise?”
I groaned.
“I made her two promises…”
***
“So, you promised your sister that you’d both be there for the birth of her baby, and allow her to be the best man at your wedding.” Henley sounded amused. “What did she say would happen to you if you broke those promises?”
I grinned at her. “She’d disinherit me.”
She giggled, and it sounded like tinkling glasses.
She was so fucking cute that sometimes I could barely stand it.
“She’d never disinherit you,” Henley patted my hand. “And how were you supposed to know that she was calling because she was in labor instead of calling because she was pissed that she didn’t get to see you marry? Don’t feel too bad here. There is this thing called voicemail…”
That was true.
“Her husband doesn’t do voicemail,” I said. “He has a problem listening to automated recordings. It messes with him.”
She nodded her head in understanding. “Sometimes, there are certain decibel levels I can’t hear, too. Which is really weird. Like, why can I hear a song on a radio, but I can’t hear sirens when they’re coming up behind me?”
My brows rose at that. “You can’t hear police sirens?”
She shook her head. “No. I also can’t hear train horns, doorbells, or anything really high pitched.”
I frowned. “That’s not exactly safe. That means that you can’t hear a fire alarm, or a smoke detector either?”
She shrugged. “Nope, but that’s also why they’ve installed all the strobe lights with the alarms. We had this one phone when we were younger that I couldn’t hear, either. Mom had it for like, ever. She never understood why I didn’t answer when I was younger, and we just figured out a few years ago when they asked me why I didn’t answer Mom’s phone. I just couldn’t hear it.”
My mind drifted as she continued to talk, but all I could think about was what would happen if there was a fire. If it happened during the day, she wouldn’t hear it. I’d only thought I had to worry about her during the night when she didn’t have her transmitter on. Now I had to worry about her during the day, too?
“Sir, the fasten seatbelt sign just went on.”
I looked up to find our flight attendant glaring at me.
I shot her an apologetic smile, then fastened my seatbelt.
“Why is the fasten seatbelt sign turning on?” Henley turned to me. “We still have two hours until we arrive. It says so.”
She pointed at the screen that was on the back of the seat in front of her. She’d turned it to the interactive map that tells you how far the plane has gone and when we left our previous location. What time it was at our impending destination. The temperature. How fast the plane was going, and where we were currently flying over.
Before I could answer her, though, the entire plane shook, causing Henley to gasp.
I’d found out, about two seconds into our takeoff, that she’d never been on a plane before.
Obviously, that meant she hadn’t experienced turbulence, either.
“It’s okay,” I soothed, making sure she could read my mouth. “Turbulence is normal.”
She looked like she wanted to disagree but decided to keep her mouth shut instead.
I immediately felt awful.
She’d had to remove her transmitter when the plane’s engines started up, and she hadn’t been able to keep it on since.
Meaning she was running short one sense during a brand-new experience.
Luckily, she had me to distract her.
I caught her chin and turned her face toward me, and away from the interactive map in front of her.
The moment her fearful eyes met mine, I immediately softened.
I also knew just what to ask to make that fear go away.
“How many babies do you want?”
“If a man like Rhys Rivera asked me how many babies I wanted, I’d melt into a puddle on the floor,” someone whispered a little too loudly behind us.
I ignored them and then decided that the rest of this conversation would take place with me not actually saying the words.
“Uhhh,” she hesitated. “Is this a test I can fail?”
I snorted. “No.”
I still held my hand on the corner of her face, keeping her eyes pointed toward me.
But it wasn’t because I thought she might look away. It was because I liked having my hand on her.
Touching her where no other man would ever get to touch her again.
“Okay,” she hesitated. “Then, my instinctive answer is one. I mean…what if that one is deaf? Would I want to subject another person to this existence?”
She waved at herself in a breezy, uncaring way, but I could tell that she was upset.
I narrowed my eyes. “You. Are. Not. Defective.”
Due to the stiltedness of my words, she could easily read that I was putting force behind the words—words that I forgot that I was supposed to say silently, not out loud.
“Seems like she’s defective to me.”
I stood up so fast that I was doing it without actually planning on it.
I glared at the woman over my seat, gave her a glimpse of the real me, and saw her pale.
I didn’t say a word—didn’t have to.
I’d made my point perfectly clear.
Don’t mess with my woman.
The woman winced, and I smi
led, showing a row of top and bottom teeth that looked more like a leer than a smile, then regained my seat.
Henley was looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
“She was kicking my seat,” I lied.
Henley studied me for a brief moment, then shrugged. “Anyway, if our first arrives without problem then I want to try for another. As long as we keep having healthy, happy children, I’ll keep producing them.”
I grinned. “So, we’re gonna be Rivera, party of twenty-eight?”
Her eyes widened, and she spoke louder than she’d intended. “No!”
I chuckled and leaned forward, dropping a kiss onto her mouth.
Pulling back before it could get too heated, I leaned back in my seat but kept my head pointed in her direction.
The plane shook again, and I felt her soft hand take mine.
I looked down at it, studying the difference between her hand and mine.
Mine was big, scarred, and rough while hers was small, delicate, and soft.
But her tiny hand fit into my big hand perfectly, as if it was meant to be there.
I curled my fingers around hers and didn’t let go.
Not when the plane shook again, and certainly not when the plane jolted so hard that one of the oxygen masks in the seat in front of us descended.
“Please make sure that your seatbelt is fastened. The staff will now be taking their seats until we can get through this rough patch that we’re about to go through. I’ll also be dimming the cabin lights,” the captain suddenly came over the air.
And just like that, the lights were down low, and the staff was sitting in their seats.
The way that our seats were positioned, the only people that could see our seats were Henley and me. The seats beside us were angled in such a way that they faced more inwardly, the backs facing away from the aisle just like ours did.
When Henley whimpered, I realized that I was going to have to do something to distract her.
If this had been my first plane ride, I knew damn well and good that I wouldn’t be getting back on a plane anytime soon if I could help it.
And since we were both set to fly out to California the day after next for my next game, I didn’t want her to have any negative feelings on her flight experience.
Which was why I did what I did next.
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