Her Anchor (164 page)

Chapter 7

              Max was in a state of shock for a moment as the referee held his hand above his head.  He smiled happily, however, when they handed him his new belt.  He grabbed it and held it up high, showing it off proudly.  Max was handed a mic for the honorable speech. 

              “Thank you, everyone, for this amazing opportunity.  Thanks to those of you who believed in me, but most of all, I have to give thanks for my amazing girlfriend.  Tammi get up here!”  He yelled, pointing the mic at her.  She blushed slightly, but people began to pressure her to go and soon enough she was in the ring with the new champion. 

              He wrapped his arm around her tightly, kissing the top of her head with glee.  “Like I said folks, Tammi here is the one to thank.  She is the reason I’m here in the first place.  So… that being said… I have something very important I want to ask of you.”  Max looked over at his trainer who smiled, walking over to him and handing him something discretely.  The crowd tried to look on, curious to know what was going on. 

              Tammi looked at him but was unable to figure out what he had been handed.  With a grin he opened up his palm, revealing a small black box.  He opened it and a beautiful diamond ring came into view, making Tammi gasp in surprise.  She looked at him with disbelief in her eyes as he got down on one knee before her. 

              “Tammi Diarmada, will you marry me?”  Tammi’s hands went to her mouth in surprise, but she managed to nod as tears came to her eyes.  Smiling big she lunged forward, hugging him tightly.  They kissed, making the crowd awe loudly in response. 

              Max smiled before standing up, holding his girlfriend with one arm and slinging his new belt over his other shoulder.  A happy man, he walked out of the ring, proud of himself and everything he had managed to accomplish. 

              After the big fight and the proposal, the couple had of course celebrated.  In the end, Max’s injuries had been minor and with a few sprays of antiseptic and some bandages he was a new man.   After changing out of his shorts, he drove them to their favorite restaurant where they had a romantic dinner together, enjoying the food and laughing the whole time. 

              But eventually, Tammi had to step in and say something.  “Max.”  He stopped midsentence looking at her, surprised by her tone of voice. 

              “What is it, Tammi?”

              Slowly she reached into her bag and pulled out a piece of paper.  Flipping it over, she placed it on the table between them.  Max looked at it curiously, he glanced at her.  She nodded.  Slowly, he picked it up, seeing a swirling image of grays. 

              “What is this?”  He asked, looking at it curiously.

              “An ultrasound.” 

              “A… but why?”  He asked, looking pale all of a sudden.  Tammi, bit her lip, the fear of rejection bubbling to the surface. 

              “An ultrasound…” she repeated herself, whispering. 

              “You do mean that thing that shows you your baby, right?”  Tammi nodded gingerly.  All of a sudden it all clicked for Max and he rushed over to the other side of the table, hugging her tightly before placing his hands on her stomach.  “I’m going to be a dad?!” 

              Tammi chuckled at his excitement.  Now Max really couldn’t stop talking.  But soon enough he was driving them home, holding Tammi’s hand over the console.  When they got home, he got out of the car and opened the door for her, making her giggle.

He continued to overplay the gentleman part as he opened the door and then picked her up bridal style, carrying her over the threshold.  She giggled again as she wrapped her arms around him, leaning up and kissing his lips softly.

              He kissed back, making his way to the bedroom.  Laying her down on the bed, he got on top of her slowly, kissing her neck, nibbling it gently, teasing her.  She moaned softly, her fingers pulling at the hem of his shirt, ready to get the night started.  With a naughty grin on her face, she suddenly flipped them over.

              “As an added bonus to your belt, let me personally congratulate you on you big victory, Mr. Champion,” Tammi whispered sexily as she straddled him, a fire burning in her eyes as her tongue slowly ran across her teeth. 

              “Wait… can we do this with the baby?” 

              Tammi nodded.  “I asked the doctor.  The baby is totally safe.”  She grinned, kissing his neck again, once again getting in the mood.

              Max shivered slightly in anticipation, knowing this would be one hell of a night.  Before he could react, Tammi had already ripped off his shirt and was working on pulling off his pants.  He allowed her full control for a moment until he was almost naked before rolling them over and pinning her down, keeping his body off of hers, making sure to keep the baby safe. 

              “But you know babe I can’t let you do all of the work.”  He quickly ripped off her clothes leaving her in nothing but panties.  Lustfully, he reached down, tearing away her flimsy thong.  He grinned and started to kiss her breasts roughly.

His lips were everywhere and soon he gave her nipples little love bites, making her arch her back while she made her way into his boxers.  She found his already hardening dick and started to tease it with her small soft hand.  He groaned softly into her ear, enjoying it, but he wanted more.

              He pulled down his boxers and with one well-aimed thrust he was deep inside of her.  They both paused for a moment, feeling each other.  Max moaned out, feeling her tightness all around him, squeezing his dick like never before.  Tammi could feel him throbbing inside of her and the sensation drove her mad. 

              Soon she was biting his neck and grinding her hips into him, making herself feel good.  He grinned, getting the message and started to thrust into her, faster.  Before long the only sound that could be heard in the room were their moans, laced with the sound of their bodies rubbing together. 

              Tammi had never felt like this before, and she didn’t want it to stop as she kissed his lips, her tongue making its way into his mouth.  Soon, she felt a burning heat between her legs and she knew her first orgasm was mere moments away.  Max could feel her quivering around him and grinned in satisfaction as he continued to pound her. 

              Her breasts bounced.  He kissed her hard, letting her lips melt into his own, as his fingers dug into the delicate flesh of her ass.  With the intent to make her feel even better, he quickened his pace, breathing hard. 

              It was enough to send her over the edge, making her scream out his name until the neighbors could certainly hear her.  But that wouldn’t be the last time of the night she would climax.  No, they would continue well into the early hours until they would both collapse, breathing hard, but pleasantly exhausted. 

Chapter 8

              “Max Celino making history once again as he defends his title against the undefeated challenger from Brazil!”  Tammi flicked through the channels, stopping at the sports network and smiling as she saw a recording of her now husband, holding his belt over his head.  He defended that thing until the very end and she was proud of him for it. 

              “Mommy!”  A little girl rushed into the room and slammed into her legs, hugging her tightly.  Tammi smiled down at her daughter, seeing her pigtails shake as she nuzzled into her legs. 

              “What is it pumpkin?”  She asked softly. 

              “Daddy has a booboo again,” she said, pointing to her father as he entered the room, a small cut on his finger. 

              “Again?”  Tammi asked, raising an eyebrow. 

              “Hey, in my defense, it is very hard to cut vegetables like those fancy chefs on the TV.”  Tammi rolled her eyes, before getting up and grabbing the first aid kit.  Bringing her family into the kitchen, she placed the kit on her new marble countertops and smiled.  Looking through the kit, she grabbed a bright pink Band-Aid reserved for their daughter, Emma. 

              She leaned down, giving it Emma.  “Why don’t you be Daddy’s nurse this time?”  Emma smiled brightly and nodded as her face scrunched up in focus, delicately peeling off the paper, before slowly placing it on her father’s cut. 

              He smiled warmly and kissed the top of her head before she ran off into her room.  Tammi watched her go, before turning to Max.  “You know, now that you are world-renowned and rich, you could hire a fancy chef… or maybe a professional nurse.”  She teased. 

              He laughed and pulled her closer.  “You kidding?  The fame is good, and the money is better.  But I would never give up my beautiful personal nurse for the world.”  He chuckled, kissing the top of her head. 

*****

THE END

God, why the hell was it so hot in here? I felt on the verge of melting, clean out of my clothes, into a wet, sticky puddle on the floor. Every inch of my skin was prickling uncomfortably, flaring up, making me feel as though my entire body was on fire. Perspiration was peeling down along my neck, seeping into my blouse, and dripping tantalizingly down along my spine.

I kept walking past the damn thermostat every time I happened to be in its vicinity, thinking for certain one of these times or another I would spot it turned up ridiculously high, or else simply broken. But every time I laid eyes on its face, it was like the damn thing was just making fun of me.

The temperature set at such a reasonable level that it should have been impossible to break out in a sweat. On some levels, it was as baffling and as frustrating as hell, but honestly, it wasn't like I didn't know the true cause for what I was going through.

I didn't know how much longer I could suffer through this though... There was only so much of this sheer torment a girl could take before things started getting intense, physical, spiraling out of her control in spite of her own best intentions. I mean, I sure as hell hadn't asked to have been put in this situation, and really, what girl in her right mind would?

It was getting harder and harder, as the minutes ticked by, to maintain any semblance of composure whatsoever. And I feared, in my disheveled, maddened state of being, that sooner or later I would be completely unable to avoid giving myself and my seedy, inappropriate thoughts away to the devilishly attractive guest in the living room.

I just had to focus, I knew... I had to move through this thing carefully, in order to avoid falling into the many traps set before me. I stared out the kitchen window for a moment into the darkening evening, the sun getting dimmer and dimmer at a rapid speed, and the mood becoming an even hazier, sensual one.

I turned, suddenly, almost ridiculously, shooting my head around to each side over my shoulders, thinking for certain that he was there, right behind me, leering at me, undressing me with his eyes, much as I'd done with his own clearly incredible physique so many times in my own mind throughout the course of the evening.

But of course, he was nowhere to be found... Of
course
, he wasn't... I felt like he was one of those damn paintings, the ones where your eyes were supposed to be painted to follow you around the room. Anywhere I went while he was under this roof, I felt certain I would feel him, boring into me with his eyes, penetrating me to my core, seeing so thoroughly into myself that there was nothing left to conceal.

And hell, even if I did happen to survive the evening until he made his way out the door, I had no reason to suspect that that feeling would go away. The prickling beneath my skirt, the goosebumps erupting across my skin, the sweat soaking me, and the feeling of an intimidating, looming presence lingering on and on and on.

Christ... I had to focus, I
had
to... Or else it would only get much, much worse...

I closed my eyes, and took a deep, deep breath. I tried to clear my head for a moment, to wash out any imagery of the man in the living room from my brain. To wring it out to dry, cleanse it, and leave it back in the clean, innocent territory where it should properly be.

But, of course, at this point, there was only so much that could really be cleaned away from it, only so much that I could get it back on target, and with sad resignation I opened my eyes again, knowing I was going to have to just grin and bear it until Daniel came home.

I reached out a hand for the neck of the wine bottle, and plunged the corkscrew into the lid, twisting it off, and gently tipping the bottle over into two clean champagne glasses. My hands shook dangerously as the deep red liquid sloshed into its respective containers, and I practically became drunk off of the stuff from simply coming into contact with it.

Eventually, it became too much for me, and I cursed as I spilled a more than generous splosh of the stuff across the kitchen counter, nearly knocking the filled glasses over as well, but hastily preventing myself from doing so at the last minute. It seemed like a tremendous, colossal deal for a moment, this spilling of our beverages, and I think I almost flew into a damn panic attack at the sight of the tart substance oozing across the kitchen counter.

But then, I closed my eyes yet again, taking a deep, intense breath, and struggling once more to clear my head. This, in itself, was no big deal, and if I couldn't manage an incident as inconsequential as this, there was no way I was going to survive once I made my way back out there into the living room.

I opened my eyes again, stilling my nerves for what felt like the hundredth time that evening, and went about carrying on my facade of self-composure to the extent it proved possible. I grabbed a kitchen towel and hastily sopped up the mess of the spilled wine, then cast the dirty rag aside, and gripped the necks of the glasses so tightly I might have damn near popped them off, in order to avoid dropping them and the glass shattering all over the place.

And now it was time... There was no avoiding it.

I emerged, a ball of nerves, into the living room, the most artificial smile you might care to imagine peeled red and glossy across my made-up lips, and my demeanor so saccharine that I might have passed myself off as one of the damn Stepford Wives.

He wasn't in his seat anymore, and this realization sent an instant spike of panic through my body. But then, I saw, he was just over standing and looking at the wall of framed photos on the other side of the room, and a cold shiver of relief made its way in the opposite direction.

“Hey, um... I've got the wine... Sorry it took so long, I had a little bit of a spill in the kitchen.”

He turned to me, and for the hundredth time that night, my heart nearly burst, skipping a beat, at the sight of his dark, handsome face.

“Oh, I'm sorry to hear that,” he said, in his most seductive of voices, the sound of it alone getting me embarrassingly wet with want, and my ability to resist him diminishing further and further by the minute. “Do you need help cleaning up or anything?” he offered.

“Oh, no, no,” I said, shaking my head a little bit too insistently, I'm sure, and handing the glass of wine to him before I had the chance to spill it again. “No, I got it all cleaned up, it was just a small accident. Thank you, for offering, though.”

“Of course,” he said lowly, smiling that dark, malevolent smile of his, and I tried, stupidly, to smile back. It felt like my lips weren't really working, to be honest, and I'm certain it came out more as a grimace than anything. God, I felt like an idiot... Convinced that I was almost surely creeping him out with my own discomfort, I tilted my head back and downed a generous amount of my wine, nearly draining the entire damn glass in one gulp.

It was ridiculous, I knew, but if I was going to make it through this I was going to need as much alcohol in my system as was humanly possible. As I drank, I glanced over at the grandfather clock on the opposite wall from the corner of my eyes. It was almost 7:30, damn it- Daniel should have been here at around 6:45, at the very, very latest. I was about to go flipping out of my mind, here...

Then, suddenly, there was my guest's dark, ensnaring voice once again, and I nearly choked on my wine as I turned toward him, distracted as I'd been, and caught very suddenly off guard.

“I was just looking at the photos you all have hanging up over here. Like this one, of your wedding day? You look astonishing in this.”

“Oh, uh, thank you,” I said, my mind racing, and physical compliments not at all the sort of thing I needed to hear from this man right now if I had a hope in hell of resisting his many unspoken temptations. “Yeah, three years, now,” I stammered, extending a trembling finger encased in a gold wedding band his way.

I needed to remind him that I was, in fact, a happily married woman, or at least that was the excuse I made for doing this, although in hindsight I'm almost certain that it was more like I needed to convince myself in carrying out this small, stupid gesture.

It was a huge mistake, though, as I realized very suddenly, because now he was reaching over, taking my hand in his hand, pulling it close to himself as though to study the ring around my finger. A wave of shivers came pumping through my body, and my breasts began to beat wildly with anxiety, my head spinning, and my teeth sinking deep into my lower lip.

“Wow, that's really beautiful,” he said, gazing at the damn thing with more intensity than I felt certain was necessary, and his grip all the while driving me absolutely wild. His hand was large compared to mine, rough and strong and warm, causing my own palms to sweat with the passing of every second I remained captive to his grip. “You have very soft hands,” he ventured, smiling up at me, in a way that seemed both to feign innocence and to acknowledge that he knew exactly what the hell it was he was doing.

At last, he let go of me, and my fingers seemed to withdraw only very slowly back into position, clenching into a tight fist at last at my side, as though to prevent without question any danger of such contact being repeated at any point in the future. I cleared my throat again, and tried to think of what I should say to this.

“I, um... Yes, I moisturize... Thank you...” I smiled feebly once again, unable to raise my eyes to meet his own this time around, and attempting to figure out where next to steer the conversation. Instead, I tilted the wine glass one final time to my lips, drinking away the last of my sweet, inebriating nectar, and my head spinning just a little bit as I struggled to see straight.

“I'm sorry again about Daniel not being here yet,” I said finally, looking once more at the clock after such a short time of having already done so. “I thought, you know, since he was the one having a friend over for dinner, he might actually be here when he was supposed to be. But, I guess, joke's on me...”

He smiled at this, looking over at me and studying me, and I had to avert my eyes once again. I tried to use the excuse of taking another sip of my wine, but by the time I'd raised it halfway up to my lips, I recalled that the glass was already empty, and I was forced to bring it back down, feeling largely like a complete ass at having done this.

“Oh, that's alright... Daniel always was just a little bit that way... Unpredictable... A real wild card, honestly... That's what I always loved about the bastard,” he grinned, and I grinned back at this. But then he added, “Plus, this way I get the privilege of meeting his pretty wife while he's gone...”

This, as you might expect, stirred something in me, and I squirmed in my seat with discomfort.

“So, um... Ryan... You two... know one another from college?” I offered, changing the subject as promptly as I could possibly do, blushing, I could tell plainly, my cheeks were about as red as the wine still sloshing around in his glass.

“Oh yes,” he said, peering into the surface of his drink reflectively, as though having become suddenly absorbed in nostalgia.

“Yes, your husband and I were very close back in the day. He and I did just about everything together during that time... It's strange, really, beginning such a close friendship with someone at that age... Sometimes it really feels like the two of us have known one another since childhood, even if it's only really been just a few years.”

I smiled at this, but tried to calculate a few things in my mind. It seemed, I don't know... Peculiar to me, that these two should be such close friends, given that the man sitting across from me hadn't shown up as a guest at our wedding, and if he'd been as close with my husband as he presently claimed, he should reasonably have been best man material, or at the very least an usher.

I wondered, vaguely, if there was some degree of untruth to what he said, or whether, perhaps, there had been a falling out between the two of them at some point, that had, for the time, prevented his attendance at our special day.

I put these sort of thoughts aside for the time being, however, aware as I was that they would do me no good at the present, and if anything would only serve to aggravate an already tense situation even further.

“What was he like?” I asked, suddenly, surprising even myself just the least bit at the sound of the words passing forth from my lips. “My husband, I mean, back when you knew him in college?”