The Complete Series Boxed Set (40 page)

Mike and Dylan sha
r
ed a look of horror.

“
Shit,” Dylan muttered without thinking.
 

“Tit! Tit!”

Laura, of course, picked that exact moment to shuffle back in for her second cup of coffee. How that woman managed to drink it that hot and that fast made Dylan’s mind reel.

“
G
reat!” she said with abundant sarcasm. “Just great!”

“Tit mama. Tit mama!”

“She’s got
that
right,” Dylan said, staring a
t
Laura’s lush, untamed breasts. His favorite time of day was morning, when she awoke braless, letting the girls hang out as they should. He hardened under his all-too-thin shorts, and it was painfully obvious.

And painful.

“Jillie, don’t say…you know…” They’d learned the hard way that a toddler
would
just keep repeating the very thing you try to tell her not to. Toddler Logic 101.

“
Tit! Jammit tit!”
 

“Damn tits making me hard,” Dylan said in a voice meant for Mike. But he was a little too loud.

“I heard that!” Laura exclaimed. Her eyes traveled down his shirtless chest to his raging cock. “And I can see it, too.”

“You gonna do something about it, lady?” he asked in a
teasing
voice.

Mike made a dismissive sound. “
G
et a room.”

“You offering to watch the baby?”

Mike looked at the clock on the stove. “You two serious?” He looked at Laura, who
arch
ed one eyebrow.

Ah,
G
od, she was so ripe this morning.
Dylan
could taste her, thinking of her thighs pressing against his cheekbones…

And his cock
made
his shorts
rise
like an
eight
-person dome tent.

But he only needed one person right now…

Mike smiled. “You do the same for me tomorrow?” he asked Dylan. “I gotta leave in fifteen minutes, though.”

Laura laughed and pointedly looked at Dylan’s crotch, which only made him harder. “I think three minutes will do it,” she teased.

“
Three? Only three?” He gave a look of concession. “Okay, to come inside you.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the bedroom. “That gives us twelve minutes for everything else.”
 

She followed him, jogging a little, which made her tits bounce and his body tense with growing arousal. Jesus. She was serious. He had been joking about sex and now—

Man
, he loved his life.

Throwing her on the bed, he stripped her out of her pajamas in seconds, throwing his own shorts so far across the room he’d fin
d
them later in a spider plant that was perched on a shelf above the bathroom doorway.
Their mouths pressed together, hot and wet, tongues dancing at the rush of decidedly illicit pleasure they were both stealing. Technically, nothing was stolen except for time.
 

And time w
a
s a precious commodity these days.

“Cyndi’s coming
tomorrow
,” she whispered as he took one nipple in her mouth.

“And you’re coming right now,” he answered, fingers on her hot red nub already, the combination of sucking and touching normally enough to drive her to her first orgasm.

“I meant,” she gasped, “we could go to the sex cabin
when she watched Jillie.
”
She frowned, her body tensing. He stopped and pulled up, looking at her obviously in distress.
 

“What?” he asked, desperate to make her happy again.

“I just…maybe we shouldn’t. Not with Frank coming around suddenly.”

Motherfucker. A flash of hot rage filled him, making him soft
en
. “When you’re with me or Mike, you’re safe. Period.”
His head buzzed like a hive full of disturbed yellow jackets, ready to plunge their stingers into the source of the problem. Laura most certainly was not the cause of any of his issues, but the urge to sink into
something
needed to be appeased. Preferably his cock sinking into her warm, loving core versus his fist into her uncle’s face.
 

“But I—”

“How about we focus on the present and worry about the rest later?” he said, nuzzling her neck.
He was taming her and gentling her all at once, her body tense and eager, aroused and suspicious, centered on the edge of some kind of yawning chasm of anxiety and dread.
 

She relaxed, but he could feel the difference.

Frank needed to be dealt with.
Now
.

“You’re right. I
l
ove you so much. And I love
this
so much,”
she said with a gasp.
Her touch on his shaft made him hard again. He was a simple man with simple pleasures, caught in a complicated web. Later, after he made her head and body explode, he’d simplify this Frank mess.

Simplify the
fuc
k
out of it.

“Ah,”
he said, words already falling from his mind like dying leaves. Inarticulate half-thoughts fluttered through the cavernous space where linear thinking was supposed to take place inside him. Replacing it was a singular throbbing need to get inside her. Now.
 

Now now now.

Her eyes were unfocused, mind a million miles away, even his touch unable to ground her. A wellspring of aroused madness bubbled up inside him, making his blood rush to the surface of his body, turning him into a throbbing mass. Maybe he didn’t need to ground her.

Pinning her in place with his cock would do.

He prowled over her prone body, one hand doing the swift job of parting her legs, mouth on her before she could protest—but she didn’t even try. Her hips thrust up in grateful acceptance of what he gave, and it was his own gratitude and grinding need that met her in his mind.

She pulled his head away, though, squirming under his tongue. “No. Not this. I want you to fuck me. Hard. Now.”

That
was an order he’d gladly obey.

Pulling himself up in a swift, flowing movement, he belied the laws of physics, his shaft filling her, meeting wet, slippery silk as he groaned, neck muscles tightening with the surprising pleasure of how good this moment always felt.
Always
. His power over her was matched by Laura’s own intensity, eyes wide open and meeting his, the challenge met by paired flesh that sought one conclusion.

Her hands were rough, hard fingers digging into the corded muscles of his shoulders, his back, and when her fingernails sank into his ass he pu
l
led out, plunging deep, the change in pace calibrated to make her gasp.

“Oh!” she moaned, the sound clipped by another thrust, then another, the lovemaking intense and hard, fevered and not gentle, as if he were driving out all her insecurity and fears by pushing her body to the limit. Maybe the mind would follow, vanquishing the confusion and overwhelm, but Dylan had no control over that. Her mind was hers. She had to find her own way.

Her body was a completely different subject, and as he pressed his fists into the mattress, curved his hips up and in, he pierced her with a final push that made her gasp turn ragged, the sweet pink of her cheeks matching the soft walls below that he played so well to elicit her explosive climax.

She shuddered and he followed, eyes now closed and body tightening, his
worship of
her soft, lush landscape the only thought he was capable of clinging to, sweat sprinkling his back, the hot push of abs against abs, her legs cordoned around his waist like he was rescuing her making him feel like a god.

Laura
did this to him. Made him feel omnipotent. Made him feel like he could do anything when he was inside her, as she wriggled and groaned, shimmered and panted—because he did that to her.

He
did.

His muscles twitched, hot seed pouring out of him, draining him, his mouth sucking one pert nipple in as she convulsed in an aftershock of sensual glory. And then it all faded, the red lights of the clock’s numbers telescoping into focus, his mind back in the real world even as his flesh was encased by her.

Slipping out, he separated himself from her, heartbeat normalizing, the transition from sex world to practical life always fragile. He grinned at the ceiling, willing his body to go back to baseline.

“Thank you for that,” she said with a sultry voice, the sound of sex in the cadence of her words. It was a full-throated sound that hinted at a landscape of lust and more. He was hard again.

She noticed.

“Nice refractory period,” she said, nodding with approval. That made him laugh, and the two dissolved into giggles.

“
O
ne minute!” Mike’s voice barreled down the hallway. “I really do have to go!”

Dylan jumped up and searched for his shorts,
finding them dangling over his head, making him laugh
. Laura mimicked him, jabbing her legs into her
p
ajama pants.

“I got this,” she said, pulling him in for a kiss, the press of his naked body against her flannel-covered hips and legs making him inhale slowly. Sensation receded, replaced by thought as the day’s tasks spread out before him.

Rather have
her
spread out before him, but hey—duty called.

A
s
she sashayed out of the bedroom and she heard Jillian shout, “Mama! Mama!” his eyes lit on his phone. Naked and distracted, he grabbed it, searching for Nicholas Murphy, private investigator.
Mike walked in as he searched the Google listings.
 

“Hey.” Mike opened the closet door and pulled out another white shirt, undoing his cuff links. “You mind covering your junk?”

Dylan looked down and shrugged. “You’ve seen it before.
D
on’t look if you don’t like it.”

Mike snorted, peeled out of his dirty shirt, grabbed the new one, and marched out down the hall, shouting, “Laura? Can you tie my tie for me? You do the knot just right.”

Within three minutes he had the number. And just as he heard Mike’s Jeep roar out of the driveway, a voice rou
g
her and more jaded than any he’d ever heard in his life answered the phone.

That was a big fucking comfort, because rough and jaded got shit
done
.
 

Leaving Laura, Jillian, and Dylan wasn’t hard—
Mike
knew Dylan would keep them safe if something happened, and the chances that this Frank character would cause problems were remote. While Laura was clinging to Jillian like she was
a life preserver, Mike looked at this from a different angle.
 

Frank wanted money.

What was his price?

A five-figure check could make this all go away. Maybe. If Frank knew how deep their pockets were, he
would
want more. And if they gave him money, he might come back again. Knowing the tap was as big as it was—and the $2.2 billion trust fund was public knowledge—would Frank’s interference never stop?

Then again, this was shadowboxing right now. The guy didn’t have the balls to approach Laura directly. Josie—in person. Laura—by email.

He was cagey, all right.

And Mike had no problem writing a check to make this all disappear.

His call to his lawyer had been revealing, and when
all was said and done they’d scheduled a meeting for later today to discuss the implications of possibly giving Frank money to go away. First, though, he had this real estate buyer’s meeting.
 

While he wasn’t planning to sell the resort, he was prepared to sell off enormous tracts of land for a singular purpose:

To preserve them.

A real estate developer had recently made plans to put in more than one hundred new homes on land that had come available earlier in the year, along with strip malls that could drive small local businesses into the ground.

He was too stretched to buy it then—even a $2.2 billion trust fund had its limits when you split it with another person and only could use the income each year.
No complaints.
That amount was a small fortune, but in terms of running a complex business
like his ski resort,
with more than a hundred employees, loads of heavy machinery, high liability costs in cases of injury, and myriad issues that plagued small ski resorts, it wasn’t as much money as he’d thought.

But he was fine.

A conservation group’s attorney had approached him last week to discuss buying ski resort land
that abutted the proposed development
for a simple purpose: protection. If the land were environ
men
tally protected, the developer wouldn’t be able to put houses so close to the ski resort.

Locals were excited by the idea, and it could help the community.

A thought nagged at him, driven by comments from Laura:

When was enough
enough
? He didn’t have to own the resort. He didn’t have to run it. While he’d handed much of the workload over to Shelly, his now-
o
perations
m
anager, he still worked too many hours. Work invaded his mind constantly, and he never, ever felt like he could turn it off. Never felt like he could relax.

Never could let his guard down.

And now Frank came along and made his guard go way, way up. Unlike Dylan, he wasn’t hyped up. Unlike Laura, he wasn’t scared.

Mike’s view of this was more tactical. Figure out the guy’s weakness. Figure out what he wanted most. Manipulate those two pieces of information to strategic advantage. Dev
e
lop a plan. Execute it.

And then wa
l
k away from the entire mess.

If it could be so easy, though, it would be. Nothing was ever that simple. As he picked up Route 2 to head into the city, his mind was everywhere but where it should have been.

Home.

With the people he loved most.

* * *

The meetings in Boston had gone well enough that he drove back to the ski resort’s corporate offices with a much lighter heart. The conservation group advocates were well informed and pleasant to work with, and his lawyer had given him the most basic of advice regarding Frank, which boiled down to one simple word: