The Cowboy's Convenient Wife

by Joanna Bell

  She was kneeling beside me, looking down. And somehow I knew, before she even answered, what she was going to say. What she wanted. My brain almost folded in on itself.

  How many blowjobs had I received at that point in my life? I didn't even want to think about it. A lot, let's put it that way. All those pillow-lips, artificially plumped and shaped and smeared with sticky, fruit-scented lip-gloss. Sometimes I would find some of it on my dick or my thigh after the girl was gone and feel a wave of post-orgasmic repulsion come over me.

  Astrid didn't have lips like that. Hers weren't pumped full of crap or too big for her face. She actually had quite a small mouth, the lips naturally rosy without any make-up – and ever so slightly chapped at the time, due to our activities. I knew what it was to need a woman's mouth on my cock. I didn't know what it was to need only one woman's mouth on my cock. Just anticipating it sent a surge of electricity right down to my balls.

  "I, uh," she started. "I want to do something."

  I actually saw my cock twitch. "Oh do you?"

  "Yeah," she replied, laying her hand on my belly and pushing her fingers into the trail of hair that led down from my bellybutton. "I never, um – I never really got into this before. I did it, but I didn't really want to do it. You know?"

  I thought vaguely of all the lackluster head I'd gotten – and given. It was all a billion miles and a thousand years away. "Yeah. I know."

  Astrid gathered her hair behind her head and tugged it down over one shoulder. And then she looked at me.

  "I want to do it this time, though."

  She's lucky I didn't die right there next to her. She's lucky I didn't just fucking expire from arousal. You would think I wouldn't be ready so soon after the last time – you would be wrong. My cock was so stiff it ached. The head was so sensitive just the feeling of her breath had me leaking pre-cum.

  "Do you?"

  Instead of answering, Astrid bent down another few inches and slid her warm, wet tongue over the underside of the tip of my cock. My eyelids fluttered shut, my whole body relaxed back into the bed and a long, slow moan escaped my lips. I couldn't keep my eyes closed for long, though. I had to look. I had to watch what she was doing to me.

  "Is this OK?" She asked, running her tongue over me again and gently, tentatively caressing my balls in one of her soft little hands. "I don't – I don't really know if I'm very good at this. I'm not sure if –"

  "Astrid?"

  "What?"

  I reached down and caressed her cheek. "You couldn't do this wrong if you tried."

  One thing that always got me about Astrid Walker was her obvious need for my approval. I hope that doesn't sound fucked up. I mean, what's so bad about needing someone's approval? It's not like I didn't need hers way more than I should have, either. There was just something so sweet and open about the way she needed me to tell her something was OK, to reassure her or hold her hand.

  Even when it was about the right way to put her mouth on my cock it was still – because it was her – strangely sweet and innocent.

  My reassurance worked, too. She lowered her lips over the head, pushed them down my shaft. My breath caught in my throat at the feeling of her mouth around me, the perfect, smooth wetness of the inside of her cheek. I forced my hips to stay where they were, even though every instinct in my body wanted to push up, to go deeper.

  And then she slid back up again, and then back down, and then up until a slow, torturous rhythm was established. I could feel the cum in my balls building up again, who the fuck knows where it even came from that time but it was there, ready for Astrid to draw it out.

  At one point she did this thing, curling her tongue up underneath me and flattening it out over the very tip. I don't even think she meant to do it but the sound I made and the way my body tightened must have told her I liked it because she did it again and again until I had to reach down and touch her hair.

  "Baby. Astrid. Oh – fuck. Hold on."

  She looked up at me, worried. "What? Did I do something wrong?"

  I chuckled as my cock throbbed against her lips. "No. No, you did not do anything wrong. I just – if you keep doing that you're gonna make me come."

  She smiled. A half-shy, half-cocky and deeply proud smile. I don't think I've ever seen a sexier look on a woman's face. "Am I?"

  "Yeah," I nodded, brushing a lock of hair off her shoulders. "You are."

  Without any warning she dipped her head down once more, taking me further into her mouth than she had yet managed. I leaned my head back into the pillow as my thighs tensed up. It was getting very difficult not to thrust myself further into her mouth.

  She pulled off me again and looked back up. But instead of saying anything she just kissed the tip of my cock, and then the underside, and then all the way down the shaft to my balls and back up. And then she took me into her mouth one more time and started to work her way up and down again.

  It was coming. I could feel it. I grasped a handful of bed linens in one hand as the sweetness of her mouth around me started to get to the point of being too much.

  "Fuck!" I gasped, finally unable to stop myself, my hips jerking upwards involuntarily as the release approached.

  She didn't gag. She almost did, though. And I knew if she kept doing what she was doing, I wasn't going to be able to hold back the next urgent thrust.

  "OK. Wait. Wait!"

  She stopped. "Yeah?"

  "Baby," I panted, squeezing my eyes shut as the orgasm threatened to spill over anyway. "I can't hold back. I –"

  "I don't want you to hold back."

  Girls have said that to me before. They get all worked up and think they can take me – but most of them can't. Usually, that doesn't bother me. Hell, someone unexpectedly gagging on my cock used to be a huge turn-on.

  Not with Astrid. I didn't feel the same way with her. I didn't want to take pleasure in her discomfort.

  I smiled. "I think you do, babe."

  "No," she insisted, shaking her head. "I don't."

  I don't think she realized what a dangerous game she was playing. At least I thought I didn't, until she took me into her mouth and did that thing with her tongue one more time.

  "I don't want you to hold back," she repeated, and the sound of her talking with my cock halfway inside her mouth just froze my fucking brain. "I want you to come in my mouth, Cillian. I want – "

  That was too much. Maybe a better man would have managed to hold off – but I was not a better man. Not back then. I thrust my hips up and buried myself back inside her soft mouth. She took me, too. What a perfect girl. She knit her delicate brows and closed her eyes and took me. And when the dam of my pent-up bliss broke and I exploded in the back of her throat she swallowed all of it.

  It's a weird thing, sex. Maybe everybody but me already knew that. Sex for me was like putting on a jacket when I was cold or eating a sandwich when I was hungry. You eat the sandwich and that's it, it's done. Until the next time you're hungry – and then you eat another sandwich. It was never more than the simple meeting of a need. Sure, sometimes the need is extreme. But try letting yourself get really thirsty on a hot day sometime – you'll never taste anything better than plain water after too long without it.

  Is sex more than that? It wasn't. Not for me. Not until I met Astrid.

  Afterwards, when my eyes had uncrossed and my brain was working again, I pulled her up into my arms and kissed her – her cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids when she closed her eyes, her chin, her neck. If I could have swallowed her whole I would have.

  Sex isn't just weird in how little – or how much – it can mean, though. Getting blown, for example. You'd think having my cock sucked would be a power trip, right? Sometimes it is. Show me a man who says he doesn't enjoy the sheen of sweat on a woman's forehead when she's doing her best to please him and I'll show you a liar. But there's this idea – one I fully subscribed to – that it's about submission and dominance and power. And don't get me wrong, it is. But there's this crazy t
wist that can happen where it's so sweet and so good it almost reverses the dynamic. When you need someone, they have power over you. And I needed Astrid. I needed her submission. I needed her need to please me. It wasn't something that was within my control. Being with her was like doing the best coke of my life for the first time. No. It was better. And I think part of me knew, as I kissed the top of her head, that I would be chasing that high for the rest of my life.

  "Why are you looking at me like that?"

  I rubbed my forehead, pained in the best way. "I don't know."

  "Did I do it wrong? I told you I don't have a lot of –"

  "You crazy girl!" I laughed, and then pulled her in close so I could whisper in her ear: "No, you didn't 'do it wrong.' Nothing about that was wrong, OK? In fact I think that might be the most right thing that has ever happened to me."

  "Really?"

  Oh Jesus. She was so sweetly earnest, so genuine in her need to know she hadn't done it 'wrong.'

  "Where did you come from?" I asked quietly, looking into her eyes. "Really, where did you come from?"

  "Miami."

  "Ah yes, Miami. And are all the girls like you in Miami? Because I think I'm moving if they are."

  "You're not moving anywhere!" She admonished, wagging one of those long, slender fingers at me. "You're mine now."

  You're mine now. In the past, a statement like that would have had me dressed and out of there so fucking fast.

  "You know everyone is going to think we made a mistake, don't you?" I asked, lifting her hand to my mouth, kissing each fingertip, and then doing the same to the other hand.

  "I know," Astrid replied. "But I don't care."

  I trailed my fingers up and down the soft skin of her back. "Neither do I. I'm glad we did this. Fuck everyone else."

  "Yeah," she hesitated briefly. "Fuck everyone else."

  I laughed and she scrunched up her nose. "What? Are you laughing at me?"

  "I'm laughing at you cursing," I said, craning my head down to kiss her mouth. "You don't curse a lot, do you?"

  "Not a lot. Sometimes – but yeah, not a lot."

  "It's not a problem," I smiled, seeing that she was self-conscious. "I like it. I bet your parents raised you right, didn't they? Yeah, look at you. I can tell. I bet everyone loves you."

  A little shadow flitted across her face. I wasn't expecting that. It was unthinkable to me, in the first throes of love – which I was very much in, whether I fully understood the gravity of it or not – that anyone could find Astrid Walker anything other than entirely captivating.

  "My parents raised me well," she said. "You're right about that. They're good parents, they do everything they can to support me."

  It hit me, as I lay in bed naked with their daughter, that I was probably going to meet Astrid's parents soon. You can't very well be married to someone and not meet their parents – right? I didn't want it to happen too soon, though. Not while we were so completely wrapped up in each other. I wanted more of that. Days, weeks, years of it. Real life could wait.

  "Wait – is there someone who doesn't love you?" I asked. "And do you want me to kill them?"

  That last question from me came out at the same time as Astrid said this:

  "I don't think my fiancé –"

  She stopped right there, realizing what she'd let slip. And I, for a few seconds, wasn't sure if I'd heard her correctly.

  "Your – fiancé?" I asked slowly, surprised by the strength and depth of the negative reaction the word drew up in my chest. "Wait. Were you –"

  "I was engaged," she replied quickly. "I should have told you. I'm sorry. I didn't – I didn't mean to keep it from you."

  She was afraid. I could see it in her eyes, big and round with worry. Was she afraid of me? Did part of her sense the anger buried in my soul?

  Astrid didn't have to be afraid of me – or so I thought. It wasn't her I wanted to tear limb from limb. I sat up and took a deep breath.

  A fiancé?

  I'm not a fucking caveman. Not always. I don't expect girls to be virgins, and I certainly didn't expect Astrid to be one. I had a history – much more of one than she did – and I knew that she did, too. I just assumed it would involve boyfriends. I assumed it would be like my history, albeit maybe a little less busy. I thought there might even be a long-term boyfriend or two in the mix. She did seem like the type. But a fiancé?

  You have feelings for a fiancé. You love a fiancé. Don't you?

  Of course my head was immediately filled with images of Astrid doing to some other man what she had spent the last 48 hours days doing to me: lavishing him with her feminine attentions, laughing at his stupid jokes, closing her eyes and sighing as he –

  I forced myself to stop picturing it.

  "It's OK," I said, definitely trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince her.

  "Are you sure?"

  She knew I wasn't being truthful. We both knew. And it suited both of us to pretend we didn't.

  "Yeah," I replied, forcing a smile. "Of course it is. What – you think I expected you to be an untouched virgin?"

  "No," she continued, her body stiffer in my arms than it had been just moments before. "I just – you don't think I kept something from you, do you?"

  "We hardly know each other! How could you be keeping things from me?"

  I was correct about that. We did hardly know each other, and the idea that either of us could be said to be keeping things from the other at that point was absurd.

  Absurd or not though, Astrid's erstwhile fiancé bothered me a lot more than I was letting on.

  Chapter 12: Astrid

  I showered before we went out for dinner and as much as I didn't want to admit it I half-expected Cillian to be gone by the time I was finished. He was upset about Julian, even though he insisted he wasn't. And I was so lacking in backbone or whatever you want to call it that I thought it was my fault.

  I was, I admit, a little star-struck by my tall, movie-star-handsome husband. More than a little star-struck, perhaps. I never even crushed on boys like him at school. It's like my soul just knew it wasn't worth it, that I never would have had a chance anyway. Boys like that went for their female equivalents: bubbly cheerleader types with gorgeous figures and perfectly applied contour. They didn't go for mousy, anxious beanpoles.

  But Cillian did go for a mousy, anxious beanpole and honestly at the beginning it was just about the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. There simply isn't anything else like the careful attentions of a man like that. It thrilled me to my core just to get a conspiratorial look from him, or a soft pat on the butt as he ushered me through a doorway. I was utterly besotted. And because I was besotted, I was afraid. Afraid he would come to his senses. Afraid he would realize that while I wasn't so bad, he still preferred bubbly cheerleaders.

  After my shower I stood in front of the bathroom mirror wondering if he was in a taxi on the way back to the airport, cursing himself for being stupid enough to marry me. And then he knocked on the door.

  "Astrid?"

  I swallowed. "Yeah?"

  "Are you OK?"

  "I'm OK," I called back.

  "Are you?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Can you open the door?"

  I opened the door. Cillian was wearing jeans and nothing else and looking like the epitome of what Ava would have called a "snacc." I mean really, in what universe was it likely that a girl like me would get a man like that?

  "What's that?" I asked, finding the distraction I was seeking in the form of what looked like a small tattoo on his left bicep. "On your arm."

  "It's my mom's birth date."

  "That's sweet," I said, touched. "Your parents are divorced, right?"

  He drew in a slow breath. "Actually, my mom died. When I was 7. I guess we're gonna have to take a break from fucking to talk to each other at some point, huh?"

  Cillian Devlin didn't have a mother. Something in my heart gave way at the thought of him as a
little boy suddenly finding himself without his mom to hold his hand and kiss his scraped knees when he fell.

  It was easy for me to see him as almost superhuman. He was so strong, so confident, so effortlessly good at wrapping me around his little finger. But he wasn't superhuman. Indeed, my husband was as flawed and damaged and likely to conceal his weak spots as any of us. He was just a lot better at looking like he wasn't – and I was too drunk on sex and muscular shoulders and whispered conversations in the dark to notice.

  "Yeah," I replied quietly. "We are."

  ***

  "Oh come on," I admonished an hour or so later, when Cillian asked the waiter for steak. "This restaurant has 3 Michelin stars."

  My husband looked at the waiter, and then at me, and shrugged. "So what? You don't have to have one."

  When the waiter was gone, he grinned at me across the table.

  "Look at you, all offended. That's adorable."

  "I'm not offended."

  "Yes you are," he laughed. "It's OK. I just want a steak, that's all. And I don't even know what a – what did you say? A mitchabin star? I don't even know what that is."

  "What?" I replied, giggling at his pronunciation. "You don't know what a Michelin star is?"

  "A mitchabin–what? How do you say it?"

  I pronounced it slowly. "Meesh-uh-lan. It's a way to rate restaurants. You can have 1, 2 or 3 stars and 3 stars basically means you're eating at one of the top restaurants in the –"

  "Mitcha–what?"

  That was the point at which I noticed a smile twitching at his mouth. "No. It's meesh. Meeeesh. Not –" I paused as the smile overtook his face, and then dipped my fingers into my champagne and flicked it at him. "Jerk!"

  He leaned back in his chair, chortling. "You must think I'm a real hayseed, huh?"

  I sighed, embarrassed I'd fallen for it. "Well how am I supposed to know whether you know what a Michelin star is or not?"

  Cillian put on a high-pitched voice, imitating me. "Meesh-uh-lan. Meeeeesh."

  "OK!" I protested. "I get it, you know what a Michelin star is."

  "Actually," he commented, picking up his champagne glass and emptying it in a single gulp, "I don't. Not really. I've heard of them – my stepmom seems to care about them. But – well, you saw Sweetgrass Ridge. Do you think the people there give a shit how many Michelin stars a restaurant has?"