by Julia Kent
“That’s because I’m not there,” he said in a seductive voice. Her body tingled, a shiver running through her. How could he make her shift gears like this, and so quickly?
“This place is surrounded by woods,” she replied.
“Now you’re speaking my language. I would love to do a repeat of our walk in the woods the other day.”
“Me, too.” She still wasn’t sure what had unleashed that fiery part of her. The power and the force of her desire had risen up inside her like a sudden squall, a tempest in her chest and core, and nothing could sate her. Nothing. She’d spent the better part of the night jumping a surprised but delighted Mike, while Dylan had tended to poor Aaron and his new tooth.
Life was a series of transactions involving meeting children’s needs.
Laura had a brief flash of remembering she had needs, too.
“We have a week in Paris to spend getting more of that, Laura,” he said, his voice dragging over her like fingertips, making her wet and aching just from the suggestion. She was glad she had the cabin to herself tonight, with Josie settling into the one she’d share with Alex, because Laura was going to need some quiet time to, um...manage these desires.
Two hands at a time. If she couldn’t have four on her, at least she could take care of matters herself. When was the last time she’d done that?
“You there?” Dylan’s voice sliced through her ridiculous thoughts about orgasms, making her sigh deeply, the end of her exhale a groan he took for pleasure.
“You’re thinking about sex, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Damn. I’m getting hard just talking about it.”
“Are we having phone sex, Dylan?”
“Do you want to have phone sex?”
“I want to have real sex.”
“I am on your team, babe.”
“Now.”
“Uh....no can do. Give me a day.”
“A day,” she said. “I know.”
“But you can take care of things.”
“I know.”
“Another one of those things you know, but don’t do, huh?”
“Masturbation isn’t exactly high on my list of daily priorities,” Laura joked.
Silence.
Huh. She was learning lots of new things today, wasn’t she?
“You do it daily?”
“Well,” he grunted. “You know.”
“No. I don’t know. Where do you—how do you...?” Her voice trailed off, low and hushed, and she realized this crazy conversation was turning her on more than she was willing to admit.
She heard strange shuffling noises, then a sound as if his hand brushed against the speaker of his phone. A sigh. And then.
“Mostly in the shower,” he said. “It’s easier that way. But today? Today it’s gonna happen right now. On the phone. With you.”
“Uh!” Laura made a gasp of surprise. “What do you mean? Are you naked?”
“I am locked in our bedroom, on the bed, and yes...naked. Can you imagine that, Laura?” He modulated his voice, sounding like one of those leading men in an erotic thriller, and she could, indeed, imagine him naked and sprawled on the bed, the sleek lines of his model-perfect, heavily-muscled body waiting and open, ready for her.
“Oh, God,” she murmured, her hand going to her breast, nearly stroking her own nipple. Stop this, she chided herself, looking helplessly at the back of the cabin door, wondering what she must look like right now. Josie would be here any minute. She couldn’t do this.
“I’m holding my rock-hard cock right now and thinking about you against that tree yesterday,” Dylan said.
Oh, fuck.
She couldn’t not do this.
“Aaron!” she heard in the background. That was Mike.
“Everything okay?” she asked Dylan.
“Ignore that sound. The door’s locked. Mike’s got the kids. I want to focus on us,” Dylan growled.
In her mind’s eye, she imagined him pumping himself, eyes on her, head tilted to the side, lips parted in concentration. If she were in bed with him she would crawl, naked, over his body, the tips of her nipples dragging against the thick, dark hair on his calves, his thighs, the long march up his marbled torso leading to a kiss, then the press of heat against heat, of sigh against sigh.
And...she was wet. Throbbing, wet, and in desperate need of release.
“Damn you,” she said in a voice filled with smoke and need. Of all the times to stumble across a moment like this. The change in the past two days in her relationship with Dylan, with this undertone of teeming sexuality just waiting to surface at any moment, made her feel like a giddy teenager again.
Except without the crippling self-doubt.
“What are you wearing?”
She almost laughed at the question, and then decided to up the ante. “In three minutes I’ll be wearing your pearl necklace.”
He whistled through his teeth. “Oh, God,” he groaned. She could almost feel him pumping with his hand, could imagine the silky-dry feel of his shaft, how skimming it with her curled-up palm gave him an out-of-proportion level of pleasure that she never quite understood.
Then again, the clitoris wasn’t exactly straightforward, either, yet Dylan and Mike managed to do whatever needed to be done to make her orgasms rocket her into the ethers.
“I’m remembering how your hot hands felt on me, how you yanked up my skirts at the tree,” she murmured, her own hand staying firmly by her side. There was no way she was going to reach unto her waistband and touch herself right now, because Josie could appear at any minute.
But getting Dylan off? That she could do.
“How you slid right in my wet, eager...pussy,” she rasped, a little self-conscious with the dirty talk. The word echoed in the empty cabin and she suppressed a giggle.
His breath hitched and...there he went. She might be hundreds of miles away from Dylan, but she knew the sound of his orgasm.
He came back to the phone, panting and a little embarrassed. “That turned into a one-minute wonder, huh?”
Laura started to reply, but stopped.
“Aaron?” Mike called again, his voice hollow and tinny in the background.
And then she heard the unmistakable sound of:
“DYLAN? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING NAKED ON THE BED?”
“The door was locked!” Dylan bellowed back. “What the hell? You picked the door lock?”
Laura heard shuffling sounds, like Dylan pulling the covers up. She imagined the poor guy, startled and muddle-headed, that post-orgasmic bliss destroyed by Mike.
“I thought Aaron locked himself in here again. I can’t find him!” Mike’s voice was filled with self-righteousness.
“You could have knocked!” Dylan sounded like a teenage boy getting caught looking at his dad’s Playboy magazine.
“How the hell was I supposed to know you’d be on the bed...naked...doing, you know—”
“Aaron’s in da tent in da wivving woom! We’re playing hide-an-seek, Daddy!” Jillian’s voice was unmistakable. “Papa, why is your chest naked? You taking a baf?” she asked.
“Let me give you a biiiiiiiig hug, Jilly!” Mike said. “I’ll pick you up. Don’t get on the bed right now. Papa needs some privacy.”
“Oh, sure, now you respect my privacy,” she heard Dylan shoot back.
Mike and Dylan bickered in the background while Jilly started chanting “Baf! Baf! Baf!”
Laura bent over in half from laughter. Her wheezing was the only sound she was capable of making, and that’s exactly how Josie found her a minute later when she walked through the front door of the cabin.
Not wanting to add to Dylan’s obvious distress, she hit “End” on the call and looked at her friend, who stared at her with a bemused expression.
“Something funny happen?”
“You might say that.”
Chapter Nine
Mike Pine
If the shadow government ever wanted to create
a new form of torture that would be highly effective in breaking interrogated suspects, he had an offer they couldn’t refuse: a six-hour road trip with three children ages three and under.
Mike had cracked indeed.
He had memorized all of the lyrics to Let It Go a long time ago, but after the seventeenth time in a row of playing the song, he was pretty sure he could recite it on his deathbed. Add in Jillian’s obvious inheritance of her mother’s tone deafness and he was scanning the road for anything close to a drug store where he could buy ear plugs.
Or an ice pick.
“You okay?” Cyndi asked. She was in the minivan with him. Dylan was driving behind, in their little compact car. When the wedding was over, he, Dylan and Laura would head down to Boston and fly out of Logan Airport. A coin toss had made Dylan the driver in the quiet car. All he had was Cyndi’s twenty-year-old niece, Ellie, who raved about audiobooks and begged to have them listen to some book called Outlander.
“I need to peeeeeeeeeeee!” shouted Jillian.
This was the seventh time in four hours. They’d already stopped once in Maine, and they had at least two hours to go, though in toddler driving time, that would probably become five.
“Are you sure?” he asked, trying so hard to keep the edge out of his voice.
“Do you want me to sit back there with them? I can play iPad games, or just distract her.”
“DADDYYYYYYYYYYYY! The pee is trying to escape!”
Mike gave Cyndi a look. “I think we need to stop.”
Thank God he had a second adult there, and one who was female. Cyndi unclicked Jillian from her carseat and took off for the women’s room while Mike stayed in the minivan with the twins, who were out cold. If only Jillian would fall asleep like Aaron and Adam.
Three minutes later Cyndi and Jilly were back in the van, Cyndi making efficient work of the carseat, settling everyone in and giving Mike the go-ahead.
“Everything all right?”
“She didn’t need to go after all.”
Potty training was going to kill him.
Mercifully, within fifteen minutes, Jillian did fall asleep, making the rest of the drive a reasonably enjoyable event, though Mike could have done without the first four hours of nerve-wracking hell. By the time they found the gaudy, hand-painted sign of a dolphin and a starfish and turned onto the dirt road at Escape Shores Campground, he was eager to see Laura.
And to marry her.
“This looks like such a wonderful little haven!” Cyndi exclaimed. What a treasure they’d found in her, Mike thought. Protective and firm, loving and open, she’d been instrumental in helping to make the crazy spectacle of raising three toddlers bearable and enjoyable for everyone in the Pine/Michaels/Stanwyck household.
Having Laura come up here for the night to pow-wow with her best friend, Josie, was a smart move. For weeks, Laura had been on edge. Wedding planning was getting on everyone’s last nerve. The day-to-day bustle and chaos of life was hard enough to get through; add in a two-hundred-person event and the family and friend entanglements that came with it, plus the location, and the joyful frenzy was of their own making—but would be a welcomed relief when it was over.
One issue he didn’t need to deal with: family. Dylan had been on the phone with his mother half the night as she packed to make the trek with his father. Everything from asking about tuxes for the boys (no), and ribbons for Jilly (yes), to the nonstop excited chatter of a proud mother had made Dylan cross-eyed by the time he’d crawled into their enormous bed, which was absent Laura.
But one twin and Jilly had zonked out in her place. They left them there, a barrier between them, which had been just fine by Mike. He was still pissed at Dylan for whacking off in the middle of the day, leaving him alone with the kids. What the hell had he been thinking? Dylan had refused to explain his actions, discreetly untangling himself from the sheets and running off to the bathroom, leaving Mike to corral Jilly.
This wedding was making everyone weird.
Except for Mike, of course.
The straight dirt road was stippled with “5 MPH!” signs everywhere, so he adhered to the warning, going slow. The minivan lurched and bounced on the uneven, unpaved road, but for some reason the kids stayed asleep. Thank God for small miracles.
By the time they got to the camp office, Cyndi was in love. Laura had speculated that their nanny would get along just fine with Sandy, the campground owner who coordinated most of the wedding logistics, and as a dark-haired woman with grey streaks and a friendly face approached his side of the van, his grin widened.
“Mike?” she asked. “Mike Pine?”
Just as he was about to open his mouth, a piercing scream filled the air. The woman he assumed to be Sandy covered her brow and peered through the back window. He turned around to see which twin was screaming, only to find Jillian with her face pressed up against the same glass Sandy was looking in, making faces at the poor woman.
“Jilly!”
“AIIIIIIEEE!” That was Aaron, who was red-faced and sweaty, likely upset by a wet diaper.
“Oh, you’re the other Mike, all right,” Sandy said as she pulled back and laughed. “How about I hop in and we drive right over to your cabin, so we keep it simple?” She jogged around to the other side of the van and Cyndi popped the electric door, Sandy belting herself in next to Jillian before Mike could say a word.
How did she know?
“I have six kids myself,” she said, answering his silent question as Aaron’s shrill screeches woke up Adam, making his brother join in. “The youngest is in his twenties now, but I remember. Oh, how I remember these days.” The screaming didn’t faze her one bit. Mike wondered if she was available for hire as a built-in grandma. He’d pay her triple what she made now.
“Turn right here, at the third road.” Within two minutes they had backtracked until they found a large cabin at the end of one of the side roads, a rustic place that looked like heaven right now.
Three adults and three kids made for an even score, and by the time the kids were toddling around, Laura came running out of the cabin, hair loose and streaking behind her, tight workout shorts making him really miss her.
Encased by small beings that came out of her body, she was in a pile of arms and squeals, fat diapers and brown hair and blonde curls, clearly enjoying her mini-reunion with the little beasts who had gone an entire day and a half without Mommy. He cracked his neck and stretched his back, the little popping sounds not really alleviating any of his tension.
A night with Laura would, though.
“Where’s Dylan? and Ellie?” she asked, looking up at him, finally free of the kids, who were off discovering sharp sticks and rocks and other calamities while Cyndi herded them through the woods around the cabin.
“Great to see you, too,” he intoned. “I missed you so much, Mike,” he added in a falsetto meant to imitate Laura’s voice.
She grinned and wrapped her arms around his waist, her kiss a little longer than usual. “Hi. I missed you.”
“That’s more like it.” He slung an arm around her shoulder, hunching a little because of the height disparity, and looked up. The pine trees went on forever, a breeze making them sway a bit like drunken soldiers. “This place looks great.”
Sandy chattered away with Cyndi, giving the kids a look Mike knew. Eager grandmas-to-be stared at the kids like this when they were out in public, eyeing the imps with such affection. He wondered if they would be so enamored if they had to deal with them in a hot, sweaty minivan for six-plus hours.
“Trip okay?”
He shot her a dark look. “Dylan won the coin toss. He and Ellie are right behind us.” He frowned and looked around. “Or, at least, they were.”
Her hand slid to his ass and gave an affectionate squeeze. He returned the favor and the second kiss they shared was slower, stronger, sweeter, with a little more punch than usual. By the end of it, he was ready to groan, and wondering how long before he could get her alone in a room with
a bed.
Or just a floor and a door that locked.
“You’re relaxed,” he said, smiling down at her, foreheads touching.
“I’m actually freaking out,” she replied. “Trying to distract myself.”
“Use me.”
She burst out with giggles.
“You think that’s funny? No. That’s not funny. That’s an offer.”
“At least you’re here,” she said in a light tone.
His brow turned down in bemusement. “What’s that mean?”
“Oh, you know, Dylan and I had to resort to phone sex yesterday. At least with you, I can—”
He wrenched away from her, puzzle pieces clicking in place like pages being flipped in a book. “THAT’S what his nakedness on the bed was all about?”
Her eyes turned into saucers. “He didn’t tell you?”
“No! I picked the lock on the bedroom door because I thought Aaron trapped himself in there and walked in on Dylan with his hand on his cock and—you were on the phone? You were having phone sex with him?”
Sandy and Cyndi turned, drawn by Mike’s ever-increasing volume.
“Shhh! Could you keep your voice down?” Laura pleaded.
Any other day and he could have turned down the volume. He could have turned down the adrenaline bursting against his veins, slamming into the walls of his arteries, fueling a red rage that was out of proportion. But a night with a teething toddler, more than six hours in a van being tortured by Disney music, and the sense that life was nothing but one big fishbowl filled with piranhas taking nibbles on him 24/7 these last few months had stretched his patience and perspective to the absolute limit.
No.
He couldn’t keep his voice down.
Without thinking, he reached around Laura’s back, scooped an arm under her knees, and marched her up the small set of stairs into the cabin, where he dropped her on a bed, turned around and locked the door, and began undressing, livid.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m taking a nap!” he snapped, now completely naked.
Her eyebrows hit her hair line, eyes on his crotch. “One part of you is very, very awake.”
