Complete Abandon

by Julia Kent

  “She is,” sighed Mike.

  “What are we talking about in terms of lack of interest here?” Alex asked.

  Josie gagged audibly.

  “Once a week?” Alex continued.

  Dylan snorted.

  “A...month?”

  Mike cleared his throat. “We’ve had sex twice since Jillian was born.”

  “HOLY SWEET JESUS!” Josie shouted. Thank goodness she’d finished swallowing, because the shock of that little detail would have required Alex to perform the Heimlich if she’d still been chewing. “What on earth is wrong?”

  “That’s not quite true,” Dylan said, turning to Mike. “There were a few blow jobs—”

  “STOP!” Josie ordered, just as Madge delivered plates filled with cannoli, a crock pot of what must be the mac ’n cheese, and an array of delights.

  “Blow jobs, huh?” the waitress cracked. Alex turned beet red. So cute he could blush under circumstances like this. Josie wasn’t sure if he could get any sweeter.

  But right now she wanted to kill him as he so dryly talked about Mike and Dylan’s penises as if they were commodities. And Laura’s vagina were a department store shelf.

  An empty one.

  “TWICE?” Josie couldn’t get over that one. Sure, she’d had dry spells herself. But not while living with Thor and a guy who looked like a romance novel cover model.

  “Nothing wrong with two blow jobs,” Madge muttered as she walked away.

  “See why we called you?” Dylan said plaintively. He reached for the ice cream sundae and stuffed a spoonful of creamy cold sweetness in his mouth, closing his eyes. Josie imagined it was the closest to sex he’d come in, well...a lot longer than she’d imagined.

  “Poor Laura.”

  Alex looked at her like she had two heads. “Poor Laura?” He gestured to Mike and Dylan. “How about poor them?”

  “Poor everyone,” she conceded.

  “Not poor me,” Alex whispered, his hand snaking around her waist, sliding up her ribcage to—

  “Hey!” Dylan snapped. “No PDAs.”

  “What is this? Catholic school?” Josie snuggled up against Alex’s warm form. Scrubs were thin enough to show that he was pretty warm for her form, too. She patted Alex’s hand. He took hers and put it on his thigh. Nice and high. Then squeezed. Twice in six months? Try six times in one week. Even that wasn’t enough these days, with Alex’s crazy work schedule. Mike and Dylan had every right to look so sad, but now Josie was on high alert about her best friend. Time for an intervention of some sort.

  “Might as well be,” Mike grunted. “We’re celibate.”

  “And not by choice,” Dylan added, now halfway through the sundae.

  “What are you doing about it?” Josie demanded. “Do you give her breaks? Compliment her? Take her out for nice dinners? Give her massages?”

  “Buy her a nice new sex toy?” Alex added.

  Josie’s turn to blush. “That doesn’t work for everyone.”

  “Works for you!” he said. “Snaps you right out of a bad mood. That fourteen inch—”

  Mike put both palms out flat in a gesture of halt! “We get it. And yes—we tried that. No go. We’ve sent flowers. Chocolates. Gotten extra cleaning and errand help. You name it. All she wants to do is play with the baby, nurse, and read.”

  The group went silent as they ate their way through two continents’ worth of plates filled with amazing culinary feats.

  As they picked at the remainders of the desserts, Josie had an idea. “You said she just reads all day, right?”

  “Yep.” Unison. The frequency with which those two answered the same word or phrase was eerie.

  “What’s she reading?”

  Mike’s face folded into an expression of consternation. “No idea.”

  Dylan shrugged, eyebrows coming together as he frowned, near-perfect muscles attuned and thinking, all focused on her question. He might be an arrogant ass but he was a damn attractive one. Shaking his head he looked at Mike. “Me too. I can’t say.”

  Josie chuckled. “I think,” she said, scooping the last dregs of truffle shavings out of a tall sundae glass, “you might find some answers on her eReader.”

  Alex crossed his arms over his chest, then groaned, removing his arms and placing a flat palm on his full stomach. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you think that knowing what she’s doing for most of her waking hours could help Mike and Dylan to understand what she’s feeling?”

  All three men bent in, leaning toward her, as if she were divulging the secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  “Seriously, guys? The woman spends eight or ten hours a day reading and living in a fantasy land in her head and you didn’t even think to ask her what she’s reading?”

  Mike blinked rapidly, his strong, Nordic jaw set in concentration. Piercing blue eyes met hers, buried under a brow furrowed in understanding. “She is living in that little machine. And in her head. I never thought to ask what she’s reading, frankly. I just ask about her and the baby.”

  Dylan sighed, his face so different from Mike’s, dark and swarthy, yet no less concerned. He was also the scruffier of the two, with a torn t-shirt from some ’80s band covering his toned body, and a face that hadn’t been shaved in a good three weeks. “Beard” wasn’t quite the word for the train wreck of whiskers that covered his face and neck.

  “No, I didn’t ask either.” He ran a frustrated hand over his face. “Jesus. How could we miss that?”

  “Because you’re men,” Josie declared.

  Six eyes stared at her, gone to stone.

  “It’s true!”

  “You’re saying women are smarter than men about relationships?” Alex asked, his voice fighting to stay neutral. Her heart soared. She loved a challenge.

  “Do you have a penis?”

  “You know damn well I do.”

  “Then yes.”

  “You realize that you’re the one who was so terrified of my monster of a mother that you—”

  “HEY!” Mike growled. “This is our relationship mess we’re deconstructing. Not yours. Go book a slot on Dr. Phil if you want to untangle your mess.”

  “We’re the ones who should be on that show,” Dylan grumbled.

  “You’re better suited for Maury,” Josie said.

  “Who?”

  “Nevermind.”

  “Nice diversion,” Alex cracked, elbowing her in the rib, “but let’s get back to the point. Go read her eReader. See what she’s been reading. Maybe it will give you some ideas and you can go from there.”

  “I can already guess,” Dylan groaned. “Breastfeeding books and baby signs and how to make homemade baby food. Sew your own cloth diapers. How to make a Maya wrap from leftover moss and shredded placenta. Shit like that.”

  “It’s not shit!” Mike retorted. “It’s a perfectly valuable way to bond with your kid.”

  Dylan rolled his eyes. “Co-sleeping and breastfeeding is fine. But she’s going on about sherpa fleece and buying a sewing machine to make more absorbent cloth diapers and my mind goes zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. And now she’s asking about ‘elimination communication.’”

  “What’s that?” Josie was almost afraid to ask. “Like, announcing when you have to pee?”

  “OK, she’s going overboard,” Mike relented. He turned to Josie. “No—it’s not using diapers on the baby and reading her signals when she needs to go, then holding her over the toilet.”

  “Laura is doing that?” Josie’s jaw dropped.

  “No, thank god,” Dylan exclaimed. “But she’s thinking about it.”

  “She really has thrown herself into the whole Attachment Parenting thing,” Josie agreed.

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Alex said. “Every parent has to pick the approach that works best.”

  Silence. That anyone anywhere was holding a baby over a toilet every hour so it could pee was an eye opener. If Alex wanted that for their kids... Wait. What kids? She didn’t want kids! Josi
e scrubbed her mind. She needed to focus on Laura.

  “But you might want to broaden your expectations,” Josie mused. “I think you’re in for a surprise when you see what she’s been reading.”

  “You know something we don’t?” Dylan asked.

  “No. It’s just...I’m a woman.”

  Three balled up napkins hit her head at the same time.

  Dylan

  “Are they asleep?”

  Mike closed the bedroom door slowly and looked at him, a finger pressed to his lips. Turning the knob slowly, he managed to close it entirely with just the faintest click. “Yes.”

  Finally! Josie’s suggestion had been a good one, he had to grudgingly admit, but getting Laura 1) away from her eReader 2) away from both of them and 3) Jillian away from both of them all at the same time had proven to be a logistics nightmare worthy of air traffic control at LaGuardia Airport. What a mess. Ten days after their meeting with Josie and Alex at Jeddy’s they finally had their chance. With Laura sound asleep, and Jillian snuggled up with her, they could take a long look at what was going on inside Laura’s head.

  Literally.

  The eReader powered up quickly and Dylan zipped his way through the screen to find her library.

  Well, now.

  Josie was right, much as Dylan was loathe to admit it.

  “It’s like a giant online porn shop!” Mike hissed. His eyes bugged out of his head as he leaned over Dylan and held the corner of the machine.

  “This one has ‘fem dom’ in it. What’s that?”

  “Beats me.”

  For the next ten minutes they scrolled through page after page of book covers in full HD color. Blush by Lauren Jameson. Anything He Wants by Sara Fawkes. A bunch of books by someone named Maya Banks. He suspected the book Burn had nothing to do with firefighting.

  Surrender by Melody Anne. Bared to You by Sylvia Day. Release Me by Julie Kenner. They all had tasteful little objects on the covers, with pearls and cufflinks and shadowed faces, but as Mike opened one and randomly flipped through to what looked like a sex scene—

  My, oh, my.

  Laura had quite a little kink going on here.

  In her mind.

  Dylan’s pants tightened as his eyes skimmed over the words. Women in bondage. Long, drawn out scenes that went on page after page. Master/sub contracts. And then...

  “Their Virgin Princess! That’s the book Josie was joking about at Jeddy’s,” Dylan pointed out. Mike had remained remarkably silent as they stood there, transfixed.

  A few taps and they scanned the first few chapters. Three bodyguards for a princess in a land where three men and one woman was the norm.

  “THREE?” Dylan grunted. “Do we need to make room for another razor in the house?” He snorted. “Then again, it’d be just another guy who won’t be getting any.”

  “Shhhh,” Mike whispered, entranced. Dylan could see his eyes racing across the page, eating up the words. And those were some words. You name a descriptor for male and female genitalia, it was there. And the dom in the story was—whoa.

  He made Dylan feel like a wuss.

  Butt plugs. Three ex-military bodyguards. A plane crash in the desert—Josie wasn’t kidding! That meant she was reading these books, too. Were all women reading this stuff now that Fifty Shades of Grey and eReaders had unleashed something? This wasn’t his grandmother’s romance novel. Noni had always read bodice rippers, with covers that showed a gleaming man’s bare chest next to a damsel whose dress was pulled down around her shoulders, his mouth pressed to the woman’s neckline for a kiss.

  “My stories,” she called them. Noni invested a lot of money in her stories. When she had died, they’d found more than four hundred paperbacks, mostly Harlequin books, stacked neatly in grocery bags in her guest room closet.

  The local nursing home residents had been thrilled to get them.

  Now Dylan wondered what the hell was between those covers. This was like crack for romance lovers.

  And Mike was quickly becoming addicted as he gently pulled the eReader from Dylan’s hand and walked over to the couch, settling in for a good, long read.

  Good and long being the operative adjectives.

  Those three bodyguards knew how to please a woman.

  Holy BDSM!

  For the next twenty minutes Dylan was transported somewhere else.

  And so was his cock, which twitched and grew, straining against his jeans. While his hand, a bottle of Laura’s coconut-scented lotion, and YouPorn had held his needs at bay for a bit, he was desperate for the old sex life he, Laura and Mike had shared. Thoughts of Laura filled him, pumping through his mind as he imagined she was the princess in the book, being readied for her three (no, two...) men.

  What—two wasn’t enough?

  By the looks of it, Laura needed hundreds of men. Pages of long, drawn out temptation and longing, then fevered denial and brutal—yet passionate, and loving—bondage and domination greeted his eyes as he drank it in. Mike sat next to him, their bodies touching, breathing even and steady as they comfortably read through the next few chapters of the book, shifting occasionally in what Dylan imagined was arousal.

  Or shock.

  Or, more likely—envy.

  The men in these imaginary worlds got everything they wanted. Sex. Love. The woman. A forever ending that he, Mike and Laura already had.

  Minus the sex.

  It wasn’t about the orgasm. Really—it wasn’t. What he missed most was the sound of her breath hitching in that oh-so-sexy way she had, the little give that told him she was getting ready for him. How her face flushed with need when she was aroused. The wetness of her walls as he slid one finger in her, his mouth eager to taste her juices.

  Everything sensual and alive and skin was missing right now. Collapsing into the goodness and animal need of a world where the bedroom made everything else fade, where the three of them could just be raw nerves and want and naked lust was...gone.

  Dried up.

  As if it had never happened.

  There was no lack of affection in their lives. Hugs and kisses and cuddles abounded. But when he or Mike tried to turn a peck on the lips with Laura into something deeper, she went shallow. Neither wanted to push because, well...they were respectful. Nice. Honorable.

  Learning that it turned out she’d been filling her head with this every day, for hours and hours, made him re-evaluate the last few months. Not in the sense that he should ever violate her boundary—if Laura didn’t want sex, Laura shouldn’t have to have sex. Period. End of discussion. No meant no, always.

  But what did all this BDSM reading mean?

  “Where did we go wrong?” he asked Mike.

  Mike shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes off the screen. Running one hand through his shaggy, blonde hair, he mumbled, “I don’t know, but damn, this writer can write.” A long, slow sigh poured out of him, his lips pursed, face deep in a frown. He looked like a Norse god troubled by thoughts of war.

  “No shit. You as worked up as I am?”

  Mike looked longingly down the hallway, toward their bedroom door where Laura now slept. “Yeah.”

  Unable to stand it any more, Dylan stood and marched over to the kitchen, willing his erection to go down. Heel, boy, he ordered it. Reluctantly, it began to fade. Reading all that had triggered more in him than any porn ever could. The words elicited reactions and emotions far stronger than any image or video ever could.

  Maybe that’s why romance novels were so popular. If that was why Noni read so many...

  He shook his head like a dog trying to brush off a burr. Don’t think about Noni aroused. Gross.

  The new espresso machine gave his hands something to do, scooping the coffee in, tamping the grounds, and then—yes! The familiar hiss of manna being brewed. Two little cups later, he brought Mike one and reclaimed his seat. Browsing through a new book, Mike took the cup in one big hand, his other cradling the eReader.

  “I can’t believe this is what
Laura’s reading!” Mike whispered.

  “We need to do something about this,” Dylan insisted. “It’s obviously her fantasy.”

  “We can’t engineer a plane crash on a desert island and have a suitcase full of sex toys wash ashore magically,” Mike said dryly, taking a sip.

  “No, but we could get Josie and Alex to babysit for a night while we get some velvet handcuffs and drip some hot wax on a blindfolded Laura!”

  The air rang with Dylan’s words, and...yup. Hard again. A quick glance at Mike told him he was in the same state.

  “If this is what she really wants,” Mike mused, “why doesn’t she just ask for it? She knows we’re about as open as anyone can be in the bedroom.”

  Dylan shook his head, then took a good, long look at Mike. “You look like hell.” Hair overgrown, a scruffy beard, and a button down with a missing top button greeted his eyes.

  “You’re just a shorter, darker version of me.” A not-so-gentle set of fingers brushed against Dylan’s overgrown cheek.

  “We’ve let ourselves go,” Dylan said. Aside from quarterly meetings with the Board of Directors for his new charity, an organization designed to help families of cancer victims with services and grant money, Dylan didn’t have anywhere he had to be that required cleaning himself up. When Jillian was born he’d stopped volunteering at the fire station, so now he was basically a professional dad.

  And trust fund dude, a fate he and Mike had settled in to, finally. Even Mike had handed over most of the day-to-day operations of the ski resort to his management. No one really needed to look presentable for society. Other than basic hygiene, they just hadn’t cared.

  “We can fix that right now. A quick haircut, shave, and some decent clothes would go far. You clean up nicely when you bother,” Mike said, smiling.

  Dylan frowned. “Not enough. It’s not like we’ve looked like this forever. I think we need to go further.”

  Mike finished his espresso and set the cup on the end table with a grace that belied his size.

  “How far?”

  Dylan tapped on the eReader and pulled up a page full of sex toys. “Let’s start here.”