“This doesn’t seem that complicated to me. It seems like two people in love who don’t have the guts to tell each other.”
“It’s not that simple,” whispered April from across the table.
Just then Max reappeared from the kitchen and the conversation switched gears again.
They spent the evening laughing and telling stories like old friends and by the end of the evening, Marisa and Tracey were both completely and utterly charmed by the man. April smiled to herself at how well they all got along and how casually Max handled being the only man in a group of four.
At the end of the night, as Tracy and Marisa were leaving, Marisa said, “We better do this again, even after you find that place, April. This man is too much fun not to have around.”
“Deal,” said Max, kissing them both on the cheek and seeing them out.
After they had watched Tracey’s car disappear at the end of the long driveway, Max turned to her. “Thanks for letting me crash your ladies’ night,” he said.
“Are you kidding me? They loved you. They’re going to expect a sexy former-marine at all out ladies nights from now on.” The words were out of her mouth before she could retrieve them, she cringed at her own faux pas and then considered if she should just come out and tell him how she felt about him while her tongue was still loosened by the wine.
No, she told herself. Don’t you go ruining a perfect evening.
Luckily Max saved her by changing the subject.
“Listen,” he said. “About your house hunt. Take your time on that, okay?”
His eyes were sincere, but as always, impossible to read.
Don’t tell me that, Max. If it were up to me, I’d stay here with you forever.
8
It took April three weeks to find a new apartment, not for lack of trying. Eventually she found a place close to the city center and the offices where she worked. During those three weeks, there had been moments where she felt that she had found what she had always been searching for with Max out at his ranch. He never made any sort of advance towards her, but he was the kindest man she’d ever met. At times, she felt the air around them sizzle with electricity, and yet both of them seemed content to ignore the feelings passing between them. After all, it wouldn’t be right. Would it?
On the evening that her new lease was e-mailed to her by the owner, she bought a bottle of champagne and met Max out on his ranch. He had taken the night off and was sitting out on the front porch watching out over the cattle grazing beside a stream.
“I have good news,” said April.
“Is that a fact?” said Max, smiling.
“Yup, hold on.” She went to the kitchen and returned with two champagne flutes. As she set them down on the porch’s balustrade, she noticed that instead of feeling excited for the new road ahead of her, she only felt regret. She popped the cork into the field laid out before them and poured each of them a glass.
“What are we celebrating?” asked Max, taking his glass from her.
“I found myself an apartment,” said April. Max’s eyes became downcast, but he smiled anyway.
“That’s…um…that’s good news,” said Max as they clinked their glasses together.
“Yeah, the owner says I can move in tomorrow. I’ll take the day off work to get settled in and—”
“April,” said Max. “I have to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“I didn’t want to say anything before. I didn’t want you to feel like I was rushing you after everything you’ve been through, but…”
Max set down his glass and stood up to face her, then he took her glass from her and set that down as well.
Their gazes bore into each other with everything left unspoken between them; all the things they were too afraid to say or even to accept to themselves. For a long time no words passed between the two of them. The simply stood, drowning in one and other’s gaze.
Then his fingers found hers and in those moments, April’s doubting mind was silenced and all that remained was the feeling of his presence and the deep rhythm of his breathing. Her body yearned for him and took control of her. She lifted herself onto her tiptoes to better reach his lips and felt the weight being taken up into his strong arms.
As their lips met, words became unnecessary. She could feel his yearning, his longing for her to stay, even, she imagined, the fear of losing her. She returned the desperation of his kiss. It was finally clear, though she still couldn’t quite believe it; they both wanted the same thing.
The intensity of the kisses became almost too much to bear and she pulled away from him, her breasts heaved as she fought to catch her breath. Her skin tingled and every part of her felt suddenly alive. She made to kiss him again, but when he leaned forward, she pulled away again.
“You’ll have to catch me,” she whispered, backing away from him.
He took a slow step forward, then another as she backed away, retreating into the house. Soon her cautious retreat broke into an all out sprint up the stairs, crying out with childlike laughter as he bolted after her. She made it into his bedroom before he cornered her against the wall beside his bed.
“For a marine, you aren’t so quick,” she said, teasing him, their lips once more hovering millimeters apart. “I almost outran you.”
“Almost, but I know the lay of the land here, ma’am,” he said.
She kissed him again then and the excitement in her belly became a fluttering of wild butterflies. They became lost in the mad rush, tearing at each other’s clothing, desperate to remove anything and everything that separated them. As her panties slipped from her ankles and were discarded across the room, he lifted her into his powerful arms and they landed in a heap together on the bed, a tangle of kisses, limbs and naked flesh.
She could feel the raw power of his muscles as he spread her out, laying her open and vulnerable, pinning her wrists and kissing her neck, her face, biting at the lobes of her ears. The rush of lust had rendered her helpless to him. She could do nothing but writhe beneath him, her hips straining to meet his. But now was his turn to tease her.
His fingers moved across her electrified skin, pinching the throbbing nubs of her nipples, twisting, sucking, while she yearned for him to be inside her. His mouth moved over the plane of her belly, kissing her navel, her inner thighs, her ankles then back towards the part of her that craved him the most.
As his face plunged between her legs, she could do nothing but ride the heavenly waves of his tongue and curl her fingers into the brush of his short hair. Her breath came out in heavy moans and even her scalp tingled with the sheer enormity of sensation engulfing her.
By the time he came up, she was breathless and half drunk on their chemistry. She guided him to her entrance, her hips rocking up to take him, but he seemed to be working on a deeper, longer rhythm, one that tortured her with its excruciating slowness, but she knew that when it came, it would be unlike anything she had experienced before.
Despite her urgings, he slid into with such measured increments that she could feel every nuance of thickness and texture with exquisite clarity. She closed her eyes, allowing him control and savored each inch of him as it filled her.
And then, just as she knew it would, his self-control wavered and broke and he took her with all the force and urgency that she could handle.
Minutes or hours later, she had lost all sense of time or how many times she might have climaxed, she found herself straddled on top of him, his back rested against the bed’s headboard, his arms bracing her back. They moved in a lust-drunk rhythm of ecstasy and she wished that she could spend forever just like that, him inside her, closer than any two people could physically be, staring into those eyes that went on forever and ever and ever.
9
Afterwards, as they lay facing each other, their hearts pounding and their heaving breath finally slowing, April said, “You know when you said I should think of this place as a halfway house?”
“Ye
ah,” said Max.
“You said halfway between my old life and the new one of my choosing.”
“Yes.”
She squeezed his hands in hers. “If I had to choose, this would be my new life,” she said.
“If I had to choose, it would be mine too,” said Max. “April, I have to tell you, I knew from the moment I saw you at the nightclub. I wanted you. I don’t know why, or what it was, but something inside me just told me that you were…special. Now I know it for sure.”
“Max,” she said. “I hope it’s not too early to say this, but everything else has just been so crazy, I might as well come out with it.” She held her breath for a moment, afraid of the words, and his reaction, but knowing they would spill from her anyway. “I love you.”
Max’s eyes stared into her in the endless way that they did. For a moment he said nothing and she felt sure that she had made a mistake by saying them.
“I love you too,” he said. The butterflies in her stomach stirred once again in response to the words. “I have for as long as I’ve known you.”
“It seems so crazy and complicated, but when you say it like that, it’s really not that complicated at all, is it?”
“I don’t know where this will go, or what will happen, April, but I do know that I’ll be the best man I can be for you. Stay here with me. I have a feeling it’ll all work out.”
April could already imagine the perfect life with him, sprawling out before him. There was only one little black spot on the otherwise perfect blank canvas.
“What about Brian?” she asked.
“What about him?”
“I mean, what if he comes back. What if he won’t give up?”
Max took a deep breath. “April, just like everything else, we’ll work through that. One step at a time.”
“One step at a time,” she agreed.
He smiled then and kissed her on the tip of the nose. She smiled, placed her head on his chest, felt the warmth of his body and breathed his oaky scent. She felt so safe in his arms that even the thought of Brian no longer bothered her.
One step at a time, she told herself. That seemed like a pretty good idea to her.
10
One year later, to the day and that mantra had shaped the life they now had: One step at a time.
She awoke next to Max, remembering that first time they had made love. The first time they had opened up to each other and said the three magic words that had turned her world upside down in the best of ways. The sun streamed in through the wall to wall windows of his bedroom, turning his light chest hair into strands of gold. Outside, the country landscape sprawled around them and golden light lit up the fields and the backs of the cattle already grazing there.
April thought about everything that happened. All the changes that had taken place, and yet one constant had always remained: the love her and Max had shared.
She had bumped into Brian once during that year. She had been picking up groceries on a Saturday morning and seen him in one of the aisles, picking out diapers. She hadn’t walked up to him to greet him or ask how he was doing. Not out of spite or fear, he had simply been so involved in his task that he hadn’t seemed to notice her and she had thought that had been for the best. His eyes were dark and sunken and his mouth pulled into a tight, grim expression of weariness. She felt sort of sorry for the guy and wondered how he was holding up.
As she checked out, she noticed him walking back to his car where a woman sat waiting for him, her eyes were stern, her mouth pulled down in a perpetual expression of dissatisfaction. In her arms she held a crying baby that she was desperately trying to calm. April watched as Brian climbed into the car and presented his purchase.
“These are the wrong ones!” she heard Melany say. “I specifically said not these ones! These give her a rash.”
“You said these were the ones to get and not the other ones,” said Brian, sounding resigned.
“Do you even hear yourself? Do you know how stupid you sound right now?” said Melany, picking the diapers from his hand and flinging them back into his face.
April ducked away as Brian got out of the car headed back to the store to exchange the diapers. She sat in her car for a while thinking about poor Brian and his fate. Ultimately, she thought, we all have to live with our own decisions. And Brian’s decisions had lead him there.
She thought about Brian as she returned to her happy life with Max out at the ranch. She felt no guilt for it either, nor did she feel any kind of triumph for seeing Brian the way he was. She simply felt gratitude that things had turned out the way they had for her.
Meanwhile Tracey and Marisa had both found their own happy love affairs. Marisa had met a man who was every bit as strong-willed as she was; a tall, solidly built man who ran a security company. His name was Lex and seeing him and Marisa together, she knew they were perfectly suited for one and other. He didn’t pander to her, nor did he maintain a stoic emotional distance, but somehow found just the right amount to soften her harsh façade and break through to the sweetness that she kept hidden from the world.
Tracey’s love interest was a high school basketball coach in his late twenties with a wild sense of humor and the sunny disposition to match her own.
The ladies nights had mostly been replaced by couple’s nights with the six of them, and as a group they were every bit as fun. But every now and again, for old time’s sake, the ladies still got together and danced the night away like the world was ending.
***
April’s fingers moved to Max’s chest and played for a moment in that fine patch of sunlight. Max smiled sleepily, but his eyes remained closed. Step by step, her fingers walked down the trail between his pectoral muscles, along the ridges of his abs and below the sheets.
Her fingers wrapped around his morning hardness and she squeezed gently, watching the muscles at the corners of his eyes twitch ever so slightly. She kissed a nipple, then followed the path of her fingers with kisses until they reached their target.
He groaned, as if still dreaming, as she took his manhood into her mouth, slowly moving her lips up and down the shaft, savoring the length. Once it was slick with her saliva, she lowered herself on top of him. His hips rocked gently as he slid into her and when his eyes finally opened, she had him pinned beneath her, riding him slowly.
He smiled up at her, taking in her naked breasts above him. “Happy anniversary,” said April.
“You can say that again,” he said, cupping her buttocks with his hands, aiding her gentle rhythm.
She moved her hips in slow figure of eights, just the way she knew he loved until her slow rhythm became too much for him to bear and he flipped her onto her back to take charge. His strong hands, stroked and teased, while his powerful thrusts elicited uncontrollable moans of ecstasy from her. He had learned to play her body like a master musician plays an instrument and within seconds, she reached her first glorious climax of the morning.
One year. One incredible year she had spent with this man and even now, when their eyes met, the world seemed to disappear and leave only the two of them.
One year and she could still think of nowhere else she would rather be than with him.
They spent that morning of their first anniversary, in a lust-drunk rhythm of ecstasy, wishing that they could spend forever just like that, him inside her, closer than any two people could physically be, staring into eyes that went on forever and ever and ever.
THE END
Making it Raine
The Scheme
Somewhere in the cosmos, God is laughing his ass off, thought Jane Lewellyn, and not for the first time. She was the last one to arrive at the meeting, which was held in the auditorium of a local elementary school. She’d only been a member of Eco Energy for three months, but the irony was still as fresh as it’d been the first night she’d attended the lecture that they’d sponsored, about how advances in solar technology were making it possible to harvest “ungodly” amounts of energy from the su
n. She’d sat in the audience, taking notes about it for her boss, Mr. Gregory, but by the time the lecture had finished she’d been completely converted: the professor, one Frank Tyson, was eloquent, rational, backing up everything he said with years of substantive research, to the point where the only thing anybody with a rational mind could say was, “Yep, solar is the future.”
Of course she couldn’t admit it to Mr. Gregory right then and there. But on their way back to the headquarters of Rigel Investments, Inc., she realized that everything that he was spewing against the Dr. Tyson was unsubstantiated, a conjecture that the professor had spent five minutes carefully debunking, something that directly contradicted what he’d said earlier. She kept her mouth shut, though: a girl had to eat and her job at Rigel paid well enough to do so.
Adding to the sensation of irony was that one of Rigel’s biggest clients was Malcolm Raine’s Stone Bridge Oil Company, the largest and arguably most powerful oil conglomerate in the world. As her red-tounged Louboutins clacked across the floor, and she sat down in her pencil skirt and ethereal blouse, she could feel the eyes of the other members of Eco Energy staring at her: Janet, who didn’t shave her legs and was a hardcore vegan; Lindsay, who wore crystal pendants (she didn’t actually believe that they healed, they just suited her); Fred, a silversmith who made custom jewelry and only ever wore Birkenstocks.
ROMANCE: THE SHEIKH'S GAMES: A Sheikh Romance Page 94
