DAVID: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security)

by Glenna Sinclair

  What was I supposed to say to that? I just nodded.

  By the time I got my chair around the couch and into the bedroom, she was peeling her bra from her body, her hips bare save for the bright red thong she was wearing. Talk about erotic sights! I’d never had a woman in this room before. Never thought I would.

  “Do you want to do the honors?” she asked, turning sideways and hooking her thumb under the thin string of her thong.

  I was paralyzed. I wasn’t dead.

  I rolled closer to her and hooked my thumbs under each side of the thin material. I pulled slowly, enjoying the view as her bare flesh came into view.

  “Just so you understand,” she said as she stepped out of her thong, not shy about turning toward me, baring her nakedness, “this is just two broken people finding comfort in one another. Don’t get the mistaken idea that this is going anywhere.”

  “No problem.”

  She smiled as she leaned down and pressed her lips to my forehead, her breasts falling in front of me so that I couldn’t help myself as I caught them in my hands. She lingered, allowing me to linger, loving the feel of her hardened nipples pressed against my palms. But then she grabbed the edge of my towel and yanked it clear as she stepped back, dropping the towel from the tips of her fingers as she climbed into the center of the bed.

  “Come on, big boy,” she said.

  My bed is even with the seat of my chair, making it simple for me to transfer myself from one to the other. I slid onto the bed, pulling my legs up after, struggling a little to position myself where I wanted to be. And where I wanted to be was right alongside her small, curvy body.

  I drew a nipple into my mouth, nibbling at it just slightly, just enough to bring something like a sigh mixed with the softest of moans from between her lips. Her other nipple was again stabbing the center of my palm when I wasn’t rotating it against my hand, making it grow harder and harder. And then that tiny point of erectile tissue was in my mouth and she was struggling to keep her breath from catching in her throat.

  My hand danced down her belly, my fingers seeking out her beautiful cunt. I slid my hips down a little, tugging at my dead legs so that they didn’t impede my progress as I moved down the length of her body, tasting her skin along her ribs, inside her tiny belly button, and along her hipbones. I so wanted to kiss her behind her knees, to nibble at her toes, but my movement was too inhibited. Instead, I contented myself with nibbling at the pad of flesh between her shapely thighs, my finger dancing down below, seeking out the slit between her chubby lips.

  She made that sighing noise again even as she rose up a little, trying to see what I was doing.

  “Relax,” I said, pushing her shoulder so that she moved back against the pillows again before I again adjusted my position, making some decidedly ungraceful movements as I positioned myself between her legs. She had to help a little—much to my mortification—but the reward was well worth the effort.

  I love the female form. I can’t begin to describe how fascinated I’ve been with it since I discovered a hoard of Playboy magazines under Ash’s bed when I was twelve. Not that I’ve had tons of experience with it. But enough. I can’t put into words how desperately I’d wanted to be here again, to have a woman spread her legs most willingly to my touch, to be able to taste the sweetness that only existed within the deepest secrets of a truly aroused woman. I’d even considered allowing Kirkland to set me up with one of his women—something he offered to do on a nearly weekly basis. Now I was glad I’d waited. Being with a woman was magnificent. But being with a woman who came to you most willingly, of her own desires…I’d never thought I’d be here again.

  I intended to make it as enjoyable for her as I possibly could.

  I ran my fingers along her lips, just the lightest touch. She moved her hips, and I backed away, showing her that she needed to be patient. However, patience was clearly not something Ricki was particularly good at maintaining. Each time I touched her she wiggled her hips, thrust them toward me in an attempt to force me to touch her deeper, to touch those places that ached almost painfully deep inside of her. I backed away each time, making her wait. She groaned each time. Once she even sat up on her elbows and stared at me, annoyance dancing behind the need in her eyes.

  When she finally got the message and settled down, when she resisted the need to move as I touched her, I spread her lips and slid my finger along the tender folds of her inner lips. She groaned again, her hips coming up, nearly forcing my finger inside of her. I smiled as I pulled back, and she whimpered ever so softly.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” she complained.

  “What do you think you’re doing to me?”

  She lay still again. I touched her, dipping my fingertip in her wetness and using it to allow for smooth movement over her tender regions. I pressed a finger against her clit, and she jumped, a sound of pure excitement flying from her lips. And then my lips, and she bucked, but I didn’t let go and I thought she might go out of her mind. My tongue tasted her, then I rolled the little nub behind my upper teeth and there was no keeping her still.

  “Where the hell did you learn that?” she demanded breathlessly.

  “Do you want to talk, or…?”

  “Oh, God!”

  Her clit grew and pulsated in my mouth, her juices flowing like crazy, making my tongue tingle as I ran it along her slit. She had great handfuls of the bedsheet in her hands, pulling at it as I touched her, her body writhing against me and away from me, as though she was of two minds and couldn’t decide what she wanted more.

  “Please,” she moaned. “Please.”

  “Please what?”

  I looked up at her, resting my hand on her mound aware of what the pressure was doing to her clit. She moved her hips again, grinding herself against my hand.

  “I need you.”

  “Do you?” Her face was bright red as she stared at me. She wasn’t used to expressing herself in bed. But I was going to make her. I wanted to hear her say it. “Tell me.”

  I began to slide back up the length of her body, my hand still pressed to her mound as I pulled myself with one hand wrapped around the bed sheet. She watched me, her hips still moving, still forcing my hand to offer her a limited amount of release.

  “I want you,” she said, as I stretched out beside her, my finger again searching for a way inside.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Again that blush.

  “You know.”

  “Do I?”

  She turned into me and kissed me, her kiss like the touch of a nymph in some mystical story. My thoughts turned to mush, my cock aching so badly that I almost traded places with her, ready to beg her for release. She touched me, turning into me so that we lay facing each other, our hands doing things to one another that should be illegal. Now it was my turn to move my hips, to need more than this mutual manual manipulation.

  “I want you inside of me,” she whispered against my lips. “I want you to cum inside of me.”

  And that was all I could take. I desperately wished I had the leg strength to take control, to thrust inside of her until neither of us could catch our breath, to create a rhythm that was ours and ours alone. But I couldn’t.

  That didn’t deter her. She threw her leg over my hips, reaching between our bodies to guide me to her. And then she pushed me over, coming with me, the weight of her body forcing my cock deep inside of her. I cried out, my vision blackening a little on the edges as pleasure rushed through me in a way it hadn’t for me in a very long time. She didn’t sit up like she did the night before, but she drew her knees up to give her the leverage she needed to fall into a slow, deliberate rhythm while her lips remained close to mine, her breasts pressed to my chest with the most delicious pressure.

  I took hold of her ass, holding great handfuls of flesh, urging her into a rhythm that was just a little faster, that offered just a little more friction. It was better than anything I’d ever known before. Maybe having control wasn�
��t all it was made up to be. Maybe this had always been the secret to the perfect fuck.

  We moved together for a long time, sharing kisses that lasted longer than the air in our lungs. And then kissing was out of the question, the need to reach that pinnacle, that cresting wave, too much. I saw it on her face first. Pleasure danced in her eyes like stars dancing over a cartoon figures head. And then her body stiffened as the muscles inside of her began to convulse, pumping my cock better than any hand job I’d ever had. That was when I lost it.

  There’s nothing like coming inside of a beautiful woman to make you feel like a man.

  Chapter 12

  Ricki

  I drew the blankets up around us and curled up with my head on his chest, my hand moving idly along his ribs. He reached under and grabbed my hand, intertwining our fingers as he pulled my hand up against his chest.

  “You know so much about me,” I said, “but I feel like I know next to nothing about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  I shrugged, my mind going over the things I already knew, things I didn’t really want him to realize I knew. There were somethings that needed to remain my secret for the moment.

  “Have you always wanted to work for your brother?”

  He laughed. “Wouldn’t Ash love to hear you ask that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we argued about it for the longest time when he first asked me to work for Gray Wolf.” He looked at me, dropping a gentle kiss on my forehead as if I was a simpleminded child. “It was all his idea, the company. He needed something to do, but I guess he felt like he couldn’t leave me out here on the West Coast all alone. So he started a security firm that could not only allow him to stay close to me but help some of his military buddies, too.”

  “But you didn’t want to work for him?”

  “Would you want to work for your controlling older brother?”

  I imagined Ryan, my older brother, caring enough to want me anywhere near him, but it was a struggle. I’d pretty much burned the family bridge when I left home all those years ago.

  “I didn’t want to be taken care of. I lost my job just after the accident, but I had money. I didn’t need to go to work right away. But Ash decided it wasn’t healthy for me to sit around and do nothing, so he brought me here, sat me in front of a state of the art computer system, and told me to do whatever I wanted. How could I resist that?”

  “Do you miss your other job?”

  “The FBI?” He thought about it for a minute. “I regret the way it all ended. And I regret never getting the chance to put my training to any real good. But, no, I don’t miss it that much.”

  “Really?”

  “I have the freedom to work on my own code, my own programs with Ash. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. The FBI…I think that was more to satisfy my father than it was for me.”

  “He must have been proud though. One son in the FBI and the other a Green Beret.”

  “He was. Especially of Ash.” He ran his hand slowly over the top of my head. “Father had always wanted to go into the military himself, but he had some hearing loss in his right ear from a childhood illness, so they wouldn’t let him.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  David shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  He touched my head again, running a few strands of my hair through his fingers. “I’ve seen what being in the military did to Ash and Donovan. I’m not sure my father would have been the same man if he’d seen half of what they did.”

  We lay there quietly for a few minutes, both of us lost in thought. That was my mom’s thing. That the military had changed my stepfather, making him the way he was with me. She said I reminded him of someone he’d known overseas, someone who hurt him deeply. She’d never say what that person had done, but I could have guessed. My stepfather served in Iraq during the first Gulf War. The soldiers fooled themselves into trusting the Iraqi citizens back then. There’s no telling what lies some of the women told the soldiers to get what they wanted out of them.

  I’d often laid awake at night and wondered what he might have been like if not for that war, for that woman. But I’ve come to realize that the kind of violence he showed me was something that came from inside of him. It was there no matter what happened to him. Without the war, without the woman, it might have been worse. He might have targeted us all instead of just me.

  David shifted, reaching down to adjust one of his legs.

  Two broken people. I couldn’t imagine a statement that could be truer.

  “Can I ask you something personal?”

  “I think we’re beyond the point of having to ask such a thing. What do you want to know?”

  “Why aren’t you married? Or why don’t you have a girlfriend at least? You’re a fairly good looking guy.”

  He laughed. “Only fairly?”

  “Maybe a little more than fairly.”

  “But not as buff and sexy as my brother.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. I see the way women look at him.”

  “He’s not married either.”

  “No.” David grew quiet for a second. “His fiancée was killed in Afghanistan.”

  “Really?” I sat up a little so I could see his face. There was honest grief in his eyes that spoke more of his relationship with his brother than anything he could ever say.

  “She was CIA and they were on some mission together, doing some sort of research on a corrupt politician, when they got separated. He never saw her again and the government declared her dead after a quiet—but thorough—investigation.”

  “That’s sad.”

  David nodded. “Sadder than what happened to my fiancée.”

  “And that is?”

  “She couldn’t handle this.” He slapped his hand against his dead thigh. “She came to Austin right after the accident and waited until the doctors brought me out of the medically induced coma they’d put me in. Then she told me she couldn’t spend the rest of her life with an invalid.”

  “Wow! What a bitch!”

  David laughed, but it was a sad laugh that had little humor in it.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “that was when the doctors thought I’d severed my spinal cord. After Ash arrived and insisted on bringing me back to Los Angeles where he knew doctors were doing incredible things with spinal injuries, it was discovered that my spinal cord was intact. I just had inflammation that was pinching off certain parts of it, causing the paralysis. I called her, told her what they’d said, but she had already moved on. She got married to some dentist while I was still in the hospital.”

  I touched his face and let my fingers linger on his jaw. “She didn’t deserve you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can you imagine what it would have been like if you’d married her before the accident? You’d have been destined to either a life of resentment or a nasty divorce.”

  “I suppose.”

  “No doubt about it. This accident saved you from misery.”

  He snorted. “That’s an interesting take on the whole thing.”

  “You’re still alive, aren’t you? And you don’t have an ungrateful wife tearing you down. I think that’s a win-win.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  I kissed him lightly against the lips. “One thing you should know about me…I’m always right.”

  He smiled. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  I kissed him again, my lips lingering on his. Then I settled back down against his chest.

  “What did you do for the FBI?”

  He took a deep breath, the movement moving my head as if I was lying on a waterbed or something.

  “Mostly reviewing information, writing reports. That sort of thing.”

  “Then how do you know so much about me and the other hackers I used to work with?”

  “I started out in the cybercrimes division. But it didn’t last
long.”

  “Why?”

  “I was good at it. My supervisors were concerned I might get in over my head.”

  “Or they were afraid you’d do something they couldn’t control.”

  “More than likely.”

  “Were you involved in taking any of us down? We had a lot of people arrested there toward the end.”

  “Was that why you went legit?”

  I shrugged, the memory of that time suddenly stronger than I would have liked. I’d pushed all that away, determined to always look forward, but I had to admit, there had been times when I couldn’t avoid it. Usually late at night when there was nothing to occupy my mind but my regrets…and David was a huge part of those regrets.

  “I had lots of reasons.”

  “Like…?”

  “Why so curious?”

  I felt him shrug, but I refused to sit up and look at him; I refused to look in his eyes as we discussed this one thing I really couldn’t share with him.

  “It just seems odd, the way you turned from being that person who only wanted to prove how vulnerable we all are to being one of the corporate leaders you once blamed that vulnerability on.”

  “I guess I finally saw the value of having money.”

  “Or was it something else? Were you afraid of being caught?”

  “If I was, you wouldn’t know who I was back then. I would have taken more care to hide my identity.”

  He was quiet for a minute, but I could feel the wheels turning in his head. He was putting it all together and that was the last thing I wanted.

  I climbed out of bed and began fishing around for my dropped clothing.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Fun’s over,” I said, glancing at him. “I should go home. I have an early meeting in the morning.”

  “Just like that?”

  “You didn’t exactly stick around last night.”

  He looked sheepish even as he sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress with his hands.

  “I wasn’t sure you would want me there in the morning.”