My Mail Order Wife (The Value of a Man Book 1)

by Olivia Gaines

  It was a kiss.

  He hadn’t kissed her this morning because he was afraid that if he had, he would not have made it to the office.

  The way she handled his parents and even his brother…was nothing short of amazing. TataLavisha was a remarkable woman and she was his wife. “Debra,” he called to his assistant, “I am heading home.”

  Chapter 16. Here comes the rain…

  The first drizzles of rain started as he left his office and headed toward the subway line. He hadn’t brought his umbrella and only hoped he wouldn’t get drenched by the time he walked the three blocks home. Thurston looked down at his feet. He wished he had worn a more comfortable shoe, but he had been so thrown by Douglas not wanting him to leave him this morning. That was a truly awesome kid. He knew he would be lying if he didn’t admit to getting choked up when Douglas called him Daddy. It felt so natural with the boy. It felt natural with TaeTay as well. The two of them made him relevant.

  Luckily, he made it home in time, getting only moderately damp from the rain. He opened the front door to hear the jangling of a bell. “What in the world?” he said as he looked up, and true enough, there was a bell.

  Douglas came around the corner at a full sprint, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Daddy! Daddy’s home!” Thurston bent low to scoop the boy up in his arms. His chest felt tight as he watched his wife round the corner with a gigantic grin, just for him. I am relevant. I matter. Someone is happy that I made it home.

  “I hope you are hungry Thurston, I made roasted mushroom chicken and rice, and I recycled those veggies from yesterday into a fantastic salad.” She said all of this as she took his briefcase, kissed his cheek, and scolded Douglas. “Get down off of the man and let him get in the door good, Douglas,” she said.

  “It’s fine. He’s fine,” he told her because it was. His father never allowed them to greet him in such a manner. His mother lined them up at the door each evening to give his Dad a handshake. This was so much better.

  “You two get washed up for dinner while I set the table,” she told them.

  In the downstairs bath, a small footstool had been placed at the sink for Douglas to stand on to wash his hands. Thurston used the nailbrush to scrub his hands then watched Douglas do the same. The boy was talking 50 miles a minute as he explained how he kept the house safe. “Mommy opened the door to get the mail, but she forget to lock it. Then I saw a cute puppy out front and went outside. That was when Mommy went down to the store to buy the bell.” His little face was twisted. “I was put in timeout for a long time Daddy. She wouldn’t even let me change into one of those special outfits I wanted to put on.”

  It took everything he had not to crack his face in laughter. From this day forward, his first 20 minutes through the front door was going to be devoted to his son. When they got to the dining room table, it was set so nicely that Thurston’s eyes were wide in surprise. TaeTay picked up on it very quickly, “I know, right? I love this dish set. It was a wedding present from Mrs. Horowitz. It even included the salad bowl!”

  “Do you know Mrs. Horowitz?” Thurston asked, surprised by the familiarity in her tone.

  “No, but she gave us these dishes along with a nice note. So I made a thank you card to send to her,” she said as she shook her head to an imaginary rhythm. “I also left out all of the gifts with name tags so you could see who sent what before I put everything away. It is a nice haul. You have some good friends. Mine would have brought a bottle of Alize and some gift they stuck in a dirty Crown Royal bag.”

  He laughed. Throughout dinner, he laughed some more as she told him stories. The laughter continued as Douglas shared with him the drawings he’d made of the two of them as super heroes on a mission to rescue all the lost puppies in the world.

  “Oh, Douglas, go and grab my briefcase, please. I have something for you,” he told the boy, who sprang from the chair faster than the speeding bullet he had drawn on the paper.

  The case wasn’t heavy, but Douglas wasn’t very big for a five-year-old. He looked more like a four-year-old with an old man’s eyes. Eyes that got wide with excitement when Thurston pulled out the Spiderman costume. TaeTay gave him an angry look, “Great, now he has to change clothes again!”

  The boy couldn’t wait to get into the suit. He stripped down to his Superman underwear and donned the costume, which came complete with web slingers that shot out Silly String. By 8 pm, the walls were covered in the stuff and so was TaeTay’s hair. Thurston realized his error too late. “Well, hopefully he will shoot off his load and it will wear him out enough to go to sleep.”

  TaeTay turned real slowly and looked at her husband. She raised her eyebrows as Thurston shook his head no, “That came out all wrong…”

  “I was about to ask, is that what you need as well, Thurston?”

  He walked away saying, “I am not touching that. I am not responding. I am applying the rule of thumb and getting a bucket and cloth to clean these walls before we go to bed.”

  She let it go as well and focused on the little ball of energy. It took some effort, but TaeTay finally got Douglas out of the suit and into the tub. He would not go to bed until Thurston read him a story.

  In the living room, TaeTay had put on some soft jazz as she waited for her husband to join her on the very ugly, uncomfortable couch that she could not wait to get rid of. She poured herself a glass of wine and waited to see if he wanted something stronger. “No wine will work,” he told her.

  “Come sit with me,” she said as he took a seat in the corner of the chair, leaning into the warmth of his body.

  “TaeTay, tomorrow it becomes official; my hat goes into the ring for the open congressional seat. Once I apply, there is no turning back,” he said as his thumb rubbed her shoulder.

  “I’m ready for whatever the course may bring,” she told him.

  “You seem so calm and confident about all of this. I’m a nervous wreck; I’m not sure if I am ready,” he confessed out loud. His inner voice had been saying it since he found out, but now it was out of his mouth and she heard it. The rain had started to pick up as heavy droplets were slung against the windows.

  Her wine glass now on the table she faced him sitting on her knees, looking him squarely in the face. “As your wife, I support whatever decision you make; however, I would hate for you to pass up this opportunity then regret it for the rest of your life. I know nothing about being a congressman’s wife or even being a wife for that matter, but I do know that I will handle whatever comes our way.”

  He pinched her. “Ouch, what was that for?” she asked.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were real. How did I get so lucky? I mean no one else snatched you up to make you his? I know there are some broken hearts back in Compton,” he told her as he stared into her eyes.

  “You lucky? No, I am the lucky one. I remember seeing you come through that back door of the conference center. I was thinking a girl like me never gets a guy like that… well not unless we are a side chick or a jump off…”

  “A what?”

  A slight tilt of her head, “Thurston, where I’m from girls don’t get married. The best we can hope for is a steady long-term relationship with the father of our child or children. What we get is a piece of a man that we are sharing with two other women, that we eventually have to all catch the bus to the prison to go and see. I didn’t want that for myself, so I stayed to myself.”

  His hand slid over hers, and she continued, “I found myself as a single mother to a two-year-old child of a man that was in prison. My sister was one of those women who died for her man, leaving a son. A son of man in prison. The week before we came here, he was shanked and killed.”

  Thurston leaned forward on the couch, listening to what she was saying. “Ironically, that same week, drug dealers started showing up on my doorstep giving Douglas little odd jobs to do for money. Two of them pretty much told me I had to make a choice between the ugly, violent one or the big nasty violent one.”

&nbs
p; “TaeTay, I didn’t know. I had no idea,” he told her as he pulled her onto his lap.

  “There was no way for you to know, but we are the lucky ones Thurston. Douglas is a great kid and he deserves to grow up and be a good honest black man. I know they still exist because I married one,” she told him.

  He couldn’t help himself; he pulled her in close and kissed her with everything in him. He was feeling greedy, needy and his thoughts were getting seedy. He let her go. When she came to his bed, he wanted her to do it on her own, with no coercion from him. He bid her goodnight, and headed to his room.

  It was a little after midnight when he heard the light tapping at his door and what sounded like tears. “Come in,” he said as he reached for the bedside lamp. It had to be one of the ugliest lamps he had ever seen in his life, even with his unfocused eyes.

  “Daddy,” he heard the soft voice. “I am scared.” The rain had picked up from droplets hitting the window to a full-blown storm. Lightening flashed and Douglas nearly jumped a foot in the air. When the thunder clapped, he screamed.

  “Open the door all the way and come on and climb in,” he told his son. He only needed to tell him once. The lightning flashed again and you would have thought the boy was actually Spiderman as he leaped into the air and landed on the bed. He scooted under the covers, drawing the bedding over his head.

  He was trying to comfort the boy when the thunder clapped and he looked up to see his wife standing in the door as well. “Hell, I’m scared, too. We don’t get storms like this in Southern California.” She told him to move over as she climbed into the bed with them.

  Douglas snuggled up close to him, and Thurston draped his arm across the boy and drifted peacefully back to sleep. My family.

  Chapter 16. Man and wife…

  I can’t breathe.

  Thurston was suffocating. His legs were running, yet he was going nowhere. They were tangled in something. The harder he struggled, the further down he went. It was a dark place. The grip around his neck was closing off his throat and he could not breathe. Fight. Fight your way out. His fingers clawed, his arms were swinging, and he could almost breathe. A little more. A little more and he was awake.

  His breathing was shallow, but his chest felt heavy. The clock said 2 am. My chest. I can barely breathe. His eyes traveled slowly down his chest to find Douglas sprawled sideways on him with his little foot in his throat. The space that he had occupied in the bed between him and the boy’s mother was now filled with TaeTay, who had wrapped herself around him as well with her legs intertwined with his. Thurston moved over an inch to the left. They moved with him.

  Never one to use profanity, he was ready to start cursing up a blue moon, and his right leg was asleep and so was his left arm. If he moved another inch, he was going to be on the floor. To make matters worse, his bladder was full and it felt as if Douglas had emptied his onto his belly. “Shit, please let that be sweat,” he said. He gathered the boy in his arms, or rather the one arm that was working, disentangled himself from TaeTay, and carried Douglas to his room. When he laid Douglas in his bed, his pants weren’t wet, so it was only sweat. He made quick work of changing Douglas’s little damp sleep shirt and tucked the boy in. His little eyes cracked open only once to say, “I love you Daddy.”

  “I love you too, Douglas,” Thurston told him as he curled his little body into a ball and went back to sleep. Thurston only hoped it would be so easy for him. He relieved himself in the hall bathroom and quietly changed his tee shirt as he stood beside the bed watching his wife sleep. If it wasn’t love he was feeling for this enigma of a woman, it had to be mighty close. He slid back into bed beside her and closed his eyes, breathing deeply, inhaling her scent, and hoping to get back into a slumber before he had to get up for work.

  TaeTay rolled over on him and her hand slid low to take a grip on his person. With ease and care, he loosened her fingers and slid her hand up to his chest where he held it there for a few minutes. She moaned softly as she threw her right leg over his thighs and her hand went back to get a handful of him. “Shit,” he muttered again as he tried to remove her hand but it wasn’t budging. His body was responding to her touch.

  “Honey, wake up,” he whispered as he tried again to move her hand. This time, the movement of her hand made him gasp. Any more of that and I am going to wake you up my way. He nudged her with his arm, “TaeTay, sweetie, wake up.”

  She exhaled softly against his neck, sending courses of testosterone from his upper portions to his lower ones. “I am awake,” she said to him as her fingers gripped tighter… “…and this is not a chicken wing flap.”

  “No, it is not,” he responded as he lay there for a second; he didn’t want to move too fast. Everything about him was fully awake now, but he was not going to rush her. Even as badly as he wanted this moment to occur.

  “Thurston, I am in your bed,” she told him. That was all he needed to hear.

  “And this is where you will sleep from now on,” he told her as he rolled over to face her. He kissed her gently as his hands began to remove her gown. His touch was tender as his hands went to her full breasts, caressing her skin, kissing the delicate flesh. This time together was more about connecting them as man and wife than the act was for any other purpose, or so he told himself.

  The more he touched her, the more responsive she became. TaeTay wasn’t sure if it was the time lapse between the last time a man touched her or the way her husband was stroking her delicate parts, but her body was on fire. She wanted this man like she had never wanted any other and try as she might to be the lady who would stand at his side, the woman he married needed her man.

  She told him so.

  In his ear, with breathy moans.

  It only invigorated him more.

  Her nails scratched at his arms as he touched her there, preparing her body for his entry. Soft kisses along her neckline that made a trail down her body to her breast, her navel and then her… “Oh, Dear Lawd!” she cried.

  Anxious fingers dug into the skin of his shoulders as TaeTay pulled at him to join their bodies. Suddenly, he stopped as his eyes traveled to the door. Slowly, he slid out of bed to close and lock the door, securing it so Douglas would not come in and be traumatized for life. He took his time returning to the bed, reaching unhurriedly to turn on the ugly lamp. Her eyes flickered, trying to adjust to the light.

  “I want to see your face when I make you mine,” his lips said the words, sending her mind into overdrive. TaeTay’s eyes were on his beautiful, strong body. The man was in great shape as he pulled the tee over his head to reveal firm abdominals. The boxers slipped down to his ankles and her heart almost stopped beating at the beauty of him.

  “I am yours, Thurston,” she told him. The bed creaked a bit under his weight as he climbed back into the bed and took her into his arms.

  Thurston could not stop staring into her eyes, “You are such a beautiful gift that I will cherish all the days of my life.” His mouth came to hers as he moved and positioned his body to join them as man and wife. TaeTay’s breath came out in huffs of air as he sweetly filled her, plunging her deep into a magical world where only they existed.

  As with each thing he did, his movements were well-planned and deliberate, creating a perfect rhythm as he brought her pleasure. His wife gave as good as she got and what he had hoped was a tender connection became a passionate encounter with no holds barred. It was wonderful, fantastic, and Thurston lost himself in his sweet TaeTay. She was lost too, surrendering to his movements as she found her release and cried out his name. He matched her pace and reached his own, grunting through his pleasure until he finally collapsed on her sweaty body. She squeezed him tight with her thighs and then her arms.

  “I don’t care if you don’t say it back. I didn’t care if you don’t feel the same way, but I love you, Thurston. I love you for everything that you aren’t, I love you for everything that you are, and I love you for what you are to me,” she told him.

  “I
love you as well, Ta-Ta-La-Vee-Sha,” he said as he held her close enjoying the post-coital bliss.

  “You are skilled and generous, and I liked it,” she grinned in the dim light.

  “And you, my wife, are a hell of a woman,” he commented into her shoulder.

  “Next stop on this love train is Washington, DC,” she said.

  Thurston felt like a pig. He wanted her again, and he knew he was going to be very late for work because round two was going to take a while. It was already 3 am. “The train has to be decoupled leave the station first. All aboard…”

  “You and your fancy words,” she said as she clicked off the lamp. “Toot, toot!”

  It was 7:30 in the morning, and although he was awake and standing in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee, Thurston was barely able to stand. He looked at the cup of dark liquid, which seemed to be moving on its own inside the cup and he knew he was going to have trouble getting through his day.

  “Hey, you look beat,” TaeTay said as she bounded down the stairs with far too much energy.

  Is she serious? “I didn’t get much sleep,” he said flatly.

  She squinted as she leaned in to kiss him. “I’m sorry, but Hubby, making love to you was really good.” She paused as she took the milk from the fridge. “It was like I have been on a diet and someone offered me a cookie. I wanted to have just one…”

  He laughed at the analogy, “But, Baby, you gorged out and we ate the whole box.”

  “Speaking of that…”

  He shook his head as he pushed away from the sink. “I have to go to work. We are not going to speak on that…”

  “I’m just saying, you are a generous and giving lover, Cookie Monster,” she was grinning as she made a bowl of cereal for Douglas.