by Lexy Timms
Mark laughed, knowing she could feel the warm air against her skin. Camille writhed. One of her hands reached down, tangling in his hair, tugging enough to let him know where she'd really like him to go. He didn't give in to the pull.
“Please,” she said. “Mark.”
“Hmm.” He tipped his head to the side like he was considering, and closed his teeth gently over soft skin. “Okay. I suppose.”
He didn't waste any time moving up then, sliding his tongue over her sex. She arched up from the bed with a gasp and a little sound that might have been a whimper.
“Been waiting for this since last night,” he pulled back long enough to say.
Her answer was another soft moan as he leaned back in, his tongue finding her clit. His hands on her thighs slid upward, wrapping around her hips instead to hold her still for him. She bucked against the pressure.
“Damn,” she said above him, breathless and shaky. “Oh, fuck. Mark.”
He didn't pull back this time, just kept up the stroke of his tongue against her. One of his fingers slid inside her, and her thighs shook against his shoulders. Mark drew back and pressed two inside.
The hand still tangled in his hair curled a little tighter, and her foot pressed against the middle of his back, trying to draw him in closer, a silent request for more. He didn't give in. Like he'd told her already, they had all day. So he kept up the same slow pace, drawing her slowly toward the edge of orgasm, not allowing the pleasure to build any faster. A string of moans escaped her, coming faster, each one pitched a little higher than the last. Begging without words for release.
He could feel the tension coiling in her muscles again. She was close.
Mark flicked his tongue over her clit, fingers sliding in deep. The tension wound in on itself and exploded outward. He could feel it in the rock of her hips and the tremble in her thigh muscles. A little cry left her throat, and a word that might have been his name.
This time, he didn't stop. He kept up the same easy pace. Her second orgasm came faster, and then a third. Mark worked her through each of them with fingers and tongue, feeling the shudder of pleasure rocking through her in the motion of her body and the curl of her toes against his back.
She shoved at his head and he finally pulled back, looking down at her sprawled on the sheets, her cheeks flushed and her chest still rising and falling with rapid breaths. Her dark hair was spilled messily over the pillow. It was an intensely satisfying picture. One he wouldn’t mind seeing a few more times. Or a lot more times.
“Hmmm” she breathed. “I think you’re going to have to carry me out of here when I eventually leave.”
“That good, huh?”
“I’d tell you, but I’m worried you’ll get conceited about it,” she answered, smiling a little tiredly. “So I’m not going to tell you that no one has ever made me come three times in a row like that before.”
Mark laughed at that, but the sound came out a little strained. She’d had hers. He hadn’t had his. “We could go for four,” he suggested.
Her tongue slipped out to wet her lower lip. “We could,” she agreed, her eyes sliding down his body to his hard cock. “That looks painful.”
She wasn’t wrong.
One of her hands lifted from the bed, and she crooked a slender finger at him. Her long nails were painted as red as her lips had been before time and kissing wore the color off.
“Come on then, hot stuff.” She dropped her voice back down into that low, smoky register that’d had him hard before they even left the bar. “I’m right here, awaiting your pleasure.”
Mark didn’t need to be told twice. He crawled further up the bed, and tilted her hips up with his hands so he could slide in slow and easy. Her eyelids fluttered, and one of her long legs wrapped around his waist. He leaned down, bracing his weight on one forearm, so that he could kiss her as they moved together.
He wasn’t going to last long. The need was wound too tight after the wait. Mark let himself move a little faster, forehead resting against her shoulder. One of her hands slipped down between them so that she could stroke her fingers over her clit as he moved. The other was tangled in his hair again, nails teasing at the nape of his neck.
“You feel so good. Fuck.”
Her answer was to tighten the leg around his hip, dragging him in closer. The fingers working her clit moved faster.
Pleasure rocked through him. Through the rush of it, he felt himself follow her over the edge, her spine arching and her limbs pulling him close. He let himself sink down until his weight rested against her body, and they lay there together.
“So, I know we just woke up,” she said finally. “But a think a nap might be in order. Or,” she corrected as he shifted to roll over to the side. “A shower and then a nap. If I can stand up.”
Mark huffed a laugh. “Moving sounds like way too large a task right now.”
“Nap and then shower?”
He reached for the sheet, pulling it up over both of them, and rolled over again to wrap an arm around her waist, pulling her in against his chest. “That sounds like a brilliant plan.”
She snuggled into his hold, and lay one of her arms over his, threading their fingers together against the slight curve of her stomach. Mark let his eyes slide shut.
A minute later, the only sound in the apartment was the slow and steady breathing of sleep.
Chapter 3
The thing about babies and Mondays was that babies didn't generally understand the significance of them, which meant that they definitely didn't understand the fact that Jamie needed to get some work done if she was going to help Alex with the office stuff. She'd hoped to work through their nap, but so far that had been a bust. Lillianna was being less than cooperative about sleeping. Every time Jamie got her down to sleep, she was up again about ten minutes later.
She finally got both of them into their cribs, and quiet, and with a sigh of relief headed to the in-home office to do some of the paperwork that she'd been neglecting. She took the baby monitor with her, just in case.
It was strange to be looking down at paperwork again after so long away from the office. Jamie hadn't really meant not to go back after the twins had been born, but she'd just been too busy to be involved. She could have hired a nanny, but the thought left her cold. She'd had enough neglect from her mother. She wasn't going to do that to her children. Alex disagreed with her, but he didn't understand.
Paperwork, she reminded herself. There would be time to worry about the finer aspects of childcare later. She sighed, and opened her laptop. There were more unread emails than she was ever going to catch up on, let alone read through in time to do anything about half of them. The time-sensitive ones had hopefully gone to Alex as well, or they were going to have angry clients knocking on their doors before long. She knew they would have gone through the secretary, so hopefully he'd made sure they got to where they needed to go. It wasn't that Jamie didn't trust him. He was good at his job. But she always worried a little when someone else was doing the work that she was supposed to be doing. Alex had said that there was no one who could do what she did for him, but what if that meant that things weren't getting done?
She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Explaining to clients that she hadn't answered their emails because she was still Alex's PA, but hadn't had time to do any real work since their children had been born wasn't exactly going to go over that well, she was sure. Most people in finance were still a little harsh on women in the field, she'd noticed. And they really didn't think that women should be raising children and working in investments at the same time.
Over the baby monitor, she heard the sound of one of the babies fussing, and her hands paused over her keyboard. It was silly, she knew; they couldn't hear her through the monitor. It wasn't two-way. But that didn't allay her fear that if she made any kind of noise they might wake up and demand to be held, or fed. She just needed an hour or two to get some work done. That was all. Was that too much to ask?
&nb
sp; Apparently it was, because she'd gotten three emails in when the fussing started up again, and this time it escalated to crying. She stood up from her chair and headed down the hall to the baby's room, where Benton was the one awake instead of Lillianna. Although, if he kept crying they were both going to be up, and she wasn't sure she could deal with that on her own. She leaned down to pick up Benton, cradling him close, and carried him out of the room in her arms, humming quietly. He quieted almost as soon as she picked him up, although he still squirmed, making little fussy sounds.
At least she didn’t need to change his diaper.
It wasn't that Jamie didn't love her children, although that was a thought that sometimes found its way into her head on bad nights. What if she got so frustrated with them when she was trying to work because she was a bad mother? Looking down at Benton, who had stopped whimpering and was halfway to sleep again, his eyes closed and his tiny hands curled against her chest, she didn't think that she was a bad mother after all. Because she loved him. Loved him with a fierceness that she was sure her own neglectful mother hadn't felt for either her or Christine. If she loved them that much she couldn't be a bad mother, could she? She couldn’t be a bad mother in the same way hers at been, at least, and that was a relief.
Moving carefully so that she wouldn't wake Benton or reawaken Lilliana, Jamie carried her son back into the nursery and laid him down in the crib. He didn't stir and she let out a silent breath of relief, making her way back to the office.
It’s going to be okay, she told herself as she sat down again. Alex would see. She could take care of them and still get work done. She was doing it right now. She knew her husband only brought it up because he worried, but she also knew what she was capable of, and taking care of two children while still working as a PA for Reid Enterprises was something she could do, no sweat.
Okay, well, maybe a little sweat, but it would be fine.
She opened another email, skimming over the contents, and started composing a reply. The phone rang.
Of course the phone was ringing, because if the babies weren't crying something had to be taking her attention away from work. Jamie swore under her breath and reached for it. At least she'd remembered to set it to silent. If it had woken the twins she wasn't sure she wouldn't hunt down the caller and kill them.
The caller, it turned out, was Christine. Jamie suddenly felt a little guilty for the thought. Her sister was doing better after three months, but she hadn't fully recovered from her bout of depression, and some days Jamie was afraid that she would relapse, and that she'd walk in to find her lying on the floor again.
At least Christine was living with her father, and not alone somewhere that she wouldn’t have any help if she did spiral back down. Their mother hadn’t been seen since she signed the divorce papers. Jamie wasn’t sure whether she hoped that the woman would show back up or not. She’d been nothing but mean, despite all of Jamie’s attempts to reconcile with her, and when she’d even abandoned her favorite child, Christine, Jamie had pretty much given up hope that her mother would ever act like a parent should. She didn’t know if she wanted her children subjected to that. Even if her mother did come back, Jamie wasn’t sure she would let her see the twins.
She slid her thumb across the screen to answer the phone, and lifted it to her ear. “Hey, Christine.” Jamie made sure the words sounded cheerful. She didn’t want Christine thinking that she wasn’t happy to hear from her. They’d had their differences in the past, but after the stay in the mental hospital Jamie’s sister had become almost an entirely different person. She was quieter now, and easier to upset. The hostile tension that had always been present between them had dissipated, though, and there were no more insults from Christine. No more teasing about Jamie’s weight or insisting that Stephen was being persecuted by the legal system. She’d stopped asking if Jamie had let Stephen film them having sex. In fact, she almost never mentioned Stephen at all.
“Hi, Jamie,” the quiet reply came through the phone.
“How are you?” Jamie asked, shifting the phone so that it sat between her shoulder and chin and she could rest her hands on the laptop keyboard again.
“I’m doing really well,” Christine replied. “I mean, not… great. But I guess as well as I could be.”
“That’s good to hear,” Jamie said, tapping out a brief, formulaic reply to the email in front of her. “I’m really glad that you’re feeling better, Christine.”
There was a pause, like her sister was trying to figure out what to say. Jamie felt that way sometimes when they were talking. The pieces of their old conversations didn’t fit into the new ones they had now, but sometimes it felt like she didn’t know what to put in the place of the insults and fighting that had gone before.
“Thank you,” Christine said finally. Another pause, this one shorter. “How are you?”
“Oh, you know,” Jamie said, opening one of the spreadsheets instead of an email because it was easier to look at numbers and talk than try to read during a conversation. “Busy, mostly. The twins are keeping me on my toes.”
There was a hesitant laugh from Christine. “That’s actually what I was calling about,” she said. “I mean, I know that maybe I’m not your first choice, with everything that happened, but… I’ve started to get kind of bored just sitting at home and I thought maybe I could do something that—”
The quiet on the baby monitor abruptly gave way to crying, and Jamie sighed and stood. “Hold that thought a minute, Christine. I’ll be right back.”
She wondered as she made her way down the hall to the nursery again if the twins were getting sick. Maybe that was why they were so fussy today. Their getting sick would be just what she needed, something to make her day even more hectic.
Both babies were awake and crying by the time she walked over to the cribs. Jamie laid a hand in each one, smoothing them soothingly over the babies’ bellies.
“Hey, little one,” she crooned, looking down at both of them. “Don’t cry. I’m here.”
There was no decrease in the volume of the crying. Jamie hadn’t really expected one. She reached down and picked up Lillianna. Usually once she stopped crying, if they were both crying, Benton settled down, too.
The reason for Lillianna’s distress became obvious as soon as Jamie picked her up. She needed her diaper changed. Wondering if Christine would hang up on her if she didn’t come back soon enough, Jamie lay Lillianna out on the changing table and took care of the diaper swap.
She was getting good at it. Not quite as good as Alex, who seemed to have the same natural knack for baby care as he had for anything else that he set his mind to. It made her laugh sometimes, to think about the multi-billionaire CEO of Reid Enterprises changing a diaper with his own two hands, but it also made her feel warm, and in love. No matter how rich he got, Alex didn’t let it turn him into someone who only cared about money, or who felt like he was above anyone else. It was one of the many reasons that Jamie was so in love with him. And why, even through the roughest early days of new parenthood, she found herself falling more in love with him every day.
As she had predicted, Benton settled down again as soon as Lillianna stopped screaming. He’d been born a few minutes before her, but Jamie could already tell she was going to be the ringleader. Alex had wanted a little girl who was always talking back. He was probably going to get his wish.
With both the babies laid down again, Jamie jogged back toward the office and picked up her phone. “Christine?”
“I’m still here.”
“Oh, good.” Jamie smiled into the phone. She was a little impressed that her sister hadn’t just hung up and gone to do something else. “I’m sorry. The twins were crying.”
“Yeah. I could hear them actually.” Christine was silent for a moment, and Jamie wondered if she should say something, but then her sister spoke again. “What I was saying earlier… I wanted to talk to you about maybe helping out with the babies. If you were okay with that? I’d just
really like something to do, and I know that you’ve got work on top of the kids, and they’re my nephew and niece, so… I guess I was just thinking that maybe I could help you take care of them sometimes. Watch them for you. Stuff like that.”
On paper, it was the perfect solution. They already had Mark helping them out sometimes. And family members weren’t nannies. They were people that the twins should bond with, and have relationships with. But Jamie was a little worried about Christine watching the kids alone. What if something happened? What if she had a bad night?
Or, she didn’t have to be alone with them. She could come in sometimes while Jamie was working. That way there would be someone to make sure the twins were taken care of and Jamie could get her work done, but Christine wouldn’t be alone in the house with them while she was still recovering.
“That’s actually a really amazing offer,” Jamie said. “I could definitely use a little help. Thank you so much, Christine.”
“Oh,” Christine said. “You’re welcome. I should have offered sooner, honestly.”
“No. That’s okay. You’re offering now.” Jamie leaned back a little in her chair. “Actually, it would be really great to have someone who could watch the kids while I’m trying to work. Make sure they have someone right there if they’re crying or anything.”
“I could do that,” Christine said, voice soft.
“Okay,” Jamie said, learning to love her sister more every day. “What if we start with sometime later this week? Let me know what time works best for you.”
Christine offered a few different times, and Jamie nodded. “I think Thursday would be just fine. Why don’t we do that?”
“I’ll see you then,” Christine said, and Jamie thought she could almost hear a smile in her sister’s voice.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Jamie answered, surprised by the fact that she actually was. She and Christine had a better relationship since her breakdown, but there had always been the concern about Christine’s mental health hanging over their heads. This time it would just be them, doing what sisters did, and Jamie found herself wanting that experience. “I’ll see you on Thursday.”
