Laying a Foundation: Bonus volume: Includes series prequel, The Groundbreaking (The Love Under Construction Series) (30 page)

Nikki laughed out loud, and Tony grinned. “Anyway,” he began again, “when she was finished, she told me it was her turn, and taught me to perform cunnilingus. She scared me to death when she came – I’d never given Dottie an orgasm, so I thought she was dying. She thought it was hysterically funny. We got back up on the bed together and she explained the mechanics of male and female orgasm to me. Before she left that first night, we had plain vanilla sex, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Plus I knew we had nine more sessions to go. You can’t begin to understand what that was like for me.”

“What else did she teach you?”

“Everything. At least seventy-five different positions. All kinds of ways to give a woman an orgasm, with my hands, tongue, vibrators. Using all kinds of sex toys, lubes, creams, anything you can think of. She taught me about orgasm denial, how it can help a woman who has trouble having orgasms to have huge, earth-shattering ones. Cock rings, penis pumps, things like that. How to use a suction device to enlarge the clitoris, make it more sensitive. The ins and outs, literally, of anal sex; how to prepare a woman who’s never had it before, dilating techniques, lubes to use, everything. Some bondage, rope play, safe use of restraints. And she had some really strict rules,” he added, taking a deep breath.

“What do you mean?” She noticed that he seemed to be getting tense.

“I don’t know exactly how to say it . . .” he mumbled, looking at his hands.

“Just spit it out. If we’ve come this far, you should’ve already figured out that you can tell me anything,” she told him matter-of-factly, and he believed her. So far, she’d turned out to be the most open-minded person he’d ever met.

“Well, she believed if you were going to do it to somebody, you should allow it to be done to you. And if you wanted it done to you, you should have to learn to do it to somebody else.”

“Meaning?”

“She brought a friend in to assist. A male friend.” There – he’d said it. Nikki’s eyes got a little wider, but she didn’t say anything. “She said if I wanted to have anal sex with a woman, I should know what it felt like. So her friend helped us with that.”

“Are you trying to tell me you took it up the ass for the team?” Nikki asked, incredulous and, as usual, blunt as hell.

Tony blushed. “Yep. Not as bad as I thought it would be, either. Not sure I’d ever want to do it again, but now I know what it feels like to somebody else if I fuck them in the ass. Great way to drive home a point, pun intended,” Tony said, and chuckled a little. He still looked a little embarrassed. “Does that completely freak you out?”

“In a very positive way. I’m trying to imagine, and it’s very hot,” she practically purred. “And I’m very impressed.”

Damn
, he thought,
this woman is incredible. I can’t believe she’s not running for the door, but if she’ll hang around now, I guess nothing will scare her away
. “So then she said if I wanted to get oral sex, I should learn to give it, because if I did, I’d know what the giving was like, and I could teach a woman how best to do it.”

“And you gave her friend a blow job, too?”

“Yep. Also not as bad as I thought it would be, although I don’t think the taste of ejaculate is something I’d want to experience very often.”

“I can’t say the same thing.” Nikki’s eyes went kind of glassy. “Frankly, I like the taste of cum. Sometimes I crave it.” Nikki nibbled at her lower lip, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Tony struggled to stay in control until she told him, “Go on. Please.”

He waited a minute, trying to remember where he’d gotten to in the conversation, then started again. “So that’s kind of how it went. She taught me to fist her, taught me to do some very basic restraint techniques, some light BDSM stuff, flogging and the like, and nipple torture. We had a three-way with the male friend, and then another night, she brought in a female friend and we did a three-way. She also taught me how to take a woman from giving me a simple blow job to letting me fuck her throat.” Tony watched as Nikki instinctively put her hand up to her neck, letting her fingers slide down almost to her cleavage, and he thought he’d come unglued. This was going much better than he’d expected. If he was getting this much of a charge watching her reactions to this discussion, how spectacular would the sex be?

“You have to understand,” he said, catching and holding Nikki’s gaze, “this wasn’t lovemaking. She was a lovely, warm, friendly woman, but it was very clinical, almost mechanical, for her. She was instructing me and I was learning. She asked me on the last night if I felt confident about my abilities. I told her I’d never felt more confident in myself, or more virile, for that matter. Then she said, ‘I’ll tell you a secret about women that every man should know.’”

Nikki waited; she leaned toward him, and Tony was enjoying watching the look of anticipation on her face. Finally, she blurted out, “Oh, for the love of god, tell me what she said!”

“She said, ‘What every woman wishes you knew but won’t tell you is that, deep down inside, every woman wants her man to take control of her in the bedroom. She craves it. She wants to be dominated, to be pushed to her limits, to be taken to where she can’t stand it anymore and then taken just to the other side. She wants her man to let her choose a safeword, and then she’ll try her best to never use it, to take everything he gives her and beg for more. Treat a woman to that raw maleness, that masculinity, and make her enjoy it and feel cherished and loved, like she’s the most desirable woman in the world, and she’ll feel safe with you and let you do anything with her and to her that you want.’” He stopped for a minute, the questioning in his eyes warming her face, and asked, “Nikki, I have no idea – was she right?”

It took her a minute to catch her breath, then she forced out in a whisper overflowing with longing, “Oh, baby, she was one hundred and ninety-eight percent right.” She was pretty sure if she didn’t change gears, she was going to come right then and there. Tony watched her squirm; he knew what was going on, and he loved it.

“So, let’s talk about deal breakers.” Tony attempted to break the sexual tension by taking the throw from the back of the sofa and spreading it over Nikki’s lap, and she was definitely glad for the change in the conversation.

“I’m assuming you have some or you wouldn’t have introduced the topic?”

He stood. “I do.” Before sitting back down, Tony refilled their wine glasses. “My number one deal breaker is cheating on me. I simply won’t tolerate it. Period.” His tone was stern. He tried to get comfortable on the sofa and started again. “There are far too many things out there now that penicillin won’t kill. I’m responsible for too many people, their jobs and their lives, to take chances like that, and I won’t be with somebody who exposes me to that kind of danger.” Nikki nodded her understanding.

“Number two is being untrustworthy. I have to be able to trust you. I get lying about something like a Christmas gift or a surprise party, but if it’s a lie to cover up something wrong or at least questionable, then I’m extremely intolerant. I can’t be open and honest with somebody who’s not open and honest with me.”

“Number three is my family. You’ve got to get along with them. I know they’re not perfect. My youngest brother’s wife, Caroline? They were horrible to her when she and Bennie first met; they’re still not very kind. I knew it wasn’t her; it was them, and Bennie and I called them on it. That wasn’t her fault. But if you’re being generally rude or hateful to them, bitchy or mean or whatever, that’s just not going to fly. If there’s a legitimate problem with you and them, then we’re going to have a problem, that is, if you’ve contributed to it.”

“And number four is as big as number one. I will never again be in a relationship where sex is withheld. No discussion, no negotiation. If you were in a terrible accident that left you completely debilitated, or had a horrible illness, like cancer, where you were incapacitated or in disabling pain, that would be one thing. But to withhold sex for spite, or meanness, or from general disregard or lack of love, nope. I’m done with that. I lived with it for sixteen years, and I won’t do it again.”

With that, Tony put his wine glass on the table beside the sofa and asked, “Yours?”

Nikki looked thoughtful for a minute. “I’d say the cheating thing for me too. The fucking everything in sight thing wouldn’t bother me that much, but I’d be terrified you’d come in and tell me you’d fallen in love with somebody else. That would kill me. And even without that, I couldn’t take the pressure of the competition. I’ve always been able to hold my own sexually, and if you found somebody you liked better than me in the sack, well, I can’t imagine you could, but I couldn’t compete with her if you did. And I guess my second one is like your trustworthiness issue. I couldn’t take it day in and day out if I felt like you were sneaking around or hiding something from me, or if you were lying to me all the time. Those are about all I can come up with. I can work with anything else, as long as you’re trying. Oh, and by the way, my safewords: Stop is red; slow and question, yellow; and go, green. And I have a hand signal for when I can’t speak,” she demonstrated, showing him two fingers raised in a “V.”

“For when you can’t speak? And why wouldn’t you be able to sp . . . Oh. Never mind.” His cheeks pinked up. “So that’s it?” Nikki nodded and took a sip from her glass. “Well, okay then. I think it’s all out on the table, except for one more thing we need to get out of the way.” Tony poured each of them another glass of liquid courage.

“So, what’s that?” she asked, sipping the Kentucky vintage from nearby Willisburg.

“You were about to say something to me on the phone the other night and I stopped you. I told you I wanted us to be looking each other in the eye the first time we said that, not hiding on the telephone. So can I be the first to say it?”

“Oh, well, go right ahead!” She smiled through her relaxation from the wine. She wanted to hear those three words more than anything else in the world.

“Okay. Here goes.” He took a deep breath. “Nikki Wilkes, I love you. I love you and I’m in love with you. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I want to be with you, completely and totally, emotionally, mentally, and physically. I’m ready for that step. And I want you to think about a long-term relationship with me, up to and including marriage. I’m not proposing, at least not yet anyway; I just want you to think about whether or not that’s something you’d be open to. Will you?”

“Absolutely!” She sat up straight and looked straight into his eyes. “My turn. Tony Walters, I love you and I’m in love with you. One look at you makes my knees weak and my heart pound. I want you so bad I can barely stand it, and if we don’t have sex in the next couple of weeks, I think I’ll lose my mind. And I will think about a long-term relationship with you. I’m not saying I never want to remarry; I’m just saying that this relationship caught me off guard and I hadn’t given marriage any thought up to now but, trust me, I have in the last week. I hope you know how crazy I am about you.” She stopped, then added, “Oh, and by the way, I love your kids and their significant others. I hope they’ll eventually think of me as a kind of mom.”

She was startled to see a tear well up in the corner of his eye. He wiped his hand across it and looked down at his lap. “My poor, poor kids,” he moaned, shaking his head. “They never really had much of a mom, and from what I’ve seen, you were a pretty fine one. You have no idea how happy what you said makes me. I’d like nothing better than for them to eventually call you Mom. They deserve to have a woman in their lives who loves them and does the things for them that moms do.” He reached over and pressed his hand against her cheek, and she rested her face into it as she put her hand on the back of his. Moving to sit beside her, he leaned down and placed a soft, chaste kiss on her lips, then dropped his forehead against hers. They sat that way for several minutes.

“I probably should get up and go to the bathroom.” She stood and took a much-needed stretch.

“I’ll get us some more wine. I guess we need to start back in a couple of hours.” They’d talked for so long that it had gotten near dark. “But I wanted to ask,” he hesitated, “. . . would you like to go away for the weekend with me? Memorial Day weekend, in two weeks?”

“I’d love to!” She kissed him on the cheek. “Where are we going?”

“The house in Gatlinburg maybe?”

“Oh, my god, YES!” She kissed him on the cheek, then ran toward the bathroom.

As he filled the glasses, Tony decided he should check his phone. He’d turned the ringer off when they got to the house, and he didn’t often do that. Looking at the screen, he saw calls – lots of calls, mostly from Clayton, one from Vic, his cousin in Lexington who managed their office there, and one from a number he didn’t recognize. He pulled up his voicemails, and there was a message from the unfamiliar number.

Tony touched LISTEN and put the phone back up to his ear. “Mr. Walters, this is Detective Marsh from the Lexington Police Department. Could you give me a call, please?” The voice left a number.

Clayton, then Vic, then the police? A sick fear rose in Tony’s chest as he hit Clayton’s contact and the phone began to ring. Nikki walked back into the room just as Clayton answered.

“Dad! Where the hell are you?” Clayton sounded frantic.

“Clayton, what’s going on? I’ve got calls from you, and Vic, and the Lexington police?” He glanced over at Nikki; she stared at him in alarm.

“Dad, where are you?” Clayton asked again.

“I’m at the big house. Why?”

“Are you alone?”

“No. Nikki’s here with me. What’s going on?”

“Dad, go sit down. Right now. Make sure Nikki’s with you. Do it!”

Tony started to question, then took Nikki’s hand and went back into the great room. He sat down, then pulled her down beside him with her ear next to the phone so she could hear too; she could tell he was nearing full-blown panic. “Okay, son, I’m sitting and Nikki’s here. What’s going on?”

“Dad, I’m so sorry. It’s gone. The Lexington office is gone. Those assholes from GoGreen burned it to the ground.”