Laying a Foundation: Bonus volume: Includes series prequel, The Groundbreaking (The Love Under Construction Series) (39 page)

When the water was tepid, Tony let it out, toweled off, and walked naked into the bedroom. He was at half-staff, and Nikki patted the bed beside her.

“Baby, I’m just not sure I’ve got it in me tonight,” he groaned, trying to relax into the mattress. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. Not one thing. I want to do something for you, nothing in return.”

“Oh, no, I can’t let you . . .”

Nikki had always appreciated Tony’s “she comes first” attitude, but not tonight. “You can and you will.” Nikki stripped off her gown down to nothing but her panties. “My pleasure – literally. Now, lie back and close your eyes. Do not open them. And no matter what I do, the operative word here is ‘relax,’ okay?”

“I’ll try.” Exhaustion was so plain on his face that she couldn’t understand how he could
not
relax.

She positioned herself between his legs. “I want your legs bent. Knees up, feet flat on the bed.” He pulled his legs up. “A little more. That’s good,” she said as he moved his feet closer to his hips. Gripping his already-stiffening cock, it grew and hardened in her palm, and she went to work. Once he was agonizingly rigid, she took the head into her mouth and got busy. She found him delicious, musky and sweet-smelling and kind of savory, like fresh grass warmed by sunlight.

She stopped for a second. “I’m about to do something that’s going to feel weird, but remember, relax, okay?” Tony nodded. “Keep your eyes closed, baby,” she repeated.

She went down on him again, but she was doing something with her hands too – he couldn’t tell what. He heard a snapping sound, then something chilly dripped down below his balls. Her hand was moving around and he knew the cold sensation was lube. She pressed something lightly against his entrance, and he tensed.

“Relax, baby. You’re going to love this if you’ll give it a chance.” Tony took a deep breath, and Nikki rimmed the ring of muscles, then pressed firmly into the center. He remembered Cinda and her friend and tensed again. Her finger slipped in gently, then stopped to give him time to become accustomed to the stretch. The sensation was unnatural to him, but not really painful.
Relax,
he kept telling himself,
she won’t hurt me.
She gently pulled her finger in and out until he had relaxed the muscles completely.

“Oh my god,” he blurted out. “Your nails . . .”

“I told you, relax. Condom. I’m not going to hurt you,” she answered.
My girl,
he thought.

Then she pressed her finger farther in, several inches, and he felt her doing something, moving her finger somehow. He wasn’t sure what it was but, at first, it felt somewhat weird and uncomfortable. Then something odd happened – he felt himself getting harder, painfully so. Something knotted in his belly, and he recognized it as the tension of an orgasm building, but it didn’t feel like it usually did. It had an urgency and power he couldn’t have expected and hadn’t experienced before. Nikki continued to suck and lick his cock, and she stroked inside him at the same time. It suddenly hit him: She was stimulating his prostate, and he tried to relax and enjoy the sensation. The longer she did it, the more he realized it wasn’t really unpleasant, just unfamiliar, and the intensified arousal he felt was unexpected but damn welcome. It was more than her mouth on him; something erotically delicious was happening to him, and he felt warm all over. The vortex deep in his core started to double on itself, and he moaned out loud and wound his fingers into her hair, then held her head and began to fuck into her throat.

“Oh god, Nikki, I’m coming,” he whispered hoarsely, then cried out again, “Oh, god, I’m coming!” Just as he felt his balls tighten and draw in, Nikki took her mouth from him and cupped her hand over the head of his cock, stroking his shaft just beneath it with her fingers as she rubbed her palm in a circular motion over its head.

Tony’s whole body stiffened; his back arched, and he shook all over. “Ohhhhh, my god, ahhhhh!” he screamed, feeling a strange but wholly satisfying sensation as he felt pure liquid heat shoot from his cock. He gripped the headboard with both hands, and every muscle in his body hardened and strained. It felt like his cock would never stop pulsing.

“Aw, yeah, baby! That’s it!” Nikki cried in encouragement. When his muscles finally stopped contracting, she gently drew her finger out of him and stopped stroking him with the other hand. “Honey, look. You’ve got to see this.”

Tony looked down at his belly, and he was shocked – a puddle of cum lay in the middle of his six pack. He realized it probably wasn’t as much as it looked like, but at first glance it seemed like a quarter of a cup or more, and it was still dripping from the palm of her hand. “Oh, fuck, did I do that?” he asked, astonished.

“Yeah, baby, you did!” Nikki looked very proud of herself. “How did that feel?”

“Amazing. Weird, but totally amazing. Where did you learn to do that?”

“From Randy’s urologist. He said it’s very good for men. It’s called milking the prostate. Randy would never let me do it.” She wiped his stomach with the towel. “Pretty good, huh?” He nodded. She crawled across him and pulled out a couple of the wipes he kept on his nightstand, then wiped his stomach down and cleaned up her hands. “And now,” she ordered, throwing the wipes away, “you go to sleep. I hope I’ve managed to help you relax. This was my early Father’s Day gift to you, baby. I want you to get some rest; I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t worry about me, princess. Just be here with me.” Until that moment, Tony hadn’t let himself admit how exhausted he was. “And that had to be the best Father’s Day gift I’ve ever gotten,” he whispered. Nikki turned off the light and curled up against him. In less than five minutes, he was out like a light.

She felt it building, building, building, until it finally broke, hitting like a tsunami. Wave after wave, the orgasm took her down, down, down . . .

Nikki’s rocking pelvis woke her, and a tiny gasp escaped her lips. That didn’t happen very often, but it was scrumptious when it did. She wondered what time it was, and opened her eyes to find Tony staring at her, a wide grin lighting up his face in the darkness of the bedroom.

“What are you doing awake?” she asked him, stroking the side of his face.

“You woke me up making some kind of sound. Did you just have an orgasm in your sleep?” he asked with a look of shock and delight.

“Yeah,” she answered, sweeping his hair out of his face.

“I didn’t know women did that.” He started peppering tiny little kisses on her lips.

“Yeah. It. Happens. Sometimes. Not. Very. Often. But. Sometimes,” she managed between kisses.

“Wow. I knew guys did that, but not women. That was very cool.” He gave her his sexiest smile and added, “And I suppose it would be okay, since your portion of the show is over, if I gave you the grand finale?”

She gave him a sweet little kiss. “That would be awesome. Hey, what time is it?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s just whatever time it is. Actually,” he told her, pulling her to him, “I think it’s time to fuck you, baby.” They lay on their sides, and he drew her legs up and around his waist, then slid ever-so-gently inside her like silk on water. His strokes were slow and gentle, and she felt like she was being caressed from the inside out, so tenderly that she almost couldn’t feel him moving. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he pulled her close, her breasts pressed against his chest, his arms wrapped around her tightly, and she could feel the possessiveness in his embrace. They passed tiny, warm, lovely little kisses back and forth between them like raindrops falling onto pebbles. She’d never felt safer or more loved, and he’d never loved anyone more in his life. They rocked against each other until they both came in a solemn, reverent swelling of desire, and then lay peacefully, his cock still inside her, until they fell back to sleep.

“H
oney, did you hear me?” Tony’s blank stare was fixed on something outside the window, and Nikki’s voice brought him back.

He spun around in the desk chair and looked at her. “I’m sorry. What did you say?” he asked.

“I said, do you know where the receipts are for your trip to Owensboro in February? I found the entry in your planner, but not the receipts. They’re not in with everything else, and I don’t know where to look.”

He rifled through his desk drawer and pulled out a folder. “Here.” He handed her a wad of cash register receipts. “They were in with the information on the location.”

She shook her head. “You were a thousand miles away. You okay?”

“Yeah.” He motioned for her to come to him, then took her by the waist and pulled her onto his lap. “I’m just concerned. About you.”

Her brow furrowed. “Me? What’s wrong with me? Is something hanging out of my nose?”

He shot her a look and rolled his eyes. “Nothing’s wrong with you – now. But these bastards, they want to get to me for some reason. And the easiest way to hurt me would be to hurt you. I don’t want that to happen. If anything happened to you because of me, well, I’d die.”

“Oh, nothing’s going to happen to me – I’m too damn ornery!” She kissed his forehead. “I’m fine, and I’ll stay that way.
I’m
worried about
you
. You’re not eating right, not sleeping, just generally off. Look, June is almost over. We’ll have the Fourth of July thing, and then let’s go away for a weekend, please? Just get away from here?”

Tony smiled, the first time she’d seen him smile, except in bed, in a week. “Yeah, let’s do that! I’d love to. We’ve got three days to get all of this finished up, and then the holiday, and we’ll head out. Anywhere you want to go, anywhere at all.”

“I’ll think on it.” She kissed him lightly on the lips, and he wrapped his arms around her waist and reciprocated with a long, deep kiss, his tongue buried in her mouth. She finally pulled away from him and slapped him playfully on the chest. “But if we don’t get back to work, we’re going to miss the deadline.”

They’d missed going to the gym three days in a row, but the financials were almost done. Then they could take a deep breath. In seven days the big house would be full of family and fun. Tony was pretty sure he could hold on until then.

“Well, that’s the last of it.” Cheryl handed a stack of assorted paperwork-type mess to one of the accounting clerks, who promptly took off out the door.

“Whew! I’m exhausted!” Tony fell back on the sofa in his office. Cheryl plopped down in the chair in front of the desk and turned to look at him. She smacked him on the leg and he grinned.

“Let me tell you something, boss man,” she said in her sassiest voice. “That little girl you’ve found? You’d better hang onto her. She’s a keeper.”

“Don’t I know it! She’s turned me upside down and wrong side out, and I keep coming back for more.” He smiled so wide that his cheeks hurt. “Isn’t she just the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen?”

“You know, Tony, she’s not.” He frowned at Cheryl’s words until she said, “Not in the magazine-type beautiful category, you know? But there’s something about her, something from the inside . . . the more you look at her, the more you’re around her, the more beautiful she gets. It’s like there’s something ancient and mysterious in there, something dark and sweet and, I don’t know, rich or something. Like she’s made of dark chocolate and her blood is pure liquid gold. I hugged her one day and all day I felt warm and energized, like she’d rubbed something magical onto me.” Cheryl had a dreamy, far-away look on her face, as though she wanted to say something but didn’t quite know how.

“I know exactly what you mean. She has the same effect on me all the time.” Tony stared at the ceiling. “I can feel her when she walks into the room. It’s like the air changes. Like it’s charged with something vibrant and energizing. Like I’m being drawn to her.”

“So I take it everything’s going good with the two of you? Even, you know . . .”

Tony grinned. “Oh, yeah. Everything’s excellent. By the way, since we’re here alone, I thought I’d tell you: I’m going to talk to Clayton and Annabeth before the holiday and, if they’re okay with it and everything goes well with the family and all on the Fourth, I’m going to ask Nikki to move in with me.”