Stroke of Luck (6 page)

Long moments later, Annalisa opened her eyes and looked over at Robert, back in bed after disposing of the used condom.

“Wow,” she said.

“Wow back,” he replied, opening his eyes only after saying the words. She lay on her side and grinned at him as she started stroking her hand down his chest. She played with the line of hair as it moved across his nipples then arrowed in a straight line down his stomach. She circled his bellybutton for a few seconds, enjoying learning the way the whirls of skin wound inward.

His hand moved and captured hers, keeping it on his belly before she could move lower.

“Not so fast, lover,” he said. “I need a little recovery time.”

Annalisa smiled more widely. “Oh, sorry. I thought we might go for the best two out of three.”

“We will,” he promised. “Just give me a couple of minutes.”

Annalisa sighed. “Oh, if I must.”

“Talk to me,” he said, surprising her a little. “Tell me how you started doing this.”

“This?” she asked waving her hand to encompass them in the bed, but looking everywhere except at his face so he wouldn’t see the humor in her eyes. “Well, I guess I was twelve the first time…”

His fingers grazed her jawline. “Twelve? You had sex when you were twelve?”

“Oh, I thought you were talking about the first time I took pictures.”

A low laugh rumbled through him and she felt the vibrations in her fingers where they still rested on his abdomen. The sound gave her a little thrill.

“I did mean that, but the way your hand was moving and your tone of voice made my mind short-circuit a little,” Robert said. The chuckle was still in his voice and she let a soft laugh escape her.

“Well, as I was saying, I took my first picture when I was twelve. My father had given me a camera.” Now her voice softened at the memory. “It was a little while after I started living with my Uncle Vinnie and Aunt Rebecca.”

He was quiet for a moment but he pulled her so that she was lying on top of him, his strong arms wrapped around her.

“My parents died in Mozambique when I was eleven,” she said. “My father was on assignment. He was a photojournalist too. My mom was a biologist. She went on all his assignments with him. They took me with them a lot, but for that trip I stayed with Vinnie and Rebecca. My daddy bought the camera before they left New York and told Uncle Vinnie to hold it for me until my birthday.”

“I’m sorry,” Robert said, his voice so quiet it was a comfortable rumble against her ear. “It’s tough to lose your parents but I can’t imagine how hard it is when you’re that young.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “And I was lucky. Uncle Vinnie and Aunt Rebecca were wonderful. I’m not saying my parents weren’t. But they were very involved with their careers. Aunt Rebecca, she was home every day when I got out of school. And Uncle Vinnie…well, he’d been a reporter, but when he became editor in-chief he was home every night as well.”

Robert didn’t say anything, but Annalisa felt his unspoken support to continue her story.

“I never thought about it until now, but they gave me something I was hungry for,” she finished.

“Stability,” Robert said.

“That’s right.” Annalisa raised her head from the comfortable spot on his chest to look at his face. “My father got the camera for me before he died, but Uncle Vinnie and Aunt Rebecca gave me the skills, the time and the patience to learn how to use it. One day when I was fourteen, I came home from school to find that the room that had always been the study had been turned into a darkroom. There was a processor and everything.”

“They must be very proud of you now,” Robert said.

“Oh, I think they are, although Uncle Vinnie worries about me every time I go on an assignment. For some reason, he seems to think I’m accident-prone.”

“Wonder why he’d think that,” Robert said, a smile lurking around the corner of his mouth. She almost took offense but decided instead to see if she could extract her revenge in other, more pleasurable ways.

She squirmed a little on him, not uncomfortable, just wanting to get his mind off her accidents and onto doing something more interesting.

“Oh my,” she murmured when her pussy rubbed against his hardening dick. “There seems to be evidence that perhaps you’re almost ready for the second heat.”

“You can count on it. I’m ready to hear the gun,” he said. His arms moved so that instead of wrapping around her waist they were at her hips. His hands gripped her buttocks and brought her completely against him.

She smiled and started to settle in until she realized that he wasn’t wearing a condom, having removed it after their last session. He realized it at the same moment and stopped, his cock mere inches from her pussy lips.

“Damn,” he muttered. “Wait just a minute.”

“No, let me,” she said. She jumped up and grabbed the strip of condoms and unwrapped another one.

Then she hurried back onto the bed and knelt on the mattress beside him. He was on his back, one arm behind his head, the other lying across his stomach.

His cock—that glorious, beautiful organ—was jutting upward from a bed of dark hair, and his balls were starting to swell as well.

Annalisa didn’t realize she was speaking aloud until she heard the first words from her mouth. “I would love nothing more than to photograph you just like this,” she said.

His chuckle sounded a little embarrassed but it turned into a seductive moan when her fingers gently encircled him. She traced his length from top to bottom and back again. Over and over she worked him. When his dick was a hot, pulsing rod in her hands, she used her mouth and tongue on him, licking and slurping, all the while telling him how beautiful he was.

By the time she delved her tongue in the wet slit at the very tip, his balls were drawn tight against his body and his hips were thrusting upward.

She raised her head for one final look at his face before she rolled a condom onto him to finish the blowjob. When she started to lower her mouth back onto his dick, his hand slid into her hair and gripped the strands, halting her inches from her prize.

“You did all the work last time. It’s my turn now,” he said. Before she could blink their positions were reversed. She was on her back and he was between her legs. She hated the thought of that moist, ready cock being denied, and she told him so.

“Oh, it isn’t going to be denied,” he promised then robbed her of all her breath when he placed his mouth against the outer lips of her pussy and started using that gifted tongue of his to show her just how he did the work.

Soon she was moaning as he licked and kissed like a professional lover. He found every spot to bring her the most pleasure. As he licked he used his fingers to tease and tantalize, stroking her clit and reaching deep inside, finding the spot that would give her the ultimate release. As she came she cried out in joy and rode the wave of pleasure to shore.

She felt him move and opened her eyes to watch as he slid inside her still quivering pussy. He stroked inside her with steady, even thrusts that quickly spiraled her back over the edge of pleasure. His dick jerked, signaling his simultaneous release, and she felt complete in ways she’d only imagined.

A long time later they were lying side by side and he was stroking her face and hair. She felt a great need to sleep but wanted to talk more. With supreme control, she leaned up and kissed him gently then asked a question. “Can you tell me what it’s like when you row?”

His hand stopped its movement on her face as if he were surprised by her words. Then a smile bloomed across his face.

“It feels almost as good as making you come,” he said. She smiled as she knew he expected her to but she also felt a little disappointed. She’d been hoping for something more truthful from him. She didn’t know why, because it wasn’t as if they were a couple or anything. That thought stopped her. She was thinking this was something more than just a good time. And that was her problem, not his. She started to say something that would lighten the mood, which had turned much too serious on her part, when he spoke again.

“I don’t know if I can explain it.”

She was beginning to be able to read his expressions, and what she saw now was that he was searching for the right words. Annalisa stroked her hand across his damp chest to give him time and unspoken support. She was afraid any interruption on her part might stop what he wanted to say.

After a few more seconds, he tucked her more securely against his body and slowly began to talk about his past.

“When I was injured in Afghanistan, I thought I had lost everything. Being a Ranger…well, I never thought I’d stop,” he said. “Oh sure, I knew at some point I’d be too old and too beat-up to continue, but I figured that was years away. Honestly I thought I’d be dead long before that happened. It’s just the law of averages. You jump into too many fires and you’re going to get burned.”

She made a sound she hoped was noncommittal, one that wouldn’t stop him. She had a feeling she was going to finally get a glimpse into the real man, one she was dying to get to know better.

But he was silent for so long that she was afraid he wasn’t going to say any more.

“I did a feature shoot of some of the training the Rangers do a few years ago,” she finally said.

He snorted. “I bet that went over well with command.”

“They didn’t seem to be too upset. I was only there a few hours,” she admitted.

The way his mouth moved, just at one corner in a sort of wry grimace, told Annalisa that she hadn’t seen anything of importance. Not that she was surprised by that knowledge.

“Yeah, well, training is good and it does prepare the men the best it can for action. But nothing really mimics combat.”

She couldn’t truly begin to imagine what he’d seen and done on battlefields large and small in places she’d never known existed.

“So when you were injured, what did you think you’d do?” she asked.

“Honestly I figured I’d just quit. I mean, nothing was going to get me back with my unit. Hell, my knee was shot. They had to rebuild the whole damn thing.”

“Is that when you first started rowing?” she asked.

“Yeah. At the rehab wing at Walter Reed,” he said, naming the famous military hospital. “I couldn’t run, especially at first. One of the grunts—I mean, one of the privates—was trying to learn to walk after losing both his legs in an IED attack in Fallujah and he challenged me to try it. He was a fucking—I mean, a freaking—workout animal.”

Annalisa bit her lip to keep from asking what had happened to the soldier, especially since Robert had said “was”.

“Everybody called him ‘Stumpy’. I thought it was because of what had happened in Iraq, but later I learned he’d been called that since he was a kid because he was just a little fella. Of course, the guys at Walter Reed ragged the shit out of him. Anyway, this little runt of guy was working out all the time. I would see him use the rowing machine then crawl his way over to the pool and do fifty laps then come back and hit the rower again.”

“So he challenged you?” Annalisa prompted, wanting to hear how he’d gone from rebuilding his knee to getting on the Olympic team.

“Yeah. And soon all the other guys were in my face too,” Robert said. “Before my injury, I just put in the PT time because it was required. Frankly doing all the things Rangers do just came naturally. I played a lot of ball in school but I didn’t have to work at it, you know? After my knee got blown up it was different. I’d never known that kind of pain. I’m sad to say, if they hadn’t been on me, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk today.”

He took a breath and Annalisa kept her face against his chest. She couldn’t imagine the pain he’d been in and her heart was breaking at the thought of what he’d lived through. He picked up his story and though she was about to cry, he seemed calm about the events he related next.

“They were right to ride me. You should have heard what Stumpy said to me. ‘Wimp’ was the nicest name he called me. He said if he could do it with zero legs, I ought to be able to row myself to China and back. One of my flaws is being unable to resist a challenge, and Stumpy was right on. The rowing machine was a great workout. My legs got strong. Then one of the physical therapists, who was really into the local rowing scene, told me about tryouts they were having for an eights team.”

She wasn’t sure how she knew, maybe it was the tone of his voice, or perhaps the easy way he was breathing, but Annalisa felt certain he was smiling now. The thought made her heart feel full that at least part of this memory was a happy one for him.

“Stumpy and the guys said I should go for it. My doc said it was okay. He gave me the all clear for anything I wanted to do except rejoin my unit. So I figured it might be fun. No one was more surprised than me when I made the damn team. From there it snowballed. I never dreamed I’d be here at the trials and have a chance at the Olympics. But the guys…well, they were all pulling for me, so I didn’t want to let them down. I figured at best maybe I’d get on as a coach or adviser, something like that.”

“And here you are,” Annalisa finished. “One more win and you’ll be in the Olympics.”

“Yes. I want it. It wasn’t something I’d even thought about two years ago. Now…well, I’m not going to be happy if I don’t get it all,” Robert said. “Finishing second is not an option. But, hell, if you believe in luck or mojo or whatever, I’ve probably just screwed any chance of winning.”