The Things I Do for You (The Alexanders) (12 page)

“Nick! Oh God, I can’t…” She let out the sexiest little whimper. She was taking him so deep, clenching around him hard, and he knew she was coming again.
 

It was enough to send him over the edge, his release rocketing through him. It stunned him, the force of his orgasm causing him to shake. He clenched his fingers around her waist hard enough to leave bruises.
 

“Damn, Raina.” He pressed his lips against the soft skin of her breastbone and laid his head against her breast. He could feel her heart hammering beneath her ribs. It gave him a very masculine sense of satisfaction to feel her fingers clench and unclench on his leg as she rode out the final pulses of her own release.
 

RAINA KNEW THAT the time of reckoning was coming, starting with the lecture she would get from Sam and ending with the teary-eyed questions from her sister. It was cowardly but she couldn’t help wishing they could put it off a little longer.
 

After their intense lovemaking on Friday night, they’d spent the next day alternating between dining at each of the hotel’s fine restaurants and doing dirty, unbelievably erotic things in bed. He’d taken her to
The Phantom of the Opera
on Saturday night and Raina had adored the show. It was too bad she’d only paid attention to half of it because Nick had spent the second act with his hand up her skirt.

He’d tortured her with slow, feathery strokes for almost half an hour before he’d finally thrust two fingers inside her, capturing her cry with his mouth as she’d come hard enough to almost lose consciousness.
 

Sunday had been more of the same. They’d eaten breakfast in bed and hadn’t gotten out of it for more than a few minutes at a time the rest of the day. Well, she’d asked Nick to get her pregnant. There was no way she could accuse him of not being thorough.

But they’d had to come back to the real world at some point.

She placed a hand against her lower abdomen. Although, hopefully she was coming back to the real world with something more than what she’d left with.
 

“I think it’s best if we take some time apart now that we’re back.”

Nick set her bags down next to the couch and then turned to face her. The set of his jaw told her he wasn’t going to go easily. But after three days of constant contact with him, she needed a break from his support, his smile, his sexalicious
smell
. Everything about the man called out to her on a basic biological level.

If she was going to have any chance at keeping her heart protected, she was in desperate need of some Nick-free time.
 

“Are you pulling away from me, Raina?”

“No, I’m really not. It’s just that I know things are going to be hectic for me and I’m sure they will be for you, too.”

“Yeah, I pretty much just left my office in the lurch, but it was worth it.”
 

His smile did funny things to her, making her want to drop this whole separation idea and yank him by the collar back into the bedroom. But her fertile window was over. She was either pregnant now or she wasn’t. If she wanted to have even a prayer of keeping her emotions unentangled, random afternoon delights with her hunk of a husband had to be off-limits.

Off-limits.

“Yeah it was…” She hesitated, unsure if calling their three-day sex fest “fun” was really the message she wanted to send. “I think it’ll be worth it. I’ll know in two weeks if we achieved our goal.”

“Even if we didn’t, then we’ll just have to try again. I don’t want you to worry about it. Stress isn’t good for you, right?”

“Right. That’s why I’m going to rest for a while. I know you’ll probably have to work late a lot this week, so you don’t have to worry about coming back here and checking up on me.”

Nick pulled her by the hand until she looked him directly in the eye. “If I know you, your idea of resting is answering emails and calling a bunch of people. That doesn’t sound very stress free to me.”

“Sam won’t let me overdo.”

Nick’s face darkened. “Sam isn’t your husband.
I am
. Which means that I will see you at dinner tonight, Mrs. Alexander. My parents rarely spent a night apart. I don’t have any intention of us doing so, either.” Then he kissed her on the forehead and left.

Raina stared after him long after the door closed. It would be so much easier to be pissed if she wasn’t glowing from him calling her “Mrs. Alexander.”
 

“Ugh. I’m like a teenage girl writing his name on my notebook in sparkly glitter ink.” She pulled out her cell phone and called her sister. After a brief conversation, they agreed that Ridley would come over in about an hour. Raina found herself strangely excited to talk to her sister. Usually Ridley was the one with cute stories about the things Jackson had done for her. Now it was Raina’s turn.
 

She turned at the sound of the door closing. Sam stood in the doorway watching her.
 

“Hey. We’re back,” she said when he didn’t speak. It occurred to her after she said it how stupid that was. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t know she was back.

“I see that.”

“I know you’re really mad—”

“Mad? Raina, I think I lost about three decades of my life this weekend. You think you can just ditch me and fly off to Vegas? You hired me to protect you, but you have to let me do my job. I should quit and let you figure out your own shit.”

Panic lanced through her at his words. It wasn’t like she was some major celebrity, but with all the travel she did to foreign countries, it gave her an incredible peace of mind to know that she had Sam watching her back. More than that, he was someone she’d grown truly fond of over the last five years.
 

“Don’t leave me, Sam.”

Something in her voice must have gotten through to him because he crossed to her and picked her up in a bear hug. Startled, she held stock-still until he set her on her feet again.
 

“You’d better not ever do that again.” The red strips of color on his cheeks betrayed his agitation.
 

“I really scared you, didn’t I?” she whispered.

He coughed. “Yeah. You did.”

“I didn’t mean to. Everything just happened so fast. Nick makes me do things I shouldn’t do.”

“I’m starting to think that Alexander is the only one who can get you to act based on emotion. Which is not a bad thing, except when it involves running off to another state without letting me know. And a text message is not how I define letting me know. Anyone could have sent that. I need to hear your voice.”

“I am so sorry.” A wave of shame washed over her. It had felt incredibly freeing to run off and do something spontaneous, but looking at things from Sam’s perspective, she could see how selfish it had been. She would probably quit in his place.

Sam scowled at her. “Uh huh. Don’t think I’m letting you off that easy. You missed our Saturday workout and it’s time for you to get back on track. Go get changed!”

Raina knew she was forgiven if he was willing to hold the heavy bag for her. “Thanks, Sam.”
 

She grabbed the small suitcase she’d taken to Vegas and carried it upstairs to her room. Her room had always been her personal oasis. Now she would be sharing it with Nick.
 

Was she really ready for that?

She dropped the suitcase on the bed so she’d be forced to unpack it before going to sleep that night, then quickly changed into shorts and a sports tank and pulled her hair up into a ponytail.

It was weird to be doing the usual things, knowing that Nick would be coming home to her in a few hours. It was almost like she was living in some alternate dimension where everything looked the same but nothing was.
 

It was time to figure out what her new reality would be.

*
 
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AT HIS OFFICE, Nick was trying hard not to let his mind wander to what Raina was doing. He knew exactly what her game was. She was hoping that by pushing him away as soon as they got back to their real lives, she could write their newfound intimacy off as part of “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

But he wasn’t going to make it that easy for her.
 

“I brought the new bids that we were supposed to do Friday,” Kay said. “Also, I need to head out a little earlier than usual today. Jackson wants to record tonight. I sent you a message Friday as soon as he told me about it. Sorry for the late notice.”

“No problem. I thoroughly enjoyed my time off and I certainly don’t begrudge anyone else theirs.”

Kay looked relieved. “Thanks, sir. I’d better go now or I’ll be late.”

“Good luck with the recording.”

He listened with half an ear as Kay gathered her things and shut down her computer. He heard her call out when she finally left, but his mind was still on the scene that morning. How was he supposed to romance his wife when she wanted them to live in separate houses?

All the usual things wouldn’t have any effect on Raina. She probably received flowers all the time, and considering that she was a model, clothes and jewelry weren’t going to be much of a thrill, either. If he was going to give her a gift, it needed to be something she wouldn’t think to buy for herself. Something that showed her how committed to this marriage he really was.
 

Basically a miracle in a box.

He did an Internet search for “gifts” and browsed several pages of images. He considered a package for a luxury island vacation, then quickly moved on. Raina traveled all the time. Plus, the point was to keep her stress level low so she could get pregnant. Putting her through the rare torture of airport security and a long flight was probably counterproductive.

“This being in love stuff is harder than it looks,” Nick muttered.

The problem, he realized, was that he was trying to buy her something to convince her that he was a nice guy. But there was really no product in the world that could do that. She needed to see that his intentions were pure based on his actions, not something he bought.
 

His eyes went to his briefcase. The top of the pregnancy book he’d picked up at the bookstore on the way in stuck out of the top. It was a heavy tome, easily six hundred pages of tiny text and weird, black-and-white charts and diagrams. He’d tried to read a little of it in the bookstore but the pictures of tiny bloblike cells had creeped him out a little. He felt incredibly juvenile being squeamish about a book.
 

“I can do this. Let’s read about pregnancy.” He flipped it open and paged past the initial sections about conception. No grown man should need a primer on that part, he reasoned. He stopped at the section entitled
The First Trimester
. After several pages, he had to wonder if getting Raina pregnant was such a good idea. Nausea, mood swings, fatigue, and tender breasts sounded like the symptoms of a disease, not pregnancy.

By the time he’d finished the whole section, he was almost afraid to read any more. What the hell had he been thinking? He’d gone into this assuming it would just be having a whole lot of sex and then bringing Raina ice cream and pickles for nine months. But there were all these warnings and rules that he’d had no idea about. They weren’t supposed to have sex with her on her back. And then what if he penetrated her too deeply? They hadn’t even talked about a birth plan.

He had no idea what he was doing!

“Hello, anyone here?”
 

Nick looked up at the deep voice echoing from the reception area. “I’m in my office.” A few seconds later, Elliot walked in.

“You haven’t gotten a new assistant yet?”

Nick accepted his handshake and then they bumped shoulders. “She had to leave early. This one is actually working out. She’s a singer in Jackson’s new group.”

“You’re not banging her, are you? That could get sticky.”

Nick recoiled. “No.”
 

It wasn’t an unfair question, considering his past, but just the thought made him feel wrong. What a change. It wouldn’t have even registered a little while ago and he would have just shrugged it off. But now he had to wonder if this was what Raina thought of him. Did she think he just slept with anything that moved?
 

Was she worried about him being faithful?

“So what brings you by in the middle of the week? Mom will be excited to see you.” Elliot owned and operated a security firm a few hours north in Washington, D.C. They usually only saw him on the weekends.
 

“Oh, I think she’s already excited. You’ve just made her the happiest woman on the East Coast probably.”

Nick stared at him blankly. “What did I do? Not that I’m complaining. It’s better to be on her good side.”

“Did you really think you could get married and we wouldn’t find out? What is wrong with you?”

Nick lost his breath. “You know about that?”

“This is not the 1990s. Technology has ruined the ability for people to do stupid shit without anyone finding out. A fan of Raina’s saw the two of you entering a chapel in Vegas and posted the picture on Twitter. I’m sure you can imagine my surprise this weekend when someone asked me about your wedding.”

Elliot stopped talking suddenly. Nick followed his gaze to where the pregnancy book lay open on his desk. A large diagram of a fetus was clearly visible.
 

Elliot looked back at him, no longer joking. “Well, I didn’t see that one coming. You’ve been busy, little brother.”

Nick covered his mouth with his hand. “You have no idea.”

“When were you planning on filling us in?” Eli asked quietly. His brother wasn’t usually chatty and he was hardly the sensitive type, but if Nick didn’t know better, he’d think Eli’s feelings were hurt.