The Boss (40 page)

I started to giggle. I couldn't help it.

"Are you laughing?" he asked, laughing a bit
himself.

"I am." I let my head fall back and moaned
again as he pinched my clit between his thumb and forefinger,
rolling it from side to side. "I'm just having such a good
time."

And that was it, really. I was feeling so
damn fantastic. Here I was, doing something I'd rarely done with
other partners, without any fear or shame, because I knew Neil
loved me, and he genuinely loved fucking me. We could try anything
and he would still be into me, and ready to try other things.

Not that this was a failure, by any means.
While his fingers were doing a lot more for me than his cock was at
the moment, I got a naughty thrill just from being held down by
him, having him dominate me by virtue of position, even if he
wasn't going full Dom tonight. I lifted my head again and took him
into my mouth, still somewhat breathless from laughter. After a few
long, slow licks, I had to lower my head again, but I held my
breasts tighter around him.

"You know, if you came like this, you would
blow all over my face," I said, as though it were an innocent
observation. It totally wasn’t.

He groaned and closed his eyes.

I whined in disappointment as he withdrew his
hand from between my legs.

"Get up," he ordered, swinging one leg over
me. He offered me his hand and I took it, climbing to my knees in
front of him. He pushed me onto my hands and gave me a sharp slap
on my ass before he jerked my pants down. I felt his weight shift,
his arms brush my thighs, and then without any warning, he pushed
his face against my vulva. He sucked my clit into his mouth and I
jumped, but he held my hips, urging me to tilt my pelvis for easier
access.

In the porn, the woman was on top of the man
now, straddling his face as he devoured her pussy. The noises she
made were too breathless and spontaneous to be fake. She sounded
like she was really, really getting off. Like I was really, really
getting off with Neil’s nose brushing against my labia, his tongue
tapping my clit.

"Let me hear you," Neil begged, pressing
kisses across my ass, down my thighs. "I'm going to make you come,
Sophie. And I want to hear it."

"Oh, fuck," I gasped as his fingers shoved
into me. He knew exactly what I needed. I needed him to be rough
with me, to make me feel more than just pleasure. To feel that
little twinge of fear, when there was nothing to fear. To feel
helpless, when I held all the power.

He pressed against my g-spot with two
fingers, hard, and rolled my clit under his tongue. My gaze fixed
on the woman on screen, how her thighs trembled around her
partner's face, how she gripped one breast and ran the fingers of
her other hand through her hair. Neil's thumb replaced his tongue.
His teeth grazed the curve of my buttock and I shuddered; he bit
me, hard, and that was all I needed. I sobbed and shook, grinding
back on his hand. I threw my head back as my pussy clenched around
his fingers. And I totally let him hear me.

"Fuck," I groaned again as he withdrew his
hand. After a brief pause to put on the condom, his cock took the
place of his fingers. With my pants still around my knees, and his
knees on either side of my calves, I might as well have been tied
up because I couldn’t move. He pushed in, hard, then drew back and
shoved again. There was nothing I could do but hold on, rocking
with him, my balance precarious, my fingers digging into the
blanket beneath me.

In the video, the woman was on her partner's
lap, facing away from him, the camera angled to show every thrust
of his erection into her shaved-bare pussy. They were going at it
pretty vigorously, her tits bouncing as she rode him. What we were
doing was just the opposite. Neil would slam forward, then withdraw
slowly, so I felt every inch of him drag along my sensitive
channel. My internal muscles gripped him in tight flutters. My eyes
rolled up at the unbelievable sensation.

"How can you feel so amazing?" He teased me,
leaving just the tip of his cock in me until I whimpered. He filled
me, so deep I gasped, and leaned to sweep my hair aside. His lips
fell on my nape, his tongue laving the skin there, and I shivered,
overcome by the rasp of his sharp stubble against my ticklish neck.
Every cell in my body was on fire for him. Every sense had attuned
totally to sex; the video feeding graphic pictures to my brain, the
sounds of the actors on the screen mingling with my own harsh
breaths. The scent of Neil's cologne had become a powerful
aphrodisiac, and it only heightened my desire now. Every centimeter
of my skin had come to total awareness, every touch too much and
not enough.

He picked up speed, his hand reaching around
to caress my throat. He didn't exert any pressure, just left his
hand there, possessive over the soft skin of my neck, his thumb
brushing up and down in the curve below my ear. A thrill shot
through me at the territorial nature of his touch. When we were
together like this, I belonged to him, body and soul, though I knew
that he would never seek to actually own me. I almost wept at the
security of that feeling. Pleasure twisted through me like an arc
of lightning, every muscle tightening as I panted and ground back
on him. The feeling snapped and writhed, and I writhed with it,
tossed in the storm of my own violent climax. It took me a moment
to realize the hoarse, half-shouted moans were wrenching from my
throat, not the actress on the screen.

My thighs trembled, as did my arms, from the
strain of staying up. Before I could collapse, Neil pulled out and
gently pushed me to the bed. He tugged down my pants, and I kicked
them off with exhausted legs, turning to my back and reaching up
for him. He settled between my legs, kissed me, kissed my jaw, my
neck, as he sank easily into my body.

His hands found mine and brought them up to
either side of my head, threading our fingers together as he moved.
I rocked my hips in time to his thrusts, lifted my head to meet his
greedy mouth with my own. When he came, his groan was muffled by my
lips. His head dropped to my shoulder as his body jerked
involuntarily against mine.

He leaned up on his elbows to kiss me,
breathing hard, his weight still pinning me to the bed. I giggled,
disentangling our hands so I could reach up and touch his face.
"You know what would be a terrible obituary? 'Twenty-four year old
suffocated under billionaire boyfriend.’"

"Ha ha," he groaned, grimacing as he slipped
from my body.

The moment he rolled to my side, I got up and
crawled toward the head of the bed. "Post-sex snuggle time?"

His eyes were closed, but he smiled. "Give me
a moment to get rid of this."

He ditched the condom in the remaining wad of
pizza napkins and climbed beneath the covers. He used the remote to
stop the video. I cuddled at his side. "This is basically a perfect
Friday night."

"I couldn't agree more." He hit a button on
the remote, and the lights dimmed as he wrapped his arms around
me.

An hour later, we still hadn't moved. I lay
sprawled over Neil's chest, while he stroked my hair down my back
with one slow hand.

"Do you want to go to the bedroom?" he asked,
his voice rough from wine and drowsiness.

"In a minute," I murmured. "I'm all
snuggly."

"We can sleep in here, if you like." He
suggested, and I heard it through his chest. "I stayed in here many
a night while Elizabeth and I were having our differences."

I lifted my head slightly. "Is the divorce
final yet?"

"Mmhm." His eyebrows rose. "It was final
before I came to
Porteras
. But as per the terms of the
divorce, she had sixty days to move out of this apartment and into
the house in L.A."

"Oh." I had a sudden, burning curiosity about
this woman I had been trying not to think of for so long. But
trying to pretend she never existed wasn't fair to Neil. He'd been
through a divorce, very recently. That had to be traumatic. "I hope
you don't think that you can't talk to me about all of that. I love
you. I don't want you suffering through a difficult time feeling
like you can't talk honestly with me."

His hand stilled at my back. "You surprise me
so much."

"I'm not trying to surprise you. I'm just
trying to be a good friend. Or a good girlfriend, I guess."

He resumed his slow petting of my hair, and I
laid my head back down. "Well, I suppose it's only fair to tell
you... don't expect Emma to be particularly warm when she's here
tomorrow."

"I kind of considered that ship sailed when
she accidentally heard us having sex," I reminded him.

"She wouldn't have liked you, anyway," he
admitted with some reluctance. "She doesn't trust people easily. I
think that's my fault. She had a good relationship with Elizabeth,
and she was hurt by the way the marriage ended."

"That doesn't seem very fair. You couldn't
have a baby just to stay married. Not if you didn't want one."

He wrapped his arm around me to give me a
squeeze. "Are you sure you don't mind talking about this?"

"Not at all." I scooted up the bed to lie on
the pillow and face him. "Am I supposed to be jealous of your ex?
Sensitive about admitting you've been with other people? You’re
with me now. What would be the point?"

"Fair enough." His small, sad smile pierced
my heart. This whole time, he'd been hurting, and he'd hidden it to
make things easier for me. "Elizabeth never mentioned her...
yearning for motherhood, if I can sarcastically borrow her phrase,
in the two years that we dated and later lived together. It was
only after we signed a prenuptial agreement that held a clause for
child support that the idea seemed to organically occur to
her."

"Oh." I didn't know anything about prenuptial
agreements. I had no idea they could cover child support. "I take
it that it was a lot?"

"Fifty thousand per month in addition to
whatever family court awarded. For two children, it went up to
seventy-five thousand, then an additional ten for each child
thereafter." His eyes met mine. "When we came back from our
honeymoon, she admitted she'd had her IUD removed a few weeks
before the wedding. That was a rather difficult blow to my
trust."

"But you stayed with her?" I wasn't sure if I
could have stayed with someone who seemed to be playing me like
that.

"I stayed. For a year, a year and half. It
took me a long time to face that our separation wasn’t going to end
in reconciliation. I wanted to make things work. Partially for
Emma. She and Elizabeth hit it off right away, and they were very
close." He paused. "And partially for myself. I loved her. I didn't
want to believe she’d had her change of heart because of the
prenup. I'm still not entirely sure it was. And I believe that
Elizabeth's affection for Emma was genuine, but Emma is quite hurt
by the whole thing. She's angry at Elizabeth, and at me. I think
she blames me for not protecting her from a person who ended up
disappointing her."

Emma was my age, so she would have been
nineteen or twenty when her father had gotten involved with
Elizabeth. "How old is Elizabeth?"

"Thirty-six." He raised an eyebrow. "Don't
worry, I don't have a string of twenty-four year olds in my
past."

I rolled my eyes at him. "That wasn't what I
was worried about. I was just thinking how devastating it would
have been for me, at twenty, to make friends with a woman who was
older than me, to develop a supportive, encouraging relationship
with her, and then have to doubt that friendship. She probably
doesn't blame you for not protecting her. She probably blames
Elizabeth for hurting you. And herself, for not protecting
you."

He studied my face for a moment, and I
worried briefly that I might have said the wrong thing and insulted
him. Then he said, with a slow smile of admiration, "You're a very
intelligent person, Sophie."

“I do okay for myself most of the time.” I
leaned over and kissed him. "You got divorced. Shit happens. It’s
not like you got married planning to get divorced. You don’t seem
like the temporary marriage type. Don’t take this the wrong way,
but I think you'd make a pretty awesome husband."

"Oh my, that does raise some red flags,
coming from a woman who's too afraid of commitment to accept the
offer of space in the medicine chest." He kissed me again, smiling
against my mouth. "But I'll hold onto hope."

My stomach lurched. I didn't want to examine
that statement too much.

Chapter Twenty

The next morning,
Neil and I went through our usual routine. We woke up, pretended we
would get out of bed, didn’t, talked about getting out of bed some
more, didn’t, then finally got up when it seemed like we might be
in serious danger of another weird morning meeting with Emma.

“Since it’s so close to lunch time already,
would you mind if we just sent Sue out for bagels?” Neil had to
raise his voice over the sound of my hairdryer. He was shaving at
his bathroom sink, a towel around his hips, his hair pushed back
and wet from the shower.

I shut off the hairdryer and fluffed my
mostly-dry brown waves, frowning at myself in the mirror. “Um, I
think I’ll pass on breakfast. Something about meeting your daughter
again is giving me serious butterflies.”

“I don’t know why,” he said, frowning as he
tilted his head back to drag the razor up his throat. “It isn’t as
though I’m looking for a new mother for her. If she doesn’t like
you, or if you don’t like her, you’re both adults. I assume you can
both be civil to each other.”

“As the day is long,” I agreed, but mentally,
I added,
at least
I
can be.

Sure, the last time I’d seen Emma had to have
been a shock for her. If I had walked into my mother’s house and
overheard her having sex with some random stranger, I would have
put my head in the oven.