Chapter 25
everything, but
LEXI
My back curled as I clenched inside like a fist, and then everything blasted apart. My voice squeezed out with a shriek. “Nicolai!”
And then waves of pleasure rolled through me, over and over like I was drowning in a storm. I gasped between pulses, each one sharper, each one harder.
Nicolai’s face hovered above me while he was still somehow wringing pleasure through my body, his blue eyes as bright as a summer sky as he watched me drown. “Yes, angel. Show me.”
The ecstasy slashed as he strummed my clit and the deeper parts of me like a harp that rang jarring jolts of pleasure through my body.
I slammed my legs closed on his hand, twisting in his grip, but I grabbed his wrist and held it as he didn’t stop, didn’t stop, didn’t stop.
I think—
I almost—
—died.
But then his touch gentled, each pulse lighter, each lull longer, and then I could breathe. “Nicolai.”
He snagged his wadded shirt from the end of the bed and wiped his fingers and mouth, and both his cheeks, and his neck, and then he stretched out beside me and gathered me into his arms. “That’s my girl.”
Pleasure was still zapping around in my body, making me reckless.
I’d never—never, ever—
My heart clenched as it thumped.
Part of my brain was like, Don’t piss him off, dummy. You want that to happen again. And again. My God, we want that every night forever.
The money did not concern me just then. Not in the slightest.
And he might do that again, and we are all for him doing that any time he feels like it.
The vast majority of my brain, like the lumpy top part and the squishy middle part, had been knocked offline by his tongue, including the part of my brain that controlled what my vocal cords said.
So instead of being prudent, instead of shutting up and doing my job like I had every day at Johnson Construction LLC, I opened my big mouth. “That was amazing.”
His tight smirk was a little smug as he looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.
“That was the best moment of my entire life,” I told him.
I was watching the side of his face where he was staring up at the ceiling, and his eyebrows rose. “That’s gratifying.”
“No, I mean it. I thought I was going to die. And I was fine with that.”
His smile lightened his voice. “Practicing what to tell other women to earn that thousand dollars, are we?”
“Nicolai, I’m serious!” I pushed myself up and braced myself on one arm to look down at where he lay by my side, shirtless but still with his belt firmly buckled, at how insanely handsome he was.
As I sat up, my head spun like a tornado whipped the room around me.
I lay right back down, holding onto the comforter, squeezed tight in my fists as the room lazily slowed. “This was real. This was important. I won’t go back.”
Nicolai turned his head to look at me. His eyebrows dipped. “Angel, what’s going on with you?”
My brain was careening around inside my head.
“I feel like the opposite of being told there’s no Santa Claus.
Like, there was this thing, this real thing, that everyone said was a fantasy and I shouldn’t believe in.
Something that I thought was bad and should be avoided, but it’s actually fantastic.
Everyone told me I shouldn’t. Everyone said I was sinful if I did. And oh my God, wow.”
His thick arm tightened around my back where I was lying on him.
“It’s like everyone told me that chocolate is poison, but they were all secretly gobbling down pounds and pounds of Hershey’s and Nestle behind my back and then laughing at me for being too stupid to figure it out.”
He shifted on his hip, rolling to look at me, and smoothed my hair back from where it was tangled around my face and sticking to my lip. “I’m not laughing at you.”
“But they were laughing at me, and I stayed anyway,” I fretted.
“They were laughing at me because they were having fun seeing how much they could break me. They didn’t adhere to what they were telling me to do.
His sisters were running around with all sorts of guys.
His parents drink. But I had to be extra good, extra modest, and they liked that they’d made me do that. ”
His arms curled more tightly around me. “Oh, my sweet. That’s atrocious.”
I looked up at where he was staring at the ceiling. “I don’t want people to manipulate me and then laugh about it anymore.”
He dragged me to lie across his bare chest. His skin was hot under my hands and torso, my back cooled by the frigid air rushing from the air conditioner vents near the ceiling.
His heart pulsed against my cheek, and I was staring down at his belt and legs beyond.
“They shouldn’t have done that,” he said, his voice echoing in his chest under my ear. “I’m regretting that we merely put on a show in the casino when I could have grabbed that fool by his collar and punched the living fuck out of him.”
My first thought was, Oh, no. Don’t do that. You don’t have to do that.
He didn’t have to do that?
My brain stuttered, and skidded, and stopped.
Why didn’t he have to do that?
I didn’t like violence.
No, I wasn’t supposed to like violence.
Thoughts connected into a string.
I wasn’t supposed to like it when someone defended me, because I was supposed to defend their values and beliefs, but asking to be defended in return would cause too much trouble.
I wasn’t supposed to cause trouble.
I wasn’t supposed to ask anyone to do anything for me.
I was only supposed to give.
And to work.
For them.
I was sick inside. “I don’t care about Jimmy anymore. You don’t have to punch him because I don’t care about him.”
There was truth in that.
“I like you,” I told Nicolai. “I liked this.”
His hand stroked my back in big sweeps, a gentle and gentling caress. “Yes, angel. Me, too.”
“But you said we can’t. You said I can’t even kiss you anymore.”
Nicolai sighed deeply into his stomach, his tough muscles rippling under my cheek, and he grumbled, “We really need to negotiate that pre-nup.”
Horror dumped icy water on me. “You’re going to say that we can’t do this anymore, aren’t you?”
“It’s so late, angel. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“Nope. Now. You’re going to put in the contract that we can’t do this anymore. That if I kiss you, that if I hug you, that if I touch you, then I’ve broken the contract.”
I was so going to get taken advantage of.
My body craved him. I flattened my hand over the ridges of his abdominal muscles, feeling the hard cobbles under my palm and fingers, and then I turned my head on his chest to look up at him. “I don’t want to sign a contract like that. I won’t.”
Nicolai stroked down my arm to my hand with my wedding rings on it, lifted it to his mouth, and kissed the backs of my fingers. “We should establish boundaries. Obviously, abstinence isn’t going to work. It never does.”
“It worked for me,” I mumbled.
“It isn’t working for you anymore.”
“Good point.”
Nicolai pursed his lips for a moment, then said, “My suggestion is that, if you are sure that you want me to introduce you to what your body can do, can feel, we indulge. Sex is one of life’s few diversions.”
His long stroke down my arm and over the curve of my hip was an exclamation point on his sentence.
“If you mean doing more things like that, I’m in.
But I want you to teach me what to do to you, too.
The point of this isn’t just to—to do things.
I want to be good at doing things. I want guys to say the things about me that those girls said about you.
I want them to say that I have a . . . a magic . . . P.”
I swear to God that Nicolai’s eyes widened a fraction, and the tan on his cheeks pinkened. The dark circles of his pupils definitely expanded in his eyes, stretching into the teal-blue of his irises like a hunting cat. “If you insist.”
“It’s not fair, otherwise.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“You would eventually.”
His hand caressed another long stroke over my skin. “Maybe I like touching you, watching you.”
“But that’s not all you like.”
I was still watching him from where I was lying with my head on his chest, his heartbeat under my ear. The slow drift of his gaze away from mine was an acknowledgement, even if he didn’t say it out loud.
But his heart beat faster, racing under my ear on his chest.
He did say, “But obtaining an annulment is imperative.”
That damn annulment again. I sighed, “Okay.”
“And no children. No pregnancies. That’s too dangerous. And that must be mandated in the pre-nup.”
We weren’t forever-married. Nicolai wasn’t my ever-after. “I agree.”
“My proposition is—”
Yeah, this was turning into a proposition situation.
He turned my hand, gently examining the wedding rings.
Or my cuticles. I couldn’t tell. “A doctor might be able to discern whether you’re a virgin for the annulment.
That would be incontrovertible evidence for an annulment, and they’d have to grant it.
So, we’ll do almost everything. I’ll teach you, or introduce you, to everything else. We’ll do everything, but.”
Disappointment was a sinkhole under my feet, and I fell.
But on the other hand, I had to respect his boundaries, even if his boundaries were only for me.
I sighed back at him. “Yeah, okay. I mean, I guess that’s still a lot, if you believe the internet.” An alternate version of what he’d said hit me. “Wait.”
“What?”
Nope-nope-nope. Horror infused energy into my limbs and traveled to my spine.
I sat the heck up. “When you say we’ll do everything-but, do you mean that we’ll do everything but, meaning except, you know, the actual deed?
Everything, except?” I glared at him from where I towered above him because I was sitting up for this.
“Or do you mean we’ll do everything-butt. Like we’ll do everything, in my butt.”
Enlightenment dawned in Nicolai’s bright eyes, and his mouth curved, but he stopped and sucked his lips inside his mouth before he said anything.
His eyes crinkled at the ends.
His throat bobbed.