Chapter 17 #2
I move through a series of twizzles across the ice before I swivel in a rapid circle to a stop when my phone chimes with an incoming message. Sucking in breath after breath, I tug my phone from the restrictive side pocket on my leggings and take a look.
Mom: Your Asher had me bring Mason back home early.
My Asher? What in the hell is that nonsense? My eyes flare as another text comes in.
Mom: We spent an hour chatting and giving Mason a snack while I told him story after story about you. All at his request. Then he asked for any pictures I could get from my phone that you haven’t shown him on yours. If I didn’t love Gary and Asher were into older women, I’d be all over that.
I roll my eyes. You and every other woman—and man, for that matter—on the planet.
Me: Where is Mason now?
Mom: Home with Asher. He insisted he could handle it.
Me: Mom! Are you kidding me? He has a bad shoulder. He can’t lift Mason. He can’t even change his diaper.
Mom: He showed me he could. He wanted daddy time with his son. He’s the real deal, Wyn. Joe never behaved that way around you. Not even when you were a baby.
I growl. And curse. I’m the only one on the ice so I can swear up a storm and no one other than myself will be the wiser.
Me: Stop. I know what you’re doing.
Mom: He also couldn’t stop talking about you.
He asked me about your favorite color and flower and food and if I had a video of your face when you found out you won the Olympics.
He wanted a video of your face, Wynter. For God’s sake, why haven’t you married him already?
He’s a postcard of a man. A total dream.
Me: You just proved my point exactly. Postcards and dreams show the best versions of themselves and are far from reality. No thanks.
Mom: Did it ever occur to you that he’s a Gary and not a Joe?
I grumble a whole new version of a swear, making up new ones as I spew them.
Because yes, it obviously occurred to me.
I’m not blind, and I’m not totally ignorant of Asher.
I just don’t want to believe he’s one way and then be proven wrong because then Mason suffers.
I’ve been duped more than once, and that is not okay with me when it comes to my son.
I want Asher to love him, and I want Mason to be his number one.
And I don’t want Asher to feel obligated to me because I’m the mother of his child. Asher is a golden retriever. He falls in love easily, and he falls in love quickly, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t love any new owner who came along and petted him just right.
He’s an attention whore, and men like that don’t stay loyal.
Thirty minutes later, I’m back at Asher’s place and find it eerily silent. I check the app, and they’re not in the playroom or Mason’s bedroom. “Asher?”
No answer, and my heart rate spikes to unfounded decibels.
I start racing from room to room, coming up empty each time, until I hear a thick snore.
What in the world?
I follow the sound as Asher lets out yet another noise and find him passed out on his great room sofa with Mason fast asleep on his chest, pressed against his good shoulder, wearing only a diaper. Asher has his arm fastened around him like a seatbelt—like a football he’d never dare fumble.
My heart twinges, and my eyes immediately water.
It’s the sweetest image I’ve ever seen in my life.
I pull out my phone and snap a picture of my son fast asleep on his daddy’s chest, curled tightly into him.
I step closer and run my fingers first through Mason’s hair and then Asher’s, which is the same exact color. “Are you the real deal, or the man who will scar me and leave both me and our child in ruin?”
Asher stirs, his eyes blinking open, and when he sees me standing over them, he smiles.
“Hey,” he murmurs, his voice thick and crackly with sleep. Locking his arm tighter around Mason, he shifts, taking me in. “Wow.”
“What?”
I glance down at myself. I’m wearing leggings and a fitted long-sleeved sports shirt.
“Nothing. You just look…” He laughs, and my gaze flashes back up to his.
“What?”
He hitches up his shoulder, his smile turning impish.
“Hot. Like seriously hot. The whole just after a workout thing is… yeah. It’s my favorite look on a woman, but the way you wear it…
” He laughs again in a slightly self-deprecating way.
“Let’s just say it’s a good thing our son is asleep on my chest, or his mother would be in serious trouble. ”
“You’re flirting again,” I accuse, but there is no hiding the butterflies his words elicit.
“Oh, no, sweetheart. This isn’t flirting. This is stating a straight-up fact. I’ve seen you in a dozen different ways, and each one I can’t get enough of, but you like this is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I roll my eyes in disdain, even though I doubt I’m selling it. “Keep it in your pants, player.”
My tone was sarcastic, but his is anything but as he says, “For now, I have to. But tonight, when I’m in bed alone and my cock is painfully hard and wanting you, I’m going to picture you like this. Then I’m going to picture pulling off those tight-as-sin leggings and having you sit on my face.”
“Asher!” Holy hell. I flush and then flush some more, my pussy aching and empty feeling. My nipples harden, and I know he can see that through my sports bra and thin shirt.
“Have you ever done that?” he persists, his voice dipping. “Sat on a man’s face while he ate you out like he was starving for you?”
“Knock it off.” I slide my hands under Mason, picking him up and bringing him into my arms because I need the distraction, and nothing is more distracting and less sexy than having your baby in your arms.
Asher sits up. “Answer me,” he demands, his gray eyes consuming the hunger in mine and returning it tenfold. “Have you?”
Mason wiggles against my chest as he starts to wake up from his nap. “I’m going to go change his diaper.”
Because again, there’s nothing sexy about that.
“Wynter.” Asher is on his feet. “Just tell me.”
“No, okay? No. I’ve never done that before.
” My voice climbs along with my ire as I hotfoot it toward Mason’s bedroom.
“I haven’t done a lot of things. I’ve had boring, vanilla sex with boring, vanilla men.
Missionary at its worst. I’ve never had an orgasm during sex.
Half the time I hardly had one during foreplay, if there was foreplay at all.
The freaking orgasm you gave me in record time in your dining room was the first time anything like that had ever happened to me.
No one has ever touched me just to touch me without expecting sex. Happy now?”
I set Mason down on his changing table and get to work on removing his diaper. The diaper is dry, and I curse because, for the first time in my life, I was hoping for something beyond gross to be waiting for me in there.
I make a noise of frustration and then pick him up again, walking him across the hall to his playroom. Asher is still with us, but after I dropped my lovely sex truth bomb on him, he’s thankfully quiet.
That is until Mason starts climbing up the small playscape and sliding down. I didn’t even put him in clothes. That’s how flustered Asher had me. Then he comes in behind me, his mouth on my neck, and I realize that’s his favorite spot to kiss. Every time he’s kissed me, he’s kissed me there.
“I’m not vanilla. I’m far from boring. The orgasm I gave you in the dining room was just a taste of what I can do to your body.
The idea of making you come over and over makes me painfully hard.
” He pushes into my back, proving his point with every hard inch of himself.
“I know you don’t trust me yet. I know there’s a lot about yourself you’re holding in, and I haven’t pushed it because I need to earn your trust before you’ll do that.
But Wynter, I am telling you this now so there is no confusion in your head, and then you can sit with it and think it all over.
I am crazy about you. It’s more than sex.
It’s more than a do-over. It’s more than Mason.
It’s you. I want you . No one else. I want to show you how good this can all be because I have no doubt it could be incredible. ”
Another kiss, and I hate how his words hit every vulnerable spot inside me.
I want to be more than a second chance at getting one night right.
I want to matter. I want to be just as important to him as Mason is.
I don’t trust him, but I feel things for him, and I can lie and deny that all I want, but there is only so much lying a person can do to themselves, especially when they already know the truth.
Because I’m not sure I’ve ever mattered to anyone beyond my mother and Gary, and then later Mason.
I believe I am strong and will never need a man, and that is unchanged.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want someone to stare into my eyes and view me as their world.
It doesn’t mean I don’t want a man to make me feel special and loved—truly desired for the first time in my life.
“Think about it. I’m not going anywhere.”