Chapter 19
nineteen
PHOEBE
“Where’s Marta?” I said.
“Guest room. She said, and I want to get this right, that she would be taking the monitor tonight and that this was not a discussion.”
I made a face that was not at all serious. “She’s been saying that a lot lately.”
“That woman has a very effective delivery.” Troy still hadn’t moved from the counter. He had his hands behind him on it like a man holding himself down. “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I wasn’t going to ask you for anything.”
“I know you weren’t. That’s the problem.” I put the pages down on the island, squared them up, and left them there because I needed something to do with my hands. “Come upstairs.”
He came off that counter so fast he knocked over a stool.
I got in the shower first because I’d played a tennis match in front of twenty thousand people and I wasn’t doing anything else while I still had a stadium on me.
He came in after me. He didn’t ask. He got in behind me and stood there with the hot water steaming and running over both of us.
He put his hands on my hips, and neither of us said a word for a long minute.
It was blissful.
Then he started working his thumbs into the muscles on either side of my spine and I made a noise that was frankly obscene for something that innocent.
“Your back’s a disaster, baby.”
“My back served for a match tonight.”
“Your back served beautifully.” His mouth was at the top of my shoulder. “Turn around.”
I scoffed. “You turn around.”
His mouth was right by my ear. “Uh-uh. That’s not how this works.”
I turned around. He looked at me the way he has looked at me since I was nineteen, and then he looked lower and his whole face changed, and I watched my husband forget every single word he knows.
“Say something,” I said.
“I’m working on it.”
“That’s a first.”
“Shut up.” He put his hand flat between my breasts and left it there, and his voice came out wrecked. “Look at you.”
“Mmhm.”
“I should do a lot of things to you right here, right now.” He dragged his gaze back up to my face. “But I won’t. You need to relax and what I have in store for you is the total opposite of that.”
A tiny part of me was relieved, but the rest of me felt like pouting.
I turned back around and reached for the body wash. “Fine. Then you can at least help your broken old wife wash her back.”
And he did, without another word.
After, we got out and got dry and I limped to the bed like an old woman, because my ankle had opinions and my abdominals had a great many more.
“Lie down,” he instructed.
“Bossy.”
“Phoebe, if you tear something in this bed I’ll have to explain it to your father.”
That got a laugh out of both of us, and then I got hold of the front of his towel and pulled it off him and the laughing stopped.
He was already rock-hard.
He’d been hard since the shower and he hadn’t said one word about it, which isn’t like him at all. I put my hand around his cock and watched his jaw go.
“You’ve been very good,” I said.
“I’ve been trying,” he said with some restraint.
“I know.” I stroked him slow, all the way down and back, and he made a sound through his teeth. “You’ve been so good.”
“Baby…”
“Sit on the edge of the bed.”
He sat. I got down between his knees on the rug and looked up at him and he put his hand into my hair and didn’t push, and I loved him so much in that second I couldn’t breathe.
“Phoebs. Your ankle…”
“My ankle’s fine. My mouth’s fine.” I took the head of him in and swirled my tongue around it and pulled off with a wet pop that made him swear. “Everything’s fine.”
I took my time with him because that’s all I have.
He’s genuinely beautiful and heavy in my hand, and I ran my tongue up the underside of him from base to tip and then took him as far as I could and let myself be sloppy about it, both hands working what I couldn’t reach, spit running down him and over my fingers, the sounds absolutely filthy.
His fist tightened in my hair and released and tightened again.
“Look at me,” he said, low.
I looked up with my mouth full of him, still managing to smile.
“Oh, fuck.” His head went back and came forward again like he couldn’t decide where to put it. “You’re going to have to stop.”
I didn’t stop.
“Phoebe.” He got a hand under my jaw and lifted me off him, and his chest was going like he’d run somewhere. “I’m not finishing like that tonight. Get up here.”
“Make me.”
“Gladly.”
He picked me up under the arms like I weighed nothing and put me on my back on our bed and I laughed.
He got a hand between my legs and I stopped laughing.
“Christ, you’re soaked.”
“I’ve been soaked since the shower.”
“Since the shower.” He dragged two fingers slowly up through me and circled my clit and my hips came off the mattress. “You stood there for a whole conversation about my publicity schedule like this?”
“I did.” My voice was in pieces. “Troy.”
“Yeah, baby?” He plunged his fingers just barely inside me and then brought them up to his mouth, tasting me.
Everything in me clenched tightly, my hips swiveling in protest.
And then he stopped.
He put his hand on my stomach and looked down at me, and I made a noise of pure outrage.
“Ask me,” he said.
I opened my eyes wide. “What?”
“You told me to ask you a question tonight.” His hand was so still on my stomach that I could feel my own pulse under it. “So ask me for it. Out loud. I want to hear you say it.”
“You unbelievable…”
“I’m waiting.”
I could have killed him. I could have absolutely killed him, and I have never in my life wanted anything as badly as I wanted him to move his hand about six inches south.
“Troy.”
“Nope.”
“Fine.” I got a handful of the sheet. “Get your mouth on my pussy. Right now. Please.”
“There she is,” he said, and went down.
He didn’t tease me. He’d already had his moment and he knew it, and he put his tongue flat against me and licked me from bottom to top in one long slow stroke and I actually yelled.
“Louder,” he said into me. “Marta’s got the baby monitor and the guest room’s on the other end of the house and I already checked.”
“You did not check…”
“I checked twice.”
Then he stopped talking and got serious about it, tongue flat and slow and then narrowing, tight little circles.
“So good,” he mumbled against me. “You taste so fucking good.”
I could only nod like an idiot.
He dipped his fingers into me again, bringing them to his lips, licking my juices off slowly. “This would be my last meal. Your legs wide open and your cunt dripping this deliciousness into my mouth.”
The moan was deep in my chest. I loved when he talked to me like that, like a man desperate for only one thing.
My skin flushed hot when he opened me wider, and when my thighs started shaking, he slid those same two fingers into me and curled them up and kept the pressure on my clit at the same time.
I nearly jumped out of my body.
He chuckled against me. “Ooh, she liked that.”
Then he worked my pussy like the professional he is, mouth on me, tongue flat, fingers beckoning inside me, stroking just the right spot.
It built up and up and all I could do was try to restrain the scream that tore out of me as I came so hard my head spun, but Troy wasn’t having it, and he went even more.
He stayed with me all the way through it and out the other side, gentler and slower, until I was pushing at his forehead and swearing at him and laughing.
“Okay. Okay. Stop.”
“Say please.”
“I’ll end you.”
He came up over me, mouth wet, grinning like an idiot, and kissed me so I could taste myself, and then he went still above me and it went quiet.
“Tell me how,” he said. “Your abs. Tell me how we do this right and I’ll do it exactly like that.”
Which is how I ended up on my side with my husband behind me, one of his arms under my head and the other hand spread flat over my belly, holding me together while he pushed his thick cock into me one amazing inch at a time.
I heard him say my name into the back of my neck.
“Slow,” I said.
“Slow.”
“Not that slow, Newman.”
He laughed against my shoulder and then he stopped laughing, because I pushed back into him and took the rest of him, willing him to move, and the noise he made wasn’t a laughing noise.
He filled me up completely, thick and hot, and every slow drag of him out and back in hit exactly where he knew it would, and his hand stayed spread over my stomach the whole time like he was keeping me from coming apart.
“You feel…” He couldn’t finish it. He tried twice. “God, baby, you’re so warm.”
“Don’t stop talking.”
“I’m not going to stop talking. I’m never going to stop talking to you again.” His hand slid up and cupped my breast and I gasped, and he went still. “Sore?”
“Full.”
“Do you want me…”
I huffed, impatient. “I don’t care. I don’t care, Troy, it’s fine, it’s just what happens, keep going.”
And it did happen, and he didn’t care either, and he put his mouth on the back of my shoulder and kept moving and said something into my skin about how good I was, how well I was taking his cock, and his hand went down between my legs and worked my clit in tight circles in time with him.
“I’m close,” I said. “Don’t you dare change anything.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Say my name.”
“Phoebe.” His mouth was right at my ear and his rhythm was going ragged. “Phoebe, baby, look at what you did today. Look what you?—”
I came around him with my hand over his hand on my stomach, and I heard myself, and I didn’t care about that either.
He held on for a few more strokes and then he buried himself as deep as he could get and came so hard he shook, my name exploding out of him over and over into the back of my neck like it was the only word he had left.
Then neither of us moved for a long time.
“Hi,” he said eventually.
“Hi.”
He kissed my shoulder. He kissed the top of my spine. Then he got up and came back with a warm cloth and a glass of water and did all of it without being asked, and lay back down behind me and put his hand where it had been.
“I love you,” I said. “That isn’t a decision. I want you to know it’s been running the entire time regardless of what I was doing about it.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t know.”