Rob’s arms tightened around Kari. She wished she and Rob could be in two places at once: on this couch, the massage going on far into the night, and in her bed, driving each other wild.
In her bed.
In her house. Her house.
Wow. With all the stress she had experienced over purchasing her own home, there was something groundbreaking about this thought. Having sex in her own home for the first time. Like christening it or something. A fresh start. Even the queen-sized bed was new, her previous one being too cheap, too old, and the veteran of too many moves to survive being broken down and reassembled one more time. She still marveled at how solid the new one felt, not swaying and creaking when she got into or out of it.
Yeah, that old bed would never have survived another move, let alone even the thought of what she wanted to do. To have Rob do.
Rob’s hands slid down her bare arms, the warmth from them giving her a paradoxical shiver. The shiver was echoed lower, as her body gave a little anticipatory pulse, the nerves of her clit faintly zinging. She got to her feet, Rob following her lead, threading his fingers with hers as they left the living room for the bedroom. Inside, Kari turned on one bedside lamp, its glow illuminating the soft green of the walls.
“Thanks for this,” she said, indicating the color as she turned and walked into his open arms.
“Any time.”
“Better be careful of how you throw that word around. I have a few more rooms in here.”
“Good. Gives me an excuse to be near you more often.” The future stretched before her now, more comforting with Rob in it, no longer alone and more than a little apprehensive.
“You need an excuse?”
“Maybe not anymore.” His gaze dipped to her mouth. “So, is now the time I tell you I’ve been thinking about kissing you on and off all evening?”
“On and off, huh?”
A corner of his mouth tugged up a little in a crooked smile that made her heart thump. “Okay, I think the only time I wasn’t thinking about kissing you was when we had our little…argument.” He smoothed a thumb over her lips as she started to apologize again. “Shh. Not necessary. And I’m just as culpable and just as sorry. Besides, any more talking delays the kissing.”
“We couldn’t have that,” she said, and pressed her lips to his.
Kari’s eyes sank closed as she leaned forward, pressing into Rob and deepening the kiss she had started. His breath caught in his chest and his heart started an erratic thump. She traced the edges of his ears with the lightest of touches and it seemed that entirely new nerve endings sprang to life in his body, an electric current running down the back of his neck, through his spine and down his legs, making his knees weak. He tightened his arm around her waist, spearing his fingers into her hair with his other hand. Kari’s head tilted at the same time as his did and their mouths met more firmly now, lips parting, tongues teasing, exploring. Rob’s hand on her back slid down over her butt and she inhaled as his fingers flexed.
“Mmm. I like it when you gasp like that,” he whispered against her mouth.
“You do?” Her voice shivered with laughter. Or arousal. Maybe both.
“Yeah. It makes your breasts press into me. Very nice.”
“You like my breasts?” Where had the tinge of doubt in her voice come from?
He rested his forehead against hers, eyes closed. “Why wouldn’t I?” Good lord. They were soft and responsive and…well, hell. They were breasts. That alone would be very nice. But Kari’s breasts? On Kari’s body? Was she kidding?
She shrugged, another thing that made her body move in interesting, enticing ways. “They’re…not what they once were.”
“They’re beautiful.” He kissed her again. He couldn’t conceive of what her breasts must have been once. The idea of younger Kari and younger Rob meeting had the ability to short-circuit his brain entirely. He was glad, in fact, that he hadn’t met Kari when Mia was still growing up.
This woman potentially had the power to make him throw away every principle he held dear.
He waited for terror to strike him in the wake of this realization. Instead, he was swamped with lust. His cock was stirring, hardening. Like Kari’s body, his didn’t have the same spring and responsiveness it once had had. But it still worked. Oh, yes, it worked.
“This dress…” he mumbled against her mouth. “It’s very pretty.”
“But you want it off?”
“Yes please.”
“Can you do my zipper?” she asked.
“How did you do it up yourself?” He found the tab at the nape of her neck with his fingertips, pulled down, making himself take it slow, tooth by excruciating tooth.
“With much contortion and effort.”
“You should have called me. I’d come over and do you up.”
“Would you?” She leaned back, a wicked light dancing in her pale eyes.
“Well.” His eyes slid to the side. “I might have been tempted to undo you before doing you up.”
“Or do me before you…did me up?”
A surprised snort of laughter caught in his throat and the slow descent of the zipper became a rush. His fingers brushed bare skin, warm and soft. A tiny, feral smile flickered across Kari’s face and her eyelids sank a little. His cock hardened further and he shifted his weight, trying to ease the constriction of his pants.
“Problem?” she asked.
“Only temporarily. I think.”
She nodded. “Yes. Definitely temporary.” Her lips nipped at his and then she leaned back, her hands leaving his body to slide the dress over her shoulders, down her arms until it slipped past her hips to the floor. His mouth went dry and he swallowed. Kari was wearing a bra and matching panties in light blue lace, almost the exact color of her eyes. He traced the scalloped edge of one cup, the lace pushing her breast into a plump mound. The edge of one areola was just visible. The entire effect was an unholy combination of innocence and temptation.
“I’m glad I didn’t know about this all night,” he said, his voice coming out in almost a croak.
“No?” There was a wicked light in her eyes and her mouth curved in a tiny, self-satisfied smile.
“Socializing would have been torture. Dinner would have been torture. Everything would have been torture.”
“And what is it now?”
“Whatever the opposite of torture is.”
Kari kicked her dress to the side, sending her shoes in the same direction with flicks of her ankles. “Come here. I want some of that opposite torture too.”
Kari’s fingertips tingled with the desire to get Rob out of his clothes. She popped buttons out of their buttonholes as fast as she could, tugging his shirt free of the waistband of his pants. He caught her wrists, holding them lightly.
“You’re in a hurry, speedster.” Lines fanned out from his dark eyes, humor glinting from them in the low light.
Her hands clenched into loose fists. “I can’t want a little escape after a tense day?”
“Sure. Want away. But let’s slow down. We’re not kids. We have time.”
“I’m sick of adulting.” Kari was aware that she was being petulant but she didn’t care. “Besides, you got me practically naked in one move. It’s not my fault you’re wearing more clothes.” She leaned into him, letting her head rest on his shoulder. Her wrists slid out of his hands and her hands spread across his chest, pushing his shirt off. Fingers curling into the soft cotton of his undershirt, she dragged it up, letting her touch trail over his sides, relishing how the contact made him shudder. He reached behind his neck and grabbed the shirt, pulling it off. His head emerged, hair mussed, eyes sharp on her.
“Fine. You want to play like we’re kids?” His hands slid around her waist, then down past the waistband of her panties, cupping her bare ass and pulling her into his chest.
“Yes,” she mumbled into his skin. “I want to be a goddamn adult with a mortgage and a car payment and still play.”
“So let’s play.” His hands skimmed up her back and paused. Her bra’s band loosened and she took an unfettered breath. His breath huffed in an almost-laugh. “You really hate those things, don’t you?”
“I really do,” she said, pulling away so he could remove the hated garment and toss it on the floor.
“It is pretty, though. Matches your eyes.”
“Then it has done its job and it can die now,” Kari said, her fingers working at Rob’s belt buckle, freeing the leather strap and going to work on his fly.
“I don’t know how you can wonder that I think your breasts are beautiful,” Rob said, his hands cupping them, lifting them back to the plumpness that the bra had given them.
They sag now. They aren’t young. Aren’t perky. But any more thoughts of this kind fled when he ducked his head and sucked, tongue swirling around the aching nipple. His hand pinched and teased at the other one. His caresses sent an aching desire arrowing through her, her hips swaying toward him eager for contact, friction, connection.
Maybe her middle-aged breasts weren’t so bad after all, if they could still make her feel like this. She pushed at his pants, urging them down his legs, limited in what she could do without making Rob pull away, and she didn’t want to stop him creating those exquisite sensations.
He did pull away and Kari suppressed a groan. But he pushed his pants down, toeing off his shoes and stumbling a little as he freed his feet.
“Smooth,” he said, shooting her a crooked grin that made her heart seem to melt and dribble through her ribcage. She captured his face in her hands, her eyes searching his face.
“I don’t want smooth.”
“What do you want?”
She swallowed. “Real. I want real.”
The crooked grin spread and his hands skimmed up her ribcage, cradled her breasts again. “I want real too.”
Kari swallowed, her eyelids fluttered closed.
“I want you, Kari.” Rob’s voice was soft, coaxing. His fingers teased her nipples, his lips traced the side of her neck. “You’re real and you’re brave and you’re…oh. You’re so fucking beautiful.” His lips met her skin and she gasped. “Yes.” He pinched her nipples and her half-lidded eyes closed. “I love that. Your reactions.”
She swallowed and closed her eyes. She needed to engage. To act. Not just react. She stroked her hand up the hard ridge of his cock over his boxer briefs. He inhaled, shuddering from the teasing touch. She stepped closer and hooked her fingers into the waistband, pulling his underwear down his legs until they fell around his ankles.
“Time for you to lose the drawers too,” he murmured in her ear, his breath fanning her nerves into flame. He bent, dragging the lace slowly down and her eyes flew open as his lips pressed against her clit. Her knees trembled as he brushed her curls aside, the tip of his tongue probing, ever so gently.
“Oh, God.” She swallowed, her eyelids fluttering as he continued to tease. Her knees trembled again and he chuckled, pressing another kiss to her clit.
“Can your knees hold you if I bend you over the bed?”
Kari started to answer, found her voice gone, cleared her throat and tried again. “I think so. Would you like that?”
“I would really like that.”
Rob rose from his knees, wincing a bit. Nothing like kneeling on a hardwood floor to remind him of his age. But Kari’s hazy, pleasure-ridden expression made him forget all of his discomfort. He took her hand and led her toward the bed, pulling her against him for a long, exploratory kiss. His dick, sandwiched between both of their bellies, throbbed with want. More heat, more contact, more…
He remembered that she’d needed help before. He drew back a little. “Where’s your lube?” She wordlessly pointed at the bedside table. He turned and pulled the drawer open.
Interesting. A small blue-green object like a large, silicone covered bullet sat next to a larger purple object shaped a bit like a curved barbell with teardrop-shaped ends. What the…Oh. He thought back to their earlier sexual encounter, what she had said about why she needed lube, and comprehension flooded through him. He grabbed the container of lube and the bullet, holding it up.
“You said you wanted to play?”
Her eyes widened and her already pink cheeks flushed a deeper hue, the color spreading down her neck to her collarbones. Her tongue darted out across her lips and she swallowed.
“Your choice,” he said, not sure if her reaction was embarrassment, arousal, or some combination of the two.
Her chin dipped twice in a jerky nod, her gaze skimming from his hand to his dick and then up to his face. Only then did a tiny, feral smile chase over her lips.
“Well then.” He wasn’t sure how to begin. He’d never even held a vibrator before. All his previous ideas about them had been more…explicitly phallic. Obscene, even. But this little object was almost a cipher of industrial design. The non-business end was silver and had the universal power symbol stamped into it. He pressed his thumb down on it and it jumped to life, emitting a soft buzz as it vibrated. He almost dropped it. “Yikes. This thing is powerful.”
Kari nodded. “Be gentle with it. With me.” She took it from his hands, turning it off, and led him back to the bed, dropping the vibrator to the coverlet and cupping his jaw in her warm hands. Her lips skimmed across one cheekbone, then the other, then landed warm and sure on his mouth, tongue slipping inside, taking what she wanted and giving him a delicious feeling of being desired. She broke the kiss and breathed in his ear, “How do you want me?”
Dear lord, but this was giving him flashbacks to being a kid, hunched over a skin magazine, reading in a furtive haste. I never thought it would happen to me, but… “Turn around,” he said, putting his hands on his waist and rotating her toward the bed. Her torso sank forward without his urging, her palms coming to rest flat on the coverlet. The movement made her hips tilt up and Rob drew in a breath. The almost innocent-seeming eroticism of her baring herself to him was going to make his head explode.
He opened the tube, dribbling lube onto his fingers and stroking them over her sex. She hissed.
“Was that bad?”
“Just a little chilly.”
“Ah. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just fuck me.”
Rob wasn’t a guy who needed to be asked to do a thing twice. Especially when it was a thing he was dying to do. “Legs further apart,” he said. She shifted and he picked up the bullet before he guided his dick into her. He groaned as he slid home, then groaned again when she clenched around him, just the faintest increase of pressure, but enough to make his nerves almost override his desire to go slow, to give Kari her climax first. He leaned to wrap his arm around her, guiding the humming silicone to her clit.
She hissed again. “Not that hard.” And then, “Yes. Oh. Yes,” as he moved it, experimenting at the same time as he began to pump his hips. He could feel the vibration faintly, creating an extra delicious shiver in his own body. He forced himself to breathe deeply, to not plunge into her, to not get lost in her.
Not yet.
Not that the limitations forced on him by the application of the vibrator meant he could go crazy. His arm was only so long and he wasn’t Stretch Armstrong. He kept his strokes short and circled the vibrator until Kari’s body was bowstring-taut and shaking. He pulsed into her and circled the vibrator again. Once, twice. She gave a strained, needy little sound. A third time. As it circled down again, she let out a shuddering cry, pulsing around him so hard it only took a couple of short strokes for him to lose himself entirely, his hips pressing into her as if they were becoming a single being, his dick throbbing, ecstasy and a sharp, warm, needy feeling flooding his body.
He was hardly aware of her taking the still-vibrating bullet from his limp fingers and turning it off. The sudden silence boomed in his ears.
Kari dropped the vibrator and rested her weight on her hands. Rob stroked her back, her rear, and down her thighs before withdrawing slowly.
“God. I didn’t want that to end,” he said.
Kari straightened and turned, wetness trickling down the insides of her thighs. “Any longer and my knees might have given out.”
“I would have caught you,” he said, his voice a little rough.
“That’s a lot to promise,” she said.
“No. No it’s not.” His eyes were hooded, darker than usual in the soft light. Serious and intense.
“Is something wrong?”
One corner of his mouth kicked up and the serious look was replaced by warmth. The intensity remained, though. “The opposite.”
More moisture trickling down her legs. “I…” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the bathroom.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be here.”
Something about that simple statement hit her square in the chest. She blinked.
“That is, if you want me to be.” He half-raised one hand as if to touch her, let it drop.
She reached out, grasped his hand with both of hers. “I do.”
His fingers curled around hers, the briefest pressure. “Go get cleaned up.”
Kari let go of his hand and cupped Rob’s chin, giving him a fast, firm kiss.
“You’re a good man, Rob Fox.”
Rob watched Kari’s retreating back, pale in the low light, feeling stunned.
That electric bolt of…whatever he had felt as he lost himself inside her was entirely new. He felt raw, exposed. Eustace Scrubb from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with his dragon body peeled away, bare and vulnerable as a willow switch.
Okay, nerd. Dial it back.
He rubbed his face. He didn’t know what this pounding, needy feeling was, but he knew he should clean himself up a bit. Snatching a few tissues, he dried himself off and dropped the waste in a basket in the corner.
Returning to the bed, he picked up the vibrator and container of lube, setting them down on her bedside table. “I salute you, sir,” he whispered to the vibrator. If someone had asked him a few weeks ago if he would have been okay using a device to help get his lover off, he would have been offended. He could do it himself, he would have thought. To do anything else was a failure as a man.
But tonight had turned all that upside down. The vibrator hadn’t seemed like a challenge to his masculinity, it had been a way of making Kari keen and shake and lose herself. Of making her feel as good as she could.
And he had certainly reaped the rewards as well. Kari clenching and spasming around his dick was…well. It nearly made his eyeballs roll up into his head just thinking about it.
She returned then, hesitating in the doorway. He held out a hand and she came to him, letting him pull her against his body. This was nice too, the skin to skin contact, her body’s softness pressing against him.
“Let’s go to bed,” he murmured.