It's Always Complicated (Her Billionaires Book 4) (11 page)

“You sound overwhelmed.”

Just talking to him was helping her to ground herself. “I am. It’s been a lot. And we have so much more to do.”

“That’s why we hired professionals,” he said in a soothing voice. “Let them do their jobs.” Laura had struggled to adjust to their financial situation. Never reluctant to spend money on help, she did have a hard time spending money on herself.

“I miss you.” Their hot-and-heavy sex in the woods had been on her mind, circling around and around like Dylan’s tongue on her—

“Hey!” One of Lydia’s brothers shouted, a super-tall guy with dark, curly hair. She turned toward the shout and saw why he was upset.

Someone else was driving away in his little painted golf cart.

“Jeremy got you,” Bournham called out, the handful of workers all laughing in an uproar. Inside joke, she assumed.

“You there?” Dylan asked, his voice worried.

“Yeah. Just interrupted.”

“We’ll be there tomorrow. All of us. My mom and dad and brother.” Dylan’s other siblings couldn’t make it. Partly true, partly a socially-acceptable lie, Laura accepted the absence. Who was she to judge? She was an only child. Her best friend was an only child—who was marrying an only child. Knowing nothing about having a sibling, Laura felt she couldn’t really pipe up about how she felt.

Dylan seemed resigned to his siblings’ absence. She wouldn’t push.

Mike, though...

No word from his mom and dad. Her attempt to reach out had been met with silence. In her letter, an old-fashioned paper letter she’d actually mailed through the post office, she’d enclosed a picture of Jillian playing with the twins, a gorgeous shot from earlier in the summer when they spent a day at a nearby lake.

If that adorable picture didn’t tweak their hearts, then nothing would. Mike appeared to be right. His parents would not budge.

And so their wedding would be celebrated by a gaggle of friends, coworkers, former colleagues and a ton of Dylan’s family.

That would have to be enough.

Lydia gestured toward a large cabin, and Laura described it to Dylan in real time. Two bedrooms, one on either side of a large, lodge-like living room. A tiny kitchenette. A bathroom that was barely larger than a walk-in closet, with no bathtub. She wondered how she would clean the kids, until Lydia opened the back door.

An enormous hot tub, big enough to seat twelve, was there.

She groaned into the phone.

“What’s wrong?”

“Twelve-person hot tub on the back porch.”

“Can I come now?” he growled, making her laugh. Lydia and Mike made their goodbyes, leaving her alone. Mike gestured that he would send up her bags from her car.

“I’m alone now,” she said softly into the phone. “And I know this wedding’s going to be wonderful, but I really am looking forward to it being over.”

“Me, too. Not the honeymoon part,” he quickly added. “But the wedding part.”

Her stomach lurched, like a small, slimy creature lived in it. “I kind of think we are making a mistake,” she whispered into the phone, afraid to say it but needing to confess this feeling. “It’s just a feeling,” she quickly stammered.” I don’t want to back out of this or anything. I just feel so...I don’t know.”

“Oh, honey,” Dylan said, his low voice soothing. “You’re overwhelmed.”

Her voice thickened. “Yeah.”

“And you’ve been overwhelmed for a long time.”

“Yeah.”

“Mike and I got this here at home. Cyndi and Ellie are fabulous with the kids. Let the campground owners do their thing. Let go of details. Just remind yourself that we’re doing this because it’s a celebration. Not a chore.”

The words helped her stomach to settle. “I know.”

“I know you know, Laura. I’m reminding you, though. We all need to be reminded sometimes, even if we know something. It’s like throwing dirty socks next to the hamper.”

“What?” She started to laugh and cry at the same time. Dylan had a way of taking a perfectly normal conversation and turning it into something weird.

“I know I’m supposed to put them in the hamper. But I don’t. I have no idea why I don’t. I couldn’t form a coherent thought to explain it. I just...don’t. And then you have to remind me.”

“You’re comparing your laziness with dirty socks to my emotional existential crisis around our wedding?”

He paused. She could
hear
him thinking.

“No?” his voice turned up in question. “No. Um, that would be stupid, right?”

Her laughter made her fear lessen.

“I think I get what you’re saying. I do know. I just can’t...
do
. I can’t relax. I can’t stop feeling like this is a lot of work and effort and not a whole lot of fun.”

“That’s because I’m not there,” he said in a seductive voice. Her body tingled, a shiver running through her. How could he make her shift gears like this, and so quickly?

“This place is surrounded by woods,” she replied.

“Now you’re speaking my language. I would love to do a repeat of our walk in the woods the other day.”

“Me, too.” She still wasn’t sure what had unleashed that fiery part of her. The power and the force of her desire had risen up inside her like a sudden squall, a tempest in her chest and core, and nothing could sate her. Nothing. S
he’d
spent the better part of the night jumping a
surprised but
delighted Mike, while Dylan had tended to poor Aaron and his new tooth.

Life was a series of transactions involving meeting children’s needs.

Laura had a brief flash of remembering she had needs, too.

“We have a week in Paris to spend getting more of that, Laura,” he said, his voice dragging over her like fingertips, making her wet and aching just from the suggestion. She was glad she had the cabin to herself tonight, with Josie settling into the one she’d share with Alex, because Laura was going to need some quiet time to, um...manage these desires.

Two hands at a time. If she couldn’t have four on her, at least she could take care of matters herself. When was the last time she’d done that?

“You there?” Dylan’s voice sliced through her ridiculous thoughts about orgasms, making her sigh deeply, the end of her exhale a groan he took for pleasure.

“You’re thinking about sex, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Damn. I’m getting hard just talking about it.”

“Are we having phone sex, Dylan?”

“Do you want to have phone sex?”

“I want to have real sex.”

“I am on your team, babe.”

“Now.”

“Uh....no can do. Give me a day.”

“A day,” she said. “I know.”

“But you can take care of things.”

“I know.”

“Another one of those things you know, but don’t do, huh?”

“Masturbation isn’t exactly high on my list of daily priorities,” Laura joked.

Silence.

Huh. She was learning lots of new things today, wasn’t she?

“You do it daily?”

“Well,” he grunted. “You know.”

“No. I don’t know. Where do you—how do you...?” Her voice trailed off, low and hushed, and she realized this crazy conversation was turning her on more than she was willing to admit.

She heard strange shuffling noises, then a sound as if his hand brushed against the speaker of his phone. A sigh. And then.

“Mostly in the shower,” he said. “It’s easier that way. But today? Today it’s gonna happen right now. On the phone. With you.”

“Uh!” Laura made a gasp of surprise. “What do you mean? Are you naked?”

“I am locked in our bedroom, on the bed, and yes...naked. Can you imagine that, Laura?” He modulated his voice, sounding like one of those leading men in an erotic thriller, and she could, indeed, imagine him naked and sprawled on the bed, the sleek lines of his model-perfect, heavily-muscled body waiting and open, ready for her.

“Oh, God,” she murmured, her hand going to her breast, nearly stroking her own nipple. Stop this, she chided herself, looking helplessly at the back of the cabin door, wondering what she must look like right now. Josie would be here any minute. She couldn’t do this.

“I’m holding my rock-hard cock right now and thinking about you against that tree yesterday,” Dylan said.

Oh, fuck.

She couldn’t
not
do this.

“Aaron!” she heard in the background. That was Mike.

“Everything okay?” she asked Dylan.

“Ignore that sound. The door’s locked. Mike’s got the kids. I want to focus on us,” Dylan growled.

In her mind’s eye, she imagined him pumping himself, eyes on her, head tilted to the side, lips parted in concentration. If she were in bed with him she would crawl, naked, over his body, the tips of her nipples dragging against the thick, dark hair on his calves, his thighs, the long march up his marbled torso leading to a kiss, then the press of heat against heat, of sigh against sigh.

And...she was wet. Throbbing, wet, and in desperate need of release.

“Damn you,” she said in a voice filled with smoke and need. Of all the times to stumble across a moment like this. The change in the past two days in her relationship with Dylan, with this undertone of teeming sexuality just waiting to surface at any moment, made her feel like a giddy teenager again.

Except without the crippling self-doubt.

“What are you wearing?”

She almost laughed at the question, and then decided to up the ante. “In three minutes I’ll be wearing your pearl necklace.”

He whistled through his teeth. “Oh, God,” he groaned. She could almost feel him pumping with his hand, could imagine the silky-dry feel of his shaft, how skimming it with her curled-up palm gave him an out-of-proportion level of pleasure that she never quite understood.

Then again, the clitoris wasn’t exactly straightforward, either, yet Dylan and Mike managed to do whatever needed to be done to make her orgasms rocket her into the ethers.

“I’m remembering how your hot hands felt on me, how you yanked up my skirts at the tree,” she murmured, her own hand staying firmly by her side. There was no way she was going to reach unto her waistband and touch herself right now, because Josie could appear at any minute.

But getting Dylan off? That she could do.

“How you slid right in my wet, eager...pussy,” she rasped, a little self-conscious with the dirty talk. The word echoed in the empty cabin and she suppressed a giggle.

His breath hitched and...there he went. She might be hundreds of miles away from Dylan, but she knew the sound of his orgasm.

He came back to the phone, panting and a little embarrassed. “That turned into a one-minute wonder, huh?”

Laura started to reply, but stopped.

“Aaron?” Mike called again, his voice hollow and tinny in the background.

And then she heard the unmistakable sound of:

“DYLAN? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING NAKED ON THE BED?”

“The door was locked!” Dylan bellowed back. “What the hell? You picked the door lock?”

Laura heard shuffling sounds, like Dylan pulling the covers up. She imagined the poor guy, startled and muddle-headed, that post-orgasmic bliss destroyed by Mike.

“I thought Aaron locked himself in here again. I can’t find him!” Mike’s voice was filled with self-righteousness.

“You could have knocked!” Dylan sounded like a teenage boy getting caught looking at his dad’s
Playboy
m
agazine.

“How the hell was I supposed to know you’d be on the bed...naked...doing, you know—”

“Aaron’s in
da
tent in da wivving woom! We’re playing hide-an-seek, Daddy!” Jillian’s voice was unmistakable. “Papa, why is your chest naked? You taking a baf?” she asked.

“Let me give you a biiiiiiiig hug, Jilly!” Mike said. “I’ll pick you up. Don’t get on the bed right now. Papa needs some privacy.”

“Oh, sure,
now
you respect my privacy,” she heard Dylan shoot back.

Mike and Dylan bickered in the background while Jilly started chanting “Baf! Baf! Baf!”

Laura bent over in half from laughter. Her wheezing was the only sound she was capable of making, and that’s exactly how Josie found her a minute later when she walked through the front door of the cabin.

Not wanting to add to Dylan’s obvious distress, she hit “End” on the call and looked at her friend, who stared at her with a bemused expression.

“Something funny happen?”

“You might say that.”

Mike Pine

If the shadow government ever wanted to create a new form of torture that would be highly effective in breaking interrogated suspects, he had an offer they couldn’t refuse: a six-hour road trip with three children ages three and under.

Mike had cracked indeed.

He had memorized all of the lyrics to
Let It Go
a long time ago, but after the seventeenth time in a row of playing the song, he was pretty sure he could recite it on his deathbed. Add in Jillian’s obvious inheritance of her mother’s tone deafness and he was scanning the road for anything close to a drug store where he could buy ear plugs.

Or an ice pick.

“You okay?” Cyndi asked. She was in the minivan with him. Dylan was driving behind, in their little compact car. When the wedding was over, he, Dylan and Laura would head down to Boston and fly out of Logan
A
irport. A coin toss had made Dylan the driver in the quiet car. All he had was Cyndi’s twenty-year-old niece, Ellie, who raved about audiobooks and begged to have them listen to some book called
Outlander
.

“I need to peeeeeeeeeeee!” shouted Jillian.

This was the seventh time in four hours. They’d already stopped once in Maine, and they had at least two hours to go, though in toddler driving time, that would probably become five.

“Are you sure?” he asked, trying so hard to keep the edge out of his voice.

“Do you want me to sit back there with them? I can play iPad games, or just distract her.”

“DADDYYYYYYYYYYYY! The pee is trying to escape!”

Mike gave Cyndi a look. “I think we need to stop.”

Thank God he had a second adult there, and one who was female. Cyndi unclicked Jillian from her carseat and took off for the women’s room while Mike stayed in the minivan with the twins, who were out cold. If only Jillian would fall asleep like Aaron and Adam.