Somewhere on St. Thomas: A Somewhere Series Romance (29 page)

“Wow, Ruby,” Pearl says. “I think I’m going to like it here.”

Chapter 28

Ruby

I leave Pearl getting settled in with Mrs. Knightly’s excited help and tell them I have to go pick up some food at the grocery store. Really, I need to buy that pregnancy test.

My stomach does a flip at the mere thought, and I need to stop on the sidewalk and lean against a building to breathe, gulping down the little bit of granola I ate this morning that’s trying to come back up on a wave of nausea.

Finally, I can go on and walk to the corner market. I do pick up some fruit, vegetables, and food for dinner, but also the pregnancy test. I feel as self-conscious paying as I did the first time I bought tampons as a teenager. I hurry home and meet Rafe pulling up to park on the street in his disreputable old truck. He gets out and slams the door.

“Went to the store already?”

“Had to get some food. And another thing,” I say. I see his eyes widen in comprehension, and I need him suddenly. I put down the bag of groceries and hug him, putting my face into his shirt. “I’m scared,” I mutter into his collarbone.

His arms are around me and he rocks me close. I hear cars honking in the background and people talking and walking by, but we just stand together beside the bag of groceries at the foot of the stone steps.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says into my hair, brushing a kiss on the top of my head. “I know you’re not sure how to feel about it, so I’ll be happy for both of us.”

“Okay.” I smile at him, and he brushes a kiss on my lips, a kiss that turns into a conversation, a long exploration that gets us a wolf whistle from a passing car, and I break away and pick up the bag.

“I put Pearl in the pink room. She and Mrs. Knightly seem to be hitting it off.”

“Good. I hope she doesn’t get too comfortable before she has to go to the rehab place.”

“It’s an outpatient treatment program. She’s going to be here in the evenings.”

Rafe looks down at me ruefully. “I’m missing our privacy already.”

“She’s going to be gone a lot. Can you take this stuff into the kitchen? I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Want me to come?”

I smile. I still like privacy in the bathroom, but Rafe’s never had any such hang-ups. “I’ll meet you in the bedroom and we can look together.”

“Sounds good. Any chance we can get rid of Pearl for a while?” Rafe waggles his brows as he takes the bag after I’ve removed the pregnancy test from it.

“I heard that,” Pearl says from the top of the steps. “No problem. I want to explore this town. Give me a map and I’m out the door.”

It’s a mark of how desperate we are to be alone that we give her the map and dismiss Mrs. Knightly for the day. Rafe finally takes the groceries to the kitchen and I go to the bathroom for my appointment with the little white stick that turns blue if you’re pregnant.

I’m sitting on the bed in our big, sunlit bedroom, holding the little stick, afraid to open it, when he comes in from his bathroom wearing nothing but a towel. Even in my state of nervous anticipation, I appreciate the sight of his bronzed chest, muscular arms, and the sculptured abs disappearing into the towel wrapped around his hips. He’s all power and utility of form, but when I meet his eyes, the only thing I see in them is tenderness.

He sits beside me and takes hold of one side of the little plastic holder.

“Ready? Let’s pull it open on three.”

“One, two, three,” I say. We each tug on our ends, and the middle section opens to show the chemical strip.

It’s blue.

I feel like I can’t breathe, but at the same time my heart gives a giant squeeze, and I feel my eyes fill with tears. “I wish my dad were going to be here for this,” I say.

“I wish my parents were here, too. But it is what it is, and they will live on in our child,” Rafe says. I shut my eyes, and the tears roll down my cheeks.

He kneels in front of me, takes my face in his hands, and kisses the tears off my cheeks. “I’m so very happy about this,” he says. “I’m happy enough for both of us.”

“I’m happy, too,” I say, and realize it’s the truth as the words leave my mouth. “I’m really happy, too. I’m scared, but happy. I can’t wait to see our baby.”

“God,” he breathes into my mouth. “I sometimes think I can’t contain how you make me feel.”

“Likewise,” I say, and then he drops the towel and sits beside me on the bed. I turn and perch astride one of his thighs as I kiss him. Those long arms stroke up and down my body, squeezing hard. He takes hold of my ass, his hands rough on me through my pants as I rub up and down, up and down, moaning with the furnace heat of want he’s ignited in me with just a look and a kiss.

He pushes me off and back onto the bed, kneading and biting my breasts through my shirt, nuzzling between them, an expression of ecstasy on his face as he touches them, and I moan with the pleasure of it as he pulls my shirt and bra off and does to my round, full, achingly tender breasts what I see others wishing they could do to them: rolling his face between them, massaging and toying and mouthing. Because they are luscious, these breasts of mine, with their pointy blush-pink nipples that will someday nurture our child.

Then he takes my nipple deep into his mouth and sucks hard, and I throw my head back and cry out at the sweetness of his mouth on me, feeling the heavy sucking all the way to my spine, opening everything and making it ready for him.

He pays homage to the other breast, as I’m still rubbing against his heavy, muscled thigh as he leans over me, and by then I’m almost ready to come and my clothes aren’t even all the way off. He keeps sucking my breasts and slides his hands down to my waistband and unzips and tugs my pants and panties off, his busy, hungry mouth never leaving me.

He turns me away from him, though, and I know it’s so he can see and touch and play with my ass, his other favorite part of my body. He pushes me down in front of him across the end of the bed, and I know he’s gazing at my butt, each cheek smooth and silky, firm and shapely, lightly freckled like a plover’s egg. He strokes and explores me, driving me mad, and finally he tests my readiness with a skillful hand, and I cry out for him. “Yes! Yes!”

And then he drives into me from behind so deep and hard my head snaps back and I let out a wail of fulfillment. He’s grasping my hips and surging into me, watching and controlling everything that feels utterly wild and abandoned. I’m right there with Rafe, in his body, enjoying the hell out of his conquering of mine, and at the same time I’m in my body, reveling in the heavy, deep strokes of his conquest.

I want even more sensation, so I pull my legs up and kneel on the end of the bed before him. He gives a husky groan at the sight of my folded body with him so deep in me it’s as if we’re one. He grasps my waist, and all is a pinwheel of colored light and inarticulate sound and overwhelming pleasurable sensation as he cleaves me again and again until I’m boneless and melting around him.

When the sensations have abated a little, he leaves me and I moan at the loss but don’t have time to really feel it before he pushes me down on my back now, puts my legs up on his shoulders, and enters me in one long stroke.

I gasp with the shock, with his sure and confident handling of me for maximum pleasure. My hands grasp his muscular buttocks as he gazed into my eyes, the intimacy almost too intense.

More.

More and more and more.

Just when I think I’m going to fly apart, broken on the anvil of his desire, he comes, arching like a hawk flying above me, his arms tight and body vibrating with the release of a hoarse and triumphant shout.

The depth and heft tips me off the ledge. I spasm in his arms, my whole body rippling as waves of pleasure surround the rock that has fallen into the lake of my being in one long endless
now.

Whatever else happens to us, there was this moment in time when I lived in two bodies and almost died of the pleasure of it. If I have to go, this is how I want to—death by pleasure in the arms of the man I’ve come to love beyond life.

Chapter 29

Rafe

Ruby’s feet are up in the stirrups finally and I’m clutching her hand. It’s been a long nine months of life, work, Pearl, and other travails, and eight hours, so far, of labor. I totally get why they call it “labor,” and I’m exhausted. Ruby’s exhausted, too, but I think we’re finally in the home stretch of this arduous adventure. She’s looking at me, her vivid hair stuck to her face with sweat. Her eyes are round and scared and so very green.

I’m scared, too, but I’m smiling to hide it.

She’s been telling me she thinks she’s going to die for an hour now. Her belly, that great heaving mountain, looks enormous to both of us. The fact that somehow, any minute now, she’s going to push whoever’s in there out still seems totally unrealistic to me, but everyone assures us things are going well and nature is cooperating.

“I don’t want to die this way,” she says to me, dead serious. “I want to die having an orgasm with you.”

The doctor, a woman who looks way too young for the job, is checking around down there under the sheet, and she snorts with laughter.

“Think of this as the biggest orgasm you’ve ever had,” she says. “One that actually produces something. You can push on the next contraction.”

We see the contraction begin before the pain hits. Ruby’s vast belly seems to pull upward into a teardrop shape; then it goes square and harder than stone.

I know because I’ve felt it happen under my hand a hundred, maybe a thousand times now. Those muscles would put a world-class weight lifter to shame.

She’s still looking at me when the pain hits, and her eyes widen with the shock that, no matter how many times it’s happened today, never seems to get less terrible.

I squeeze her hand hard. “Go for it, Ruby! It’s time to push. You can do this!”

She seems to gather herself and sit up past even the inclination of the table, and she bears down, turning bright red, and damn if I don’t see something emerging between her legs.

“Go, Ruby! Go! The biggest one ever!” I yell.

She sucks a great big breath and bears down again. Our child slides out into the world after three massive pushes.

“Fastest first baby I’ve delivered in a year!” the doctor exclaims. We’re both crying and laughing and trying to get a look at the baby and see what it is.

Ruby says, “I didn’t die!” in some astonishment, and they hand him—he is most definitely a boy—to me first.

He’s crying a bit, covered with that white stuff, flailing his long arms as the nurse helps me tuck a thin blanket around him. I hold him close against my scrubs and angle him so Ruby can see his face. I can feel tears pouring down my cheeks, but I’m grinning so hard it hurts.

“Oh, hello, Peter,” she says, and I swear I see him recognize her voice. He goes still. His eyes open and they’re dark blue. His hair is dark like mine, and I can hardly bear to part with him for a second, but he needs his mama now.

Ruby’s putting our son, Peter Kane McCallum, named for both our dads, to her breast, cooing in a soft voice I’ve never heard from her before.

Ours is an ordinary story, really. Girl meets boy, they fall in love, they get married, and they have a baby. He’s rooting around and getting hold of that tasty nipple, and he latches on so hard she yelps, and we laugh. We look down at him together, amazed at this miracle that happens to people every day.

And it happened to us.

Dear Readers,

I hope you enjoyed this story of a deep and fateful love filled with life’s layers of complication. I know it’s sexier than I usually go, but
Somewhere on St. Thomas
is the story of a young woman’s awakening sexuality with the man she loves, an incredible time for anyone lucky enough to have that experience. Continue reading for an excerpt from
Somewhere in the City
, Ruby’s sister Pearl’s very different story, but an equally thrilling path to love.

Special thanks to Eden Baylee, a romance/erotica writer I particularly respect for her classy handling of some of the stickier parts, who read my earlier drafts and said, “You’ve got a nice way with this!” Believe me, I needed the encouragement.

Yes, I’m a hopeless romantic that believes in Big Love. I hope you enjoy these “take me away” stories! And if you do, please leave a review.
I read them all, and they matter so much!

Much aloha,

Toby Neal

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Somewhere in the City

a Somewhere Series Romance

by Toby Neal

Chapter 1

It’s dangerous to be too beautiful.

I know. I’ve lived it. Right now I’m sitting on a hard metal folding chair in the recovery meeting, enduring the way guys scope out my body and girls judge me. I’ve dressed down for the occasion, too—I’m no threat to anybody in my ratty hoodie, the hoodie that’s been a kind of security blanket for the last six months since Dad died and everything changed.

I have on baggy jeans, and my hood is up to hide my hair. I’m thinking of dying it. Some mousy color, like muddy brown. My hair draws way too much attention.