51
Dominic
“Dom?”
My name from her mouth was a croak. “Mmm?” I nuzzled into her hair.
“I need something,” she whispered.
Oh, God. If she was going to ask me to go again, there was a very good chance I would die. I already wasn’t sure if my dick was ever going to work again after the last round. There was a possibility that my heart would give out, too.
I considered myself to be rather excellent in bed. But three times in one night was asking a lot of my mid-forties prowess. Even for a superhero. Four would quite possibly break something important.
“What do you need, baby?”
“An ice pack.”
Relieved, I laughed weakly. “Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to ask for another round. Something I won’t be physically capable of until I’ve had at least two IV bags of fluids.”
Her laugh turned into a yawn. “I’m sticky. And sweaty,” she murmured into my pillow.
We’d finally made it to the bed. And made good use of it, too.
But my superhuman sex powers were officially depleted.
“I literally poured my entire water content into you. I’m basically human beef jerky right now.”
“Thank you for your sacrifice,” she teased.
I lifted my head and rolled her toward me. Her pretty pink nipples were hypnotizing, and my idiotic dick that had no concept of consequences like chafing or possible failure to launch stirred at the sight of them peeking out from my white, rumpled sheets.
Down, boy.
“I’ll get you an ice pack and some water,” I promised her, brushing a kiss to her forehead and one to her cheek. I threw in a nibble at her neck for good measure.
She breathed out a laugh, and I decided it was the best noise I’d ever heard in this house.
“We’re so stupid,” she said.
“In what way?” I asked, giving in to temptation and bestowing a long lick on the nipple closest to me.
She gave a full-body tremble against me. “We could have been doing this for weeks now.” Her fingers stroked into my hair.
“Yeah, except you had to be stubborn,” I reminded her, leaning over to give her other breast the same treatment.
My moronic cock was already at half-mast again.
“Me?” She snorted. “By the way, I’m still not quitting.”
“We have a lot to figure out,” I said to her breasts.
She sat up and hit me with a pillow. “Dominic Russo! You can’t make me quit.”
Obligingly playful—a description that never once in my entire life applied to me—I pinned her to the mattress.
I didn’t want to think about the consequences of tonight. I wanted to live in this space where there was only now… and Ally’s perfect, perky breasts rubbing against my chest. But there were things that needed settled. Now.
“How are you hard?” she demanded with what I deemed an appropriate amount of wonder.
“I’m not really,” I scoffed modestly.
“You’re hard enough,” she said, staring down between us to where my cock rested against her belly.
“You need an ice pack. I need a gallon of electrolytes. And we need to talk.”
She pouted. “Isn’t it a million o’clock right now?”
It was after three in the morning.
“We can sleep later. First, I’m taking you home.”
Her face fell, and the bastard I was preened like a rooster when I realized she misunderstood what I was saying and was disappointed at the prospect of not spending the night with me.
“To get your things. You’re staying here tonight.”
“Dom, my things are in New Jersey. By the time we get them and get back, it’ll be time for work.”
“We’re both working from home tomorrow. My home.”
“Is my face really that bad?” she joked.
I leaned in. The picture of seriousness. “It is.”
She whacked me in the head with the pillow again, and I grinned. “And speaking of faces, there’s no way on this planet that we could go into that office without what we just did written all over ours.”
“You think another day will erase the orgasm scoreboard etched on your pretty face?” she teased, squeezing my cheeks in her hand until my mouth did that ridiculous duck lip thing.
“We may have to take off the rest of the year,” I muttered through her fingers.
Her laugh untied knots in my chest that I didn’t know I had.
And I knew I wasn’t going back to before.
Before tonight.
Before I saw the bruises on her face.
Before I knew what Ally felt like from the inside out.
Before she could laugh naked under me.
I wasn’t physically capable of it.
With extreme male reluctance, I crawled off her, hooking her ankles and dragging her toward the edge of the bed. “Come on, Maleficent. Let’s find you some pants.”
A middle of the night road trip with Ally bundled into another pair of my sweatpants and Brownie wedged onto her lap seemed otherworldly. She unabashedly sat on a bag of frozen lima beans I’d found in my freezer while I guzzled my second sports drink.
“Sex in our forties is supposed to be even better,” she mused, stroking Brownie’s head and staring out the window. “But I’m not sure I’ll survive to see the end of thirty-nine.”
“When is your birthday?” I asked, already knowing the answer thanks to the HR file I’d memorized. Maybe it was a test to see if the unveiling of Ally Morales began and ended with sex.
“May.”
“How does Maleficent plan to celebrate forty?” I wanted to know everything there was to know about this woman.
She wrinkled her nose. “All celebrations are on hold until Dad’s situation is settled.”
I brought her fingers to my mouth and kissed her knuckles. “Then what?”
“So far, the only thing I’ve come up with is a mango margarita on a beach that requires a passport. I want to sit in the sun and stare out at an ocean so blue it doesn’t seem real. And I don’t want to have to worry about if I can afford to tip the bartender.”
I approved of the plan. Especially if it involved Ally in a bikini and me in the lounge chair next to her.
I held her hand as she directed me, first to an all-night convenience store for surprisingly decent green tea and an armload of snacks to stave off the hunger caused by our sex marathon and then on to her father’s house.
It was still dark when I swung into the skinny driveway, but I breathed a sigh of relief. Google Street View hadn’t lied. The neighborhood was not terrible, and the house itself looked… comfortable.
“Brownie should probably wait in the car,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt.
I was immediately suspicious. “Why?”
“It’s a bit of a construction zone inside. I don’t want him to step on a nail or something.” She hopped out of the car and carefully closed the door in my dog’s face.
Brownie looked crestfallen for all of two seconds before he remembered it was an unholy hour in the middle of the night and curled up and went to sleep behind the wheel.