Complete Bliss (a Her Billionaires novella #3) (6 page)

“You two have the weirdest conversations,” Darla added.

Alex and Josie both stared at the smartphone. “Like you don’t?” Josie snapped. “You are the queen of weird discussions.”

Darla backed off, voice sheepish. “Fair enough. But c’mon—you know how hard it will be to get Joe and Trevor there? And what the hell will they talk about?”

“Double penetration positions?” Alex suggested. “Best sex practices for threesomes? How to make a schedule on Google Calendar to balance it all out? What to do when—”

“Stop!” Darla and Josie shouted at the same time.

“You just managed to offend both of us,” Josie said, laughing and trying to look stern as he lifted her shirt and kissed her belly. A flood of heat pooled between her legs and her fingers wove through his hair, then down his muscled back. 

Except he smelled funny.

“Off to the showers with you!” she ordered, regretfully pushing him toward the bathroom. Her bathroom.

Um,
their
bathroom. Alex had moved in two days ago.

His lease had been up and his roommate was long gone on some fancy residency fellowship, again, leaving Alex with a tough choice of either finding a new roommate or getting a smaller, cheaper place.

She’d expected him to suggest moving in with her, but to her surprise, he hadn’t. As days had turned into weeks of watching him scour Craigslist and roommate sites, she’d finally caved in and asked.

This was an experiment. A testing period. It was not permanent.

At least, not for now.

He gave her a big, sloppy, sexy kiss and stripped his shirt off over his head, leaning forward as he peeled the v-neck scrubs over his neck and head, the ripple of muscled layers like soccer fans doing the wave. Only this was better.

“Earth to Josie? You there? Alex still there making pervy comments about my sex life?” Darla’s voice startled her. 

“No,” she sighed, watching him untie his scrub pants and shake out of them, leaving him in boxer briefs that outlined every vein, every curve. Thumbs hooked into the waistband, he gave her a big, sultry wink like a stripper, and then he pulled them off, giving her a mouth-watering view.

“Is he doing sex things to you right now? On the phone? Because that’s just plain rude.”

“No, Darla, he’s not doing—‘sex things’? You have the vocabulary of a twelve-year-old boy.”

“It’s about all I need to have a conversation with you.” 

The sparring normally would have made Josie laugh, but watching her boyfriend’s ass stride toward the bathroom to take a soapy, steamy shower rendered her quite speechless.

And intolerant of being on the phone.

“Do whatever you need to do to get Joe and Trevor to Jeddy’s.”

“You make it sound life or death.”

“No—but I think it’s worth a try.”

“Why is it so important to you?”

“Come here!” Alex shouted as the distinct sound of the water being turned on filled the walls. Josie scrambled to get out of her clothes while talking with Darla.

“It’s important because I see my niece and my best friend in really unique relationships and sometimes it’s nice not to be the only freak. If it turns out there’s another freak just like you, you’re not a freak anymore. You’re a tribe.”

“A tribe of two?”

“Oh, oops! I dropped the soap!” Alex called out from down the hall. “Josie, can you come pick up the soap for me in the shower?”

Darla giggled. “You two play games, too? Me and Joe and Trevor have this one game we call the ‘Tortured Romance’ game, where Joe is the Russian hit man who is ’sposed to kidnap me, and does, and then Trevor is the Special Ops dude who has to rescue me. But then the hit man and the Special Ops dude find—” 

“I do not want to hear about your sex games!” Josie screeched. Her excited clit made a face of horror worthy of an Edvard Munch painting. Or worse, Macaulay Culkin in
Home Alone
.

“Like I wanna hear yours!” Darla huffed.

“Just—goodbye!” Josie stabbed her phone screen repeatedly with an angry finger and fell over as her foot caught in the hem of her pants.
Might as well strip on the ground
, she thought, and she made quick work of it, completely naked in seconds, ass cold on the hard tile of her kitchen floor.

She stood, just long enough to get a good, long look at the UPS guy delivering the latest item she’d ordered online.

A good look because her—their,
their
—curtains were wide open in the front picture window.

UPS Man got an eyeful, too.

She ran down the hallway, body flushed with embarrassment, excitement, and a lingering sense of disgust from her conversation with Darla.

“What was that all about?” Alex asked as she slipped into the tiny shower with him, her face coated with the shower spray. He was so tall she had no choice. It was like showering under a very misty waterfall, and she kept her eyes closed most of the time.

Which was sad, because right before her was one of the seven-inch wonders of the modern world.

She opened one eye.

Make that eight.

“Darla started telling me all about some sex game she plays with Trevor and Joe—”

Alex’s entire body shuddered.

“Yeah, about right,” she confirmed, her hands running in opposite direction to the water’s flow on his arms, stretching over his shoulders, sliding down his back, ribcage, to his hard ass. Filling her hands with his flesh, she pulled him hard against her, and found him
hard
. 

Against her.

The kiss he slammed her with was insistent and unyielding, the kind of claiming that only two people who have been together for a while can exercise. She opened her lips and he was inside her, tongue reacquainting itself with her warmth, telling her about his day, reuniting after so much time apart. 

His long shifts were part of the deal in loving him: being with a doctor, she knew, carried the constant separation, and never knowing exactly when he would come home from a shift in the labor and delivery ward, or the ER, meant getting accustomed to ambiguity.

But he was here. Now. Hot and strong and wet and in her arms, and that—by God—was what she was going to think about right now. Not her silly niece’s sex life, or about the client shortage that Good Things Come in Threes was experiencing, or her flashing the UPS delivery dude, or the fact that she had just taken a ginormous leap forward in trusting Alex with a bigger piece of her life. 

And her heart.

Right now, there were decidedly more delicious body parts that Alex could have pieces of, and my, oh my, was he finding them quite nicely without needing to use a map.

Josie was learning, stroke by stroke, caress by caress, lick by lick, that sex with the same person could be infinitely interesting given enough time and enough desire. While that should have been obvious, and she wondered how she’d managed to reach mature adulthood without really registering that little piece of wisdom, it was quite different when you lived it. Day by day, encounter by encounter, orgasm by orgasm.

The water’s mist was like an audience, watching and omnipresent, demanding access to their skin, their breath, their very essence, as Alex dropped to his knees and buried his face between her parted thighs, her hands reaching for the balance bar screwed—she hoped—tightly into the shower’s wall.
Thank heaven for safety features
, she loosely thought as his tongue found a way to make quite a show for the air that surrounded them. Her head tilted back as her neck muscles tightened and loosened, imitating the pattern of her sex as it clenched and released, and as she shifted slightly her movements were greeted with a face full of hot water. 

Sputtering, she tugged lightly at his hair, and he moved up, hands on either side of her, caressing her calves, then knees, thumbs digging in possessively as he traversed her thighs, then hips, ribcage greeted by palms that enveloped her breasts with a nearly feral touch. By the time his hands cradled her face for a kiss that tasted like her, like rain, like everything, she was ready to have him inside her.

More than ready.

Always thinking ahead, she thought as Alex turned away and gave her a spectacular view of an ass that was either forged in a Bessemer furnace or hand-carved by a sculptor. The condom he put on made her smile. No babies.

Not yet.

His touch was more insistent this time, her last view of him fleeting but unfurling a rosebud of need inside, his wet hair and determined, dark look making him dangerous. A force of nature. Her dangerous force of nature, of course, but as he centered her and lifted one leg into place for her, his shaft sliding in from behind and making her core grab hold of him like a velvet glove, she
wanted
danger.

Wanted
him
.

Her fingers curled in on the tile, eyes unfocused and body one cloud of wet, hot skin, pumping blood and tingling with the kinetic frenzy of having Alex behind her, all muscle and flow. He did all the work, and that was just fine, a tacit agreement that was forged through time. You do the work this time; I’ll ride you tonight…

Their climax hit within three breaths, smashing them against the tile wall, their ability to calibrate it swept away by the mind-blowing, involuntary nature of impulse, biology, and release. She screamed, the sound guttural and base, low in her throat but raw, as Alex murmured her name over and over in her ear, the rasp muted by the shower spray and steam that applauded and shouted “Bravo!” at their performance.

Gasping, she slumped against the shower wall, Alex behind her, the wet hair on his thighs prickling her ass, the feel alien and intriguing.

“Too bad we can’t have porch sex again,” he said as she turned off the shower and slid back the curtain, reaching for two towels. Handing one to him, she paused for a moment to marvel at the casual domesticity of it all. Shower sex. A towel offered as if it were so natural. Part of the flow of time and building a life with another human being, to share for decades and beyond, all the way until the fire of mortality was gone, and the soul moved on.

Deep in her pensive moment, she missed Alex’s comment. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Penny for your thoughts?”

“They’re worth way more than that,” she said with a funny laugh, a sound choked with emotion. He had a radar when it came to her, which only made the moment more infused with emotion. Two days. He’d lived here for two days and already she was thinking about forever.

Abstract forever and real-life forever were two very different concepts.

So far she thoroughly enjoyed both.

“You have that look in your eyes,” he said in that warm, whiskey-laden voice that was so smooth it made her wet. The man could recite the
Physician’s Desk Reference
manual and she’d be writhing in sexual ecstasy in minutes. 

“What look? The crazy cat-lady look?” As if on command, her skittish cat, Crackhead, darted out from underneath the couch and fled into the sanctuary of her—um,
their
—bedroom, ensconced under the bed, two shining orbs staring at them.

“Crackhead will never get used to me,” Alex sighed. 

“Don’t make me choose between the two of you,” she joked. Alex gave her a sour face and disappeared into the kitchen, and from the sounds of it, he was brewing coffee.

A woman could love this man deeply. And she did.

Josie finished toweling off and walked naked into the bedroom, rummaging through her dresser for clothes. A second dresser, one that didn’t match (
and yet belonged there
), rested under the window across from hers. Alex’s meager furniture had fit in so well with her eclectic possessions that it was creepy. Creeptastic, in an overly perfect kind of way. As if he were made for her. Even his coffee mug set with the little wooden stand matched the one she had found at a yard sale a few months ago.

Creepy.

“You look like you want to bolt out into the street and run away from me. Like I have tentacles and crawl into your body at night to turn you into a pod person.”

“You have one tentacle that crawls into me at night,” she said suggestively.

“And if I had more, they would join it.” As if his cock were listening, it rose slowly, cockeyed (
no pun intended
) at first, then slowly straightened out, long and strong, the sedate politeness of his foreskin turtlenecking down.

“Seriously?” She made a dismissive, but joking, sound as she stared at his rod. “You’re ready again?”

“Always ready.”

“I know that’s not true, because there was that one time—”

Alex grabbed some underwear and quickly put them on, as if his penis were offended by the conversation and needed to have its ears covered. “That one time I’d just come off an unexpected thirty-eight-hour labor, drank five beers, and you rolled over and started humping me! Give a guy a break.” He stretched a simple, moss-green t-shirt over his head, pulling the thin cotton with a furious rush. “And besides, I still managed to make you come a few times!” 

“They need to patent that tongue of yours,” she agreed.

“Can we stop talking about the one time I couldn’t perform to your satisfaction?” 

“It’s not that you didn’t—” she protested. 

“Or shall I bring up the time you fell asleep during sex?”

“Hey! Not fair! I was on painkillers after that dental surgery and—” The look on his face made her shut up. He was right. Not fair. “Fine. Truce.” The quick kiss they shared righted the world. The steamy gurgle from the kitchen made it all even better.

Sitting at her—
their
—kitchen table, sipping from breast-shaped mugs Darla had given Josie as a gag birthday gift (
“Mama won them in an online sweepstakes contest. You should have seen the molded chocolates that came with them!”
), she sighed with contentment. And then she ruined the moment.

“I need your help in convincing Mike and Dylan to sit down and talk with Trevor and Joe.”

Alex’s surprised look quickly turned to confusion. “What the hell would those four have in common? Oh…” His voice went low and his eyes registered suspicion. “What are you up to? Is this some stunt for Good Things Come in Threes?”