Following Trouble (2 page)

“Come here.” He sat, reaching for me as I approached, pulling me between his denim-clad thighs. “My God, you’re something.”

I shivered as his hands roamed over my hips, up the curve of my waist, cupping my breasts, weighing them. I bit my lip, keeping myself from crying out as he kneaded my flesh, his expression caught between lust and wonder and… something else.

“Sabrina?” His gaze lifted to meet mine, brows drawing together, and my heart dropped to my toes. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

I stood, frozen, completely naked and vulnerable between his thighs, unable to move or think or talk or even breathe. How could he possibly know? I’d been so careful to keep all the signs and symptoms to myself, which had been relatively easy, considering the time and distance.

“How—?”
I whispered, swallowing hard.

“I memorized every inch of you.” His gaze swept down to my breasts, still cupped in his hands. “And unless I’m crazy, I’m pretty damned sure… you’re pregnant?”

He posed it as a question but the look in his eyes told me he knew the truth. I’d hoped to keep it from him for just a little longer, but here it was. I couldn’t deny it, not now. I tried to tell what he was thinking, searching his eyes for some sign. He wasn’t running away screaming—that was something—but that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

I was so ashamed. I’d been so stupid. Not only had I slept with this man after knowing him for all of a few hours—
I’d slept with a freaking rock star with no protection whatsoever
. I’d been off the pill for years, since my last year of high school, and I hadn’t even
suggested
a condom, for God’s sake. Yes, there had been two of us, and yes, you would think one of us might have considered the consequences—all of which I had now been tested for but only one of which had come to pass—but it had all felt like such a fantasy, not real at all. You didn’t think about birth control in a dream.

You didn’t think about it until you woke up
to reality and found yourself—

“Yes.” I closed my eyes, feeling the weight of it in my chest. It had been lodged there too long, unspoken.
“I’m in trouble.”

I’d never seen the ocean before. I stood there in wonder that first time, when Rob opened the French doors off his room, onto a patio, and I saw a dazzle of moonlight on the Pacific in the distance. The house wasn’t right on the ocean, but it made up for it by sporting an endless, “infinity” pool that surrounded the whole house, like a moat around a French fortress. We could look down on it all from our patio perch.

We went
down a curved flight of stairs to sit near the pool to talk, me wrapped in a silk robe Rob plucked from a hook in the bathroom—I wondered, briefly, how many women before me had worn it—and Rob still barefoot and shirtless, wearing just jeans in the warm California night air. Even as close as we were to the city, the stars were plentiful and we sat together on one of the outdoor couches, his arm around me, my head tucked under his chin.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” That’s what he kept asking, like the fact I was carrying his child was irrelevant, or maybe just not quite real. But keeping something from him? That
seemed far the worst sin.

“I was scared,” I admitted, which was the truth.

I’d spent most of my teen years terrified of getting pregnant until I had a talk with my mother about my “irregular menstrual cycles” during my freshman year of high school, which she understood as code for, “I’m sexually active,” and took me to her obstetrician to put me on the pill. But I’d gone off it just before college because it messed with my hormones too much—Katie said I was Bitchzilla during my periods when I was on the pill—and relied on condoms from there on out. Besides, I reasoned, they were far safer when it came to all the other bad things that could result from sex, aside from pregnancy.

And of course, I’d always seen pregnancy as a bad thing. I loved kids, of course—I wouldn’t have gone into elementary education if I hadn’t—but my own kids? That would be far in the future, when I had fallen in love,
gotten married, settled down.

But I am in love.

One out of three.

Rob stroked
my hair, sending goose flesh down my arm, and I knew it was true—I did love him. The moment I saw him again, face to face, the instant his lips met mine, I knew all the waiting had been worth it. I was in love with this man, had fallen more and more in love with him, in spite of the distance, in the past two months, and was still head-over-heels for him now. I couldn’t deny that, as much as my practical side would have liked to.

So here I was in love—not married, not settled—but most definitely pregnant. Now what? I’d been asking myself that same question for a month as my body started changing, as morning sickness hit in the middle of class as I had to
grab the trash can before I puked. I knew I had to tell Rob. Katie had suggested I “take care of it,” and never let him know, but that wasn’t an option for me. I wanted him to have a say, whatever that looked like.

“There’s still time.” I said the words slowly, closing my eyes against it.

I hadn’t made a decision, not fully. I didn’t want to make up my mind without him, without his input, so I’d tried to stay Switzerland about the whole thing. And aside from the occasional nausea and my growing, tender breasts, I could pretty much stay in denial if I wanted to. And I’d wanted to, until now.

“Time…” he murmured softly, stroking my hair, puzzling out the word, like he didn’t quite understand. And then,
all at once, he did. He sat up straight, jarring us both out of position. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“You were perceptive enough to guess I’m pregnant but you can’t cipher out the secret code for abortion?” The words were so cutting, I couldn’t even believe they’d come from my mouth.

We looked at each other in the moonlight, the ocean breeze lifting my hair, blowing it back from my face. He looked truly shocked, like the idea had never even occurred to him. But how could that be possible?

“Sabrina…” He
shook his head slowly, his eyes pained. “I know I’m supposed to do the P.C. thing here and say it’s your body, your decision, something like that. But… I can’t do that.”

“Okay.” I swallowed.

“I know what I want.” He slid closer, turning my chin up to look into my eyes. “But I’m not sure that matters.”

“It does,” I insisted.

“Does it?” His thumb moved along the line of my jaw. “I don’t know.”

“I wouldn’t be here if it didn’t.”
I didn’t have to say it but he knew. Things could have gone Katie’s way. I could have just done something about this “problem” and never said a word.

He nodded. “What do you want to do?”

I wanted to tell him I was scared, that I didn’t know what to do. One minute I was fantasizing about getting married and settling down and having his little rock star baby, and the next I was sure I couldn’t handle being a mother at this age, that I was crazy to even think of having a baby with a man who was not only a rock star but who was also, technically, still married. Was it fair to a child to bring it into the world under these circumstances?

“I don’t know.
”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true.” It was as close to the truth as I thought I could get.

“No, it isn’t.”
Rob slid closer still, taking me into his arms. “You’re afraid to say it, but you know what it is.”

“So you read minds now?”
I rolled my eyes, trying to push him away.

“I read yours.”
His words stopped me and I let myself melt against him, let his arms comfort me.

“So you tell me
,” I said, meeting his gaze. “What do I want?”

“Close your
eyes,” he urged.

I shook my head, biting my lip, knowing exactly what he was up to. I remembered the restaurant, in a dark corner of
La Fondue
, when he’d made me close my eyes and tell him what I wanted, when I’d confessed things I hadn’t ever admitted before, to anyone, even to my best friend. And he was right. I wasn’t just afraid to say it—I was afraid to know.

“Do it.” He pressed his forehead to mine, his face unfocused, swimmy, forcing my eyes closed. “Now tell me. What do you want, Sabrina?”

“World peace,” I snapped.

“That goes without saying.”
He snorted. “What else?”

I swallowed and whispered,
“You.”

“Good. What else?” His hand moved around the curve of my waist, coming to settle low on my belly, below my navel. “What do you really want?”

I felt tears welling and tried to stop them but couldn’t. They slipped silently down my cheeks. My head screamed at me that this wasn’t right, it wasn’t practical—it wasn’t even rational or smart. I couldn’t possibly want this, and yet…

“Our baby.” It wasn’t just the first time I’d said the words, it was the first time my mind had even created the concept. “I want our baby.”

I felt him let out a breath. “It want him too.”

“Him?”
I sniffed, opening my eyes. He was smiling.

“
Or her.” He rubbed my belly. It wasn’t growing yet, at least not that anyone else noticed. Only me and my skinny jeans could tell.

“Rob…” I swallowed again, trying to come to terms with it. I knew what had escaped my mouth in the moment, but just because it had been the first thing that came into my head didn’t necessarily make it the right course of action. “Are you sure?”

“I love you,” he said simply. “I want you. I want this. I’ve been telling you that since I met you.”

“I know but…”

He leaned in and kissed me to shut me up, and it worked. When I was in his arms, when we were together like this, everything else melted away. It was just the two of us—well, two and a half now, or maybe two and a quarter—and no one else in the world mattered. So I was a school teacher from Detroit and he was a rock star who had platinum albums and traveled the world. And was still married. What did that matter?

Wha
t in the hell are you thinking?

My mind screamed, but my body simply refused to listen.

Rob kissed me and reality, rationality, pragmatism, all of that vanished. Our heat dissolved it, eating away at ‘practical Sabrina’ like acid. She sizzled and faded and was no more. Rob brought out a darker, wilder side of me I hadn’t really even known existed before he came along. He ushered in a sort of transformation in me I couldn’t halt, even if I wanted to. It wasn’t anything so slow and easy as caterpillar to butterfly though. It was more like a switch being thrown, or being tossed into a fire. I was burned away, consumed, and reborn in his arms.

So I didn’t ask him what this meant, this crazy, irrational decision. I didn’t ask him what it would look like, or how it would come about. I didn’t wonder about his job or mine, the fact that we lived two thousand miles away from each other,
or that he still had a pesky wife to worry about. I couldn’t think about all of that when he was kissing me, touching, me, making me, as he had from that very first day, completely and utterly his.

The heat was too much for both of us.
We couldn’t wait. There was no build up, hardly any foreplay. It had been too long. We both wanted it too much. I felt his erection through the denim of his jeans, straining against the fabric, and I had to free him. I worked at his button and zipper, distracted when he slipped his hands under the silk fabric of my robe.

“Easy,” I whispered when he teased my nipples with his thumbs, kneading my flesh. They were so tender and sensitive, it was hard to bear. Then his mouth was there, sucking and licking, making me gasp and thrash.

“Please,” I begged, arching my back and feeling my nipple slip from between his lips with a fat, wet popping sound. “I can’t…”

He groaned an apology, working his way down my belly, untying the robe and exposing me completely to the night air. My wet nipples pursed and pointed skyward as Rob moaned and parted my labia with his tongue. I was so wet and swollen, had been for hours
just thinking about him, I couldn’t stand it. I wanted him inside of me.

“
Please,” I begged, rolling and grinding my hips, thinking about him buried deep inside me. “Please.”

He tongued my
sex as he unzipped his jeans, making me buck with pleasure before he knelt up and, without warning or hesitation, slid his cock into me. It went easy—I was slick, slippery, ready for him.

“Oh Rob,” I moaned, my fingernails digging into his bicep
s as he began pumping, kneeling on the ground between my legs as I wrapped them tight around his waist.

“Fuuuuck.” He grimaced, biting his lip as he bottomed out inside me
.

He was a Greek god in the moonlight, every inch of him chiseled and honed to perfection. And he was mine. I ran my hands up his biceps, across the hard planes of his shoulders, snaking my arms around his neck and pulling him to me, capturing his mouth in a deep, dark kiss.

His tongue thrust in time with his cock, driving us both higher, making me dizzy with wanting him. I couldn’t hold it back, everything I felt for him, how much I wanted him. There was no barrier between us now. I was completely his in that moment and the way he looked at me when I broke our kiss, gasping for air, told me he knew it.

“Harder,” I begged, digging my heels into his lower back, driving him deeper. “Oh, baby, please, please, make me come
for you!”

Rob let out a low groan, hips moving fast and hard,
so deep it almost hurt, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t get enough of him. I felt him throbbing, every beautiful, glorious inch of him, and knew he was close. He body seemed to take over all on its own, like a machine, and I shuddered underneath him as I felt that first sweet, hot blast filling me.

“Oh God, Sabrina!” He called my name as he came and that pushed me right over the edge. I came too, trembling beneath him,
satin walls clamping down on his length like a velvet vise. Rob grabbed my hips, thrusting like an animal, growling in my ear as he filled me.

T
he night air was filled with our harsh, ragged breath and I clung to him, like I couldn’t get enough. He yanked his jeans up over his hips and stretched out beside me. It was dark except for the ambient light from the infinity pool beside us and the moon high above. Rob stroked my hair, my cheek, the tops of my breasts, his hand finally settling, with a profound meaning, on my lower belly. We breathed together and kissed like we thought we might never get the chance again, our lips moving in whispers occasionally—his name, my name, and words like
sweet
and
love
and
mine.
We were lost in each other and found again. I don’t know how long it was, minutes, hours, before someone called Rob’s name from behind us.

Then a flood of lights poured over the patio.

I startled but Rob’s eyes flew open, brow knitted, jaw tight.

“Stay here.” He frowned, yanking my robe closed and cinching it tight before rolling off the edge of the patio couch, zipping up his jeans as he stood.

“I heard you were back in town.” It was a woman’s voice, dripping honey. “Didn’t waste much time getting back in the saddle now did you?”