Sed threaded his strong fingers through her hair and cupped her head with improbable gentleness before rocking his hips forward and shifting his cock deep into her mouth. Not prepared for the unexpected invasion, she struggled not to gag. He groaned, fucking her mouth while she applied suction. His fingers fisted into her hair and the tenderness of before evaporated. His more aggressive side, which she tried to tame outside their sexual encounters and encouraged within them, emerged as his thrusts deepened. She sucked harder, hoping she wouldn’t require much air as she gave him what he craved.
Unexpectedly, he pulled free of her mouth and tugged her to her feet. He gripped her hips and set her on the cold metal deck railing. She yelped in protest, but the sudden chill evaporated when he stepped between her open thighs and rubbed his fingers along her center to test her readiness. She was hot. Wet. More than ready. He shifted his hand to his cock to guide himself inside her. Jessica groaned as he thrust deep, and she wrapped her arms and legs loosely around him to draw him closer. His hands gripped her ass as he took her hard and fast. Her cries of ecstasy were lost to the wind, mingling with the calls of the gulls.
“I can’t believe you’re finally mine,” he said close to her ear.
As always, the deep timbre of his voice reached deep inside her.
“I’ve been yours from the start,” she said, capturing his face between her palms. She wished only that she could see his eyes and his love for her shining in their expressive blue depths. “I was just too stubborn and stupid to admit it.”
“Don’t ever forget you’re mine,” he said, thrusting deep and holding her hips so he could claim that final inch.
Her breath caught as she pressed her heels into the backs of his legs—filled with him, surrounded by him, joined with him, and not just physically. “I’m sure you’ll remind me.”
He chuckled. “Every damn day, baby.”
He brought her to her peak, knowing exactly how to please her, and then scooped her off the railing and carried her toward the house. Each step drove him deeper inside her. She clung to his shoulders, head tilted back and bare breasts offered to the sky, the breeze, the night. He stopped in the middle of the immaculately tended yard and lowered her to the grass. She moaned in protest when he slipped free of her body but surrendered willingly to his mouth between her legs. As usual, he gave more than he took. Sed was a generous lover. He brought her to a second peak, and she knew him well enough to realize he’d continue giving all night if she didn’t take matters into her own hands—and mouth and pussy. After she gathered a few of her scattered senses, she sat up and pressed both hands against his chest, urging him onto his back. When she leaned over his lap, hair brushing his belly, he grabbed her by the hips and turned her so that he could delight her with his mouth as she did her best to remember to please him with her own.
God, he could make her come. And come. And come again. When she decided the poor man wasn’t ever going to claim his own release, she scrambled down his body, grabbed his cock, and pressed it inside her.
He groaned at the sudden change in sensation, and she worked her inner muscles around him as she rode him, smiling to herself when his toes curled in the moonlight. She leaned forward, still riding smoothly, bending his cock down to alter the spot where he felt her, and then tilted her pelvis in the opposite direction to rub him in a new way.
“Jess!” he called out, his fingertips sliding down the center of her back and drawing a shiver of delight from her body. “God, you feel good.”
“Not as good as you make me feel,” she said.
“Lie,” he growled. He sat up behind her, grabbing her breasts and pulling her down hard on his lap so she couldn’t move. “This needs to last until dawn, and you’re determined to make me come.”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “You don’t always have to fuck me like it will be our last time together.” Not that she was complaining, but it had to be hard on his body.
He pressed his face into the center of her back and rubbed his mouth against her spine. “But you never know.”
“I do know. I know we’ll be together and making love for the next fifty years.”
“I need at least eighty to get my fill of you.”
She laughed and covered his hands with hers, pressing his palms into her breasts. “I’m up for it.”
“I’d better start stockpiling Viagra.”
“Somehow, I don’t think you’ll need it.” She pried his hands from her body and elbowed him in the ribs. “Now will you lie back and take it like an obedient husband?”
“Yes, wife. Whatever makes you happy.”
He settled back on the grass, and she climbed off him to switch directions. She wanted to watch his face while she gave him pleasure. He had such expressive eyes. The way he looked at her always caught her around the heart. Her vision had adjusted to the low light outside, but most of his expression was lost to darkness.
As she guided him slowly and gently back inside her heat, his eyelashes fluttered and his lips parted. Once he stopped fighting his own pleasure, it didn’t take Jessica long to draw him to release. He gripped handfuls of grass as his back arched, and his entire body shuddered through the force of his climax.
“Mmm,” he said as the tension drained from his body. “If you weren’t already pregnant, that would have definitely knocked you up.”
She rolled her eyes at his macho bullshit and slid off him to curl against his side. She settled her head on his shoulder, and he stroked her hair idly with one hand.
“The stars all came to watch,” he said, and she turned her head to look up at the darkened sky.
She giggled. “My star came for sure.”
“He did. And he’ll be ready for more in about an hour.”
“An hour! Are you going to let me relax at all this week?”
“No, Mrs. Lionheart, I’m not.”
She grinned and snuggled closer, her arm tightening around his waist. “Glad to hear it, Mr. Lionheart.”
Chapter Two
Standing across from him over Dad’s grave, she looked so very beautiful. Even though tears flowed down her cheeks, her nose was red, her eyes puffy, and her expression crumpled in misery, she was beautiful. Mom looked at least twenty years younger than she actually was. The woman standing by the grave was the mother of Sed’s past. The one who’d made him do his homework, taught him how to iron a shirt and how to argue. The mother who never dreamed she’d be a widow at fifty. Now her three kids were grown and her husband was gone. She had no one.
“Mom,” Sed called to her, but she didn’t hear him. “Mom, I’m here. He’s gone, but I’m here.”
She continued to weep, collapsing on her knees beside the grave. She clawed up handfuls of freshly turned dirt and threw them into the dark hole. Sed heard the clumps strike the lid of his father’s coffin.
His dad appeared beside him. Dad was twenty years younger too, the father of Sed’s childhood memories. This was the man who’d taught Sed how to grill and shave and sail and how to be there for his family no matter what. He was much too young, too strong, to ever die.
“How could you leave her, Dad? Can’t you see that she needs you?” Sed tried to punch him, but his hand went through Dad’s transparent shoulder without resistance.
“Looks like rain,” Dad said. He tipped his face up to the dark thunderheads above and then turned to walk away. He was gone before Sed could take a single step after him, but Sed called to him anyway.
“Dad! You can’t leave her like that.” Couldn’t he see that she was in agony? Couldn’t he see that she was Jessica? “Jess?” Her name escaped Sed as a pained sigh.
“How could you leave me, Sed?” Jessica said, tossing more dirt into the grave. “Can’t you see that I need you?”
He squeezed his eyes shut against the pain in her expression. When he opened them again, he was staring at the satin lining of the coffin lid above him. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, but he could hear her crying above him, beside him
, all around him. He could also hear the sound of the dirt striking the lid of his coffin with thick and heavy thuds.
Sed sucked in a deep breath and sat up in bed. His heart was thundering, and his stomach churning. He wasn’t dead. Dad still was, but he wasn’t. Moonlight streamed through the patio doors of the honeymoon rental house and bathed his wife’s face. She wasn’t crying over him, but she was blinking and staring at him quizzically.
“Another nightmare?” she asked, her voice muddied with sleep. She reached out to take his hand and offer comfort.
He’d been having that dream for weeks now. He supposed it wasn’t so strange that his father’s passing had given him a sudden fear of death. What he did find odd was that he wasn’t afraid of dying. He was afraid of leaving Jessica to face the world alone. Afraid of her agonizing over his loss, of grieving as if her soul had been wrenched from her body.
Did it make him self-absorbed to think she’d be devastated by his loss? Maybe. But he’d seen his mother’s grief, and if Jess’s feelings were as strong for him as his were for her, Sed’s passing would destroy her. And he couldn’t do that to her. He never wanted to cause Jessica anything but joy. But he couldn’t share that fear with her. It sounded completely self-centered and stupid. What kind of lame asshole feared causing someone grief?
“Go back to sleep,” he said, reaching over to stroke her hair behind her ear.
“Why won’t you tell me about it?” she asked. “Sharing will make you feel better.”
“It’s just about my dad dying, sweetheart. Don’t worry about it.”
“I can’t help but worry.”
He really needed to get his shit together. Worrying about him wasn’t good for her or the baby.
Jessica sat up and fluffed the pillows behind her. She leaned back into the comfortable nest and patted her lap. Sed smiled gratefully—this was becoming a nightly ritual between them—and curled up on his side beside her, using her thigh as his pillow. She massaged his scalp, his temples, his forehead, face and neck until all the tension drained from him. She then stroked his hair and hummed softly until his heart rate slowed and his breathing steadied and his eyes drifted shut.
“You can tell me anything, you know,” she said.
He meant to say that he knew that, but he fell asleep instead.
Chapter Three
Jessica’s leg was asleep, but the rest of her was awoken by her full bladder at dawn. It took her a moment to orient herself. She was accustomed to having Sed beside her, but everything else was unfamiliar. After coming inside in the middle of the night, they’d fallen asleep in the comfortable bed side by side, but now she was propped up on a pile of pillows and Sed’s head was resting in her lap. She stroked his hair and recalled he’d had another nightmare about his dad. He’d been having them recurrently since his father passed and had a hard time falling back to sleep unless she held him and helped him relax. He was sleeping soundly now. She considered not moving for a while longer so she wouldn’t disturb him, but her bladder had other ideas. Jessica carefully shifted his head off her thigh and onto a hastily substituted pillow and hobbled to the bathroom, her entire leg tingling painfully as blood flow returned to her flesh.
Sed was still sleeping—looking like he hadn’t moved an inch—when she returned to the bedroom, and she thought about crawling back in bed beside him, but the sunrise was calling to her from outside the French doors, and the patch of grass beyond the patio looked incredibly inviting. Her muscles begged for a deep stretch, her soul cried out to connect with the outdoors, and her skin craved the brush of the morning breeze.
Naked yoga on the lawn at dawn? Yes, please.
She opened the patio doors and left them open, allowing briny morning air to flood the bedroom. The smooth surface of the patio blocks was cool beneath her feet, and she sighed in bliss when her toes curled into the cushion of soft grass just beyond.
She began her practice with a sun salutation—bending forward to touch the grass, reaching up to touch the sky, extending and folding and breathing. The breathing was the most important part. It connected the inside of her body to the outside world. This was liberating. This was ecstasy. This was yoga.
A scraping sound behind her made her instinctively cover her bare breasts as she spun around.
“Don’t stop on account of me,” her sleep-tousled husband said from the lounge chair he’d pulled out of the shadows and into the early morning sunshine.
She smiled and returned to her vinyasa feeling an added connection to the man observing. When she reached the end of the repeated sequence of poses, she settled on her shins, curled into a tight ball, and extended her arms out in front of her. Child’s pose always delivered an amazing stretch through her hips and lower back, but this morning it offered a little something extra. The grass beneath her teased her nipples. It felt a little kinky, but she liked it.
“I’ve never been jealous of a yard before,” her audience said from his chair.
“It is taking a few liberties with my body.” She rose up onto her hands and knees, knowing that Sed had an unfettered view of her backside and what was usually hidden between her legs as she alternately arched her spine up like a cat and swayed her back low like a cow.
“Are you imagining me inside you while you do that?” he asked.
Well, she hadn’t been, but now that he mentioned it, her thoughts shifted in that direction. “Not sure what that would feel like. Why don’t you show me?”
“Are you sure you want me to interrupt your practice?”
She peeked over her shoulder and found him lounging with his huge cock in his hand. She licked her lips and forced her attention from the sexy sight of his nakedness to the grass between her hands. “I suppose not,” she said, loving to tease him until he lost control. She lifted her hips into the air and flowed into downward-facing dog. Soon after they’d first reconnected in Las Vegas, Sed had claimed the pose would be better named as upward-facing pussy.
“I know what that one feels like when I’m inside you,” he said.
She lifted one foot from the grass and high into the air and then modified her three-legged dog by bending her knee and touching her toes to the back of her head. She moaned in pleasure at the opening of her chest and abdomen as the muscles stretched at her command. She wasn’t sure why the entire world wasn’t populated with nothing but yogis. Yoga was her favorite form of exercise, relaxation, and stress relief. Well, it was a close second to sex with Sed. And whenever she could combine the two passions, she always ended up beyond satisfied.
She lifted her hand from the grass and flipped over so that she was arched belly up in a full backbend. The world appeared upside down, and she closed her eyes to allow a deeper reflection on what her body was experiencing. She adjusted her pose to alleviate tension in one shoulder. With each inward breath, she lifted her ribs a centimeter higher, and with each outward breath, she arched her back a bit more.
“Impressive.”
Sed’s voice came from nearby. Which meant he must have vacated his chair.
She opened her eyes and lifted her head enough to see him standing less than a foot away from her spread knees. Her legs weren’t far enough apart for him to shift between them, but with the careful adjustment of one foot and then the other, he had all the room he needed to take her if he stepped forward. He understood her repositioning as the invitation she’d meant it to be and reached out to slide a finger along her seam. Her belly quivered, and her limbs trembled as his finger moved from clit to pussy to ass and then took the reverse trip. She focused on holding her backbend.
“I always feel like I’m intruding on something sacred when I interrupt you like this,” he said.
His finger slipped inside her, and she gave it a friendly squeeze of welcome before inching her feet a little wider. “If I didn’t like it, I’d tell you to stop bothering me.” She tightened again before adding, “And that finger of yours makes my body more like a sacred temple than any yoga pose.”
> “Always happy to contribute.” His thumb brushed against the hood of her clit, and a jolt of pleasure shook her. His finger slid deeper.
She groaned.
“You’re not just bendy,” he said, slowly stroking inside her and rubbing her clit at the same time. “You have to be incredibly strong to hold a pose like that for so long.”
“I’m feeling a bit weak in the knees at the moment.” Her legs trembled to punctuate her claim.
“Would it help if I supported your back?” he asked, sliding his finger free and shifting both hands to brace her lower back.
The head of his cock nudged her opening, and she shuddered.
“Nope,” he said. “That makes you shake more, not less.”
She laughed softly. “It’s not your back support that’s making me shake. It’s that teasing cock of yours.”
“This one?” He shifted his hips in all directions until he managed to penetrate her slightly.
“Yes, that’s the one.” She braced one hand firmly on the ground and lifted her other to reach between her legs and guide his cock deeper.
“Thanks for that,” he said. “We do make a great team.”
She placed her hand on the ground again and held her backbend as he began to thrust. Her toes curled into the grass as blood pooled in her head and made her dizzy. She had the strangest sensation of spinning above the ground completely disoriented as he found a slow and steady rhythm. When her arms could no longer support her, she sank slowly to the grass, groaning in disappointment when Sed’s cock slid free of her body.
“That felt good,” he said, staring down at her with a smile on his lips. “Show me what else you can do.”
“I’ve been working on camel pose,” she said. “I’m not sure if I can do it with you inside me.”
“Camels are known for their impressive humps.”
She snorted. “Well, let’s see how impressive my humping is in camel pose, then.” She was guessing not very impressive at all. “Lie on your back.”