He chuckles and kisses my forehead. “You would be a terrible judge.”
“Hey! I can be serious, you know.”
He rolls his eyes. “No, you can’t. Just admit it.” He thinks for a moment and then smiles. “Don’t change a thing, though. You’re perfect as you are.”
I half sit up and my mouth falls open. “Are you admitting that you like my dizziness, Judge Masters?”
His eyebrow rises. “Perhaps.” He pulls me down to kiss him again. “Don’t tell anyone.”
I fall back down beside him. “Well, nobody knows about us anyway, so it will remain a secret.”
We remain silent for a while.
“Big weekend, huh?” I smile.
“Hmm.”
“How long has it been since you just let loose like you did last night?”
He shrugs, frowns, and pulls me over his body again.
I wait for him to answer with my head on his chest.
“I was twenty-two when I met Alina.”
What?
“She was at the same university as me and I’d seen her around. She was pretty.”
I smile imagining him younger.
“We hooked up one night after going to a nightclub.”
God, he would have been a good-looking twenty-two-year-old. He’s insanely hot now at thirty-nine.
“We slept together again a few weeks later after another night out. I didn’t see her again until she turned up at my dorm room three months later. She was pregnant.”
My heart drops.
He licks his bottom lip as he stares into space.
“What happened?” I ask.
“I did the right thing.”
My stomach twists. “You married her?”
He nods softly with his bottom lip caught in his front teeth, and I wait for him to keep going but he doesn’t.
“Did it go okay?” I whisper softly.
He shrugs. “I tried. I tried every damn day to fall in love with her.”
My eyes fill with tears.
“Twenty-three with a wife and a baby,” he mutters softly.
I kiss his chest and rub my cheek on his skin. I hate this story because I already know how it ends.
“It wasn’t so bad at first. We both put a front on for the sake of the other. Until she fell in love with me, but I didn’t fall in love with her…” His voice trails off.
A tear falls free, and I quickly swipe it away.
Stop it.
He clenches his jaw and I know he’s right back there, all those years ago. “I couldn’t even force myself to make love to her.”
Oh, this is a horrible story. “Jules,” I whisper, and he wraps his arm around me and pulls me closer.
“Samuel was conceived when I came home drunk one night. That’s the only time it would happen.”
I close my eyes.
“Then… she started drinking.”
God.
“It got so bad that I had to have a full-time nanny to care for the children even while she was home.” He stares into space. “Some days, she never got out of bed.”
Oh, this poor woman.
“I tried, I tried to get her help. I just didn’t do enough.”
My chest hurts for both of them.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I told her before I left for work one morning that I was filing divorce papers that day.”
I scrunch my eyes shut as I wait for the next part of the story.
“She said goodbye to the children.”
A lone tear rolls down my face onto his chest.
“And she drove drunk down a dead-end street at around 130 miles an hour, straight into a tree.”
The lump in my throat hurts as I try to hold my tears back.
He stares straight ahead, almost frozen.
“Do the children know?” I whisper.
“No. How could you ever tell your child that their mother killed herself because their father didn’t love her.”
I sniff as the tears roll down my face. “I’m so sorry.”
He kisses my temple. “Me, too.
“Are you going to watch the movie with us?” he asks me.
“Yes.”
It’s Sunday night. We’ve had the kids with us all day and haven’t had a moment alone.
He slowly brings his hand up to cup my face and my eyes close.
His touch is magic.
“I need to you to know how much I regret how I treated you at that dinner,” he whispers. “It’s playing on my mind.”
I nod. “I know.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know what came over me. I just handled the whole thing so badly.”
I watch him as he struggles with this conversation. “I know.”
His eyes search mine. “My children have to come first.”
“For me, too,” I whisper. “Their needs will come before mine or yours.”
Our eyes are locked, and I feel like I’m agreeing to a deal here. He wants me to secure his children’s happiness for him. How do I assure him of that?
Kiss me.
“This is harder than it should be,” he admits quietly. “I can think of nothing else but you.” He dusts his thumb over my bottom lip. “Promise me. Promise me that when we fall apart, you won’t leave them.”
Why is he so sure that we are going to fall apart?
I frown and nod before I can stop myself. “I promise that your children will always come first.”
His eyes drop to my lips, and my heart begins to race. Right on cue, we hear someone bounding down the stairs, and we jump back from each other. He goes to the fridge and gets out a bottle of wine as a cover.
Sammy comes into the kitchen. “Come on. Let’s watch the movie.” He disappears into the living room and I hear Willow and him talking. They get comfortable on their new beanbags, snuggled with their baby animals.
Julian comes up behind me and snakes his arms around my waist, pulling me back onto him aggressively.
“Go and change into a skirt,” he whispers into my ear. He nips my lobe and goosebumps ripple my skin.
What?
Holy fuck.
I walk into my room and start going through my wardrobe quickly. What the hell? I don’t even have a skirt that isn’t tight.
Shit. I think for a moment.
I know. I have a nightdress and gown. I take off my underwear and throw on my black silky nightdress, along with my white fluffy gown to cover it, and then I walk back out into the living room. My heart is beating fast as my adrenaline takes over
He’s going to touch me.
“Hurry up, Brell,” Willow calls.
I walk into the living room to find the kids on the floor facing the television, and Julian at one end of the sofa. He pats the space next to him as his tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip. “Turn the light off.”
Fuck’s sake, there isn’t a hotter man on Earth than him.
I turn the light off and sit down next to him. He throws the large blanket over both of us.
Terminator 2 starts playing, but I have absolutely zero interest in the movie.
“Lie down,” he mouths.
I do as I’m told and put my legs on his lap. The blanket is completely covering us.
He grabs my foot and rubs it over his hard cock through his pants, and I close my eyes when I feel how hard he is.
With his eyes fixed on the television, he undoes my robe and then puts my back leg up on his shoulder along the sofa. He pushes my other leg forward, effectively opening me right up.
What the hell?
He smiles darkly as his eyes stay fixed on the television, and I watch as the shadows of the television flicker on his face. His hand runs up my calf, and then up my thigh, under my nightdress, to my stomach and my bare breast. He clenches his jaw as he grabs a handful of my breast and squeezes it hard.
I try to concentrate and control my breathing.
What the fuck are we doing?
There are two kids in the room, completely oblivious, but none the less…
He goes to the to other breast and kneads it in the palm of his hand. I can feel the desire in his touch and I nearly combust. He trails his hand down my stomach as he explores my body. His fingers follow my hipbones and my ribs. He grabs my bottom foot and rubs it over his cock again.
Fuck, he’s rock hard.
I close my eyes and enjoy the way my body tingles. This is insane.
For fifteen minutes, his left hand explores every inch of my torso as he touches me tenderly, while his right hand is on my foot that’s over his cock.
Every time he grabs my breast he flexes his cock beneath me, and we both close our eyes and become lost in the moment.
Touch me…
Touch me…
Touch me there.