A Forever Family: Their Doorstep Delivery

If she’d thought about it, she would have come up with all kinds of reasons that this shouldn’t happen. But with his mouth on hers and his hands stroking over her body, rational thought was impossible. Even coherent speech seemed beyond her grasp as she responded with only throaty sighs and needy whimpers.

And then, one desperate word, as common sense nudged its way into the middle of her true-life erotic fantasy.

“Condom,” she gasped.

He groaned. “I don’t have one.”

Which probably wasn’t surprising considering that he’d been married for so many years and, by his own admission, celibate in the year since his wife had died. Thankfully, she’d prepared for this possibility, remote though it had seemed at the time when she’d hidden the box of condoms among a variety of other items she’d purchased from the pharmacy.

“Top drawer of the night table.”

He yanked open the drawer and found the box, tearing it open in his haste and scattering the strips of condoms all over the floor.

He swore; she giggled.

Finally, he had one of the little square packets in hand. Cassie tried to take it from him, but he held it out of reach.

“Not this time,” he said. “I’m afraid if you touch me now, it will be over before we even get started.”

“I think we’ve started,” she said. “I’m so ready for you, I feel as if I’m going to explode.”

“Sounds promising.” He covered himself with the latex sheath, then parted her thighs and drove into her in one smooth thrust that made her cry out with pleasure.

Braden groaned his assent. “This...being inside of you...is even more incredible than I imagined.”

Her cheeks flushed with pleasure. “You’ve imagined this?”

“Every night since I met you,” he admitted.

She tilted her pelvis, pulling him even deeper. “So what happens next?”

He proceeded to tell her, in raw and graphic detail, how he wanted to pleasure her body. His words both shocked and aroused her, further heightening her anticipation. When he stopped talking, he focused his attention on doing everything that he’d promised. And it was exactly what she’d needed—and so much more.

When he was able to summon enough energy to move, Braden rolled off Cassie and onto his back. Now that blood flow had been restored to his brain, his mind was going in a dozen different directions. “I think we just shattered the world record for fastest simultaneous orgasms.”

A surprised laugh bubbled out of her. “I feel so proud.”

“You feel so good,” he said, tightening his arms around her.

“If I’d had even an inkling that this might happen tonight, I would never have let you into my house,” she told him.

“I didn’t plan this. If I had, I would have been prepared,” he said. “But I’m not the least bit sorry.”

“Right now, I’m not sorry, either,” she admitted.

It had been nearly a decade since he’d made love with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and he’d expected to feel a little bit guilty after doing so. Regardless of the fact that his relationship with Dana had been deteriorating over the past several years, she’d still been his wife. But the minute he’d taken Cassie in his arms, all thoughts of Dana had been swept from his mind.

From the first moment that his lips touched hers, he hadn’t thought of anyone but Cassie. He hadn’t wanted anyone but Cassie.

“So where do we go from here?”

She nudged him toward the edge of the mattress. “You need to go home.”

He didn’t know whether to be insulted or amused by her ineffectual efforts to push him out of her bed. “You’re kicking me out?”

“Don’t you have to pick up Saige from your parents’ house?”

He shook his head. “She’s sleeping over tonight.”

“Oh.”

He slid his arm up her back and drew her closer. “Why are you so determined to draw lines and boundaries around what’s happening between us?”

“Because if I don’t, I’ll try to turn this into something that it isn’t,” she admitted.

“Something like what?” he asked curiously.

“Like a happily-ever-after fantasy.”

The admission gave him pause. Because he liked Cassie—and he really liked making love with Cassie—but he had no intention of falling in love with her. “You don’t believe we can have a mutually satisfying physical relationship without making a big deal out of it?”

“I know that a couple of orgasms are not the foundation of a lasting relationship—”

“Three,” he interjected. Then, in response to her blank look, he clarified. “You had three orgasms.”

She blushed but didn’t dispute his count. “The number is irrelevant. You have to—”

He silenced her words with a quick kiss. “Hold that thought.”

She frowned at the command but didn’t say anything else when he slipped from her bed. He’d noticed the small three-piece bathroom tucked near the stairs when she led him up to her bedroom. Thinking only of the necessity of dispensing with the condom, he wasn’t paying attention to the shape of the space and, when he turned, rapped his head smartly on the sloped ceiling.

When he returned to the bedroom, rubbing his head, he saw that Cassie had wrapped herself in a short, silky robe and had scooped up the condoms that were scattered on the floor and stuffed them back into the broken box. He caught the edge of the drawer as it was closing and withdrew a strip from the box to set it on top of the table.

She looked at him, the arch of her brow as much a challenge as a question.

“I want to see if we can set another record,” he told her. “For the world’s slowest simultaneous orgasms this time.”

“I’m not sure there really is such a record,” she said dubiously.

“I don’t care,” he admitted. “I want to make love with you again.”

Make love.

Those two little words stirred something inside of Cassie’s heart. She was probably reading too much into the expression, especially considering that she would have been offended if he’d used the common crude vernacular. Still, there were other ways to describe the act, various euphemisms that he might have relied upon—such as the “mutually satisfying physical relationship” he’d already referenced. But she wanted to believe that what they’d shared was lovemaking, because she wanted to believe that hers wasn’t the only heart involved in what was happening between them.

Except that she was trying to keep her heart uninvolved.

Yes, the experience of being naked with Braden had been beyond incredible, but she needed to maintain perspective here. He was a single father with a young daughter—a widower who had lost his wife barely a year earlier. It would be a mistake to believe that what they’d just shared was anything more than the result of an intense and mutual attraction or that it could lead to anything more than that.

“I have a habit of falling hard and fast,” she admitted, as he eased her back down onto the mattress.

“Don’t fall for me,” he said. But with his lips skimming down her throat, and lower, it was really hard to concentrate on his words.

“I know I shouldn’t,” she acknowledged. “Because falling in love with a man who’s still in love with the woman he married is a heartbreak waiting to happen.”

He lifted his head to look at her. “You think I’m still in love with my dead wife?”

“It’s okay, I know—”

“No,” he said. “You don’t.”

She frowned at the certainty in his tone as much as the interruption.

He took a moment to gather his thoughts before he finally said, “The truth is, I’m only a widower because my wife was involved in a fatal car accident before she could divorce me.”

“What?” she said, unable to make sense of what he was telling her.

“A few weeks before the crash...Dana told me that she wanted to move out,” he admitted.

She couldn’t imagine why a woman—especially a new mother—would choose to break up her family. Unless her husband was abusive or unfaithful. And though she couldn’t imagine Braden being guilty of either of those offences, she was obviously missing something. “But...why?”

“Things hadn’t been good between us for a long time,” he confided. “I thought it was the stress of not being able to have a baby, and maybe that was a contributing factor, but obviously there was more going on than I realized. Only six weeks after we brought Saige home, Dana decided she couldn’t do it—that she didn’t really want to be a mother after all.”

Cassie was stunned. She didn’t understand why anyone would pursue adoption unless they were desperate to have a baby—or how anyone, when finally given the incredible gift of a child to raise, would suddenly decide that they didn’t want to be a parent. “Oh, Braden,” she said, her tone filled with anguish for him and what he’d been through.

“I’m only telling you this so you know that I’m not still missing my dead wife. I did grieve that her life was cut so tragically short—and I grieved for the loss of the life that I thought we were building together. But the truth is, the love we’d shared died long before she did.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“The point of sharing that sordid tale wasn’t to elicit sympathy,” he told her. “It was to let you know that I’m with you because I want to be with you, because I don’t want anyone but you.”

Her heart began to fill with cautious joy and tentative hope. “Then this isn’t...a one-night stand?”

“I sincerely hope not,” he said.

The simple and earnest words tugged at her, but she struggled to maintain her balance. Because there was still a lot of distance between “not a one-night stand” and “forever after” and it would be a mistake to believe otherwise.

He tipped her chin up and brushed his lips over hers. “Now can we stop talking and start taking advantage of the hours we have left in this night?”

She lifted her arms to link them behind his head. “You don’t want to hear all of my deep dark secrets?” she teased, in an effort to lighten the mood.

“Everyone has secrets,” he said. “But unless you have six previous lovers buried in your backyard, I don’t need to know all of them right now.”

“Not six previous lovers, only one.”

He paused, just a beat. “You only had one previous lover?”

She smiled sweetly. “No, I only buried one in the backyard.”

His lips curved just before they settled on hers. “I’m willing to take my chances.”

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