Smoke Signals (21 page)

His gaze never leaving mine, he closed his hand over me, molding my flesh to his palm. “Like this?”

“Yes.” I rolled forward on the balls of my feet, closing my eyes.

He placed his other hand on my ribs, gradually sliding down toward my hip before settling in the curve of my waist.

My breaths caught in my throat.

Razor brushed his lips over my eyelids. “Tell me what you want, Tori.”

“Harder,” I forced out. Just one word was all I could manage. The way he was touching me felt good, but I needed more.

He shifted his hand, and my nipple beaded into a hard, sensitive bud. Through the material of my leotard, he gently pinched my tit between thumb and forefinger, and rolled.

I gasped.

“Too much?”

“No. It’s good.” It was better than good. His grip was just enough to cause the slightest bite of pain—not too much, not too little—that washed away my ability to think and left a delicious yearning sensation in its wake.

He did it again, and this time he caught my gasp in a kiss, his tongue sweeping inside my open mouth to play with mine.

Dizziness had me making fists in his shirt, drawing him closer, and holding on for all I was worth. He backed me up against the wall and dragged both hands up and down my sides, teasing along my rib cage.

“I want to make you come,” he said between kisses.

I shook my head. “It’s too hard. No point. Just touch me. Hold me.”

“Let me try. I won’t— I won’t do anything to hurt you. Just let me…” His words trailed away as he nibbled a line along my jaw and down my neck, ending at my clavicle. “Let me give this to you.”

Even though I knew it was pointless, even though I knew he’d never do the sorts of things necessary to bring me to climax, I nodded. “Yes. Fine. Try.” Because even if I was right and he was wrong, at least he was touching me. His hands were on me. His lips. And that was what I needed. To escape. To pretend, for just this moment, that there was someone left in this world who loved me. Whether it would be enough to make me orgasm wasn’t really a concern, because sometimes, even for me, being touched by a man felt good.

Razor took my hand and led me down the hall to his bedroom. He stripped off his shirt and tossed it on the floor before moving in behind me. In a practiced move, he nudged my yoga pants over my hips. They slipped to the floor, pooling at my ankles. I waited, restless, breathless, for him to touch me again.

And I waited some more.

The heat of his body scalded my butt, my thighs, even though we weren’t touching. I wanted to ease back toward him, to press myself against him. I craved the sensation of my curves making way to fit with his hard body.

But still I waited.

I held my hands in front of me, anxiously picking at my fingernails.

He finally touched me, with nothing more than the tips of his fingers grazing my hip. His other hand came around my waist and took hold of one of mine, putting a halt to my nervous habit. Then his lips were on the back of my neck, light as a feather, but it made my stomach flip.

The ocean-like scent of the soap he’d used after working out with the guys flowed around me, crashing into me like a wave. I wanted it to take me under.

He nudged the backs of my knees, and I dropped back against him. His arm flitted around my waist, holding me up. “I want you in my bed,” he said, his breath tickling my ear. “I want you in my bed, naked and writhing because you’re so close, so fucking close, because I’m driving you wild.”

Still holding my hand, he stretched my arm up over his shoulder and let it go, trailing his fingers down the underside of my limb, teasing the sensitive flesh. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or suck in a breath.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t seen
Dirty Dancing
. I’m stealing Swayze’s move, and you don’t even recognize it. You’re killing me.”

“It’s good move.”

“Mm-hmm. This one’ll be even better.” He tipped my chin up and back until he could kiss me from behind.

My knees turned to jelly, but it didn’t matter because Razor picked me up and carried me to his bed. He laid me on my back and came over me, settling himself between my thighs. His cock was hard, pulsing against me through his jeans. He held himself above me with much of his weight on his elbows. I wanted more of his weight on me. I wanted the feel of him crushing me to the mattress.

I hooked my ankles together behind his back and dug my fingers into his biceps, trying to drag him down to me. But no matter how strong I was, he was stronger. He wouldn’t budge.

In fact, he grinned down at me. “What do you want?”

“You.”

“I got that. What else? What do you want me to do? How do you like being touched? What’s it going to take to make you come?”

He wasn’t going to like my answer.

“Need to be rough.”

Sure enough, he was already shaking his head.

“Not to hurt,” I said. “Just… No sensitivity left. It’s gone.” I shrugged. They’d gone so far so many times when I’d been filming porn that I wasn’t sure I’d ever regain normal sensation. “Have to be rough or I don’t feel. Like pinching tit. Light touch won’t work.”

He shook his head, but he slipped the straps of my leotard off my shoulders and lowered it enough to free my breasts. At first, the kisses he placed along the line of my clavicle were tender and sweet. But then he moved lower, using his tongue and teeth to nibble down my breastbone to my abs.

I sucked in a sharp breath when he circled my belly button with his tongue before dipping it inside, his hands scraping up and down my ribs. Gradually, he made his way to my breasts and pussy, removing my leotard completely and flinging it overhead to land somewhere in the room. And everything he was doing felt good, I couldn’t lie about that. He kneaded my breasts; he pinched and twisted my tits; he licked my pussy and nibbled on my lower lips before sucking my clit into his mouth and swirling his tongue around it over and over and over again.

It felt…nice. But nothing more. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much effort he put in to push me over the edge into ecstasy, it just wasn’t going to happen. True, I wasn’t staring at a spot on the ceiling and praying for it to end, but things weren’t so easy for me. I doubted they ever would be again.

He’d been at it so long it had to end. And soon. While I appreciated his attempt, it was a lost cause. But I could tell he had no intention of giving up until he succeeded. Something told me Razor wasn’t used to failing.

So after he changed his rhythm again, I writhed against him, and I made soft, whimpering sounds, and I increased my breathing as if his endeavor were affecting me far more than it was. He licked and sucked with even greater intensity, and I bucked my hips into him and cried out, forcing my legs to tremor and my whole body to tense and release.

Razor kept it up for a few more moments before crawling up the length of my body to collapse on top of me. The weight of him pressing me down into the mattress felt as good as everything else he’d done. I sighed, savoring this moment. This—this was what I’d wanted more than anything. He kissed my cheek and whispered nonsensical words in my ear, using his hands to stroke my arms and hair.

His cock—as hard as ever—pushed against my belly. Maybe now he’d finally let me do what I could for him. We both knew he wanted me, and we both knew I could get him off. Now that his silly requirement had supposedly been met, it should be time.

He rolled us over so I was straddling him, and he kissed me lazy and deep. Excellent. He was playing right into my plans. In this position, I had a much better chance of freeing his cock to return the favor, so I started my efforts by letting my hands roam over every inch of his chest and abs.

He made deep sounds into my mouth when my fingertips teased his belly button, like he’d done with his tongue to mine. With one hand still toying with him that way, I worked to undo his belt.

Razor broke off the kiss and grabbed for that hand, stopping me before I’d done anything but release the catch on his buckle. “No, baby.”

“But—”

“Maybe you can fool a camera into thinking you had an orgasm, but you’re not fooling me.” He rolled us over again, pinning me down. “You don’t come, I don’t come. That’s the deal. That’s not changing.”

“I did—”

He put a finger over my lips and shook his head. “Please do us both a favor and don’t lie. Not about this. Not about something so important.”

If the necessity of me having a real orgasm was one of the more important parts of our relationship, we were doomed to failure. I pouted, so frustrated I was on the verge of screaming. “But if I can’t? If I never come again, how can you wait? It’s not fair to you.”

“How the hell is me getting my rocks off while you can’t enjoy sex fair to
you
?”

“I
did
enjoy, though. Just didn’t come. Sometimes it’s okay to not come. It’s still good.”

“Beautiful, if someone got me that close all the time and then left me hanging…” He shook his head. “That’s not good. That’s not okay.”

“But women are different.” He opened his mouth to argue with me again, so I kept going before he could get a word out. “
I’m
different. Porn changed me. My body, it’s not same like other women. Not anymore.” It didn’t look like I was getting anywhere, so I decided to try a different tack. “We compromise?”

He scowled so deep I wanted to rub the line between his eyebrows until it went away. “What kind of compromise?”

“You keep try to make me come, but agree sometimes it not happen, still okay. I give you blow job or hand job. Trade off. It’s fair.”

“It’s not fair.”

“You get blue balls. You need to come. Bad for hockey.”

He stared at me, his brow still furrowed in thought for so long it left me antsy. But then he said, “I have one more condition.”

“Condition?” I raised a brow.

“You have to agree to the therapy that Dr. Rodriguez suggested.”

“I don’t need—”

“
I
need you to try the therapy. Because as much as I love the thought of feeling your sweet mouth on me, it’s not enough. I need more. I need to be with you, and I need for you to be okay when it happens.”

He wasn’t going to budge on that. I could see it in the set of his jaw.

“Fine,” I agreed, but I wasn’t happy about it. Not at all. “I go to physical therapy.”

“And counseling,” he added.

I opened my mouth to argue.

“Tori,” he said on a sigh. “I’ll come with you, but I need you to go. Especially now that you know about your mother.”

Mama
. I’d done my best ever since Dmitri had left to forget about all that he’d told me, but now it came rushing back in a flood of tears.

Razor kissed my cheek, the salty tears covering his lips. “See?” he said. “Because of this. I can’t handle much more without knowing you’re getting help. It rips me into shreds to see you hurting like this, baby.”

He rolled off me and tugged me to his side, tucking my head onto his shoulder.

He held me until the tears stopped, brushing his fingers through my hair and stroking my arm and back all the while. When I was done, he said one word. Just one, no more and no less.

“Please?”

“Yes,” I said, my throat raw and my eyes scratchy. “I’ll go.”

ALMOST EVERY DAY
of late, Greg was calling me with something else Tori and I needed to do in order to prove our marriage was real. It was already almost September. The other guys were starting to show up in Tulsa, and we’d been married for more than a month and a half.

In the last few weeks, I’d added her to my health insurance policy and updated my life insurance and everything else of that nature to include her as my beneficiary.

Once I’d done that, he’d told me I needed to somehow get her name onto my mortgage, she needed a phone of her own, a car with her name on both the title and insurance policy, and we needed joint bank accounts and credit cards.

For the last few weeks, any time I wasn’t busy working out for the upcoming season and she wasn’t at some dance class or hanging out with Tallie, we were working toward proving that we were truly sharing a life in every sense.