The Complete Series Boxed Set (3 page)

“OK, she’s going overboard,” Mike relented. He turned to Josie. “No—it’s not using diapers on the baby and reading her signals when she needs to go, then holding her over the toilet.”

“Laura is doing
that
?” Josie’s jaw dropped.

“No, thank god,” Dylan exclaimed. “But she’s thinking about it.”

“She really has thrown herself into the whole Attachment Parenting thing,” Josie agreed.

“Nothing wrong with that,” Alex said. “Every parent has to pick the approach that works best.”

Silence
. That anyone anywhere was holding a baby over a toilet every hour so it could pee was an eye opener. If Alex wanted that for their kids... Wait.
What
kids? She didn’t want kids! Josie scrubbed her mind. She needed to focus on Laura.

“But you might want to broaden your expectations,” Josie mused. “I think you’re in for a surprise when you see what she’s been reading.”

“You know something we don’t?” Dylan asked.

“No. It’s just...I’m a woman.”

Three balled up napkins hit her head at the same time.

“Are they asleep?” Mike closed the bedroom door slowly and looked at him, a finger pressed to his lips. Turning the knob slowly, he managed to close it entirely with just the faintest
click
. “Yes.”

Finally! Josie’s suggestion had been a good one, he had to grudgingly admit, but getting Laura 1) away from her eReader 2) away from both of them and 3) Jillian away from both of them all at the same time had proven to be a logistics nightmare worthy of air traffic control at LaGuardia Airport. What a mess. Ten days after their meeting with Josie and Alex at Jeddy’s they finally had their chance. With Laura sound asleep, and Jillian snuggled up with her, they could take a long look at what was going on inside Laura’s head.

Literally.

The eReader powered up quickly and Dylan zipped his way through the screen to find her library.

Well, now.

Josie was right, much as Dylan was loathe to admit it.

“It’s like a giant online porn shop!” Mike hissed. His eyes bugged out of his head as he leaned over Dylan and held the corner of the machine.

“This one has ‘fem dom’ in it. What’s that?”

“Beats me.”

For the next ten minutes they scrolled through page after page of book covers in full HD color.
Blush
by Lauren Jameson.
Anything He Wants
by Sara Fawkes. A bunch of books by someone named Maya Banks. He suspected the book
Burn
had nothing to do with firefighting.

Surrender
by Melody Anne.
Bared to You
by Sylvia Day.
Release Me
by Julie Kenner. They all had tasteful little objects on the covers, with pearls and cufflinks and shadowed faces, but as Mike opened one and randomly flipped through to what looked like a sex scene—

My, oh, my.

Laura had quite a little kink going on here.

In her
mind.
 

Dylan’s pants tightened as his eyes skimmed over the words. Women in bondage. Long, drawn out scenes that went on page after page. Master/sub contracts. And then...

“
Their Virgin Princess
! That’s the book Josie was joking about at Jeddy’s,” Dylan pointed out. Mike had remained remarkably silent as they stood there, transfixed.

A few taps and they scanned the first few chapters. Three bodyguards for a princess in a land where three men and one woman was the norm.

“THREE?” Dylan grunted. “Do we need to make room for another razor in the house?” He snorted. “Then again, it’d be just another guy who
won’t
be getting any.”

“Shhhh,” Mike whispered, entranced. Dylan could see his eyes racing across the page, eating up the words. And those were some words. You name a descriptor for male and female genitalia, it was there. And the dom in the story was—whoa.

He made Dylan feel like a wuss.

Butt plugs. Three ex-military bodyguards. A plane crash in the desert—Josie wasn’t kidding! That meant
she
was reading these books, too. Were all women reading this stuff now that
Fifty Shades of Grey
and eReaders had unleashed something? This wasn’t his grandmother’s romance novel. Noni had always read bodice rippers, with covers that showed a gleaming man’s bare chest next to a damsel whose dress was pulled down around her shoulders, his mouth pressed to the woman’s neckline for a kiss.

“My stories,” she called them. Noni invested a lot of money in her stories. When she had died, they’d found more than four hundred paperbacks, mostly Harlequin books, stacked neatly in grocery bags in her guest room closet.

The local nursing home residents had been thrilled to get them.

Now Dylan wondered what the hell was between those covers. This was like crack for romance lovers.

And Mike was quickly becoming addicted as he gently pulled the eReader from Dylan’s hand and walked over to the couch, settling in for a good, long read.

Good
and
long
being the operative adjectives.

Those three bodyguards knew how to please a woman.

Holy BDSM!

For the next twenty minutes Dylan was transported somewhere else.

And so was his cock, which twitched and grew, straining against his jeans. While his hand, a bottle of Laura’s coconut-scented lotion, and YouPorn had held his needs at bay for a bit, he was desperate for the old sex life he, Laura and Mike had shared. Thoughts of Laura filled him, pumping through his mind as he imagined she was the princess in the book, being readied for her three (no, two...) men.

What—two wasn’t
enough
?

By the looks of it, Laura needed hundreds of men. Pages of long, drawn out temptation and longing, then fevered denial and brutal—yet passionate, and loving—bondage and domination greeted his eyes as he drank it in. Mike sat next to him, their bodies touching, breathing even and steady as they comfortably read through the next few chapters of the book, shifting occasionally in what Dylan imagined was arousal.

Or shock.

Or, more likely—envy.

The men in these imaginary worlds got everything they wanted. Sex. Love. The woman. A forever ending that he, Mike and Laura already had.

Minus the sex.

It wasn’t about the orgasm. Really—it wasn’t. What he missed most was the sound of her breath hitching in that oh-so-sexy way she had, the little give that told him she was getting ready for him. How her face flushed with need when she was aroused. The wetness of her walls as he slid one finger in her, his mouth eager to taste her juices.

Everything sensual and alive and skin was missing right now. Collapsing into the goodness and animal need of a world where the bedroom made everything else fade, where the three of them could just be raw nerves and want and naked lust was...gone.

Dried up.

As if it had never happened.

There was no lack of affection in their lives. Hugs and kisses and cuddles abounded. But when he or Mike tried to turn a peck on the lips with Laura into something deeper, she went shallow. Neither wanted to push because, well...they were respectful. Nice. Honorable.

Learning that it turned out she’d been filling her head with
this
every day, for hours and hours, made him re-evaluate the last few months. Not in the sense that he should ever violate her boundary—if Laura didn’t want sex, Laura shouldn’t have to have sex. Period. End of discussion. No meant no,
always
.

But what did all this BDSM reading
mean
?

“Where did we go wrong?” he asked Mike.

Mike shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes off the screen. Running one hand through his shaggy, blonde hair, he mumbled, “I don’t know, but damn, this writer can write.” A long, slow sigh poured out of him, his lips pursed, face deep in a frown. He looked like a Norse god troubled by thoughts of war.

“No shit. You as worked up as I am?”

Mike looked longingly down the hallway, toward their bedroom door where Laura now slept. “Yeah.”

Unable to stand it any more, Dylan stood and marched over to the kitchen, willing his erection to go down.
Heel, boy
, he ordered it. Reluctantly, it began to fade. Reading all that had triggered more in him than any porn ever could. The words elicited reactions and emotions far stronger than any image or video ever could.

Maybe that’s why romance novels were so popular. If that was why Noni read so many...

He shook his head like a dog trying to brush off a burr.
Don’t think about Noni aroused. Gross.
 

The new espresso machine gave his hands something to do, scooping the coffee in, tamping the grounds, and then—yes! The familiar hiss of manna being brewed. Two little cups later, he brought Mike one and reclaimed his seat. Browsing through a new book, Mike took the cup in one big hand, his other cradling the eReader.

“I can’t believe this is what Laura’s reading!” Mike whispered.

“We need to do something about this,” Dylan insisted. “It’s obviously her fantasy.”

“We can’t engineer a plane crash on a desert island and have a suitcase full of sex toys wash ashore magically,” Mike said dryly, taking a sip.

“No, but we could get Josie and Alex to babysit for a night while we get some velvet handcuffs and drip some hot wax on a blindfolded Laura!”

The air rang with Dylan’s words, and...yup. Hard again. A quick glance at Mike told him he was in the same state.

“If this is what she really wants,” Mike mused, “why doesn’t she just ask for it? She knows we’re about as open as anyone can be in the bedroom.”

Dylan shook his head, then took a good, long look at Mike. “You look like hell.” Hair overgrown, a scruffy beard, and a button down with a missing top button greeted his eyes.

“You’re just a shorter, darker version of me.” A not-so-gentle set of fingers brushed against Dylan’s overgrown cheek.

“We’ve let ourselves go,” Dylan said. Aside from quarterly meetings with the Board of Directors for his new charity, an organization designed to help families of cancer victims with services and grant money, Dylan didn’t have anywhere he had to be that required cleaning himself up. When Jillian was born he’d stopped volunteering at the fire station, so now he was basically a professional dad.

And trust fund dude, a fate he and Mike had settled in to, finally. Even Mike had handed over most of the day-to-day operations of the ski resort to his management. No one really needed to look presentable for society. Other than basic hygiene, they just hadn’t cared.

“We can fix that right now. A quick haircut, shave, and some decent clothes would go far. You clean up nicely when you bother,” Mike said, smiling.

Dylan frowned. “Not enough. It’s not like we’ve looked like this forever. I think we need to go further.”

Mike finished his espresso and set the cup on the end table with a grace that belied his size.

“How far?”

Dylan tapped on the eReader and pulled up a page full of sex toys. “Let’s start here.”

“Alex was kidding when he suggested we get her a new sex toy!”

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea, though. Except the toys are for us to use on her. Not for her to use on her, you know? How about we read more of these stories and buy some of the...
implements
they use, and give Laura a taste of what her imagination is creating?” Dylan presented the idea to Mike with, he hoped, a sense of urgency and excitement that would convert him.

“Hi, honey!” Mike hissed. “Now that you spent sixteen hours breastfeeding all day and are coming to bed covered in vomit and smelling like sour milk, here we are with the Baby Jesus butt plug and a Sybian!”

“Not like that,” Dylan insisted. “And what’s a Sybian?”

Mike took the eReader, flipped back to a different book, and pointed. “Start reading here. I’ll be back in a minute.” Dylan looked up and watched Mike leave the room, his frumpled t-shirt and the shaggy blonde curls over his ears symptoms of benign neglect, and sighed.

They really had let themselves go.

But that shouldn’t matter. And what the hell was a Sybian?

Ninety seconds later Dylan knew exactly what a Sybian was, and he was ready to go order one if there was any hope he could watch Laura use it. And there was that scene with the sex swing....

Where was she hiding this crazy, uninhibited side of her? Under those soft curves, that dimpled smile, those lips she bit at the moment of orgasm? The mere idea that she’d ride a machine with a dildo attached to it and like it made him nearly come in his pants right now. Flipping frantically through the eReader, he opened another book with a woman’s hands bound on the front. Then one where she wore a mask and was draped in red silk. Yet another with a cuff link and pearls on it. And another...

Ropes and handcuffs and melted candle wax and dildos and dilators and butt plugs.

His very own Laura had an active, healthy, amazingly wonderful inner sex life.

Unleash the woman, for fuck’s sake!

Or, he mused, perhaps what she wanted was to be
leashed
.

“Are you a Sybian expert now?” Mike asked as he returned from the kitchen, chomping on an energy bar.

Dylan shifted himself in a way that made Mike laugh. “Oh, you laugh, but you know exactly how I feel right now.”

“Yup.”

“That Sybian...”

“Yup.”

“I’m thinking about ordering one.”

A cocked eyebrow was Mike’s calm response. “You are?”

“You in?”

“I say order one of everything from those books and see what happens.” The devilish gleam in Mike’s eyes was so different from his droll manner that even after ten years together, Dylan was amazed the man could surprise him.

“You realize you’re talking to a guy with nearly unlimited money and zero impulse control?”

“You realize you are talking to a guy who has had sex twice and exactly one blow job in six months?” Mike’s face was serious, eyes gone dark and smoky. Mischief was gone. This was a man determined.

Dylan’s jaw dropped. Thank God they were in agreement. Whatever it took to unlock the passionate woman they’d met fifteen months ago and to regain the intimacy they all seemed to crave—but couldn’t quite find their way to—was what they needed to do now. Something had to give.