Reason Enough Read online

  “I need to get to bed….” but he was only protesting for show as I unbuckled his belt and helped him out of his clothes.

  I put him into the bath and scrubbed him with some body wash and a loofah. Water splashed over the edges of the tub and wet my clothes, but I kept at it, washing and kneading him until he closed his eyes and gave himself up to my ministrations. When I was done, I helped him out, dried him off, and took him to bed.

  I slid in naked beside him. He was warm from the hot water and my skin a little cool, but he didn’t object when I put my arm over his chest and my leg over his thighs. I kissed his shoulder.

  Sometimes we said more with silence than with all our words.

  When I kissed my way down his arm and across to his belly, he sighed. When I kissed lower, Dan’s belly vibrated under my lips. My hand found his cock and I stroked him erect in a minute. He put his hand on top of my head, though, when I went to move lower.

  “Elle.”

  I looked up at him. “Shh. I love you. Let me do this.”

  He smiled a little. “I need this, too?”

  I nodded. “You want me to do this.”

  He’d said those same words to me, in the past, and he’d been right. The way I was right now. Sex has many uses I would never pretend to know or want to know, but I did know the comfort losing oneself in pleasure could bring.

  I made love to him with my hands and tongue for a while until he shivered. Then I climbed on top of him. He groaned as he slid inside me; that simple sound sent a pulse of arousal through me. I always got turned on at the sounds he made.

  I’d meant to do this for him, not for me, but he slid a hand between us and I wasn’t going to complain. We moved together, slow at first then faster. I thought he might come right away, and that would have been fine, but Dan looked at me, watching my face as he used his thumb to provide steady pressure on my clit. When I gasped, he smiled.

  “I want to watch you come,” he whispered. “Let me see it.”

  I did a minute after that.

  He thrust inside me a few more times before his face tightened and he gasped out my name. Then he gathered me to him and held me tight. He kissed me.

  “I love you,” he said. “God, I love you so much.”

  “I love you too,” I whispered, holding him as hard as I could. I didn’t want to let go, not when he needed me to hold on.

  I thought he might cry, but he didn’t. His breathing slowed. Our bodies cooled. I pulled the blankets over us and snuggled into his side. I didn’t sleep, but I listened to him sleeping.

  I knew I should get up, take a shower. Brush my teeth.

  Take my pill.

  Instead I lay there listening to the sound of my husband breathing, and I held onto him with all I had inside me. I’d worried I didn’t have enough for him, but time had shown me I was wrong.

  I didn’t get out of bed.

  It wasn’t my conversation with Morty that had changed my mind about having a child, or watching my mother with my niece, or my niece herself. It wasn’t watching the miracle of Marcy’s son being born, either.

  All of those were reasons. Good reasons. But it was the man beside me who’d proven to me that love was worth everything. That my life, my heart, had room in it for more love than I ever thought possible.

  There were dozens of reasons to agree to have a child, but as far as I was concerned, just then, with his breath on my face and the warmth of his skin on mine, there was only one that mattered. Love.

  That was reason enough.

  The Challenge

  Excerpt

  Katie sighed again. An old argument. She liked to be prompt, even early. Dean preferred to make a grand entrance. She eyed his practiced pout. “I told you, that doesn’t work on me.”

  “It works on everyone.”

  This was very close to true. “Only because everyone else doesn’t know you like I do. All promise, no delivery.”

  Dean leered, once more leaning so close Katie could get a full whiff of his delicious cologne. “Shut your mouth! The fuck you mean, no delivery? I deliver.”

  Katie leaned, too, so her breath would tickle his earlobe. “No, babe. That ass and that smile promise a lot but Dean Manion only delivers to addresses on Penis Avenue. Vagina Street’s out of your delivery zone, remember?”

  He turned his face half an inch so his lips brushed her neck. “Just because I don’t doesn’t mean I couldn’t.”

  At this boast, so typical, Katie burst into laughter loud enough to make her happy she had her own office with a closed door. She pushed at his chest. “Puh-lease. You’ve never fucked a woman. Have you ever even kissed a woman?”

  “I’ve kissed you,” he reminded her, letting her push him away but not making it easy.

  “A New Year’s Eve kiss under mistletoe. Besides,” Katie said as she gave his tie a fond yank, “there was no tongue. Doesn’t count.”

  “Doesn’t mean I couldn’t,” Dean repeated stubbornly.

  Katie cast another glance at the clock. Fifteen minutes to make it from her office, down the hall, up three floors in the notoriously slow elevator, down another two corridors to get to the meeting room. “Look, your reputation as a sex bomb is safe with me. I swear I will never reveal to all the women crushing on you that you’d rather get a paper cut on your tongue than eat pussy.”

  She laughed again at his outraged expression. “Don’t act like it’s not true. I’ve seen you with the girls in reception, the ones who always give you doughnuts. You can whore yourself for a bear claw all you want, but when it comes right down to it, you won’t put out.”

  Dean was the part of their team who came up with the brilliant ideas; Katie figured out how to put them into action. Dean orchestrated the flash and bang while Katie made sure all the pieces fit into place. Yet it was Dean who fought the hardest to win the accounts, even when Katie’s careful financial summaries determined the risk wasn’t worth the effort. Dean who worked long hours ripping apart campaigns and sewing them back together until nobody could possibly offer something better. The same competitive edge that made him killer at racquetball drove him in his work, too, just as Katie’s intrinsically neat and tidy personality did in hers.

  She’d just tapped Dean’s warrior nature. She saw it in his eyes and stance, so briefly fierce she’d have stepped back from it if the desk hadn’t already been under her butt. Any other man in the office–hell, anywhere–who gripped her hips and pulled her close up on his crotch that way, who ran his mouth along the curve of her neck to find her ear and breathe heat into it —any other man would’ve earned a knee to the nuts and possibly the heel of her hand into his Adam’s apple.

  Instead, Katie tensed under Dean’s practiced touch, head tipping to give him greater access. There was no denying he was scrumptious. Probably more so because they were such good friends, and she knew his quirks. Now she closed her eyes while he ran his lips lightly over her skin.

  “This is so out of the boundaries of appropriate workplace behavior it’s not even funny,” she murmured.

  He moved away, not quite enough. “Since when have I ever been appropriate?”

  “This is true,” Katie said, amused to hear the sex-syrup tone of her own voice. God, it had been too long since a man had put his hands on her. “However, it doesn’t mean you could make me come.”

  About the Author

  photo credit: Whitney Hart Photography

  I was born and then I lived a while. Then I did some stuff and other things. Now, I mostly write books. Some of them use a lot of bad words, but most of the other words are okay.

  If you liked this book, please tell everyone you love to buy it. If you hated it, please tell everyone you hate to buy it.

  Find me here!

  www.meganhart.com

  [email protected]

 

 

  ooks on Archive.