“Do you want me to…um…?” Raine glanced down, and I realized I still had a rather visible bulge on display. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was offering, if it was indeed an offer, but her expression and continued look of insecurity told me everything I needed to know. She wasn’t ready for that.
“No,” I said and then grinned down at her. “Maybe later. That was just for you.”
Raine pushed up and found my lips again, kissing me softly and wonderfully.
“Thank you, Bastian.”
“Anytime,” I responded. “And I do mean that!”
“I know,” Raine said with another giggle, “but I think at this point, you have completely worn me out.”
“Wasn’t me,” I denied. “I didn’t even touch you.”
She laughed and wrapped her arms around my shoulders to pull me down to her. We kissed again before she took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and guided my head to her shoulder. I stayed there for a while, but the sight of her breasts with their nipples still standing upright and visible through the shirt she wore was driving me insane. I sat up and lowered my head back down on her stomach. Granted, in this position I was closer to the Taj Mahal of existence, according to my cock, but it didn’t bother me as much. Besides, I liked it there; I could still smell her orgasm.
Just since that morning, my cheek lying against Raine’s stomach had become my favorite place to be. I could hear her steady heart beat from there. I could wrap my arm up her side and around her shoulder and touch her cheek if I wanted to, and most of all, Raine had easy access to my hair, which she played with while I closed my eyes and felt nearly peaceful.
If I managed to find more edible food and could call on the weather gods to make it rain every three days or so, I would have been perfectly happy staying right where I was for the rest of our natural lives. I wondered how Raine would feel about that and remembered I still owed her something else.
“I guess I’m obligated to tell you another story now,” I said and immediately wished I hadn’t. What was I going to say? I couldn’t talk about her. It wasn’t going to be possible.
“You don’t have to tell me, Bastian,” Raine said. Her fingers continued to trace patterns on my scalp. When she ran her fingers through the strands, it took longer than it should have for her to reach the ends. I needed a haircut. And a shave. And a shower. Probably a dozen other things, too.
“We made a deal,” I reminded her. “I still think it was a shitty deal from my end, but I never back out on a deal.”
“I told you…”
“Actually, I have to take that back,” I interrupted. I was undoubtedly stalling. “I’ve skipped out on many deals, really. Part of the game – form an alliance, and as soon as their back is turned – take them out.”
“That doesn’t sound very sporting.”
“It’s not like there was a ref looking for unsportsmanlike behavior,” I said. “Kill or be killed. If I hadn’t fucked over those people, you would be dead now.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Raine said, her voice both soft and hard at the same time. I figured now would be an excellent time to stop talking, so I listened to her heartbeat, located just a little above my ear. My fingers grazed her hip, and I stared blankly across the length of the raft.
Raine was going to let me off the hook, which was a damn good thing. I wasn’t about to talk about the five months I was with her. It was kind of ridiculous, really. How could I talk about it when I couldn’t say – or even think – her name?
I focused on more pleasant things, like the look on Raine’s gorgeous face when she tilted her head back and came all over her fingers, whimpering my name. I thought about what her fingers tasted like when I licked them afterwards.
I wanted her, and not just as a warm body to get my rocks off. I liked having her close to me like this – touching my hair and just running her hands over me even when we weren’t really doing anything. I most certainly wanted her, but how could I even think about it after what had happened the first and only time I had ever let anyone get to me? No, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let her in for one major reason at least – I’d have to tell her about what happened before, and there was no way in hell I was going to do that.
“I met Jillian after a tournament.”
Fuck my mouth.
I guess I was going to talk after all.
Chapter 10 - Baby
“You don’t have to tell me.” Raine’s voice was low and soft.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”
“Not because you feel like you owe it to me,” Raine clarified. Her fingers pushed my hair behind my ear before running down my jaw line. If she kept that up, maybe I would be able to get through this. “I don’t have to know.”
“I want you to know,” I said.
“All right,” Raine said after a moment. “If it’s what you want.”
I nodded and wrapped my arm a little tighter around her waist. Raine’s fingers kept repeating their motions from behind my ear, down my jaw, and back again, setting a slow, gentle pace while I talked.
“I had just won a tournament,” I said. “Well, okay, that’s pretty obvious. Anyway, it was a big one – one of those that had lasted a couple of days. We were somewhere in Central America, I think. I was trucked back from the place where I had killed the last guy, and they took me to this big ranch in the middle of a bunch of fields. I kind of assumed they were cocaine plants, but I don’t really know what those look like and wasn’t about to ask, but shit, we were in Central America with a bunch of mafia types, for fuck’s sake. It was probably cocaine.”
“When the truck stopped, I jumped out of the back and got surrounded by a bunch of people – some of the guys from the organization and a shit ton of chicks. I mean, probably about twenty of them, all trying to get their hands on me and shoving each other. I remember thinking I didn’t get it – I’d been in the jungle for the past two days, was covered in blood, had two broken fingers, and a decent sized gash down my side that needed stitches. It’s not like I looked good.”
I stopped a second and lifted my arm, showing Raine the four inch scar underneath. She reached around my back to trace it with her fingers a couple of times before she just left her hand on top of it. Her other hand kept playing with my hair.
“So, in the back of these women, I see this other chick – she’s really tall and blonde with big tits, and she’s walking quickly towards us. She stood out, no doubt about that. The way she looked and the way she moved, she was every guy’s type. I mean, straight women and gay guys would fall for her.”
I stopped talking again as images of her…of Jillian…when she first walked up to me flew through my head, both glorious and gloriously painful. Raine’s fingers ran over my head a couple of times, and I managed to take a deep breath and start again.
“She pushed through the rest of the people crowded around me, walked straight up to me, and stuck her tongue down my throat. When she stopped, she said the fight had been the most incredible thing she had ever seen and that I was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. I thought she was a little crazy at first, but I usually ended up with a couple different women after a fight, so I didn’t think much of it. After one of the doctors splinted my fingers and stitched me up, I went with her to this nightclub in the middle of the freaking coke fields. So we danced and she drank…”
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t drink then,” I said. “I would have a beer or something, maybe a glass of scotch, but I didn’t ever get drunk. Jillian drank a lot.”
“I’m sorry,” Raine said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s all right,” I replied. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a minute, and then kept going. “That shit doesn’t really matter, anyway. Basically, we hit it off. She came to the room they had set up for me, and we fucked all night. That wasn’t unusual, but what was different was that she stayed there until morning. I usually kicked the chicks out of the room after
wards. I didn’t like having them there when I was trying to sleep. What was even weirder was what happened when we got back to Seattle. She was at my apartment more often than not; she was at all of my games, betting shitloads of her daddy’s money on me, and we’d fuck like rabbits at least four times a day. We went on like that for about six weeks, and everything was perfect, as far as I was concerned.”
“Before Jillian, I was with a different girl most every night. After tournaments, it was more like two or three of them would come back to the hotel with me. You would have thought switching to a one-woman relationship would have been hard for me, but it wasn’t. I loved it. I loved being with her; I loved coming home and having her there with me in the apartment, and I loved turning other women down because I was with someone. It’s like that was how I was supposed to be. I guess I just didn’t know I was that kind of boy before then.”
“I felt like there was finally something good in my life – something that meant something. I started talking to her about maybe retiring. It’s not like I needed any more money at that point. I’d been in tournaments for over six years by then and had enough money to live off the interest forever. Jillian’s family was loaded, so there wasn’t any need for us to do anything other than whatever we wanted to do. I figured we’d be set, and she wouldn’t worry about me when I was…well, when I was working.”
“That changed a bit when I came back early from a trip. Some tournament that ended up being cancelled – not sure why. It happened occasionally. Either the local authorities started snooping around or whoever was supposed to be backing it up financially ended up in a river. Regardless, I came back early. We had an office building downtown, and I stopped off there before going back to the apartment. It should have been empty, but…well…it wasn’t. I walked into the office, and when I opened the door…”
I stopped and let the tension wash over me. My hands were clenched into fists, and my throat went dry. I couldn’t even say it.
“What the fuck?” He lifted his head up and looked towards the door. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember his name.
“Bastian! You aren’t supposed to be back yet!”
“Wha…what…?” I couldn’t even get any words out.
“She was with someone else, wasn’t she?”
“Um…” I had to clear my throat to continue. “Yeah.”
“Oh, Bastian.” Raine’s hand stroked from my temple to the back of my head. “I’m sorry. That must have been horrible.”
“It was,” I agreed. “I stormed off, and she followed me back to my place. She said it was a mistake. She missed me, and she was lonely and she swore it wouldn’t happen again, so I forgave her and we made up. The second time it happened…”
I heard Raine gasp, but I didn’t pause.
“…I told her I couldn’t live like that. I needed her to be with me only, and I didn’t know how to trust her anymore. She said she’d never do it again, and then she said she wanted to…um…make a gesture. She wanted to do something special to show me how she felt.”
I stopped talking.
“Fuck, I can’t do this.”
“It’s okay, Bastian,” Raine said, her hand on the side of my face again. “Just take some deep breaths, and talk when you’re ready.”
I nodded and tried to do what Raine told me.
“What did she do, Bastian?”
“It’s not what she did,” I clarified. “It’s what she asked me to…well, or let me…fuck.”
I stopped talking again and sat up. Raine’s hands fell away from me, and I watched her sit up as well. It took me several deep breaths before I could convince myself to go on with this shit.
“I’d always been really, really careful when it came to sex,” I told her. “I’d never fucked without a condom. Ever. Not once. Not even when I was with Theresa as a teenager and certainly not when I was with different women all the time. I got checked out every six months – everything you’re supposed to do.”
“Jillian said she’d prove how much we meant to each other by letting me…” I grimaced, remembering her words and how they made me feel like she meant everything she said. I remembered how much I wanted it even though I hadn’t even considered it before. I remembered how fucking stupid I was. “She said she’d let me…come in her. She said doing that would prove how much she wanted us to be together – how much we should trust each other. She was on the pill…she said she was on the pill. Fuck, I wish I had a drink…or at least a fucking cigarette.”
I ran my hands through my hair, reached over for a cup of water, and downed it quickly as if it were a shot of vodka.
“Looking back…well…I was just a fucking moron, I guess.” I had to keep going, or there was no way I would be able to finish. “I should have realized what she really wanted. I don’t know how I would have, but I definitely should have.”
“We were together for two more months after we…um…changed our habits. I was on cloud nine, and I had decided to officially retire and ask Jillian to marry me. I even bought a ring that cost me a whole fucking tournament’s winnings, but I wanted her to have the best. I hadn’t even met her parents, but I wanted them to know I had just about as much money as they did, so they would know I could take care of her. Shit, I gave her fucking everything she wanted – the money that woman could spend on shoes alone…”
I stopped and collected myself again so I could speak a little slower.
“I was going to surprise her,” I said. “I had the ring, and I was going to pick her up at her place and take her out to dinner, maybe walk along the Sound or something to propose. I was supposed to be training that night, but I blew it off. Landon was pissed when he found out. Anyway, I went to her place and she was, again, with another guy.”
“The two times before when I caught her, she immediately began crying and begging me to forgive her. She had told me how much we were meant to be and how weak she was and all this other bullshit. This time was different. When I walked in, they were on the couch and she was riding him – she loved being on top. She looked over her shoulder when she heard me and just let out this big, exasperated sigh. She looked back at the guy and told him she’d be back in a minute, got up off of him, and shoved me into the kitchen. She barely even paused to put a robe on herself.”
“Is this him?”
“Yeah,” Jillian grumbled. “Give me a minute. This needs to be done anyway.”
“No problem, babe.”
“I couldn’t even say anything while she stood in front of me and told me we were done, that she was marrying the guy in the other room. She said what a great fuck I was and how she got what she needed from me. She rubbed her stomach at that point, but I didn’t get it – not until later. I was just trying to comprehend the half-million dollar diamond in my pocket and how it was supposed to look on her finger. I think I must have told her I wanted to marry her because she laughed and said there was no way Daddy would let her marry someone with my background. She said I wasn’t even close to being what she would consider marrying and that I needed to wise up and realize my place in her society. She pointed down at her feet when she said that.”
“I ended up just walking out,” I continued. “I guess I was in shock or something. I walked back to my apartment, which was a good two hours by foot, trying to understand what had just happened. I kept replaying the whole thing in my head until I remembered exactly what she had said – that she got what she needed. At the time, I must have thought she was just talking about the sex, but the image of her rubbing her stomach kept flickering around in my head. I had just gotten home when I realized exactly what she meant – she was pregnant, and the baby was mine.”
She didn’t make a sound, but Raine moved over so she was sitting very close to me and placed her hand against the small of my back before moving it slowly up to my neck and into my hair. She leaned against me lightly.
“I went kind of ballistic at that point, I guess,” I went on. Moving through the rest of this fucked
up story had to be quick, or I would never get through it. “I trashed my apartment before jumping in my car and going about ninety back to her place. It was too late – they were already gone. I got on her computer and found out they had bought two tickets to Italy and were leaving that night.”
“That’s when John Paul called,” I said. “She had called him and I guess told him some of what happened. He told me to stay right where I was, and he’d come to get me.”
“I didn’t realize you knew John Paul then,” Raine said.
“Yeah, I knew him,” I answered. “John Paul was Landon’s other fighter, but that’s a whole different story.”
“I’m sorry,” Raine said. Her fingers began to massage the back of my neck. “Go on.”
“I wasn’t about to listen to him and stick around. I wanted to stop her from getting on the plane. I thought if I could just talk to her and tell her how much I needed her and how I was going to retire and that I had a plan for us…I thought if she would just listen…just for a minute. I didn’t get the chance because John Paul must have been pretty damn close to her place when he called. I was backing out of her driveway, and he slammed into the back of my Ferrari, the bastard. We ended up in a fist fight, and it’s probably a miracle one of us didn’t kill the other. Maybe we would have, but Landon pulled up, got out of his car, hit me in the side with a Taser, and drove off again. John Paul knocked me unconscious and hauled me back home.”
“Over the next week, I talked to a few people and figured it all out. Ian, the guy she was going to marry – he couldn’t have kids, and Jillian’s daddy wouldn’t let her marry someone without the ability to give him an heir. She’d lose her trust fund if she didn’t have a baby. She wanted me to father it because I was pretty, according to one of her girlfriends, and she heard I was strong and smart. I must not have been too smart since I was obviously stupid enough to eat what she was feeding me.”
I was silent for a while, thinking about all the people who seemed to know what was going on, all those who left me in the dark as I fell for her lies. I had been relieved to find out John Paul hadn’t known anything about it – they had been keeping him in the dark as well. I didn’t find out until much later, but Franks had known from the beginning and had actually arranged for her to be in Colombia to get started on her plan.