It's Always Complicated (Her Billionaires Book 4) (7 page)

“Aaron can’t talk yet, so how did you know he was hungry?”

“He said, ‘May I please have some cheese, Jillian.’” The little girl’s sincerity through the lie was so adorable Laura almost laughed.

Almost.

“Guh!” Adam actually said, reaching into his mouth, pulling out a wad of unchewed cheese, and holding it out in one plump little fist for Laura to take.

Dylan came into the room and looked at the kids, then Laura. “What’s up?”

Romance
, she thought.

“We’re having a cheese stick crisis,” she explained.

He blinked, mouth twitching with amusement, and looked at each child. “How many?”

“Thirty-one.”

He handed her the contents of one hand. “Well, here are eight more. So that’s twenty-three missing.”

“If the three of them ate an average of eight cheese sticks each, there goes dinner.”

“It’s not a big deal, Laura.”

“Who put a cheese stick in my running shoe?” Mike called out from the front door landing. He was dressed in summer running clothes, which for Mike meant shorts, socks, and shoes, with a t-shirt slung over his shoulder.

“I was on the phone for less than ten minutes! How could they get these everywhere?” Laura cried out.

“Ninjas. We have three little cheese ninjas,” Dylan said in a dramatic voice, making Jillian giggle.

Josie’s words about having kids crept into Laura’s mind. Three and a half years ago she would never have envisioned her life quite like this. Guarding an oversized bag of Cost
c
o cheese sticks and mercenarily questioning her toddlers over the contents.

What the hell was she doing?

“Here,” she said, thrusting the bag in Mike’s hands
and
sprinting out the door, welcoming the hot, humid weather with the blessed relief of experiencing some kind of change that shocked her out of herself. Being in charge of three kids was more than enough for three adults.
Y
ou would think one-on-one would be enough, but it wasn’t. The children seemed to multiply, as if the sum of the three of them were greater when you put them in the same room.

And then there was the wedding.

Josie was her best friend in the world. These past two years since all the guys had proposed were filled with her pregnancy, the surprise of having twins, the delight of the babies, and the relentless joy of planning the double wedding.

And yet.

In the corners of Laura’s mind, where dark thoughts lived, a jealous little green monster crouched in the shadows, hissing and grunting, just there...coming out at times to groan and wiggle and make itself know
n
.

Josie would actually marry Alex in three days. They would be husband and wife.

Laura? Laura had to pretend.

Dylan and Mike were husband and husband. On paper, anyway. They never, ever talked about what happened that day at the Cambridge courthouse, when they’d taken care of the necessity of legal protection for Jillian. Having her two dads—one biological, one not—marry each other had given the three adults some breathing space as fears of a legal system gone awry in the event of Laura’s death were assuaged.

After the twins had come out, as dark as Jillian was fair, it had been obvious: Mike was Jillian’s biological father, while Dylan had fathered the twins. A short talk with Josie, the only person in Laura’s life who had seen the birth certificates, confirmed it.

Truth be told, Laura, Mike and Dylan had known Jillian was of Mike’s blood for a long time. Waiting until they’d had more children, and especially knowing each man had fathered at least one child (bonus—two in one shot for Dylan, as he liked to say...), had changed the calculus of their daily lives in more ways than one.

They’d all relaxed. The power balance in the relationship seemed more smoothed out. If you had asked them three years ago whether the children’s paternity mattered, they’d all three have argued until red in the face that it didn’t matter.

It hadn’t.

Until it did.

As Laura fairly ran down the well-worn path through the woods, away from the cabin, she let these thoughts loop through her mind, the cheese sticks long forgotten, the thousands of tiny details about the wedding all on pause.

Josie would be Alex’s wife.

And Laura would
just
be the same
as she ever was to Mike and Dylan in the eyes of the law
.

Nothing.

Dylan

He watched as the long, flowing skirt Laura now wore billowed out behind her, gauzy and mysterious, like something almost gothic. Almost four years together and he still hardened at the sight of her sometimes, her beauty more captivating as their life together deepened and matured.

Through thick and thin, she had been so loving, so stalwart, her joy for life and ability to go with the flow such a wonderful gift. Dylan observed Laura as the woods swallowed her, walked into the living room, and found a very perplexed Mike holding a bag of cheese sticks designed to feed an entire Boy Scout troop.

“What’s going on?” he asked as Adam struggled to take off his diaper. They’d recently learned to put it on backwards, so the toddler couldn’t remove it. Adam grunted with frustration.

“Laura. She’s...I don’t know.” Mike surveyed the chaos. “I think she needs one of us to go after her. She seemed really upset.”

“I’ll go,” Dylan volunteered, less out of a desire to escape the craziness of the kids and driven more by something primal.

Mike sensed it and just nodded.

Nearly a decade and a half with him had only gotten better, too. Dylan counted himself a lucky man. He slipped on his shoes and jogged out the door, glad he was wearing a lightweight
L
ycra tank and running shorts, for the late-summer Massachusetts air was stifling.

Three days. In three days, they would be at a giant wedding, a celebration in public that solidified what Laura, Mike and Dylan had in private. Marrying Mike two years ago hadn’t been a real wedding for him, and neither man wanted it to be. It had been a trick. A legal trick to protect Jillian, and nothing more.

Marrying Laura should be legal, he thought. But if it wasn’t, this was as close as they could get.

He caught up to her easily, finding her next to a tiny stream that ran beside the path, an old tree having fallen,
creating
a small bridge. Jillian loved to stand on the rotting log and throw small stones into the water. Laura sat on it, shoes next to her, feet dangling so low her toes skimmed the water’s surface. Her flowing skirt covered the decaying log, the contrast making her look like a woodland fairy.

“Hi,” he said softly, trying not to startle her.

She looked up and gave him a sad smile. “Hi.”

“You want to be alone?”

Her smile was shaky, upper lip trembling.

“No.”

A tiny piece of his heart snapped off and floated into his bloodstream, like a branch of driftwood without aim, at the look on her face. He eased himself onto the log, careful not to dump her shoes in the stream, and sat next to her, the soles of his feet on the wood, his knees up as he leaned back on his hands.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll never be your wife.”

The direct answer felt like a slap, like an angry welt across his soul.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“Is it...do you want...do you
want
to marry me?”

“With all my heart! But I want to marry Mike, too. And we can’t. Josie gets to actually marry Alex at the campground in a few days, and I’ll walk down the aisle, too. Wear a wedding dress. Carry a bouquet. We’ll do all the same things on the same day and everything she does will be genuine and I’m just playing pretend. By the end of the day I’ll be as married to you and Mike as Jillian is to her Barbie dolls when she plays bride!”

“Double ouch,” he said, taking a deep breath, the force of her despair catching him off guard. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought of all the things she was saying. He had. It was that he didn’t know she felt the same way.

And with such vehemence.

“I love you both so much. And two years ago, this wedding seemed like the perfect idea. Invite a ton of friends and family, do a double wedding with Josie and Alex. Have it at a great outdoor location. Then we had the twins, and we just spent the last year trying to remember how to sleep again, and I just...” Her words broke up like that piece of his heart.

His blood pounded in his ears, rushing like the stream did during the spring thaw.

“Do you want to cancel the wedding?” He struggled to come up with a way to fix her pain.

“What? NO!” Laura stood abruptly, shaking the log and nearly pitching him into the water. She began to pace, her balance remarkable, toes prehensile, clinging to the wood.

“Then what? What can I do?” he asked helplessly.

“You don’t have to
do
anything! Just listen.”

“That’s worse than doing nothing.”

She gave him a look so devoid of reason he burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry Laura. I just...I want to solve your problem.”

“I don’t think you can.”

“Triple ouch.” His brain felt like hot cotton candy, sticky and fuzzy. He could feel her emotional pain and had no viable options. He couldn’t change the law. Couldn’t change society.

They had to live around it, bending and twisting to make their life fit in whatever way they could.

“I know.” She spoke quickly, as if trying to avoid her own feelings. Carefully balanced, she walked off the log and stood on the bare-dirt shore, worrying a tree root with the tip of her toes. “I’m being silly. I can’t change it. Just have to feel it, then let it go.”

She was right. That was all any of the three of them could do.

“You know,” he said, retrieving her shoes, walking to her, pulling Laura’s sweet, soft warmth against his chest as he dropped the sandals, “If I could give you w
ha
t you want, I would.”

“You’ve given me everything I could ever want, Dylan.” He wasn’t expecting the kiss she gave him, a warm, sweet mesh of lips and tongue that engulfed him in seconds, turning from affection to passion so fast that before he knew it, he had her backed up against a tree, hands on her creamy inner thighs, pulling her panties down as her hands stripped his shorts down, unleashing him.

He sank into the wet, warm love of her body, their eyes locked as he drove home, her teeth biting into his lip as they kissed, his cotton-candy mind clearing with the hoarse cry from his throat that accompanied a climax that slammed into him as if shoved from the sheer force of love that made him want her so badly.

It was over in seconds.

The best seconds he’d had in a long time.

“What the hell was that?” she murmured against his raw shoulder, her voice woozy and low. She sighed, the rush of breath warm against his back, his hips pinning her against the thick, scarred bark of an old tree. They were on private land, yet so public.

So bold.

“That was exactly what we both needed,” he said, hearing the shake in his voice. Except his words were a lie.

He hadn’t needed that.

He’d
craved
it.

And now he wanted more.

As he pulled out of Laura, his eyes ate her up, taking in the flushed cheeks, her mussed hair, the slightl
y
dazed look of a woman well fucked. They hadn’t had a quickie like this—so unplanned, so forbidden—in, well...

Not in
ever
.

“Do you remember our first date?” she asked, as if reading his mind. “The alley? After we ate dinner? We almost had sex right there, up against that brick wall.”

“Remember it?” he asked in a voice thick with sex. “I wish we had. God, I wanted you so much. I knew the second I laid eyes on you that you were mine.
Ours
.”

Her throat tremored as she swallowed, the delicate line of her neck screaming for a kiss. A suck. His mark, to show the world she was his.

Maybe that’s what this massive thunderstorm of sexual need was all about. If society wouldn’t let them make what their hearts knew to be true legally, then he needed to imprint his scent on her. Claim her. Make her his.

And Mike needed to do the same, too.

It was almost feral. So alpha, so animalistic that as he tucked himself back in his shorts he realized he was hardening again. The thrill of heated desire poured through his muscles, making them tense and loose at the same time, a strange paradox that only Laura could trigger.

“Damn it,” he said, pursing his lips and blowing out a frustrated breath.

“What?” When she brushed her long, blonde waves away from her face like that, all he could think about was having Laura naked beneath him, writhing in ecstasy with the blue sky above them, a field of wildflowers their only bed.

And...fuck.

He was hard as a rock.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but—”

Her kiss was an unexpected blow, a strike of pure power, her tongue plundering his like she was taking him prisoner and he was doomed. Doomed by the flesh, by the ritual of lust between them that needed no prelude.

Mine, she was screaming with teeth that nipped and lips that would be raw and red tomorrow.

Mine.

He picked her up and set her down on the bare ground, reaching between them with fast fingers to unleash what had just been inside her.

“Again,” she begged.

“I came out here to comfort you.”

“Then do it, damn it. Comfort me like this.” Her hip shifted and one hand guided him in, her back arching up as he pulled her neckline down, suckling one gorgeous, rose nipple into his mouth, her groan all the encouragement he needed. Wild. She was so wild, running on pure impulse, and as his thrusts drove harder and deeper she begged for more.

More.

“You,” he said, his breath coming so fast as he fell, fell deeper and deeper into the hot abyss that was their core, “are everything to me. Everything. This—I—oh, God, Laura,” he rasped as his climax slammed him up and high, driving into her with a pounding that felt ungentlemanly until she matched his rhythm, desperate for it too, needing the force of their almost violent coupling to take them to a place where society didn’t matter.