Authors: Jen Frederick
"My swimsuit, Daddy. I'm going to tan a little."
"Tanning's bad for you." I frowned. "What swimsuit? Let me see."
"No." She had a mulish look on her face. I didn't like it.
"Why not?"
"Because you'll make a big deal about it. I'll cry. Mom will try to intercede and we'll all be late."
"Does your mother know what you are wearing?"
I could see Charlotte fighting her urge to roll her eyes at me, a gesture that we strictly forbade, but she replied, "Yes." Her self-control was admirable. Obviously a trait she got from her mother. Except in the bedroom. AnnMarie had very little self-control in the bedroom. A little teasing and Sunshine was begging me for something. Often the begging was accompanied by pulls on the hair or my head being squeezed between her thighs. Damn she was strong, and mouth-wateringly sexy, I added mentally, as she walked down the hall of our Lakeshore drive condo.
We'd moved here with Noah a year ago, sharing the top floor of a new development that I had spearheaded. Lately I've spent more time in suits than jeans and a hardhat and I missed the work, but I loved looking around the city and seeing my mark on it. My granddaddy would've been proud.
Part of the problem with Nathan was that he was constantly in and out of the house. Our kids treated these two condos as interchangeable homes. Nicholas and Charlotte went to school together. Nathan acted like a big brother to both of them but from time to time I caught him looking at Charlotte with not so brotherly thoughts. I'd have to talk to Noah about this. Maybe on the boat this afternoon.
The summer temperatures had been unbearably hot but we'd not gotten out on the lake since school was out due to my finishing up a construction project and Noah and AnnMarie celebrating the billion dollar mark on the hedge fund they co-managed. But we were getting away this weekend. We were taking Noah's boat up from Dusable marina up to Noah and Grace's North Shore residence. Grace lived out there on the weekends, preferring to get away from the city but AnnMarie and I loved being downtown, running along the lake together and making love with our balcony doors open so we could hear the lapping of the waves against the beach at night when the traffic of the cars couldn't cover the sound.
AnnMarie was as beautiful today as she was when I first saw her at Central College eighteen years ago. At forty, her ass was still high and tight, two beautifully rounded globes that made it hard for me to keep my hands off them. Her hips were a tad wider due to the birth of Charlotte but I loved her womanly figure. Today in her boy shorts and tank top, I had to fight the urge to drag her into the bedroom for a pre-boating quickie. Maybe I could make use of the stateroom on Noah's yacht. I wondered if there was a word for having sex in the bathroom of a watercraft. Was that like the twenty-thousand leagues under the sea club? I'd have to ask Noah today.
I figured he and Grace had used their stateroom bathroom more than once.
"Can you believe this?" Noah stood behind the wheel of the yacht. He had a captain or driver for the yacht but Noah preferred to steer everything. It was hard to be in business with him because of this but you just had to wait him out. Or that's what I did when I let him invest in my first building. While we coasted through four years of deployment in Afghanistan and two years of community college and two at Central, it worked because I was content to let Noah direct our craft. Once I stepped off, though, I realized what a pain in the ass Noah could be when he wasn't getting his way. I once speculated about his bedroom activities to AnnMarie but she made me stop.
"Don't talk to me about that," she'd ordered.
"Why?" I shrugged. I'd been drinking some good Scotch a businessman had sent me for finishing the building of his project early and saving him a shitload of money.
"Because I can't think of Grace that way. Or worse, Noah. I see him nearly everyday. Now I'm going to think of him standing around with a whip in his hand and shirtless."
"Can't say I like that," I'd told her. I'm the only one she should be fantasizing about with his shirt off. I smiled a little at the memory of how I'd imprinted myself on AnnMarie's memory. Noah's nudge against my shoulder shook me out of my reverie.
"Do you play
Captain may I
with Grace?"
Noah's implacable countenance showed a slight red flush and I slapped the dashboard of the yacht with glee. "Goddamn, I knew I was right."
"Your bedroom life is so sad that you have to speculate about mine?" Noah said, raising an eyebrow and trying for superior, but I'd seen this guy shit in the desert and wipe his ass with a wetwipe so that wasn't working with me.
"No need to be embarrassed. Should I call you Mr. Grey?"
"Fuck off, asshole."
"You do look a little like James Spader. Do you leave her tied for long?"
"Goddammit, Bo Peep, you don't shut up about Grace and I'm going to shove that life jacket down your throat."
I didn't say another word but mostly because I was laughing too hard. Noah was easy to get worked up if you knew his buttons and that crazy possessive motherfucker hated any Grace talk. Of course, if I was honest with myself, I didn't like to hear anyone say anything about AnnMarie in a sexual manner. That thought shut me up and I apologized.
"Sorry man, just popped into my head when I see you steering your own boat with the captain you probably pay a hundred dollars an hour cooling his jets downstairs in your galley."
"It's two hundred dollars and it's worth it."
"Two hundred dollars." I whistled. "No, Noah, I can't believe this. We've got the world by its balls."
We both looked down to the prow of the boat where Grace was showing AnnMarie some pictures she had taken of the kids. Speaking of the kids, mine was stretched over the edge of the boat, her ass in the air next to Nicholas. I followed the sight line backward and sure enough there was Nathan staring at her ass. My hand dug into the polished teak of the yacht's dashboard.
"Pull back, hoss," I heard Noah say. "What the hell? I just got that relacquered and I think you put gouge marks in it."
"You okay with having a eunuch for a son?"
"That would be a negative. Why?"
"Because if Nathan doesn't start looking at something else, I'm going to go down and use the fishhook on his twig and berries."
"I don't think you're allowed to harm your godson."
"I didn't know my godson was going to want to defile my precious daughter."
"He's just looking," Noah said mildly but he gave a quick jerk of the wheel which caused everyone to tumble to the left. Charlotte sat her ass on the bottom of the cushioned seat but now Nathan was staring at her chest. I cursed her early development. Why wasn't AnnMarie there covering Charlotte up with a towel until only her eyes were seen?
"Is Mal still in Dubai?"
"You can't move to Saudi Arabia and expect your daughter to wear a burka."
"You don't know that." I grunted. "I respected every woman I slept with. I shouldn't have been punished like this."
"You shouldn't have made babies with AnnMarie," Noah retorted. "Hot women usually have good looking kids."
"I could've had sons."
"Don't let her hear you say that."
I sighed loudly and ran a hand through my hair. "God, I know. I just feel helpless now that she's entering her teen years. I'm terrified. AnnMarie read some stupid piece about sexuality and made me have the talk with Charlotte."
Now it was Noah's turn to laugh so hard I had to take over steering the wheel.
"You're an asshole," I muttered.
Noah just laughed harder. When he could breathe, he stood up and patted me on the back. "We're raising Nathan right. Someone is going to fall in love with Charlotte and spirit her away. Why not Nathan?"
"Yeah," I said sullenly. "Could be worse."
"Could be a lot worse," Noah said. "My boys are good boys. They aren't going to break girls' hearts. I tell them all the time how Grace was it for me. You've been with AnnMarie for just as long. It's what they see and all they know. They both want that. Nathan, particularly, knows what he wants and doesn't waver. Remember the dog?"
Nathan saw a stray when he was four years old at the park. He went back every day without his parents knowing and slipped that dog food. One day that dog didn't show up and Nathan was distraught. When we finally figured out what had happened, Noah and I had combed that park for the damn dog for days but couldn't find him. Finally Noah offered to get a different dog for Nathan. Nathan refused. He didn't want a different dog. He wanted Hobo, as Nathan had dubbed him.
Several months passed and Nathan had been despondent but he still returned to the park, leaving little bits of bones and bread. The food was always gone but we'd figured other park creatures had taken it. Finally, a month before Christmas, Nathan had forced his nanny to take him out again in the cold and there was the dog, one ear missing, limping and so scrawny it looked like a rat. Nathan wouldn't leave without that dog and he sat outside in the cold for at least two hours until Noah left work to come and get him and the dog.
Hobo was old, although we didn't know how old, and lived in relative doggy luxury. No other dogs lived in the Jackson household because Hobo was the only one for Nathan. So yeah, if Nathan felt that way about Charlotte, there were a lot worse options.
"No sex until she's thirty, though," I said.
Noah shook his head. "Let's just hope they avoid teenage pregnancy."
"I swear you are trying to give me a heart attack here and then AnnMarie will kill you, destroying Freedom Funds and making our kids orphans."
"Thanks, Disaster Dave." Noah clapped me on the shoulder. "Let's get the captain up here doing what I pay him two-hundred dollars an hour to do and you and I drink some Evan Williams 23 bourbon I brought."
Later that night when AnnMarie and I were both boneless from our lovemaking, she rolled to her side and propped her head up on her hand. "Did you see Nathan staring at Charlotte today?"
"Yes," I grunted. The thought of it still got my blood boiling. "Can we send her to a nunnery? Mal's in Dubai. I think Charlotte would look good in a burka."
AnnMarie pinched me. "No nunneries; yes, let's visit Mal in Dubai; no to the burka. We aren't Muslim."
"I don't like those answers."
"Seriously, though, is this new? I've never seen him act like that around her," AnnMarie said.
"Like what?"
"Awkward, confused, a little mean." She dropped down next to me and placed her head on my shoulder. I pulled one of her legs over mine and savored the warm feel of her wrapped around me. I liked positioning AnnMarie so that her softness was artfully arranged around my body.
"A little mean?"
"Yeah, when they got out of the water, she was shivering and Nathan threw a towel at her saying she should wear more material in her bathing suit if she didn't want to be cold."
Huh. "So he's just now developing feelings for her and it confuses him. How long do you think the mean stage lasts?" I pulled my fingers through AnnMarie's dark hair, marveling at the shininess. I liked wrapping it in my fingers and around my cock. Having it hang on either side of my head like a privacy curtain as she moved on top of me, her little hands pressing into my chest as she moved up and down.
"Why?"
"If it lasts a long time then maybe Charlotte will start avoiding him."
"You can't keep her a little girl forever."
"I don't want to. Just until she's like thirty or so."
"We had sex in our twenties."
"Okay," I acquiesced. "Twenties then."
"You feel really magnanimous, don't you?"
"Yup."
AnnMarie laughed.
"Do you know how much I love you, Bo?"
"Yeah, but I like to hear it. How much?"
"I would give up Freedom Funds if I had to, to keep your love."
"A half-billion dollars, huh? That's it?"
"No, that's not it. I'd give up everything in my life but you and Charlotte. I feel like we could be happy as long as we were together, no matter what."
I hugged her. Security meant so much for AnnMarie. The money meant security for her. It meant she didn't have to rely on anyone but herself but I liked that she felt she needed me. That I was her security because she was my whole world. Her and Charlotte. For all my complaints to Noah today, I wouldn't trade my girl for a thousand Nathans, that little shit. I loved the both of them. They completed me in ways I didn't even realize I needed completing. I'd been aimless before I met AnnMarie and I thought I was living a satisfactory life. Fighting and random women were all I needed. But she came into my life and made me realize that all that was worthless. I shuddered when I think of how different my life would've been without her.
"I love you more than Freedom Funds. More than my need for security," AnnMarie said. "I'd love you even if you left me, even if you had another family that you found to take care of." Hot tears hit my shoulder and I know she was thinking of her mother who had never married and had always loved a man who couldn't leave his wife. "I'd love you if the world came to an end and all we had was each other because you, Bo Randolph, are enough for me. I don't need anything in my life other than you and Charlotte. When I met you in Central I was so afraid even though I pretended like I was strong. Your silent strength made it easy for me to face my enemies. Knowing you always had my back made me feel stronger, braver, like I could conquer the world. Your steady and unwavering love has made me reach farther and higher than I could've on my own. I don't think that the English language is powerful enough to express my love for you. Love isn't even the right word. You give me life, Bo Randolph. You are my life and I can't wait to live out the rest of it by your side."
Well, shit. The only way I could respond to that was by making love to AnnMarie again. And again until the only sounds in our bedroom were our bodies affirming the promises we'd made each other.
UNSPOKEN
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the