Tommy Gabrini 3: Grace Under Fire (The Gabrini Men Series) Read online

  “I didn’t pick her over you,” Tommy responded. “You weren’t even considered. Why would you be? There’s nothing like that between us.”

  “There used to be!”

  “But it’s not now, Alex, and you know it. Now I’m sorry about what happened with the actor, but that has nothing to do with the fact that I chose Grace to be my wife. There’s nothing further to discuss about that.”

  “But why her?” Alex was still perplexed. In her mind she was beautiful and desirable, what more could a man want? “How could she be the one, Tommy? What does she have that I don’t have?”

  “My heart,” he said bluntly. “She has my heart. She’s a woman of simple tastes, a woman without, as you put it, background and breeding, but I love her above any woman alive. Make no mistake about that.”

  “But why? How could you love her and not me? I’m everything you could want in a woman. You told me so yourself, Tommy!”

  Tommy was certain he had her naked in bed, underneath him, when he told her that.

  “You told me that, Tommy,” she said again. “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes, you’re right. You’re what any man would want in a woman, Alex. You’re beautiful, you’re stylish, you’re a turn-on, physically, in every way. But Grace is what I need in a woman. She has integrity. She has compassion. She’s all heart and she’s not vain and selfish. She’ll be by my side through thick and thin, and I’ll be by hers. And I disagree with you. She also happens to be a very gorgeous girl.”

  But Alex was still unconvinced. “She’s not as beautiful as I am,” she insisted. “I don’t care what you say.”

  She sounded so childish that she made Tommy smile. “It’s not a contest, Alex.”

  “But it’s not fair!” Tears were now in her eyes, and her anger was unleashed. Tommy uncrossed his legs as her suddenly raised voice caused some to look their way.

  “Lower it,” he ordered her.

  “I have loved you for so long,” she said, in a lowered tone, as she twisted her hands around in her lap. “She just met you a year ago or not even that long. How could she win? How could she go to the front of the line? It’s not fair!”

  Alex was an emotional wreck, Tommy could see it clearly now. Between her breakup with Beau Brantley, and Tommy’s marriage to Grace, she probably felt abandoned and alone. But he was not going to be the shoulder she cried on. He had a wife now, the best thing that ever happened to him. He wasn’t about to mess that up. He removed his handkerchief from his suit coat pocket and took her hand and squeezed it, giving her the handkerchief as he did so. Then he released her hand and stood up. He cared about her, she would always be dear to him, but enough was enough. “Are you here in town on business, or have you moved back?” He placed his hands in his pants pockets as he spoke to her.

  Alex looked at his mid-section and nodded as she dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief. “Both.”

  She was still staring at his mid-section. She was still remembering what a bundle of joy he held between his legs. Her ex-fiancé was good in bed, but Tommy was better. She used to believe that once she was married to Beau, and was well established as his wife, that she’d return to Tommy’s bed. But in a matter of weeks everything had changed. Beau had dumped her and now she would never have Tommy again? It felt like salt in her wound. It was, for her, unbearable.

  But Tommy was determined to get her to focus, not on what she’d lost, but on what she still had. It was a tough sell, and he knew it was, but he had nothing else to offer her. “Is it a modeling job?”

  She sniffled. “Yes. A photo shoot.”

  “The cover?”

  She nodded again. “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. “There’s plenty more covers in your future, young lady. Plenty men who would give their right arm to be a part of that future. Including the right man for you. Because I’m not him. The fact that I’m married has got to confirm that for you.”

  Alex looked up into his face. His greenish-blue eyes looked completely blue against the lobby lights. She wasn’t going to be able to give him up completely. First Beau, now him? There was no way. So she decided to do what she did best. She had to position herself. “When you get ready to cheat on her,” she said as if his cheating was a foregone conclusion, “will you let me be the first one you call?”

  Tommy’s heart sank. She had everything going for her. Could be with most any man she wanted. Could win most of their hearts, and their bank accounts while she was at it. But she was willing to give it to him for free. That wasn’t love. He discovered long ago that a woman like Alex didn’t love him. She wanted bragging rights. He had a line of us, but I was first in line. That was her rallying cry. It wasn’t about love. It wasn’t even about him.

  “Goodbye, Alex,” he said to her, and left her in her defeat.

  TWO

  As soon as Grace stepped out of the shower, she heard voices downstairs. Odd because she wasn’t expecting any visitors, and Tommy was still out of town. She dried off quickly, put on her bathrobe and slippers, and walked out of the bedroom’s double doors and down the hall to the second floor landing. When she looked over the railing and saw Tommy standing in the foyer, removing his gloves and talking heartily with his Estate Manager/Butler Henry, her heart leaped with joy. “Tommy!” she screamed.

  Tommy looked up and saw her. He smiled that rakish smile she loved so well and broke away from Henry. “Grace,” he said as if her name itself was a relief, and he ran up those stairs, taking them two at a time, as she was running down. They met in the middle, with him lifting her small body up and into his arms, and his mouth finding hers in a devastating kiss.

  When he allowed her to come back up for air, she smiled. “I thought you weren’t coming back until tomorrow!”

  “I wasn’t,” he said, holding her, rubbing her hair and staring at her, unable to conceal how thrilled he was to see her again. “But I missed you.”

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said, touched by how more and more outwardly affectionate he was behaving toward her. She placed her hands on the side of his incredibly handsome face and kissed him herself. Which, as usual, he took control and turned her chaste, sweet kiss, into his miles more experienced, passionate kiss. She didn’t realize his hands were beneath her robe, until he began to massage her.

  That realization added yet another layer of love to their passion because it reminded her that he’d been gone for nearly a week and she’d missed, not only him, but his second-to-none abilities too.

  She returned his passion, kiss for kiss, as he carried her back upstairs, along the corridor, and into their bedroom. He slammed the doors and had already completely removed her robe by the time he laid her on the bed.

  She grinned. He was even hungrier than she was. “It hasn’t been that long,” she said, as she watched him undress.

  “But it feels like it.” He untied and removed his tie, and began removing his suit coat.

  “Actually,” Grace said, “you look pretty darn tired, Tommy.”

  “I am tired.”

  “You must be hungry too. Do you want me to get you something to eat?” She asked this with all sincerity as she moved to get back up. But he just as sincerely pushed her right back down.

  “First I eat you,” he said, “then we’ll worry about food.”

  Grace smiled. “I see Paris didn’t change your appetite.”

  Tommy laughed. “And it never will.” He tossed his suit coat across the room almost exactly where her bathrobe had dropped.

  “It’s only been a week,” she said, lying there naked, slowly parting her thighs so that he could get a peep at what she knew he wanted most. Which warmed Tommy’s heart. Compared to the women of his past, Grace was as green as grass. But her lack of calculation pleased him. Her lack of going by some seduction script turned him on. And seeing that gorgeous brown body of hers lying there, with her legs parted, was, for Tommy, the ultimate turn on.

  He stepped out of his shoes as he began unbuckling and unzipping his pan
ts. “Miss me?” he asked her, staring at her.

  “Oh, yes,” she gladly responded. “You know I do.”

  “I miss you,” he admitted again, pulling off his pants and briefs. “In every way.”

  “Every way?” she asked him.

  “Every way,” he responded. He was naked now. But Grace had only a second to look down, at his big, dangling dick, before he was upon her.

  He moved his muscular frame on top of her petite body and began sucking and squeezing her breasts. He rubbed his dick against her thighs as he sucked and fondled her. He rubbed it and rubbed it until it was hard as steel. Then he kissed her on the lips again, and on her face and neck, and then back down to her breasts again.

  His voice was husky as he sucked her. “Behaved yourself while I was gone?” He asked this as his mouth covered her breast.

  “Behaved yourself?” she asked him, and then she screamed out in ecstasy when he bit her.

  “I want you, Grace,” he said huskily as he moved down her body, kissing her stomach, her belly button, the top of her thighs. “I want to smell you,” he added, smelling her sweet scent. “And taste you.”

  She lifted her knees as he settled between them and parted her legs. And the man with the beautiful hair, and the seductively greenish-blue eyes, the man once voted the sexist human being alive by a Seattle magazine, licked her pussy with a searing lick, igniting her passion to the highest degree, as if his tongue was fire itself.

  He felt as if he was on fire too as he parted her slit and gave her long, loving licks, shorter ones, then longer and longer licks. It used to be a time when he couldn’t go a week without getting that urge to have a woman beneath him. Now, with Grace, he could barely go a day. Because all he had to do was think about her taste, and he’d start craving her again. No other woman had ever turned him on the way Grace did. But she definitely turned him on.

  They stayed this way, in this state of bliss, for minutes on end. He sucked her, and started eating her, until her wet pussy was throbbing uncontrollably. He ate her so deep down that he almost ejaculated from the intoxicatingly sensuality of her taste alone. And he couldn’t continue this way. Not a moment longer. He had to get inside of her and he had to do it now.

  He moved back on top of her. He started sucking those juicy, already ravaged breasts of hers as he guided his stiff, fully aroused penis to her wet slit. And then, with a shove-in that lifted her half off of the bed, he pushed deep inside of her.

  It felt like a sudden rush of fullness for Grace as his big dick entered her. And when he started to move through the tightness and the friction that was her womanhood, she felt an overwhelming sense of joy. Tommy Gabrini was fucking her. This masterful man was laying it on her with a skill she was certain few men could match. And he was hers. She wrapped her arms around his back. She held onto him as he pumped his ass off. She held onto him as he did her with a fervency no other man could even emulate. Nobody could do it better.

  Tommy held onto her, too, as he fucked her. His naked body was pushing against hers harder and harder as his dick buried itself deeper and deeper inside of her. And it felt good immediately. They were already at that place of intensity. It was so intense, so unbelievably beautiful, that all he could do was experience it raw and sensually, and relax in the experience. He removed his mouth from her wet breasts, and continued to pump her and pump her hard.

  He looked at her as he fucked her. She had the prettiest smooth brown skin, the sweetest bright white smile, the most sincere eyes he’d ever seen. And she was his. Somehow that mattered to him above anything else. She belonged to him. She was the only woman alive on which he’d ever staked a claim. He’d had many other women, but they were always one of many others. But Grace was his one and only. Grace was his and he was hers as surely as the breath in his body. And he fucked her with that level of undeniable love and passion, as if he was determined to make certain she understood just what she meant to him.

  And she did understand it. In the bedroom, she loved his possessiveness. She wasn’t crazy about it outside of the bedroom, and often told him so, but she loved it here. That was why, when she began to climax, her orgasm was so extreme. It wasn’t just that she was cumming. It was because Tommy Gabrini was the one who was making her cum. It was because Tommy was pumping on her so hard, and was dick-whipping her so decisively, that she couldn’t help but feel his possessiveness with every spasm her body endured.

  “That’s right,” he was saying as she came. “Let it out, baby. Feel that rod massaging you and let it out! Don’t hold back. Let it out, baby, let it out!”

  Grace was arching now, and having severe spasms now, as the sensations wouldn’t let her lay still. And Tommy kept pumping her, causing her to continue to climax with rolling orgasms, until her vagina muscles clamped down so tightly around his rod that he came too.

  He came with an eruption of feelings, with such an explosion of sensations that it caused the veins in his neck, his arms, his penis itself to strain near the breaking point. He pushed in with one last jolt, forcing out a final release of milky cum that it filled her so full it ran out and down her legs.

  And then he collapsed down on her, but only momentarily. He knew he was dead weight on her. He rolled onto his back, and then rolled her on top of him in one fluid motion. And then he managed to speak. “It’s good,” he said, his chest still heaving with heavy breaths, “to be back home.”

  “It’s good,” she managed to say, heaving too, “to have you back home.”

  And they just laid there, with Tommy holding Grace, and Grace’s head laying on his chest. After several minutes of regulating their breathing, after several minutes of coming back down to earth, she asked him about his trip. “Was there a final agreement?” she asked.

  “Not yet. They have options and they’re weighing those options.”

  She looked up at him. “You mean another company is in the running?”

  “Two others, I found out. Univec is the biggest. A major player.”

  “Not as major as the Gabrini Corporation.”

  “Agreed,” Tommy said unabashedly.

  “Then what is Beltco waiting on? You could have initiated a hostile takeover, but you didn’t. You, instead, decided to give them a generous offer and play ball with them. But then they open it up to a bidding war? I hope it works out for you. I know how much you want this merger to happen. But I don’t know, Tommy. Beltco seems a little shady to me.”

  “I don’t disagree with you. But I’ll be majority stakeholder, and all decisions will rest with me. Their shadiness won’t be a part of any company I run.”

  “So even with this bidding war, which will undoubtedly push up the price, you still think it’ll be a good move?”

  “It’ll make the Gabrini Corporation a force to be reckoned with, that’s for sure. But it’s up to Beltco. We met in Paris. I made our offer. They will either accept it, or accept Univec’s counteroffer. I still think we’re the top contender, but we’ll see.”

  “We wait and see.”

  “The waiting game, yes,” Tommy said. “But in the meantime,” he said, snuggling her closer still. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  She looked at him. His hair had formed a full bang across his forehead. She pushed it back in place. “What question is that?”

  “Did you behave yourself while I was gone?”

  She smiled. “You didn’t answer mine either. Did you behave yourself while you were gone?”

  “Yes,” he said, unequivocally.

  “Yes for me too,” she responded. “But let’s get specific. How many females did you have to turn down?”

  Tommy smiled. “Who said I had to turn down any?”

  “So you’re telling me that no female, this entire week, came on to you?”

  Tommy looked at her. “How many men came on to you?”

  “They wouldn’t dare! They know I’m married to Tommy Gabrini.”

  Tommy liked that answer. “And those females know I’m
married to Grace Gabrini.”

  But he and Grace both knew better than that. “They know it all right,” Grace said. “I’ve been getting more and more phone calls lately.”

  “I told your staff to do a better job screening your calls.”

  “And they have. But those females can be very convincing, Tommy. You wasn’t fooling around with any dummies. They pretend to be the CEOs of some of our major contracts, and they know I have to take those calls. I can’t risk losing business like that if I don’t take the call. Then they’d lay it on me. Stay away from Tommy. You can’t have, Tommy. Blah blah blah.”

  “And what did you say? Other than blah blah blah?”

  “I have him already, bitch, what do you think I said? But I don’t know. When we were dating, I’d get the phone calls and some visits too, but it was no major deal. But now that we’re married? Geez. Some of those women are seriously furious with my ass.”

  Tommy gathered her closer. “I’m sorry about that, babe,” he said. “When I find out who’s behind it, don’t you worry. I’ll put a stop to it.”

  Grace smiled. “You mean you’ll eventually figure out which one of the hundreds of women from your past is bothering me now?”

  Tommy slapped her naked backside. “Very funny,” he said with a smile.

  Although she laughed too and laid back down against him, her butt was still stinging from the blow.

  Later that night, when Tommy woke up, he reached over and realized Grace was no longer in bed. He could hear her voice, out on the balcony, as he turned onto his back. His body was so tired that he nearly dozed off again, but her voice woke him up again. He looked over at the digital clock on the nightstand. When he saw that it was 3a.m., he frowned. What the hell, he thought.

  He got out of bed. He was naked, but it was his house, his balcony. Nobody had any business anywhere near his property this time of night.

  When he stood at the French doors and looked out onto the balcony, he saw Grace seated on the lounger, snuggled in her robe, talking on the home phone as she wrote notes in a booklet.