Mandy dropped her hand from the front of his briefs. He wasn’t thinking about sex. He was thinking about herbaby.Good God.
“Five inches?” she said, not sure what to say. This wasn’t a conversation she’d pictured having with Damien.
“I know, it’s unbelievable.” He shook his head. “And it has eyes and can suck its thumb and has fully formed sexual organs.It’s a boy or a girl already, a real live human being.” His thumb went over her belly. “Right there. Amazing.”
Had he slipped in the shower and hit his head? Something had obviously happened while she’d been sleeping, and whatever it was, he had lost his mind as a result. He shouldn’t be looking at her like that. He couldn’t. Their relationship couldn’t go there.
“How do you know all that?” She didn’t think fetal development was knowledge Damien had just picked up along the way. And they were facts he hadn’t seemed to know the night before.
“I read the book in your beach bag. Very informative.”
“You readThe Everything Guide to Pregnancy?”She gaped at him, shocked at the idea of Damien Sharpton, workaholic businessman, thumbing through the Labor and Delivery chapter. “The whole thing? When?”
“While you were sleeping.” He frowned. “Hey, do you think I blew into your vagina?”
“What?”Mandy felt all the blood leave her face. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“It says in the book blowing into the vagina during oral sex can cause an embolism and is dangerous. I don’t think I blew any air, but what do you think? Did it feel like air was going into you?”
Mandy blinked. No one had ever discussed her vagina with such a clinical attitude before, and she didn’t like it in the least. It felt uncomfortably as if she was at the OB/GYN, not lying in bed naked with her lover.
“I forgot to turn on my vaginal air pressure gauge,” she snapped. “I don’t know! I was too focused on not losing my mind to worry about physics.”
He looked hurt, the idiot. “Well, I didn’t know…I’m sorry, Mandy. I didn’t mean to do anything harmful to you or the baby.”
Oh, damn. His hand was stroking on her again, and she felt like the biggest bitch for yelling at him. “I know that. Of course you wouldn’t hurt me. But you startled me, and frankly, I haven’t read that chapter in the book so I have no bloody idea what you’re talking about.”
Which was rather distressing to realize that she was walking around making choices for herself and her baby without having the facts straight first. What was the matter with her? Who was she to think she could raise a child and not make a disaster out of it?
“I’m sure it’s fine. We just won’t have oral sex again. And when you go to your next prenatal appointment, you can ask the doctor about it. Oh, and we should avoid deep penetration or having you on your back for long periods of sex.” He nodded, as though this all made perfect sense to him and that this wasn’t an incredibly bizarre conversation for a man to be having with his knocked-up-by-someone-else assistant.
“I have to use the loo.” She shoved on his chest so he would back up. All thoughts of sensual good-morning sex were gone, shot into orbit by his vaginal-blowing fears.
“I’m starving,” he said, obviously not picking up on her tension as he sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. “Do you want to grab some breakfast? Then I should probably get some work done for a couple of hours.”
“That’s fine. I’ll shower while you’re working.” And read the damnEverything Guide todamnPregnancy.
She didn’t want to make any more mistakes. She didn’t want Damien, who wasn’t even the baby’s father, to have a better sense of what was happening to her body and baby than she did.
And most of all, she wanted to know why along with all the other sacrifices she had to make, she couldn’t even be allowed the pleasure of having Damien destroy her pussy with his tongue.
Chapter Thirteen
Showered, dressed in a bikini, and armed with information, Mandy went off in search of Damien around lunch-time.
He had completely freaked her out, on so many levels, with his behavior that morning. He had brought back to the surface her doubts about her abilities as a mother, made her feel guilt for ignoring the textbook she really should have read two months ago, and he’d worried her that maybe she had done something sexual she shouldn’t have.
What kind of mother was she? She should be knitting booties like a proper mum, not having sex with her boss.
Unfortunately, being naked with Damien seemed much more appealing than laboring her way through the creation of a yarn sock.
Then added to all of that was the confusion over watching Damien Sharpton focusing in on her child. She supposed he wasn’t acting completely out of person, since he seemed to have taken a divide-and-conquer approach to her pregnancy. He had devoured all the information available to him, now was prepared to do everything by the book, literally.
He had sent her into the shower with admonishments about the water temperature not exceeding one hundred twenty degrees.
Like she even knew what that was just by turning the taps. She had never quite mastered the whole Celsius/Fahrenheit conversion.
But no matter if the behavior fit Damien’s aggressive, assertive personality, it was unnerving. And his concern, no matter how thoughtful, coupled with the way he had opened up to her the night before, made her feel a strange, confusing longing that she had no business feeling.
