Watching Allie walk toward me, her features blurred in the darkness, her body covered by some white gauzy thing that floated around her like a cloud, I felt like I was in a dream. Some music video sequence where you found yourself holding your breath because of the carefully planned, drum-tight anticipation of what she’d do next.
I thought maybe she wouldn’t come. Sitting in my pool, I wondered whether she would or not served as a surprisingly effective distraction from how miserably we’d played and how thoroughly we’d gotten beat.
That alone was enough to make me edgy because nothing distracted me during the season. Nothing.
“I’m not usually very good company after we lose,” I told her when she came to the water’s edge. The pool matched her eyes, which made her presence that much more potent, that much more powerful as if she was an extension of the water.
“Fine with me.”
“I don’t want to talk about what went wrong.” My voice got harder at her softly spoken answer.
Her lips twitched. “Okay.”
“I don’t want a pep talk about how it’ll get better and the season is sixteen games long.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
In the warm water of the pool, I held myself very still, my hands curling into fists on top of the concrete edge. The way Allie watched me was part fascination, part awe, and an amusement that curved the edges of her lips delectably.
“Since when are you so accommodating?” I all but growled.
“I’m always accommodating,” she answered, her voice a low, hot lick of fire over my entire body. “You just didn’t see it until now.”
The puff of air that slipped from my mouth wasn’t quite a laugh, but it was close enough that she zeroed in my lips with an intensity that rippled through me with all the subtlety of a tropical storm.
Hurricane Allie.
“So,” she whispered, “what do you need to feel better, then?”
I tipped my chin up and stared at her for a beat. There were no sounds around us to cover our words, nothing that we could use as a distraction, as a reason not to hear every answer, see every response.
“You,” I said.
In a loud rush of water, I turned and braced my hands on the concrete to lift myself out of the pool. It let me use more strength, exert more of what was humming under the surface of my skin than any sissy-ass steps did.
Allie backed up so she didn’t get wet at my exit from the pool.
Her eyes tracked down my heaving chest, widening slightly when she saw exactly how much this conversation was affecting me. I couldn’t really hide much under wet swim trunks.
Then they widened for a very non-sexy reason.
“Holy crap, Luke,” she said, reaching out to slide her fingers along the early stages of a bruise on my side.
Annoyed by what that light brush of her fingers did to my psyche, how much I wanted to feel it over every inch of me, I grabbed her hand and pulled it up to my mouth.
“It’s nothing.” I sucked the tip of one finger into my mouth, digging my teeth into the fleshy pad. Allie tucked her lips together between her teeth, and her eyelids fluttered closed. “But if you’re concerned, there’s no need.”
When I sucked on another finger, she stepped closer, rubbing that finger along the edge of my tongue. “How about we take this inside? I think … holy shit, Luke.” She broke off on a gasp. “It’s just a stupid finger; how does that feel so good?”
I paused, and when she realized what she’d said, I smiled around said finger while she leaned into me and laughed. I slid my arm around her waist, gathering the gauzy material covering her body into my fist. It would rip easily.
“Yes,” I said into her hair. “Let’s take this inside.”
When I turned for the entrance to the lower level of my house, I had to steady my breathing when Allie tucked her warm fingers into the waist of my swim trunks as if I’d somehow lose her on the way inside. As if she couldn’t stop touching me.
Considering my profession, it had been a long time for me. No one I’d met had been worth the risk. To me, to Faith, and to the life I’d worked my ass off to build.
The slider opened without a single sound, and Allie followed me in just as quietly. The lights were off except for where my office was set up in the far corner. I pulled a white towel off the edge of my desk.
Allie’s fingers gripped more tightly, and as I was drying off my face and chest, I felt her warm breath along my spine.
Her forehead dropped to my skin first, and I closed my eyes when her hands lightly drifted over my skin around my waist, meeting with sprawled fingertips spread over my abs.
With careful fingertips, she traced each neatly stacked set of muscles. Muscles I’d worked very hard to maintain at thirty-five years old.
She spoke against my back, her lips glancing my skin with each word. “When you pulled your shirt off at the photo shoot”—she paused, one hand moving up to skim over my chest, the other toying dangerously with the tie on my swim trunks—“the first thing I thought was that I wanted to bite you.”
I let out a rough laugh, barely more than an exhale because I was trying very hard not to shove her down, tear her clothes off, and rut her like a wild animal who’d been left alone for too long. “Yeah? Where?”
She kissed my shoulder blade. “Right here.” Then her fingers whispered along the V of muscle under my hip bone. “Definitely here.”
Allie as the seducer was not how I’d envisioned this night playing out. My hands were shaking from my need, unsteady in how badly, how very, very badly I wanted to put them on her body in the same way as she was touching mine.
The whisper across my skin got louder, firmer when they skated over my biceps.
“Here,” she said again. “I wanted to know just how strong you were. What you could do to me with all these places I thought about putting my mouth on.”
If I was the wild animal being held at bay, she’d just ripped my rusty chains off with her words. I turned and gripped her face with both hands, sliding my tongue into her waiting, moaning mouth with a violent sort of drive to taste her.
Taste and taste and take and take.
She was sweet and wet, meeting each kiss with one of her own, deep, deep, deeper until we were wound around each other with too-tight arms and digging hands.
“I could ruin you,” I told her between kisses. “I could do anything.”
Allie pulled back, her eyes glowing unholy in her face. There was no part of her that wasn’t stunning. “Promises, promises.”
My hands weren’t shaking anymore when I reached down and slowly pulled the hem of her dress up so that the hem was between my fingers. “Hope this isn’t your favorite dress.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “It might be.”
Rip.
I wrenched it between my fingers, tearing it straight up the middle, teeth gritted and skin on fire. Underneath she wore simple white underwear, a white lace bra, and the skin that was the embodiment of every deathly siren come to life in one dangerous package. Golden, curved, endless inches that I fully planned to explore.
Tucked into her bra was a condom. I leaned down and licked across the top of the lace covering her, then pulled the foil wrapped package out with my teeth. When I leaned back, her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, her breaths fast and uneven.
“I don’t promise anything that I can’t deliver, sweetheart,” I told her after I’d tossed the condom onto the couch up against the wall.
I leaned down and gripped her underneath her bottom, hoisting her up in my arms. She wound her arms around my shoulders and moved sinuously against my stomach as I walked us to the couch. My teeth found the lace of her bra, and I bit. Hard.
Allie gasped my name as I tilted her onto her back but made sure she kept her legs locked around my waist as I knelt on the couch. It forced her lower body into an upward angle, and she arched her back more sharply, displaying herself like an offering. It was a feline movement, graceful curves and limber sensuality, someone who was totally comfortable in her own skin.
I spread my hand over her stomach, from pinky to thumb, and spanned her entire ribcage. My skin on top of hers was darker, rougher from misuse. Her skin under my calloused hands was pristine and unmarked, no bruises or breaks or violence to be seen anywhere on her body.
Not like mine.
Compared to her, with my inked skin, the bruises popping along my sides, and the scars from surgeries and injuries, I felt coarse and unrefined.
She looked up at me, her fingers slung over her head, knotted into the arm of the couch, impatient breathing and hips rolling against me when I didn’t move. Her blond hair was mussed and tangled around her face. Her lips were flushed pink from the rough treatment my mouth had given hers. From the biting and sucking.
You are perfect, I wanted to say. Instead, I dropped her legs so I could yank her underwear off. In a rare sign of shyness, she closed her knees while I stood and briskly untied my trunks. My hands were rough when I shoved them down my legs.
For two, maybe three heavy, pulsing seconds, we stared at each other.
“You’re perfect,” she whispered, and I had to blink for a moment at hearing the words I’d been thinking given back to me. It was disorienting in the sweet way she delivered them, which belied the sinful light in her eyes.
It hurt.
It hurt to look at her.
With those two words, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I wanted her over me so I could see her move. I wanted her under me so I could unleash everything burning hot inside me. I wanted … I wanted …
I just wanted her.
I held out my hand to her, helping her stand from the couch. She used her fingers and her palm to incite me further as I ripped the dress off her shoulders, then unhooked her bra and tore it off her shoulders.
Allie bit down on the skin over my heart as I walked us backward. Another bruise I’d have on my skin. My hands gripped her waist as I sat, and I lifted her easily to straddle my lap.
One of her hands clutched the back of the couch, and she moved over me. I slid my hands up the line of her back while she did, our lips tangling and sucking in kisses that never stopped, never slowed.
My hands got rougher, her movements more like a dance; my teeth found her skin, her tongue found the edge of my neck, and her breathing got choppy and wild.
The moment I snapped my hips, we both stilled in a perfect suspension of breathing, of heartbeats, of time.
I’m so screwed, I thought. It was a realization that came far too late. Because I could never, ever forget that she felt like this. That like this, she was my perfect counterpart.
Allie pressed her cheek against mine as we both started to move, her breathing, her whispered words and pleas hot in my ear. For minutes, hours, I couldn’t say, we moved against each other, her knees tight up against my hips, our chests sweat-slicked and sliding.
I felt the wave, felt it build up my legs, hot and silver and expanding like lightning in my blood, and only to crest into an explosion when Allie clutched my neck and then slumped against me.
One hand soothed up and down her back as we breathed heavily. Her hair was a tangled mess, and her clothes were in a torn heap on my floor.
And even with her still sweaty and sated in my arms, I knew I’d be counting down the hours until I could touch her again like this. How else I could see her and feel her, what new thing we could explore.
I always knew Sundays were my favorite day of the week, just not because it was now the day I got to screw my boss.
“Holy hell,” I said out loud. If there was a moment of panic accompanied by that thought, Allie chased it away instantly when she leaned back and grinned at me.
“I love Sundays,” she whispered.
“Yeah?” I asked with smug satisfaction at the sight of her. Rumpled and sweaty and pink-cheeked.
She smacked my chest, and I laughed.
I sighed and ran my hands up her back. Who had skin this perfect? Nobody I’d ever met.
“I love Sundays too,” I told her.
“Even after a game like tonight?”
My head dropped back as Allie climbed carefully off my lap and moved to the side of the couch. It was hard to think straight when she looked the way that she looked, so I closed my eyes.
It took me a minute to answer. “Yeah, even after a game like tonight.” I turned my head toward her and found her watching me curiously. How did I put into words that even after the losses, the ones that hurt mentally as much as they did physically, I’d never want to do anything else?
Her eyes dipped to the bruise on my side, but she didn’t touch me. “Does that surprise you?” I asked.
Leaning forward to plant a hot, fast kiss on my lips, Allie smiled against my mouth. I found myself smiling back.
“No,” she answered.
Then she was off the couch and wrapping her ruined dress around her shoulders while I chuckled under my breath. It was eerie how she seemed to be reading my mind tonight.
“Thanks,” she said quietly.
“You’re welcome?”
Allie laughed, looking down the length of me, my body still sprawled on the couch. I wasn’t sure I could move.
“See you next week?”
Maybe she’d be my downfall. Maybe this would blow up in our faces. Maybe there’d be a day that I regretted that I ever had this stupid idea.
But it wasn’t tonight.
“Next week,” I told her.
And she was gone.
