Somehow, without conscious action, my days turned from unknown and overwhelming to expected and routine.
Paige liked to randomly quiz me on what the team might be doing on any given day. Even if I wasn’t required to, I enjoyed spending weekdays just observing the inner workings of the Washington Wolves.
It was a well-oiled machine, no wheel or cog unimportant.
Raymond, a custodian who’d worked there for twenty years, talked to me to about the stadium improvements that helped bump up season ticket sales in the early 2000s. Marie, an accountant who’d started a couple of years ago, told me that one of the things she admired about my dad was his ability to remember everyone’s name.
No matter their job description, no matter how long they’d been there. When he walked the halls, if he saw you, he smiled. He greeted you by name and asked if he didn’t know it.
Employees who felt respected showed more respect to their jobs. That was what Ignacio, who loved spraying the lines on the field as part of his maintenance job, told me when we spoke on a Wednesday afternoon. The practice field empty except for the two of us because the team was in the film room reviewing their game plan for an away game in Cincinnati.
Apparently, my father gave Ignacio a referral to an immigration lawyer when his mom and sister wanted to come to the States. That nugget hit me like a metal club into the heart, because I was still trying to balance the man I remembered as distant and in a state of constant work as someone who’d refer a lawyer to a groundskeeper.
Tuesdays were my favorite day to be at the facility because even though it was the players’ day “off,” they were everywhere. Lifting weights and sharing music, laughing together and swearing at each other. They were huddled in film rooms, watching the same thirty-second stretch of film on a jarring loop, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, seeing something in a defensive formation that would probably elude me forever.
They were there, pushing each other to be better when they could be doing anything else.
I’d learned that every pre-game night, the players stayed in hotel rooms, whether we were home or away.
Their practice days during the game week were seamless. One day was practicing first and second down as the game plan crafted by the coaches dictated. Well, coaches and the captains. Often, I saw Logan, Dayvon, Luke, and a few others huddled around clipboards, flipping printed pages and discussing routes with their coordinators.
Did my eyes stray to Luke more than others?
I’d neither confirm nor deny. Except he was the only ass I watched religiously as it flexed underneath his black athletic shorts.
What that man’s ass could do was nothing short of freaking miraculous. I practically had bruises on my inner thighs to prove it from our night on the couch five days earlier.
If he ever noticed me watching practices from a distance, wandering the halls with one employee or another, he never so much as looked. Not once.
Stupid discipline.
Then I shook my head and turned to leave the fields where they were practicing their two-minute drills. As I walked away, I felt a quick snap of awareness, something hot that trickled down my spine, but I didn’t turn to look. If he could show discipline in public, then damn it, so could I.
But I made sure to put just a teeny extra swing in my hips, just in case. Sunday night, we’d be at the same hotel in Cincinnati, so he could damn well watch what would be waiting for him.
Something else I learned about football, in the wake of this slowly unfolding relationship with Luke Pierson, was how much one sweaty man in a strange uniform could turn me on, even with half a stadium between us. Cognizant of cameras aimed in my direction from the front row of my suite, I made sure not to gawk and drool, lick my lips like he was a perfectly seared eight-ounce filet after a week-long juice cleanse.
But in my head, when that man leapt over, over!, a defender and ran ten yards into the end zone, I wanted nothing more than to rip my top off and scream like I was in the front row of a Justin Timberlake concert and he’d just pointed straight at me.
His arms lifted over his head, the grass stains on his white pants, the bulge in his biceps and sweat coating his face made me terribly, terribly hungry.
Someday, I wanted him just like that. So while I was cheering and high-fiving people next to me, smiling happily as though my investment was doing precisely what I needed it to, I was imagining all the ways we could utilize the king-size bed waiting in my room.
Or the tub.
It was big. And had jets.
I walked to the locker room on a veritable cloud, the kind of cloud that can only precede a really good orgasm and did my duty round before their clothes started coming off.
Luke was by his locker, surrounded by dancing teammates that were making him laugh, and I could only see the side of his strong profile.
Truly, it wasn’t fair. His smile—with bright white teeth and small dimple to the left of his mouth— made him so handsome that it was painful to look at. His hair was wet and messy, the white undershirt soaked with sweat. When he lifted his arm to give someone a fist bump, the white tape wrapped around his wrist was stained green from the grass.
And I had to press my thighs together.
Whyyyyyy was that so motherbleeping hot? It was grass-stained tape! I was losing my mind.
But past it was the corded muscle of his forearm marked with black ink. I had a bright, searing memory of his hand braced on my stomach while he knelt between my legs, his hips moving with unerring accuracy, fast enough to make my skin shake, slow enough to make me incinerate with blind pleasure.
My throat tightened in anticipation, and it felt like I was swallowing a chunk of concrete through sheer will, but the need for oxygen was so great with how much my brain was spinning.
Want.
Want.
Want.
It was my own personal victory chant, and I’d repeat it until the moment he knocked on my door. Then it would change.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
“Girl, you’ve got that look,” Dayvon said, coming up to me and slinging a heavy arm around my shoulders, which was becoming his post-game tradition.
“Wh-what look?” I choked, tearing my eyes away from sweaty Luke Pierson and his black magic pheromones.
“That fire.” He nodded as though I’d done something right. “It’s how we look before a big game, and we know we are about to throw shit down, and nobody will stop us.”
I laughed, and it came out a tinge hysterical, but he was so amped on the win, he didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s a good look on you, Sutton.” He walked away, pointing a finger at me while he did. “Don’t lose that fire. We take our cues from you, boss lady.”
It was enough to make me blink.
I was the boss. Even if a lot of it was in name only. I didn’t create their game plans; I didn’t run practices or call plays. But this locker room wasn’t the place for me to practice my sex eyes on Luke.
While I firmly believed there was nothing wrong with what we were doing because we were both consenting adults, I absolutely did not want it to affect the team. Affect how they viewed me, especially when I was so new within this stitched together family.
With a deep, sweaty-man-smell-filled breath, I smiled at Coach Klein and lifted my chin. Then with no fanfare, I left the locker room alone to find my driver.
The text came first as I turned to view my reflection over my shoulder.
My sleep tank was white, and I wore nothing under it. My shorts were black, as unadorned as the tank, and barely covered much more than underwear would. My hair was wild around my shoulders. Face bare.
LP: Room number?
My lips twisted into a smirk.
Me: So demanding. Can’t you ask nicely?
LP: … please
Me: 1625
The dots bounced on the screen but then disappeared, and I wondered whether he noticed I was on a different floor than the rest of the team.
That was no accident because I’m no idiot.
Plus, I’d already slept with Luke, so the likelihood of anything noiseless happening within the walls of either hotel room was slim to none. I ran a hand over my stomach and found it already shaking. My fingers were a little numb, and I shook them out.
“He’s just a man,” I whispered to my reflection. “He’s just a regular man.”
Even as the lie passed my lips, I forced myself to believe it. Because even the way I’d undressed, taken off my makeup, and undone my hair with just my fingers was a testament to how untrue that was.
It felt like Luke preferred the most stripped-down version of Alexandra Sutton. Not only him but me too. He didn’t get the version of me that the rest of the world did. He got reality, not fantasy. And the fact that he did seem to prefer that made me want him even more.
The knock on my door came just a short minute after I’d sent my room number.
A knock on the door made my cheeks flush, for crying out loud.
I licked my lips and straightened, then tossed my hair like I was channeling Kate Upton.
His hands were clasped behind his back when I pulled the door open, using it to cover my body.
The sweat was gone. The grass-stained tape and damp undershirt were gone. In its place was clean, shower-wet hair. A face that needed a shave, but thank the Lord hadn’t gotten one, because it made the angle of his jaw look dangerously sharp as if I might cut my tongue if I licked at it with too much pressure.
I think I wanted to test that theory.
Covering his broad chest was a button shirt so blue that it made his normally brown eyes glow almost golden bronze. And those eyes held all the heat that I’d missed during the days wandering the facility, and the hours I’d lay in bed thinking about how he’d made my body feel the week before. My fingers curled into the surface of the door as we stared at each other.
Then he dipped his chin and walked through the opening with a strong, loose-limbed stride that ate up the ground from the impossible to ignore length of his legs.
With just the tip of my finger, I pushed the door shut and then flipped the deadbolt.
He watched with a lifted brow. “You think I’m going to try to escape?”
Moving slowly in his direction, I peeled the tank top off.
“Nope.” I dropped the shirt on the floor next to me.
If I thought his eyes were heated before, I’d been so, so wrong. “I was going to do that.”
I shook my head. “My turn tonight.”
“You think so?” he asked gruffly when the tips of my fingers traced the edge of my sleep shorts, which had nothing under them, and started inching them down my hips.
Luke started unbuttoning his shirt, and I shook my head, instantly stilling the motion of my hands. He froze, narrowing his eyes.
“My turn tonight,” I repeated. “I got a room on a different floor on purpose, Mr. Pierson, and I intend to make the most of that. So keep your hands by your side, and I’ll let you know when you can do any touching.”
“What?” he said in a low, warning voice.
“With anything other than your mouth,” I clarified.
He held his hands out in a conciliatory gesture even as his gaze scorched my skin. It made my breasts feel heavy and tender even though he’d yet to touch them, and goose bumps pebbled over my arms as I slid off the last piece of clothing covering me.
“Holy shit, Allie,” he breathed. “You’re killing me.”
“Oh, just wait,” I said with dark promise.
I stood in front of him, and I could see the thick column of his throat move in a long swallow. The tips of my chest brushed against his shirt, and I leaned up on tiptoe so I could speak against the corner of his mouth.
“Before I’m done with you,” I paused and licked my lips, glancing his in the process, “you’ll beg.”
Luke turned his head, his breath coming fast and furious. As if his violent reaction to my little test of how far I could push him was being held in check by a single, whisper-thin strand of thread.
That was all that separated me from civilized, disciplined Luke, the one who kept his eyes off me in public, the one who never sent me a single loaded glance when we were outside the safe, agreed upon parameters of Sunday nights, and the other Luke.
The other Luke was the one who tore clothes from my body with nothing more than the strength in his fingers. The one who bent my body in curves and angles with his unleashed strength, driven by instinct and something primal that was probably only ever channeled on the field.
But with me, it was darker, more elemental because no eyes were on us. No one to enforce rules or limits or levels of what was acceptable.
It was just us and what we wanted.
The thing that made him snap was when I arched my back and nipped at his chin with the edges of my teeth.
I practically purred when he licked at my tongue and dove his hands into my hair with scalp-tingling strength, tugging at the hair as his teeth tugged at my lips.
My fingers tore at his shirt, scratched down the skin of his chest as he angled my head for a deeper kiss and palmed my bottom roughly.
His shirt joined mine on the floor, his pants next, then my body was tossed on the bed just a breath later. His words against my skin were part command and part entreaty.
“More,” he said.
“Yes.”
His eyes heated again briefly when he saw two condoms on the nightstand instead of one like the other night.
With demanding hands, he turned me on my side but stayed on his knees on the bed. My back arched, and I braced my hands on the headboard while his free hand traced the line and bumps of my spine, down the length of my bent leg.
Once he was covered, he lifted my top leg and then stopped.
My eyes flew open, darting to him.
“What are you waiting for?” I tried to turn, tried to open my legs around his slim hips, the taper of muscle like the bottom of a V.
“For you to beg,” he said with a cocky smile.
I groaned out a laugh, which made his smile soften into something more real than he’d ever given me before.
In my head, I heard the snap of a puzzle piece clicking into place as his hips slid forward, slow, slow, slow.
It wasn’t until hours later, when I drifted off to sleep, sore and alone in my big hotel bed, that I could name it.
Happiness.
And that was more terrifying than any level of pleasure he could possibly bring me because of how much we both stood to lose.
