by RJ Scott
I padded into the bathroom then showered, putting off returning to the bedroom until I thought maybe he’d make it out from bed and not be such a temptation. The shower door opened, and six-four of naked Jason climbed in the large space with me.
“What are you…?”
He handed me a toothbrush covered in paste and gestured with his own until I got with the plan, and with speed we banished morning breath and rinsed under the running water, and then he had me pressed to the cold tiles, his lips covering mine, the sharp mint vanishing under the onslaught of kisses.
“I tried to stay away,” he muttered, as he nibbled on my lower lip and then down my chin to my throat. I could barely hear him over the shower, but I didn’t need to listen to words when in a smooth move he went to his knees and grasped my ass cheeks, nosing around my cock before finally taking me in his mouth and making my toes curl. I stared down at him, and he looked up at me, water droplets on his long lashes. To see him on his knees, sucking me, passion in his eyes, was too much for me to handle and I scrambled to grab any part of him I could, encouraging him to stand, for more kisses, closing my hand around him. What I wouldn’t have given for lube and condoms, because fuck, the idea of him inside me was insanity and nirvana all at the same time.
We kissed and rocked against each other. He pressed a meaty thigh between my legs, widened my stance until I was on tiptoes and unable to move, and then he tilted my ass a little, his finger scraping over my hole, and I was done. I groaned into the kiss as my orgasm hit like a freaking D-man on a collision course, and I tried to reach him to get him over the edge, but I didn’t need to. He twisted his body, rutted against me, and then with a muffled curse into a frantic kiss he joined me. The water washed the evidence away, but he didn’t move us apart.
He didn’t leave.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“What do you want to happen?” he asked, and reached for shampoo—my shampoo—to wash his hair, bubbles sliding down every delicious inch of him and pooling in the shower at our feet.
“What do you want to happen?”
He rinsed his hair, squeezed shower gel onto his hand and washed himself, and I couldn’t help but watch, and by the time we left the shower, both with towels around our waists, the mutual questioning was hanging between us.
“Sit down.” He was all serious and focused, and when I sat on the bed he went to a crouch in front of me. My traitorous cock twitched as my brain worked its way through several scenarios of what would happen next. “Bodyguard 101,” he murmured, and my cock deflated in an instant. This wasn’t going to be blowjobs and smiles, this was going to be him telling me that the best sex of my entire life so far was a mistake.
Or some similar line.
“I get it,” I murmured, but he shook his head, and I noticed that his hair was already drying. I wanted to press my fingers into the soft curls, but he looked so serious, and I could be a grown-up about this if I tried hard enough.
“So, Bodyguard 101, don’t get emotionally involved.”
“Don’t fuck the client,” I added.
“But, in here, with the door shut, when I know I can protect you, then I want you in my arms, I want you in me, I want to be in you, I want to sleep with you, and when this is all over I want to be in a position to shamelessly exploit your contacts to get season tickets with Detroit.”
“I uhm…”
“What I’m trying to say is, this spark here, it began the first moment I set eyes on you in that briefing, and my job is to protect you, and I’m the very best at what I do.” He paused and I wondered if he wanted me to give him some reassurance at this point.
“Well, I’ve never had a bodyguard before, but if being good is being a pain in the ass and keeping me safe, then yeah, you’re the best.”
He snorted a laugh and scooted a little closer, then placed his hands on my knees.
“See, that there? This could be nothing, but don’t you feel that this could actually be everything?”
I could’ve lied. Told him he freaked me out with his way of making me scared of my own shadow, but that wasn’t really him. If anyone was to blame it was the person out there fucking with my life.
“Yeah, it could be.”
“So, I have a proposition for you.”
“Which is?”
“First, this has never happened to me before.”
“Okay.”
He cleared his throat. “If you’re interested, we could continue this behind closed doors, learn more about each other, and when the threat to you is gone, maybe I could take you out for dinner, try this dating thing for real?”
“I like steak,” I blurted.
He smiled. “I like steak, but that’s for later, for now, when we step outside that door, it’s all business, okay?”
“Yeah—”
“No kissing, no touching, no personal stuff, you do what I say and we find this asshole messing with you and then we can be something very different to each other.”
“Do I really have to do everything you say?” I pulled him up from his crouch to tumble back onto the bed with me, and we kissed to the point of no return just as my cell alarm sounded and I knew if we didn’t move now that the last meetings before the All-Star weekend would be missing one blissed-out forward.
Kissing him was my happy place where I didn’t think about dead birds and threatening messages, or his mythical snipers on the roof, but for now, it was hockey first, and I rolled off from where I’d made my way on top.
Maybe this could work?
Chapter Eleven
Arriving in Chicago was different when it wasn’t for a scheduled game, meeting a couple of my hockey heroes in the airport was a highlight, but at the hotel it was my first meeting with Colby Lomax that was intense.
Not just because he was an intense guy, but because he was the Max part of Deamax and also the son of the owner of the Dragons. I hadn’t put that together before but I certainly had now. After shaking my hand he congratulated me on the hockey part of my life, then he and Jason moved into Jason’s bedroom and shut the door after extracting a promise I wouldn’t go off trying to track down friends.
I knew for a fact a couple of the other guys in the auction were in the hotel already, and Kyle would be there soon. I kind of needed a beer, and to catch up with friends, and not to be told what to do.
I’d promised to be good, even if that promise had been extracted under taxing circumstances, that being me on the bed getting the blowjob of my damned life.
Freaking sneaky Jason and his deals. My only answer to, do what I say and I’ll let you come, had been a resounding fuck yes.
They came out of the room after a few minutes, Colby all serious, Jason looking pissed. “Our team has traced the hacking,” he announced as they took the sofa chairs at the table in the middle of the suite.
“And?”
Jason glanced at Colby and nodded to indicate that Colby take the explanations.
“Mr. Howell, it seems you have been made the center of something that is far bigger than just you.”
“Call me Garrett,” I amended on instinct, “and what does that mean, ‘something bigger’?”
“It would appear this has everything to do with the Dragons hockey team, and very little to actually do with you specifically.”
I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees, then waited for an explanation that actually made sense.
Jason interjected, “What Colby is saying, is that the hacking was paid for from an offshore account, which our team has traced back to Prentice Corp,” Jason paused then, and I knew he probably thought I would now be putting everything together, but he was wrong.
“I play hockey, I don’t have the slightest idea how that connects with a dead bird, and the flowers, or the letters.”
Now it was Colby’s turn to talk. “The Prentice family is at the sharp end of a hostile takeover bid for Lomax Industries. All you need to know is that part of the hostilities was intended to ta
ke the Dragons out of our family’s control. We don’t know the whole story, but when it failed, there was a new push to obtain the Dragons in a much more subtle way. News stories implying management dysfunction, rumors of family rifts, and much more. We’ve fought fire with fire as much as we could, but then they changed direction again, and it would appear that you have become their main target.”
“But, why me?” I was confused how I fit into any of this.
“Take the face of the franchise, the one with the social media following, rattle him to the point that he needs protection, and then start rumors of internal issues, fights among players, cause rifts where there were none before. Destabilizing from the inside out.” He shook his head. “You’re the tip of the iceberg, and so far we’ve headed everything off at the pass, but there’s been an escalation.”
“In what? Surely now we know what’s happening, I don’t need protection, no one is actually trying to hurt me directly.”
Jason and Colby exchanged glances and my stomach sank because this didn’t look as if they were going to deliver good news.
“How well do you know Shaun Lassiter?”
“My agent?”
“You’ve been his client for a long time, right?”
“Since I was drafted, actually slightly before in an informal sense of him guiding my career.”
“But you sent this, right?” Colby passed me a print-out of an email and I didn’t have to read in its entirety because it was one I’d sent to Shaun, advising him that as of the first of August this year I no longer needed his services. It was polite and considered, and explained that I wanted different things out of life and my career.
I nodded, “I want to take a new direction in my career.”
Colby continued after a short pause, ramping up the tension. “I don’t know how to tell you, but I guess just the facts will have to do.”
“Go on then.”
“We have evidence that Shaun Lassiter has been taking payments from Prentice Corp to create the situations you found yourself in. Case in point, your car is in a storage locker under an assumed name linked to his bank account. He’s not hiding his tracks very well.”
“He never was the brightest bulb in the box,” I murmured.
“In the last three years alone Shaun’s company has posted profits of over four million based mainly off income from your endorsement contracts. However, he’s lost most of it in various high stake poker games, and now owes money to people that no-one should be doing business with. He’s been stealing from you.”
I felt sick, and hunched over a little, the weight of all of this heavy on my shoulders. Shaun wasn’t a friend, not really. He’d maybe started out as a mentor to me in the way that the hockey world worked its magic with money, but when he’d begun pushing me to accept every endorsement he could, ethical or not, that was when I’d wanted out.
“Stealing how?” I asked shakily, the betrayal cutting deep.
“Not in obvious ways,” Jason said. “It was an extra percentage on a deal to the contract you signed, enough to make it very uncomfortable for him if you hired a new agent who wanted to review those legal agreements. We think…” He looked at Colby, and then reached out and pressed a hand to my thigh. “Maybe Prentice Corp discovered this weak link, leveraged him into the scare tactics, after all, he has access to your apartment, knows a lot of your private stuff, could get the keys to your car, knew your routines. He was likely watching and waiting for that day you went to Martha’s so he could follow and get to the car.”
“Was he the one who pushed me into the wall, the bird, I didn’t recognize the voice as his.”
“We think that was a thug for hire, paid for by Shaun. Same guy we tracked on camera that scratched the words into your car.”
“So it’s over?”
“Nearly. There’s a warrant out for Shaun’s arrest but he’s not been found yet.”
Colby offered his hand and reassured me. “Deamax will work with the cops to find him.”
I shook it and stayed where I was as he and Jason headed to the door of the suite, talking softly, then bro-hugging, before Colby left.
“I don’t need a bodyguard anymore,” I murmured, and Jason sat next to me.
“Until Shaun is found and the cops can get into Prentice Corp, I thought I’d stick around as a bodyguard, make you look important to the bidders at the auction,” he said and then bumped my elbow with his. “Get to meet Kyle again, eh?”
“What if someone bids on me that I don’t like?”
He punched my arm. “Suck it up buttercup, you’ll end up in bed with me after the date anyway.”
That could have been it, but I turned in my chair and he opened his arms and pulled me close and we hugged for the longest time.
It was nearly finished, and my life could go back to normal.
And maybe Jason and I could make something more than this forced proximity thing we had going on between us.
Seeing Kyle in the foyer of the hotel was the best thing that happened after that meeting. He was a sight for sore eyes, and after he and Jason fist bumped, Jason went over to the bar and sat on a stool nursing a soda and watching me from a short distance. Something about him being there made me feel safe, even if the cops were on the job now. I didn’t pretend to understand why an organization as big as Prentice Corp would want to take me down. Yes, I was the one who did a lot of the team appearances, but I was second line, and from a hockey perspective I wasn’t as big as Simba or Loki. Maybe the destabilization of the team through social media was actually a thing?
I said my hellos, took Kyle over to where the rest of the guys stood and we talked shit for a good thirty minutes, everything from hockey to hockey, and all the hockey in between. When we talked trades, the conversation turned to the rumors surrounding trades, but we all knew that we only got to stay with a team if they could afford us, or if we were pulling our weight.
Layne arrived, a defenseman from the New Jersey Jackals, and tagging along with him was a guy called Roman who was all bright eyes and a wannabe journalist. At first I regarded Roman with suspicion because if he was here to get the scoop on what was happening to me, then he was sorely mistaken. Turns out he was just a nice guy, and Layne seemed smitten, so that was all good.
Every moment I shot the breeze I was aware of Jason’s gaze on me, and it felt fine. It wasn’t all about the protection, it was that he just wanted to be there with me.
“Ready for the skills competition?”
I knew Kyle was in for fastest skater, I was all about the shot, the others spread evenly, but I wasn’t listening because when I glanced over at Jason he was on his phone and his expression screamed serious.
“Yeah,” I offered. “Want to see you winning today, K.” I was distracted again when Jason came over, and guided me away, with a small press of his hand to my elbow. We ended up in an alcove, with Jason crowding me into the corner. In the bar SportsCenter was on the TV, the noise of a football game so loud I could hear every word, but my ears were filled with buzzing and I didn’t want to hear what Jason had to say.
“They found Shaun, heading for the border, cash in bags, he’s in custody and denying any and all knowledge of trying to hurt you. Says it was all about messing with your head, only the guy he hired took it too far, and that it’s too late to stop this person because the final order was to disrupt the auction.”
“Okay, well this nebulous bad guy won’t keep going if Shaun isn’t paying him, right?”
“I don’t like it, I have a bad feeling, and I’m taking you back to Burlington until they track down who this new person is.”
I pushed him out of my space, enough so I could breathe. “And I said that the auction was a deal breaker. Not to mention the honor of representing my team as an All-Star. I’m not going anywhere, Jason, okay?”
Jason became urgent, “Don’t be stupid, think of your safety—”
“No, I won’t go, my friends are here, we’ve worked hard on this, the emc
ee is here and ready to go, by this time on Sunday it will all be over and then you can take me home.”
“If this person is able to smash your face into a wall, and get to your car, if there is that much ability to create hate, and he’s coming here to disrupt the competition—”
“Bring in more of your team, hire people in, I’ll cover the cost. I meant it when I said that this is too important to stop.”
“As your bodyguard—”
“You can pretend for the rest of the weekend, but I’m okay here with my friends, and you’re seriously freaking me out now. Tell me it’s certain that I’m in danger and if there is risk, tell me you couldn’t protect me anyway.”
He sighed again, and I could see he was torn. “But you’re not just my client,” he murmured.
I cradled his face, wondering how it was that I had fallen for this man so quickly. Maybe I should tell him? Maybe we’d had enough time to fall in love, and we could think about the future. But, was I was just feeling like that because of the danger that had thrown us together? Could I stay strong and fight battles alongside him?
“And you’re not just my bodyguard,” I said, then pressed a kiss to his soft lips. “I have to get ready for the skills competition. You coming with?”
“Always.”
Chapter Twelve
Kyle finished in second place in the fastest skater competition with an amazing 13.378 second run, only losing to some new kid out of Edmonton. He was grinning hard, and when he skated to a stop next to me he fist bumped me and we hugged. Every success he had was something I wanted to celebrate.
“You ready for the fastest shot competition?”
Was I? If Kyle had asked me after the meeting in the room with Colby, then I would have said yes. After all, as players, we practiced our shots on a daily basis, and I was deadly accurate—had a reputation as a bit of a slap shot king. But the rest of Jason’s team had arrived an hour ago, six guys, two women, all as hard as Jason, along with Colby who was nearly apoplectic that I wouldn’t back down from the weekend, or cancel the auction. I reasoned that the worry was the auction, not the skills competition, but that didn’t stop me imagining those freaking snipers that Jason had warned me about on day one.