Scoring a Holiday Match (Mr. Match)

by Delancey Stewart

  “Yeah,” I said.

  At that moment, I thought maybe I’d let Noah take me just about anywhere.

  Chapter 11

  Holy Mother of Penguins

  Noah

  Tallulah Jeffries.

  My match was Tallulah Jeffries… And as I drove home from Old Town, replaying the night in my mind, I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.

  I wasn’t a huge women’s soccer fan. It’s not like I set the DVR for the Stars games or anything (though I would now, for sure).

  But I’d heard of Tallulah, even before we were matched. Because Tallulah wasn’t exactly a shy little flower around town. She’d been in the news. Lately, especially.

  Tallulah was both the new face of Mr. Match—which I fully intended to quiz her about—and she was the most outspoken advocate for women’s athletics outside of Megan Rapinoe. She fought for equal attention, equal respect, and equal pay for the Oceanside Stars and all pro women’s teams. And while the fans and the league might not have fulfilled all her demands, she’d rallied the other players for sure. There was a new billboard over the 805 freeway featuring Max Winchell, Fernando Fuerte and Trace Johnson (key players for the South Bay Sharks, San Diego’s male pro soccer team) advertising the Oceanside Stars. The teams had linked themselves, and they were co-promoting events all over town. It wasn’t at all unusual to see the Stars all sitting in the front rows at Sharks’ games and vice versa. And Tallulah made that happen.

  I waited at the beach, two surfboards stuck in the warm sand about a quarter mile from the pier at Ocean Beach. Tallulah appeared on the berm near the parking lot, her blond hair pulled into a high messy bun, and her athletic body poured into a wetsuit that highlighted every curve and muscle, even from a hundred yards away. She was tiny, but man was she hot. I forced my mind to consider things that would distract certain parts of my anatomy from the way her body looked sheathed in that suit because my own wetsuit wasn’t much good for hiding a raging boner.

  Electric eels, I thought. Shit, no. Eels are pretty phallic. That didn’t work at all.

  The Yankees. I’d heard lots of guys tell me they ran baseball stats when they needed to, ah, calm down. But I actually didn’t know much about baseball stats. I was a casual fan. I did hate the Yankees though. Still, it didn’t help.

  Wombats? I knew they produced square poop and I’d read that they liked to stack it in towers to attract the opposite sex.

  That did it. Square poop.

  The only problem was that I was giggling about wombats and making poop towers by the time Tallulah reached me, and she probably thought I’d lost my mind.

  “Hey you,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “You laughing at me and my complete awkwardness in this tight-ass suit?”

  I sobered. “Definitely not. You look amazing in that suit.”

  She absorbed the compliment and her face relaxed into a smug little smile. “Do I?” She let her eyes rove over my own suit-clad body, and if I wasn’t mistaken, they lingered a bit on one particular area just below the belt.

  “You do,” I confirmed. I cleared my throat, trying to keep hold of the control I’d only just found over my body. “You ready to surf?”

  Tallulah shot me a brilliant smile, and the confidence she carried in everything she did hit me like a truck. “Yeah. Totally. Just one thing first though.” She stepped closer, her eyes never leaving mine as her hands came to rest on my chest, her palms flattening against me. She rose up on her toes, and I didn’t even have to contemplate how to respond. My own hands found her tight little waist and I bent down to meet her lips with my own.

  It started sweetly, and I swear, that’s where I would have kept it. This was only our second date, after all. But Tallulah deepened the kiss, her lips parting and her tongue teasing my lips as her hands gripped my back. I opened my own mouth, fire flooding my veins as she wrapped one of her legs around my waist and I felt her other hand drop to my ass.

  Holy mother of penguins.

  Tallulah was tiny, but she was like a hurricane inside a flask. Kissing her was like unleashing a tidal wave, and when her other leg wrapped my waist and I held her against me, her hot little body pressed against mine, I had wild thoughts slamming through my mind uncontrollably. I wanted to possess her, claim her, drop to the sand and make her mine. For a moment, holding all that power and energy in my arms, I believed I might be the strongest man in the universe, able to capture an actual force of nature and make it my own.

  And then she released me, stepped away and gave me that brilliant smile. “Let’s surf, Noah.”

  Shit.

  Now my package was completely evident through the fabric of my suit, and I stepped behind one of the boards to give myself a chance to calm down. “Yeah. Okay.”

  I showed her the board I’d brought for her, and we practiced the paddling stance and the pop up there on the sand. She was a quick study, and her years of workouts definitely showed. After a few minutes, she laid down on her board on the beach and looked up at me, shielding her eyes from the bright sun with a hand.

  “Noah. If I wanted to surf in the sand, I could’ve taught myself. When do we get in the water?”

  “Now,” I told her.

  She leapt to her feet with a wild grin on her face and hooted, scooping up her board. It was comical—she was so small compared to the longboard I’d brought for her, but she hustled it out to where the water was waist deep. She leapt on and began paddling out, and it took me some effort to catch her. We went out to the whitewater, Tallulah gazing longingly behind us where the bigger waves were breaking.

  “We practice up here where we’re not going to get tumbled,” I told her.

  “In the baby waves?” She sounded disappointed and actually made her face into a comical frown. I was learning that Tallulah liked a challenge, and I wasn’t surprised by this discovery at all.

  “Master the baby waves, and we’ll go out to catch them at the break.”

  “Done.” She had no fear, no doubt. I wondered if she approached everything this way.

  Within a half hour, we were padding out deeper, past the breaking waves. They weren’t big today, but there were a few other guys out and they were big enough to give you a roll. Still, I was pretty sure Tallulah was ready.

  As we sat, waiting for the next set to roll in, I watched her. She was smiling brightly, her eyes squinting against the sun, but her gaze catching mine repeatedly, and every time it did, one word seemed to rise to the surface of my emotions: Joy. Tallulah knew how to be happy—and while my own life hadn’t exactly been a struggle, there was something so attractive about her open optimism and wonder. I wanted to stay close to it, see if I could absorb some of it, hold it near.

  “This one?” she asked, pointing to a swell that looked promising.

  “Good eye,” I told her, and we both flipped to our stomachs and began paddling in advance of the wave that was forming just behind us. “Go, go, go!” I called to her as the water began to lift just behind us. Surfing was about timing. It was about balance, too, but that was once you got up. Catching waves took a good eye and exactly the right amount of speed and momentum to bring you to the right place to catch the swell. Too much, and the wave would crash over you. Not fun. Too little, and you’d miss that rush of power, and the thing would just lift you up and then gently set you back down as it rolled on toward the shore.

  But we timed this one perfectly, and as the energy of the wave caught the back of our boards, I watched as Tallulah’s body tensed and then popped up, exactly as she’d done on the beach. I did the same, and for a glorious few seconds, we were riding, side by side under the incredible San Diego sun with the sea at our feet.

  And then Tallulah lost her balance. I watched as she flipped off the side of her board, and the wave crushed her, flipping her board and sending it beneath the frenzied churn of the water. I turned my own board out of the wave, and started scanning for her off the backside.

  Getting rolled was disorienting, and sometime
s it was hard to know which way was up, was air, was safe. And when your board got sent down with you, there was always a chance it could hit you in the head and knock you out. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen.

  I saw Tallulah’s board pop back up to the surface, and when she didn’t join It a second later, panic began to build like painful pressure in my chest. I stood on my board, looking for her beneath the surface, near where her board had emerged, and thought I caught a glimpse of something beneath the water. I unleashed myself and dove, and when I came up next to her board, she was already up, coughing and grasping the smooth polished surface like a lifeboat.

  “You okay?” I asked her, putting a hand on her board to keep myself near.

  She shook her head, still sputtering and coughing.

  Worry iced my blood, made my muscles tight. Had I broken her? I couldn’t stand the thought of being responsible for dimming even one little bit of this woman’s optimism or confidence. I waited until she seemed to be breathing again without gasping.

  “Okay?” I tried again.

  Her face spread into that wide grin again, and she said, “I told you. I’m not okay at all. I’m fucking fantastic!”

  My face split into a smile to match her own, and then my lips were otherwise engaged, as Tatllulah grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me to her, crashing her mouth into mine and tangling our tongues with an enthusiasm that had every part of my body straining toward her. I pulled her to me, our inhibitions lessened by the fact we were hidden by the rolling waves, the water all around us.

  We each kept one hand on the board, but the other hands were on a mission. I explored her body, feeling the curve of her hips, the swell of her ass. I slid my hand around that perfect round, letting it drift low and pulling her into me to grind against the almost painful erection I was sporting. Tallulah’s hand explored too, sliding between us and rubbing me until I groaned with the need to get more, to feel more.

  “Have you ever had sex in the water like this?” She growled into my ear, biting it as soon as she’d uttered the words that had my mind spinning.

  “The wetsuits would make it pretty tough.” I had a hard time getting my suit off on dry land, and the zipper was in the back. Getting my cock free would be quite a feat, and I’d probably freeze to death in the process. “Are you saying you want to have sex with me?” I asked her. “It’s only our second date, Ms. Jeffries.”

  Tallulah quit nibbling on my neck then, and pulled back to look at me. “Noah,” she said calmly. “I’m going to fuck you until you forget your own name.”

  Well okay then. “I think we’re done surfing,” I told her, and together we exited the water, collected my board and headed to my car.

  Chapter 12

  Blow Jobs and Waffles

  Tallulah

  I wasn’t a complicated girl. I liked to move and live and laugh, to feel the power of my body and my soul, and being with Noah—especially being with Noah in the ocean—had ticked every box for me.

  He was easygoing and handsome, athletic and genuine. And he taught me how to surf, something I knew I was going to keep doing, with or without the tall dark-haired hottie who’d given me my first ride.

  The combination of adrenaline and attraction had set me off, and when I’d let my hand wander down his body to grip the very impressive length under his wetsuit…that did it.

  “My place isn’t too far away,” Noah said, turning to me as we’d finished loading the boards in the back.

  “Too far,” I said, nearly panting with the effort of trying to unzip my suit. The stupid zipper was behind me, and I felt like a puppy turning in circles as I tried to reach the long cord to pull it down.

  Noah’s hands covered mine, and I stopped turning, staring up into those dark eyes as he tugged my zipper down my back. I peeled the suit off the top half of my body, feeling freer immediately.

  “Mine?” Noah asked, turning his back to me. I reached up to grasp his zipper, and watched in fascination as planes of tanned skin and hard muscle emerged where the zipper separated down his back. He peeled it from his arms, his eyes watching me as I stared at him. And if I was feeling needy before, seeing Noah without a shirt just made me want him that much more. He left the bottom half of the suit on, and something about that was even hotter than seeing him take it all the way off.

  I leaned down to pull the tight suit from my legs, but the thing was basically suction cupped to my body. I wrestled, bracing one hand on the side of Noah’s big SUV, while he watched, the smile growing as I fought fruitlessly at the thick fabric. I gave one final try to the right leg, and toppled over with the effort. “A little help?” I suggested, annoyed to see that Noah looked completely comfortable and was chuckling as he towered over me, all tall and ridiculously hot.

  “Sure,” he said, and he leaned down and scooped me up. He held me against his chest for a long minute, and then laid me down in the back of his car, next to the boards. “Let me just help you with that.” As he said the words, he trailed his fingers down the side of my body, bringing goosebumps to the surface everywhere and making me shiver. We were parked near some bushes, and Noah had backed in, so the front of the car faced the parking lot where people were moving by, but the back was blessedly shielded from view. And as Noah followed his fingers with his mouth, licking and kissing down the side of my body below the string to my bikini top, I was thankful for his parking skills.

  And the man had other skills I was coming to appreciate too, once he’d peeled the wetsuit from my body.

  “I like this bikini,” he told me, his voice a hoarse whisper. “But I don’t think you need this part here.” He took hold of the ties on each side of my waist and began to tug.

  “Wait.” I sat up. “You need to know this.”

  Noah’s hands halted and he looked up at me, and the surprised guilt in his eyes almost made me laugh. He looked like a little boy caught with a hand in the cookie jar.

  “You don’t untie those strings.”

  His brow wrinkled and that wide mouth lifted on one side. “What? Then what are they for? Of course you do.”

  “They’re just for looks.” I put my hands beneath his at my hips and slid my bikini bottoms down a bit, lifting my butt off the beach towel laid over the floor. “You just slide them off.”

  Noah blew out a long breath, the expression on his face giving everything away. “I’m distracted right now,” he said, bending down to lick a line up the center of my belly to the valley between my breasts, still covered by the other part of my bikini. “But we’re going to talk about how ridiculous that is later.” He licked the same line back down and then hooked his fingers around the sides of my bikini and slide it down the rest of the way, pausing to pull it off over my feet. He gently pushed my legs apart, stood between them and bent over.

  As I gasped and sighed, discovering another of Noah’s talents, I was thankful again for the bushes behind him. They were moving a bit, since he was practically standing in them, but as his tongue swirled and his mouth sucked, as his fingers slid and slicked and finally thrust, I found I didn’t care.

  But when I sat up again to see Noah looking extremely pleased with himself, I caught sight of what I’d noticed on the beach earlier. A very long, very big bulge in his own wetsuit. “Shall I help you off with yours?” I asked him, and scooted forward to begin peeling the thick fabric away from his hips. As I did it, my face was practically pressed up against his stomach, which was tan and firm and cut. I paused a moment in my work, needing to run my fingers along the ridges of muscle at his hips, the ones that led in a v-shaped invitation directly to points southward.

  “God I love this part of a man,” I sighed, my body tingling again.

  Noah pushed his wetsuit off the rest of the way, and then leaned down to kiss me, quieting my admiration of his perfect body. He was long and lithe, but cut and muscled. The perfect surfer or swimmer’s body. I wanted more.

  As he kissed me, I let my hands slide around his waist. When he
climbed over me in the back of the car, laying me back down as he kissed me and then slid to rest on one elbow at my side, I let my hands grasp him through his shorts.

  “Ah, fuck,” he hissed. “I’ve been imagining you doing that for hours.”

  I squeezed playfully, grinning up at him, and watched his eyes practically roll back in his head.

  Then I let go, scooting over to one side to give him room to lay on his back, and we switched roles. I slid his shorts off him, stepping out of the back of the car to remove them completely, and for a minute I just stood there, slightly in awe of the way his long thick cock jutted directly upward, defying gravity. The warm sea breeze blew around me, gulls called overhead, and life felt pretty much perfect.

  “Impressive,” I whispered as I climbed back up his body, letting my hands slip along his muscled thighs until they wrapped themselves around the silky hot flesh. I’d thought a hand job might be the thing, but for the first time in my life, I couldn’t resist bending down and adding my tongue and lips to the mix. I’d done it before, don’t get me wrong—I’d just never really wanted to do it, never felt so interested in putting it all in my mouth and sucking.

  Noah seemed to agree with my choice. When my tongue brushed the underside of his crown, he let out something like “Oh God,” but it was kind of gurgled and strained. I glanced up to make sure he was okay, and he gave me a dazed smile and pushed his hands into my hair, which had fallen out of the bun.

  I worked his cock with my mouth, my hands, my tongue, until his whole body was shaking and my eyes were watering from taking him so far down my throat I could barely breathe. When I swallowed around him, he cursed impressively, and a final soft squeeze of his balls made him go rigid as his release pumped out of him. It was salty and hot, not much different from the rest of his skin after stepping out of the Pacific. I slid back up next to him, keeping a hand on his cock as I licked the hot salty taste of the day from his stomach, his chest.