“Jeremy didn’t do it?” That guy just gets lower in my estimation every time she tells me something new. Of course he didn’t. But I’d bet dollars to donuts, he was all about the blowjobs. Selfish fucker.
“I think he would have if I’d wanted to, but I was shy. Embarrassed.”
She was so damn young. And then she was pregnant.
“And none of the guys since?”
A shrug.
Jesus.
The bluest eyes meet mine. “Rux, I’ve only been with two other guys besides you and both were… Look, I haven’t done most things.”
My muscles start to lock. “I hate Jeremy.”
She levels me with a look. “Don’t. He gave me Matty, and I wouldn’t trade that little boy for anything. Yeah, my life changed a lot when I got pregnant. And I haven’t done as many things as most women my age. But I have so much. I know I’m the lucky one.”
Christ, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside. And that’s saying a lot.
I hate it that Cammy hasn’t had this. That even now when I’m offering it, she’s too uncertain to accept.
“Here’s the thing, Sunshine,” I say, going back to my elbows so my body is resting between her legs as I look up into her face. “I think you might like it. A lot. In fact, I’m pretty sure if you let me try it, you might find that you like it so very much you’ll be begging me to go down on you every time we’re alone.”
She rolls her eyes, but that hint of a smile is back on her lips, so I’ll take it. “That confident, are you?”
“Oh yeah.” And then some.
“Rux, I just—”
“Do you trust me?”
She lets out a huff of a breath, because she knows I have her. She trusts me more than any other guy she knows.
“You know I do. More than anyone, it’s just—”
When she doesn’t continue, I nudge. “Baby, aren’t you curious what all the fuss is about? I mean, you’ve got girlfriends and I’m pretty sure the lot of you overshare almost as much as me. Give me a taste, and then you decide what you want.”
“I’m nervous,” she whispers, and my heart breaks right there.
“Have I done anything you didn’t like?”
“No.”
“Just a taste, Sunshine.” I’m dropping kisses across her belly, swirling my tongue around those sexy hollows below her hip bones. “Say yes.”
“Yes,” she whispers, her voice shaky.
Taking her hands in mine, I drop a kiss to each palm and then guide them to my hair, before edging back. “You’re going to want to hold on.”
Her eyes go wide, but she does what I ask, sliding her fingers into my hair and gently rubbing my head as I begin to kiss her hips and thighs.
I pull one leg over my shoulder and then the other, watching her face the whole time. She’s nervous, but I want her to know how good I can make her feel. And I don’t want her to feel like she’s missed out on anything.
I start slow, pretty confident I’m going to have all the time I want once she gets past the initial insecurities.
Using my nose, I brush along the slickness of her soft lips, one side and then the other, listening to how her breath catches and gauging the tension in her legs, how her hands stop moving altogether once I touch her. I kiss that tender, sweet skin, softly suckling here and there, flicking my tongue once, twice. Getting her used to where I am before I take what I want… A long, leisurely lick through the very center of her, ending at her clit.
“Fuck,” I groan, tasting her on my tongue. “Baby, you’re so sweet.” Another slow lick, because I can’t help myself. “So good.”
Her fingers curl in my hair and another breath shudders out of her. I meet her eyes from across the expanse of her body. “Okay?”
She nods, the motion jerky and tense, her eyes hazed with need.
“Good, because I can’t get enough.” And then I sink into it, making out with her pussy the way I’ve fantasized. Deep, openmouthed kisses with tongue and teeth, her hands fisting in my hair, her hips rocking up as she begs me with her body for more. Unintelligible sounds of pleasure, hers and mine, filling the room around us.
Cupping her ass in my hands, I lift her into my kiss, bury my tongue inside and groan at the feel of her clamping down.
“Rux, oh God, please, please… please.”
She’s close, and I’m devouring her like a savage now. I can’t get enough of her taste, those broken cries, and the way she’s let go for me completely.
I want to give her what no one else ever has, I want to be the one who changes how she thinks about this kind of sex. I want to be the one she can’t get enough of. The one she can’t let go. The one who makes her come so hard, she can’t remember any other man ever getting her there but me.
“Rux!” Her thighs start to jerk as her back bows, pushing her against my mouth as she comes, writhing and panting, and it’s taking everything I’ve got not to come against her sheets. But I want to be inside her. I want to push her over the edge again.
I keep making love to her with my mouth until she goes limp beneath me, then kiss her inner thighs before easing them from my shoulders so I can crawl up her body. Her hands are still in my hair and she pulls me in for a kiss that goes on and on. I should be frantic by now, breaking records getting a rubber on, but this feels like everything.
It’s hot as fuck that she let me into her mouth with the taste of her still coating my tongue. And that little moan at the first tentative brush, then her bolder curl and slide as our mouths fuse, becoming one, has the primitive part of me hammering the cage I keep it in with one word over and over and over.
Mine.
Yeah, I could hold on to this kiss forever. I could hold on to her longer than that.
But I won’t because she deserves more.
Chapter 14
Cammy
“Seriously, what’s with all the recycling?” Julia asks, looking back at me over her shoulder after trying to stuff a gum wrapper in the bin overflowing with Prime packaging beneath the sink.
I can feel the heat pushing into my cheeks as I peer around the doorway to make sure Matty’s not in the living room. Satisfied the coast is clear, I answer, “Rux. He’s been sending me little things here and there, and this week with him on the road, maybe he’s gone a little overboard.”
Her brow hikes.
“It’s not like that,” I assure, knowing she’s thinking back to when she and Greg were new, and he sent her a vibrator.
“What’s he sending then?”
Another quick look and seeing that Matty is still safely occupied in his room, I open the button on my jeans and inch them down just enough to show her the panties he sent yesterday.
“Oh my God, he’s sending you lingerie?” Then her eyes pop wide. “Wait, is that a picture of a muffin?”
“Yeah, with a little bite taken out of it. Seriously, it’s so cute in this dirty Rux kind of way.”
“Unconventional romantic, huh?”
That he is. And sweet and sexy and such a freaking amazing human being, I’m having to remind myself more and more that this thing with him isn’t forever. The friendship is. But it’s my access to this other side of him that buys me panties with a picture of his favorite snack on them that’s got a ticking clock on it.
“So... are these the only panties or are those other packages from pairs with pictures of... ribs and suckers on them too?”
“There’s a pair with a dandelion and the words ‘blow me’. And—” I think about the ones from Valentine’s Day that say, ‘Rux, licked it first, so it’s his’ and decide against sharing the specifics. “There are a bunch. They’re all kind of a blend of cute and sexy. And super comfy. No thongs.”
“Really? I would have thought he’d be a thong guy.”
“Me too, actually, and maybe he was with the other women he’s been with. But with me, it’s like he only buys me stuff that fits exactly
who I am.”
Julia’s smile gets a little wobbly and she takes a deep breath. “Because you’re everything he wants, just the way you are.”
I nod, my smile starting to stretch out of control. For what we have now, yeah.
“So you just wear his panties and then... tell him about them when he calls?”
I’m suddenly completely engrossed in wiping up a bit of nothing from the counter. Fiddling with the cooking utensils in the pitcher by the range.
“Cammy,” she whisper-gasps, and then she’s the one rushing to the doorway to check that the coast is clear. “Spill!”
“Okay, okay, I don’t just tell him about them. I might take a picture for him.” Or even indulge in a video call, though up until last night, they hadn’t escalated quite so intensely.
“You dirty girl!”
That’s what he said. But with more reverence and appreciation than my sister’s delighted shock.
“So, that’s kind of a big deal. Or maybe it isn’t,” she hedges, cocking her head. “It would be for me.”
“It was for me too.” I move to the table where we used to spend every night catching up when she still lived here. Sliding into my chair, I run my hand over the grain of the table. “I mean, I never would have done that with any of the other guys I dated.” I wouldn’t have even been tempted. “But this is Rux, and I trust him.”
He hadn’t even asked me to send that first picture. He’d just been giving me that deep rumbling moan, talking about how hard it got him knowing I was wearing the panties he sent me. Imagining them on me.
I liked hearing this big, hot hockey stud with so much experience in his past getting all worked up because of me. And I’d just done it. Taken the sexy selfie and sent it to him, never doubting that it would be safe in his hands.
Julia slides into the chair across from mine. “Does this mean things are maybe getting more serious… in a real way between you?”
“You know how you always said if a guy says he isn’t good enough… I should believe him?”
“Yeah,” she says warily. “But—”
“Julia, he doesn’t want kids. And he told me himself, when it comes to relationships, he’s not someone I could count on and he’d never want to let me down like that.”
Her shoulders sag as she leans back in her chair. “I guess that kind of straightforward warning would be pretty hard to ignore.”
I nod, but I don’t mention that there are times, when I’m tucked into Rux’s arms while we watch some docuseries late at night, that it’s easier to forget than she’d think. And when that happens, when for just a few moments, I stop reminding myself that this thing between us won’t last, it feels like I could be happy forever.
“It wouldn’t be fair to either of us, you know? What makes this so good, so safe, is that both of us know who we are on a fundamental level to the other.”
“Friends.”
“Friends.” The closest of friends, having the kind of fun I would never be able to have with someone who wasn’t Rux. “It’s enough.”
Rux
Something’s off tonight. The locker room talk around me is more subdued than usual. Conversations happening around me in voices lower than you generally hear before a game and it’s screwing with my mojo. I try rousing the guys with some tunes and trash talk, but it doesn’t work and shit—I need to get my head in the right place before hitting the ice.
Checking the clock, I’ve still got a few minutes. I pull out my phone to call Cammy—not check out the picture she sent me last night. I’m not gonna look. That picture was hot enough to melt the ice in the arena, and no way I’m opening it with the guys from the team everywhere.
Besides, O’Brian’s the guy who gets wood in the locker room thinking about his girl. Not me.
Fine, not that I’ve been busted for anyway, and I’d like to keep it that way.
Nah, tonight I just want to talk to her. Hear her voice. Find out what she and Matty are doing while I’m waiting to play. I want to hear whether she finished the project she’s been working on for her boss at the hospital and if the shoes she ordered from Zappos were as cute as she thought they would be and what the kitchen looked like after Matty made spinach shakes for breakfast.
I want that grounding sound of her voice and her laughter soothing my soul.
Only when I head out of the locker room trying to find a spot where I’ve maybe got a chance at a little privacy, my call goes straight to voicemail.
I text her instead, telling her I’ll talk to her later.
That I miss her.
Yeah, I’m a softy. Big surprise.
When I look up, Bowie and Kellog are waving me over from where they’re parked at one of those folding tables set up for cards. I hold out my fist and bump with both the D-men, dropping into the open seat.
It’s Kellog who asks, “You hear about Baxter?”
Pretty sure we all know what’s coming, but, “Nah, man. What’d you hear?”
He leans in, looking around before answering. “I heard they’re making an announcement after the game. He’s out.”
It feels like I just took a puck to the gut. I knew it was coming. But not tonight.
Though maybe I should have. I had a missed call from Greg this afternoon, but couldn’t get a hold of him when I called back.
The guys nod, their faces drawn. This is what’s off tonight. The weird vibe I was getting in the locker room. The reason the coaching staff has been huddled up all day.
“How’d you hear?”
“Bowie heard it from Static, who got it from that reporter he was banging last year.”
“Christ.”
They nod, both looking disheartened. And I get it. It sucks losing a player so central to the team. Losing our captain.
I leave the guys to it and try Baxter again. Voicemail. I call Julia. The same.
And then Cammy even though I already called. But this time, she picks up, sounding breathless and happy. “Ooh I thought I wasn’t going to get to talk to you again until after the game!”
“Yeah, I had a minute and figured I’d give it another try.”
There’s a beat of silence and then, “Rux, is everything okay?”
I close my eyes and run my hand back over my hair. Of course she’d be able to tell.
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just—” I start to ask if she’s heard anything from Julia about tonight, but I know better. And hell, I don’t really want to explain. It will be out in a few hours and she’ll see it then. So instead I ask for what I needed earlier. “Sunshine, tell me about your day.”
Chapter 15
Rux
The game was fucked.
That news about Baxter getting out beforehand was bullshit. The whole team was off. Out of sync. Late to pass. Missing opportunities we shouldn’t have missed. Vassar, who usually plays like a beast, looked like he just woke up. Popov almost scored on us. If it wasn’t for Diesel pulling out a last-minute save, we would have been the laughingstock of the league. And me? Hell.
Three trips to the sin bin, zero points. It was rough. Coach looked like he was going to have an aneurysm. And after that dumpster fire of a game, they made the announcement. Baxter came down to the press room from wherever he’d been watching from. Julia stood off to the side. And we watched as he gave an emotional speech about what playing for this team meant to him. About how his life had been about hockey for as long as he could remember. He talked about injuries and overcoming odds and then he talked about the concussions.
He talked about making the hardest choice of his life, and looking forward to finding out what was next.
By the end, Coach looked like he was about to spring a leak, and truth, I got a little choked up myself.
I knew it was coming.
Or at least I’d been telling myself I had. Maybe that wasn’t quite true though, because watching Greg shake hands with the GM and take a deep breath before giving the press a final wave—fuck.
On the way o
ut, he walked over and pulled me in for a solid hug.
And then he and Julia walked out together, and I felt… deflated.
I didn’t call Cammy after, just got my shit together, climbed into my car and headed to her place. I like being alone with Cammy, but most of the time I’m a little bummed I don’t get to see Matty after my games. Tonight though, I’m glad the little guy doesn’t have to see me when I walk in through her front door and straight into Cammy’s arms. She’s so much smaller than I am but damn, the girl knows how to hug. She peers up at me and I can see her eyes are a little red.
“That was tough,” she says against my chest. “Did you know when I talked to you? Is that what was wrong?”
I take a deep breath of her hair and neck, soaking in that warm vanilla scent of her. “I heard a rumor. Didn’t know if it was legit, but I had a feeling.”
“Greg didn’t talk to you?”
I tell her about the missed call and not being able to connect with him before the game. That I’d known what was coming for months.
“But it’s not really the same as having it actually happen,” she says, understanding in her eyes.
Reluctantly drawing back, I run a hand over my face. “No, it’s not.”
My legs feel like lead as she pulls me over to the couch. When we sit, she’s too far away, and I manhandle her some, scooping her into my lap to hold her close.
This is what I need.
I lean back and she tucks her head against my shoulder.
“You okay?” The question is soft, gentle like the woman asking it.
“I’m freaking out, Cammy,” I admit into the quiet of her apartment. And when her palm flattens against my chest, I cover it with my own. “Don’t think I told you, but before I started playing with Greg, I was headed back to the farm team.” Hell, I’m not sure they would have even let me play at that point. I take a heavy breath, the past weighing on me like it hasn’t for years. “I was losing everything.”
DIRTY REBOUND Page 10