Danica’s back was to the entrance, so Dex leaned forward to murmur, “Want to know what your parents would say if they knew I was wining and dining you?”
“Um, no, actually, I don’t. Good news—they don’t suspect I’m having frequent filthy sex with you.”
“Yeah. Good news.”
If she heard the sardonic twinge in his voice, she didn’t show it. Under the table her foot roamed up his leg to rest on his crotch. “I’d rather know what you would say if I—”
Damn…hold that thought. “Marshall and Tem are walking this way.”
Danica recoiled in time to banish the naughtiness from her expression and greet her parents with an offer to sit at the table. The offer was moot, because Marshall was already gesturing for her to sit beside Dex so that he and his wife could occupy the opposite side of the table.
Then they were facing off again, as they had done at Slayers Club Lounge last month. Except this time Danica was on his side. It made more of a difference than it should. She meant more to him than she should. But it was his own fault that he’d allowed her to unlock his heart.
“Harper, I’ve been meaning to call you in for a word,” Marshall said, folding his hulking frame into the seat his daughter relinquished.
“The league and the feds may be off my ass, but I’m still not passing out names—”
The man’s bark of laughter interrupted him. “The future of our ball club is most important to my wife and me. We never planned to wait until the eleventh hour for you to cooperate. Of course, the cooperation would’ve made things easier on the men we cleared off the team who didn’t have involvement with the shit storm Al Franco created, but folks say it’s better to be safe than sorry. Especially with money and the name Blue on the line.”
“Then why a word with him, Pop?” Danica asked. “I cleaned the roster just as you and Ma instructed me to do. Now the trade deadline can come and go, and you can both let Dex move on with his career.”
Instinctively, Dex’s hand went to her knee. Barely even moving, she draped her hand over his, drawing it up her thigh to the lacy edge of her stocking. Then she just held him there, captured between the soft flesh of her thigh and the strength of her palm.
“Our Danica takes everything seriously. Her clients. The kids at Faith House. You. That’s the lawyer in her,” Tem said mildly. “Dex, my husband and I simply want to acknowledge that we misjudged your commitment to this game. We know that the next team to sign you up will have made a smart acquisition.”
That Mona Lisa smirk created a kaleidoscope of unspoken messages that Dex didn’t want to deal with now. There was already speculation that his name had come up in connection with a few possibly interested teams, but as his agent, Shaw, was always quick to remind him, an unsigned deal wasn’t a deal at all.
“I appreciate that,” Dex replied. “Whatever good comes next is a debt I’ll owe to Danica. People don’t see how damn fortunate they are to have her on their side. I was one of them. But she showed me who she really is, who I really am.”
Her sidelong glance was awash in joy.
“Danica has many friends.” Tem twisted around the half-empty bottle of wine to read the label. “Marshall and I would stay and give a toast to her dedication to these…projects…that she takes on. But we have a business dinner. In fact, Danica, join us.”
“Can’t, Ma. I have a few things to finish up with Dex.”
“Then I will call you later. Answer the phone, Danica.” Tem twirled off her chair, and her husband followed her deeper into the ritzy dining room.
“There’s something frosty about Tem tonight,” Dex said to Danica.
“Tem is frosty. She and Pop think I’m an easy study. An open book.”
“That’s what you’ve been letting them think.”
“Always seemed easier that way, the best way to get what I want. Adapting to what they want me to do or say or be. Guess manipulation’s been my crutch for so long that I can’t make a clean break.”
“You don’t manipulate when you’re caught off guard, Danica.”
“Shh,” she whispered playfully. “That’s our secret.”
You mean I’m your secret. Because you’re the one with everything left to lose.
For that reason, for her, he was willing to play the role she’d given him, while he waited for another NFL franchise in another city to give him a reason to let her go.
*
“Dex Harper’s changed. He’s not his usual angry self with reporters and paparazzi. What did you do to make him cooperate with the press?”
Danica glanced at her phone, puzzled at the first words out of her mother’s mouth after the heavy question “Are you alone?”
Without exactly lying, Danica had confirmed she was alone—at that moment Dex was in his living room and she was resting against the console table that was in the next room.
She, naturally, didn’t add that she was in a gorgeous house on a thickly wooded lot that offered the most authentic interpretation of autumn she’d ever happened upon in Las Vegas. Or that the property belonged to last season’s hottest NFL quarterback, and she was a solid five minutes away from letting him unzip her dress and inhibitions.
Tem’s next question made her wish that she’d powered off the phone or left it in her Boxster so she wouldn’t have to think about it. But Tem had sounded strangely somber when she’d said to Danica in the restaurant, “Answer the phone.”
“To go from lawless to a charmer in only weeks is a complete one-eighty. I’ll ask again. What did you do to make Dex Harper start cooperating with the press?”
Oh, just bartered my heart. Whatever it takes, right? If only it were as simple as that. “Convinced him.”
“Your father and I have sources that tell us his tide’s about to turn. Your…efforts…are about to pay off.”
“That’s what I was hoping for.”
“Is it, Danica?”
Tem mercifully didn’t dawdle on the line for a reaction. She hung up, and Danica flipped the phone over and over in her hands.
Was this what she’d been hoping for? She and Dex had come together to get him onto another NFL team this season. If it happened, the easiest thing to do would be to let him go.
After all, he didn’t know that she’d broken her most important rule by falling in love with him. She’d never said the words, and likely never would. It was too big of a chance to take. Perhaps he didn’t feel the same way, and she’d pegged him wrong the way she had Marion. Maybe he’d decide she was too challenging to keep in his life, the way Ollie had after only a few dates.
What if Dex had healed her heart only to break it all over again?
Was he too unpredictable to trust?
“Dex,” she said, setting aside the phone and retrieving his chessboard from a nearby table. “Up to taking me on?”
He rose from the sofa to effortlessly cart the coffee table out of the way. “Who told you I was a chess player?”
“Your Slayers file. It’s listed as a hobby.” Danica set up the game on the floor, observing the play of muscle on his form as he sank down across from her on the high-twisted rug.
“Why do I feel like this is going to decide something, Danica?”
Because it is. I don’t know any other way to trust what I’m feeling.
They played, each move more strategic than the last. And in what seemed simultaneously like a blink and a thousand years, Danica found herself stuck with nowhere to move her rook without inviting defeat. “You beat me.”
“The victory’s not official until I say checkmate.”
“Dex, it’s done. You outmatched me.”
Danica made her final move, and he whispered, “Checkmate.”
She stuck out her hand for a sportsmanlike shake.
“What was on the line with that game, Danica?”
“Us.” She got to her feet. “I can’t predict you, so it wouldn’t be smart to trust—”
Dex was in front of her before she could gra
b her purse from where she’d dropped it on the sofa. His size, his strength, the soul that was revealed in his blazing eyes, stole her breath. “A damn chess game doesn’t factor into us. I defeated you, but I can’t predict what you’ll do, Danica. Sometimes it’s not all about knowing what’s going to happen next. It’s about believing. In words. Or a touch. Or your instincts.”
“My instincts have been wrong before.”
“Then believe what I say. Believe what you feel when I touch you, Danica.” Dex raised her hands to his mouth, and watching her face, he pressed a slow, openmouthed kiss on her palm. “Quit running. Playing games and setting rules can’t protect you.”
Danica pulled back her hands and went for her purse. But she didn’t throw the strap over her shoulder and walk out. She reached in and drew out the pink-cellophane-wrapped pair of sex dice—the last of the party favors from her friend’s bachelorette party.
They’d used the entire travel-sized bottle of massage oil during “I’m sorry” sex earlier. “The plan was to use everything in the bag,” she said. “This is all that’s left.”
Dex unwrapped the dice and rolled each die to see the possibilities. “What I want to do isn’t on these dice. And we don’t need more games….”
He reached for her, and they tumbled onto the floor. Their wild embrace came to an abrupt end when she bumped a chess piece with her elbow. He shoved the board off the rug, and the pieces hit the hardwood with a round of clacking sounds.
If this was the end of the road, she wanted to take him greedily, enjoy him selfishly.
With her breath shallow, Danica stared as he peeled off his clothes, revealing a body as hard and precisely cut as stone. She’d loved his body even before she had fantasized about being bold enough to touch him.
She reached for his hands, bringing him back down onto the floor. Hovering over him, she took inventory with her lips, kissing his biceps, his pecs, his abs, his pelvic bones. Lightly she ran her nails over the curling hair at his crotch, and then she welcomed him into her mouth. Each moment brought him deeper; each moan made her wetter. The memory of his taste and how his flesh responded to her touch was what she wanted to take away.
So she took. Refusing to be denied when he tried to slip from her mouth, she gave him a meaningful look, and with tongue and heat and teeth and lips, she pulled from him rapture that had him fisting her hair, groaning roughly and rocking her entire being with his trembles.
“Damn. Damn, you’re killing me, Danica.”
I’m loving you. I love you. I want to trust that you won’t hurt me. But she couldn’t seem to say those words. She slithered up his sweat-slicked form as he stripped her.
“You’re naked…” Turning her onto her back, he stroked his cock, then lifted her leg to nip the tender inside of her thigh. “Now be real with me. I deserve that.”
It was no secret that she cared about him as a friend. She knew that he appreciated her, trusted her and was addicted to the passion they brought out in each other.
But to tell him she loved him would be a mistake, wouldn’t it?
“No talking. Just touching,” she said.
“Is that a rule?”
“For tonight, yeah, it is.”
Relenting with a clipped incline of his head, as if to say, As you wish, then, he spread her thighs, her folds, and then he suckled her flesh into his mouth.
Danica’s ears rang under the attack of her own cries. She couldn’t twist away from the intensity, couldn’t hide from the thrash of lust and love. She bowed up to watch, only to throw her head back as the first orgasm vibrated through her. The next he lured from her with a single deep thrust.
She was so sensitive to him, so far gone already…and yet he wanted more.
Pulling her to her feet, he stared into her face. “I’m going to break that rule, Danica.” He bent to kiss her forehead, even though sweat caused her wispy bangs to stick to her skin. “I love you. Now I know what it’s like to say that—to even have a reason to.”
“Dex…”
“It doesn’t have to change our lives.”
Except it freaking absolutely did. Because Danica knew physically, emotionally, spiritually and every other possible way that it was true. He’d never lied to her.
His mouth met hers. “You said you didn’t know if I liked you. I’m going to take the guess out of that. I do like you.”
Danica grinned. “I like you, too.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” She turned slowly to face the side of the sofa. Gripping the sofa’s arm, she pushed her booty to his crotch. Gyrating her hips, she bounced against him. She felt his teeth grazing her shoulder blade, and then his hands were on her hips.
“Danica, are you sure this is what you want?”
“I’m sure.”
“I won’t hurt you,” he promised from behind her.
“I believe you, Dex.” And as he came to her, holding her and kissing her and gently taking what she offered, she gave him something she’d given no other man: herself, completely.
*
Of his own volition, Marion checked up on Danica. Getting in her face was one way to do it, but that had proven to be a failing approach. So he would tap another source for the information he wanted.
He swaggered into the visitors’ wing of the Silver Hills Estates senior-living compound, smoothing a hand over his Armani necktie as he scanned the Wall of Friends photo collection in the lobby.
The woman he waited for was smiling brilliantly back at him from a photograph. People called her type quirky, but to a man whose family made its own luck and whose see-it-to-believe-it mentality had paved the way for all his successes, she was weird.
Not to say he didn’t have love for her. In spite of her eccentricities, she was trustworthy. That trustworthiness was what comforted him. She had what he wanted.
The nameplate beneath it had been updated: Veda Smart-Corrine.
He gave a cursory look at the rest of the images, tensing when he saw Danica’s photo under the Benefactor Buddies section. She had a crinkly-eyed smile with a little-bit-naughty edge to her mouth. Beauty and sex appeal and sweetness and toughness combined. This photo had been updated, too, he realized. This had been taken after she’d started wearing bangs, after their divorce and even after she’d started to change.
A few days ago she’d invited him to the mansion, the place that held all of their history, and had offered to give him the keys to the house.
Offered because he’d refused to take the keys or listen to her crazy talk about the place being haunted. Not with that woo-woo negative-energy shit her friend believed in, but memories. A legal split wasn’t enough, and she wanted to give him back what she’d claimed had never belonged to her.
Marion had to know if getting rid of the house was just Danica’s angry reaction to the crap he’d let her parents drag him into.
About ten minutes after the Silver Hills Estates receptionist paged her, Veda strolled into the lobby and escorted him to a main-floor office that looked as though all it was missing was a crystal ball and a cashbox.
“Did you and Mekhi get the wedding gift I sent?” he said, kissing her cheek, not directly saying he didn’t appreciate being slighted out of an invitation to the event.
“We did. Thanks. Platinum dinnerware is really generous, Marion.” Veda went to a fancy cage in the corner of the room and extracted a white rabbit with a gray front paw.
At his puzzled frown, she kissed the rabbit’s twitching nose. “This is Moon. I found her not too long ago, and couldn’t let her go. Spending time with her is rather comforting to our residents. Fate at work, huh?”
Marion only continued to frown.
“About the dinnerware,” she said after a span of silence. “I don’t know if we should keep an extravagant gift like that.”
“Keep it. It doesn’t seem right that when people get divorced they have to divide their friends like assets.”
“I’m Danica’s closest friend, so I
know that you were doing other women behind her back.” Veda shrugged, cuddling the damn rabbit as she sat at her desk. “Plus, I’ve always had the impression that you only tolerate me.”
“Danica tried to give me the keys to the house. She said it’s ‘haunted.’ What have you been filling her head with, Veda?”
“Notions that she should be happy. She hasn’t been happy living in that house. Marion, she’s moving on, that’s all.”
“Moving on?” Marion eased a hip onto the corner of her desk. “To what?”
“To the life she wants to live.” She held the rabbit with one hand and patted his thigh with the other. “We can’t all change and expect her to stay the same. She’s finding out who she is and who she wants to be with. Right under our noses, Danica fell in love with someone who’s a better man because he let her into his life.”
Marion searched her face. “Damn…that quarterback. Dex Harper.”
“Don’t get in the way. It’s okay to let her go now, Marion. It’s okay for you to take your life off pause, too. That’s why you’re here—to find validation.” Veda got up, rifled through a bowl of crystals and held one toward him. “Rhodonite, for forgiveness and banishing fear. It’ll give you the courage to let Danica and yourself move on.”
“I don’t go for that woo-woo stuff, Veda. As for courage, I already have it.”
Veda smiled, satisfied. “Then what are you still doing here?”
Chapter 14
Marshall and Tem didn’t call an eight-o’clock meeting unless there was an urgent development that required a quick decision that affected the franchise.
Pumped with adrenaline, Danica marched in her business suit and bustier blouse to the operations staff conference room. A secretary opened the doors for her, unveiling the long mahogany table, tall chairs and an oversized replica of the Las Vegas Slayers logo that glowed beneath track lighting.
Colleagues toting thermoses, Starbucks cups, pastries and electronic tablets meandered about. Lilith, settled in next to the administration coordinator, Antoine Isaiah, waved Danica over to the vacant seat beside her. In front of her were the remnants of some sort of flaky pastry and an empty to-go cup that still held the aroma of a vanilla latte.
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