Hate to Love You

by Isabelle Richards

  “No way.” Chase stuffs the dice and the baggie with the pie pieces in his pocket. “We’ve got baseballs, softballs, and a scale. I’m going to prove that card is wrong, and you’re going to give me that pie.” He grabs the lantern and takes off toward the garage.

  “Like hell you are!” I sprint after him through the dark. I know this house well, but I still end up clipping my legs on furniture. “Grow up and bring back the dice so I can finish whooping your ass.”

  “Only if you pry them out of my cold dead hands!”

  The garage door slams. When I make it to the garage, my shin is smarting something fierce. That bruise’ll look fabulous on TV during the Hong Kong Classic next week. He’s turned the lantern off, and the place is pitch black.

  “Get your ass out here and surrender the dice before I kill myself hunting you down.”

  “Admit that I’m right.” His voice echoes, making it hard for me to tell exactly where he is in the four-car garage.

  I inch forward with my hands slightly out in front of me. “Nope. Man up and accept that you’re wrong.”

  I hear him moving, stalking me like prey. Before I know what’s happening, he grabs my hands and pushes me back against the wall, pinning my hands above my head. He kisses me. Not a nice, sweet, “I’ve barely been able to touch you in weeks” kiss, but a fierce, angry, “How dare you keep me from winning” kiss. Its sends tremors through my body, sparking all those feelings I’m forced to repress while I’m on the road. A quiet moan escapes me.

  He pulls back and tightens his grip on my hands. “Admit that I’m right.”

  I kick and nail him behind his knee, forcing it to buckle. He relaxes his grip on my hands, and I spin him around to push him against the wall.

  “When hell freezes over,” I say before kissing him so hard, his head smacks against the wall.

  If it hurt him, he doesn’t let on. My hands press on his chest to maintain my control. His pecs have become more defined from all the summer work-outs. I can’t help but trace from his chest to his abs, feeling the hard contours of his well-sculpted body. Knowing I’m distracted, he flips me around. We knock over a shelf, and the sound of golf balls scattering on concrete echoes through the garage.

  “Tsk, tsk. You should know what happens if you take your eye off the ball.” He blows on my neck, driving me crazy. “Now just admit that I’m right, and I promise I’ll make it worth your while.” His right hand caresses my chin before sliding down my throat and between my breasts. He unclasps my front-closure bra and teases my nipples. “You know you want to.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  He kisses me again, pushing me into the shelf and causing more things to fall. “You love it.”

  He’s right. I do.

  He draws figure eights on the inside of my thigh, creeping higher and higher with each cycle. “Do you know how hard it’s been to keep my hands off you all fucking night?”

  I push my pelvis into his. “Pretty damn hard, it seems,” I whisper before running my tongue down his neck. I palm him through his jeans. “You going to give up and admit that I’m right?” At this point, I’m so flustered that I can’t even recall what sparked our argument, but I’m certainly not going to let it go.

  I feel him continue to harden. He gasps when I grab his belt. I pause, waiting for him to concede.

  “No fucking way,” he replies.

  I take my hands away, and he whimpers.

  Charlie pounds on the door. “Come on, guys, seriously. It’s just a freaking board game.”

  He pulls my panties down, and they puddle around my ankles. “You think she’s coming in here?” He sounds as though he doesn’t give a damn one way or the other.

  I kick them aside. “It’s a black out. Even if she comes in, she won’t see anything. Isn’t the risk half the fun?”

  He slides a finger inside me. One finger quickly becomes two, and I moan louder than I should. It’s been far too long, and he feels way too good to stay quiet. He kisses me to stifle the sound.

  “Just let them battle it out themselves,” Spencer tells Charlie. “You know it’s a waste of time trying to referee them. If we go in there, we’ll just get something thrown at us. Give them an hour. At least.”

  Chase plunges his fingers deep inside me, making my body come alive. “If you’re not quiet, they’ll burst in here thinking I’m hurting you, and then playtime will be over.”

  “If we’re too quiet, they’ll worry we killed each other. Now enough with the fucking foreplay.” I unbuckle his belt, pull open his button fly, and wrap my legs around his waist.

  He pushes my legs down from around his waist and spins me to face the wall. He pins my hands against the wall with one hand, puts his other hand on my shoulder, and slams into me. I scream with pleasure.

  “You said something about me always being behind you,” he says. “Let me remind you exactly how much you like it when I’m behind you.”

  “You guys okay in there?” Charlie asks. “Seriously, I don’t want to take anyone to the ER tonight.”

  I have to bite my knuckle to keep from screaming again. It’s so damn cliché, but he feels as though he was made to fit my body. He’s mastered the art of bringing me to ecstasy, knowing just how hard, how fast, how deep to go. The frenzied passion between us makes it deliciously exhilarating. As the wave of pleasure consumes me, everything else in my body ceases. I can’t think. I can barely breathe. I swear my heart stops beating. If he weren’t holding me up, I’d collapse. The only thing that exists is the rapture overtaking my body.

  He holds me close as he starts to come down. Our frantic breathing slowly settles.

  “I don’t want to let go,” he whispers. “Once I do, we have to go back to reality.” He places delicate kisses down my neck and tightens our embrace. “This is my favorite place in the world, and I never want to leave.”

  I hear Charlie and Spencer debating checking on us. “I think that’s our cue.”

  He places one last kiss on my collarbone. “Looks like it.” He pulls away and pulls up his pants. He turns me to face him and places a chaste kiss on my lips. “I love you. This isn’t how I wanted it. I had much better, more drawn-out plans for us.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” I say as I clasp my bra. “That may have been fast, but you rocked my world. My legs are still Jell-O.”

  He runs hi thumb across my jawline. “I wish it weren’t this way.”

  “It’s the only way,” I say before kissing him again. “For now anyway.” That was wonderful. A much-needed scratch to a burning itch. But instead of feeling satiated, I just yearn for more. “If I drive back to my condo, will I see you tonight?”

  He buttons his fly and buckles his belt. “Can’t. Your dad called a five a.m. practice. If I go home with you, we won’t even be asleep by five.”

  Chase turns on the lantern, and we clean up the mess we made. There’re golf balls, baseballs, and soccer balls everywhere.

  I groan. “If I stay at Daddy’s house, he’ll make me go and run the stadium with the team before I fly to Hong Kong. But then again, I always beat you. That’s worth getting up at dawn for.”

  He tosses the baseballs into the bucket. “Ha, I can’t believe you haven’t figured that one out yet.”

  “What?”

  “If I run behind you, I get to check out your ass the whole time. It’s very good motivation. Plus, if I’m not directly behind you, I have to deal with my whole team checking out your ass, and that’s not going to happen. They all lust after you enough as it is.”

  I roll my eyes. “Whatever. I think that’s just a convenient excuse to cover up the fact that I’m faster and have more endurance than you.”

  He pulls me into his arm and dips me. “Are you questioning my endurance? If you are, I’ll prove you wrong right here, right now.”

  “I could stay at Daddy’s, and you could sneak in my room and test out that endurance.”

  “Hell fucking no. That man’s already making m
e run the stadium at the crack of dawn, and he loves me. I can’t imagine what he’d do if he caught me in your room.”

  Spencer pounds on the door. “Come on, guys, it’s just a game. It’s time to let it go. There’s no ventilation in there. Charlie’s worried you’re going to suffocate.”

  “We’re at a ceasefire. Ari just has to clean up the mess she made,” Chase shouts. He kisses my shoulder. “We’d better get out there.” He picks my panties off the floor and hands them to me. “You might want these. That skirt is way too short to hide going commando.”

  If only he could find a paper towel or something. The downside of sex in a garage is the limited clean-up materials. I take my panties and shimmy into them. “Thanks. Oh, we should figure out who won.”

  “Me, of course. You know that card was wrong.”

  I wink. “Yeah, it is, but it got us to the garage.”

  Just as he’s about to answer, the power turns on. “Fine, but I win next time.”

  Chapter Twenty- Seven

  Chase

  If I ever get sick of playing ball, I think I could be a deep sea fisherman. This is a slice of heaven. Aiden, and Pop and I are spending five days off the coast of Cabo doing nothing but drinking and fishing. Crystal-clear skies and no clouds in sight. No wedding talk and no women. I don’t even care if I catch anything. No, that’s bullshit. I care, and I’ll catch the biggest fish of the trip. Tigers don’t change their stripes.

  I cast my line and set my pole. “Aid, this was the best idea. Thanks for chartering the ship and getting it all together.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” he replies. “I was down this way anyway. Seemed foolish to pass up the chance.”

  I crack open another beer and lean back in my chair. “What were you doing down here?”

  “I needed to go to Brazil to check on Arianna.”

  “I thought she wasn’t going,” Pop says, grabbing another beer for himself.

  Aiden casts his line, then plops down in his chair. “There was no stopping her. I sure as hell tried. The State department issued a warning about a spike in crime, and she’s gotten a few death threats.”

  “What?” I shout, almost dropping my beer. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know how these things go. Every celebrity from the highest-paid actor to some guy in a toilet paper commercial ends up attracting psychos. Henrik’s got quite a female following, and with all the press hoopla about the two of them, she’s gotten quite a few death threats. As soon as I heard that, I forbid her to go. You can imagine how well that went.”

  I clutch my beer bottle so tightly it might shatter. After what happened to Savannah, how can she be so stupid? “Now that she’s not playing, why is she going? Douchenozzle needs a babysitter?”

  “She’s on call for some of the tennis. Plus, she and Henrik had already agreed to do a number of appearances during the Olympics. She’s convinced it would be unprofessional for her to back out. No matter how hard I fought her, she wouldn’t back down. I finally convinced her to hire a security team for protection. She’s very well protected during the games, and the network has her in a great apartment. The problem is the damn media’s all over her. She can’t take a breath without them reporting it. It puts a damn target on her back.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek, trying to rein in my anger. If either of them could see my face, I’m sure they’d see my rage. I pull down the bill of my hat to keep up my casual façade. “Douchenozzle should have fought harder for her to stay home. He’s the one profiting from all her attention. Selfish prick.”

  Aiden nods. “Between you, me, and the fish, I don’t disagree. He’s constantly drawing attention to her and their relationship. I’m guessing his agent is telling him to ride this train for all it’s worth until they reach the end of the line. It pisses me off. The point of all this was to decrease the fallout, not turn it into something of epic proportions.”

  “Fallout from what?” I ask.

  “Hey, you’ve got a live one,” Aiden calls.

  After almost two hours of constant fighting, I catch the biggest fish of the week. For whatever reason, the victory isn’t as thrilling as it usually is.

  When we return to the airport to fly home, Ari and DN are everywhere. On every magazine, on the news. Why the world is so preoccupied with them, I can’t figure out, but I’m so sick of seeing it.

  This was one of the many reasons we never went public. Besides not wanting to deal with the reaction from our families, we knew the press would go crazy, and neither one of us wanted to deal with that. I could handle it, but I didn’t want it for her. She was already America’s Baby, then America’s Sweetheart. She didn’t need to be half of America’s Power Couple. I refused to flaunt her, and I never wanted to share her with the world. DN acts as if she’s his own personal cover girl. If he worshiped her the way he should, he wouldn’t shove her into the spotlight. She’s been shackled to her “brand” her whole life. If he really loved her, he’d set her free rather than tightening the chains.

  But she chose him, so what the fuck do I know?

  To top off my fabulous day, I come home, and my place is flooded. Not a little flooded. Ankle-deep-water flooded. Mold-climbing-the-walls flooded. It seems the hall bathroom has a cracked pipe. The whole first floor needs to be gutted down to the studs to get rid of the mold. Pop’s got a great contractor, and when it’s all done, the place will be amazing, but I don’t need one more thing to organize or manage right now. I’ll be homeless for at least six months, possibly a year. Apparently getting permits is next to impossible. Remodeling will be long and expensive.

  Spencer’s in Japan for a few weeks and I don’t like the idea of Charlie staying alone, so I’m bunking with her. She and I have been off base for so long that maybe a little time together will help sort us out.

  And she can help me with Bridezilla. Jenna dropped by Charlie’s house tonight with her three-ring binders from hell, and she’s got me cornered. She has the binders spread out all over the coffee table and is flipping through a bridal magazine. She’s constantly pointing out things, but my focus is on Baseball Tonight.

  “Baby, do you want cream linens or ivory?” she asks.

  “Yup, sounds good.” That’s my standard answer when she gets like this.

  “Which sounds good?”

  “Which what?” I ask, still not paying attention.

  She shoves the magazine into my lap. “Linens. Are you listening?”

  “Sorry,” I say, pointing at the TV. “I’ve got this guy on my fantasy squad, and my team is in a major slump. I need to decide whether or not to dump him. The whole season is on the line. This is really important. Just pick what you want. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “Urg!”

  I duck when she throws the magazine before storming off to Charlie’s room. I should go after her, but I don’t. Charlie’ll calm her down.

  Up next on SportsCenter, another victory for South Africa. Henrik scored four goals. Yes, folks, that’s what I said. Four. After each goal, he flashed his I love you sign to the one and only Arianna Aldrich, who was cheering wildly in the stands. If I flash I love you, do you think I can steal her from him? Arianna, I love you. More shots of Arianna and some sports stuff next.

  Jesus, he has such a hard-on for her. The guy plays a video montage of the best of Ari at the Olympics. I can’t believe his producers let him get away with this, but I’m not complaining. God damn, she’s exquisite. I forget to breathe until the five shots of her in Henrik’s arms. Looking at his hands all over her, I can’t… I can’t take it. The remote snaps in my hands.

  “Jenna!” I yell. “Let’s plan this damn wedding.”

  Five monotonous hours later, Jenna leaves.

  Charlie brings me another scotch. “That was horrendous. Thank God we had alcohol.”

  “Texting me that drinking game was brilliant. Of course, I’m not sure I can stand, but it sure made the whole tall centerpieces versus short centerpieces conversat
ion tolerable.”

  She pours another glass of wine from the bottle on the coffee table. “I don’t think I should stand either. Camp out in the living room! Please tell me I wasn’t like that when I planned my wedding.”

  “No. You were decisive. You knew what you wanted, and you chose it. I don’t recall discussing place cards for forty-five minutes. Did we even get anywhere? I really couldn’t follow. And I was trying, that’s the sad part.”

  She shakes her head and takes a sip of wine. “No. Nothing was decided. Not one damn thing. She just went in circles.” She draws circles in the air. “I’m dizzy, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. You’re really in for it.”

  We both start laughing and can’t stop. God, I’ve missed my sister.

  “Since I’m a little tipsy, let me ask you about something that’s been bugging me,” Charlie says.

  “Shoot. But you never have to be drunk to ask me something.”

  She swirls her wine glass, apparently unaware it’s empty. “Why didn’t you tell me about Jenna’s pregnancy scare? Is scare really the right word? She was so damn happy about it.”

  My glass slips through my fingers and the amber liquid splashes on the carpet and the glass tumbles to the floor. “What are you talking about?” Charlie begins to get up. I put my hand on her knee. “My mess, I can clean it up.” I stand and walk to the wet bar to get a towel. “Now, explain. What pregnancy scare?”

  “Well, a couple of weeks ago, she thought she was having a kid with you.” Charlie tells me about her dress shopping trip and Jenna’s confession.

  Unbelievable! I can’t believe I have to hear about this from my sister! I’ve made it clear to Jenna how I feel about kids. Even if this was a false alarm, keeping it to herself feels like a betrayal. Furious, I blot the carpet. “She never said a word to me,” I reply.

  Charlie narrows her eyes and points at me. “That should tell you something! Jenna’s a crafty one. Even her name sounds somewhat diabolical. Jen-nnna.” She covers her mouth. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that as nasty as it sounded.”