Playing the Player (Sydney Smoke Rugby #3)

by Amy Andrews

  Em blushed. “Umm…yes. I was…getting the grand tour.”

  “That’s what they’re calling it now, are they?” Kathy laughed in a way that told Em she didn’t believe her for a second.

  “You know, Linc’s never invited a woman into the box before,” Valerie mused. “And I ought to know, I’ve been to every home game since they moved to Henley eight years ago.”

  “Yes. Interesting, isn’t it?” Harper murmured, her lips twitching.

  “You know,” Matilda said, transferring her attention to Valerie, “I always thought you and Linc would end up together. He flirts with you like crazy.”

  A spike of jealousy rammed straight into the centre of Em’s chest. Had Linc and Valerie King slept together? Knowing Linc was a player was one thing. Having to be social with someone who might still carry a flame for him was another entirely.

  And Valerie King was a stunning redhead. Even her thick smattering of freckles was stunning.

  “Linc flirts with everyone,” Valerie dismissed. “And it’s fun to flirt back, especially when it annoys my father so much. But none of these guys are ever going to cross that line.”

  “Line?” Em’s brain spun from relief over Valerie’s easy dismissal of anything between her and Linc to why Valerie wanted to piss her father off.

  “Don’t screw the coach’s daughter,” Kathy said.

  Oh. “That must be a particularly heinous form of torture,” Em said. Objectively, from what Em had seen of the team, none of them were hard to look at.

  There was general laughter and she realised she’d spoken that out loud. “Sorry,” she blushed. “I just meant…”

  “It’s okay,” Valerie said. “I understand what you meant. But there’s no point having a crush on any of these guys, knowing none of them are even going to dare look at me twice.”

  “Griff’d have their balls on a platter,” Kathy agreed.

  “Yeah,” Valerie said, her lips twisting into a bitter smile. “Everyone has to ignore the coach’s daughter. Including him.” There was an awkward pause, and Em wondered what the hell it meant before Valerie plastered a brittle smile on her face. “Besides, I’ve grown up with most of them. They’re more like brothers.”

  “Lucky you,” Kathy said wryly. “They’re nothing like my brothers.” Valerie laughed and the sudden cloud that had crossed her face cleared as everyone else joined in.

  Harper finally got Em alone half an hour later, under the pretext of pointing out things of interest on the field. They stood in front of the huge glass wall that formed the front of the box, watching the crowd slowly shuffle into the stadium.

  “So…” Harper said, her voice low. “You and Linc are definitely a thing?”

  “I…think so.”

  Harper held out her hand, and Em took it. “Just be careful, huh?”

  “I will.”

  “It’s just that…Linc’s probably the biggest player of all of them, yeah?”

  “I know.” She squeezed Harper’s hand. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell her best friend she was falling in love with the Smoke’s biggest player.

  But she didn’t want to freak Harper—or herself—out.

  The Smoke won the game by six points, but Em lost all interest in the score after Linc, ball tucked into his side, deliberately ran at a bunch of dudes all aiming to tackle him. He exploded into them, knocking all five to the ground, taking an elbow to the face and getting himself badly crunched in the process.

  Ordinarily, a half dozen buff guys lying on top of each other might have been the kind of man-wich Em could get behind, but her heart was in her throat as Linc lay on the field, clutching his side. When he sat up, blood was pouring down his face.

  Em couldn’t look, hiding behind her hand as he was helped off the field. “He’ll be fine,” Valerie said, clearly not concerned. “It’s just a scratch.”

  She was right. He was back on again ten minutes later. His right cheek was puffy and, on the close-ups courtesy of the wall-mounted television tucked in the corner of the box, she could see there were steri-strips over his right eyebrow. In fact, he looked directly up at the box, grinned a big, stupid grin, and held up three fingers on one hand and two on the other. The television cameras caught it, and the commentators speculated as to its meaning.

  Em just shook her head and muttered, “Crazy man,” under her breath as her heart hammered in her chest.

  Plucking that condition out of the air had seemed like a good idea in the locker room in the cold light of day, but she should have known Linc wouldn’t have been able to walk away from that challenge in particular. Watching him at the bottom of that heap had been sickening. Rugby could be a dangerous sport, and she’d practically goaded him into an injury.

  Not smart, Clementine!

  She could only hope he was as diligent with his other challenges.

  Despite the injury and the obvious discomfort his side was causing him, Linc was back in the thick of it from the start. Every time he was tackled, Em winced. She hadn’t really paid much attention to the brutality of the sport until she had a stake in it. As she peaked through the spread fingers of her hand, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hack this long-term.

  She glanced around at the other women, their gazes glued to the action. None of them seemed concerned by the physicality of the sport.

  She was relieved when the final hooter sounded. Everyone hugged and kissed in the box, pouring champagne and toasting their men.

  “To the grand final,” Eve said, and they all drank to that.

  “What happens now?” Em asked Harper as they watched the guys indulging in some post-match celebrating down on the field with their home crowd.

  “We hang around here for the next hour or so while they do all their media stuff. Then they’ll hit the showers,” she said.

  “Then we all head to our place,” Matilda said. “For beer and pizza and general game analysis. You and Linc are coming, yes?”

  Em had absolutely no idea what Linc’s plans were after this. She had hoped they’d involve a bed somewhere, although the way he’d been holding his side at the end of the game might prohibit any kind of getting naked.

  Beer and pizza might be all the action she was getting tonight.

  She searched for an appropriate, noncommittal response, not wanting to appear like she didn’t know what the hell she was doing in front of these very self-assured women. Harper smiled and gave her a barely perceptible nod, encouraging her, obviously understanding how much out of her depth Em was feeling.

  “Linc’s always the first one there,” she assured.

  “Okay. Sure.” Em glanced at the field to hide her uncertainty. “There’s Chuckers,” she said, picking out Harper’s douchebag stepbrother easily from several television sports journalists down on the field with their cameramen.

  The man pumped out superiority and pretention like a radioactive cloud.

  Harper grimaced. “Yes.”

  “Has he gotten over Dex and you yet?”

  Chuck Nugent had been at the wedding along with Harper’s stepmother. But neither of them had been exactly joyous. Thank God Tabby and Jace, Harper’s little sister and brother, had been joyous enough for all of them.

  Harper laughed. “Never going to happen.”

  Em slipped a hand around her shoulder and gave Harper a squeeze. “Their loss.”

  Linc crossed Em’s line of vision, and even from all the way up in the box, her insides looped the loop. His uniform moulded to the contours of his body, the sleeves fitting tight around all those tats, and a tiny spark flared to life like a lit match deep inside Em’s belly.

  The man wore the hell out of his uniform. Not that it was going to help her tonight, with Linc still holding his side as he spoke into a microphone and the swelling over his right eye making her ill just seeing it in full Technicolor on the television screen.

  The man looked like he needed a plastic surgeon, some rib strapping, and an x-ray. She was going to have to cool he
r jets and get used to the fact that Linc was probably going to hurt every time he walked off a field after a game.

  He’d need to rest up, probably even ice things. Maybe mainline some Panadol. Getting naked and horizontal was probably the last thing on his mind.

  Damn it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  An hour later, they were in Linc’s car heading to Tanner’s. Linc, no longer holding his side, had insisted he was fine and had scrubbed up pretty damn well considering. The massive egg above his right eye sported a livid purple-red bruise. The superficial laceration in his eyebrow had apparently been glued together, and three new steri-strips added extra protection.

  Still, she was pleased it was on the other side of his face and she didn’t have to keep looking at it.

  Despite his rather battered appearance, there was something exceedingly virile about him. Sitting behind the wheel of his sports car, his sleeves turned up, tats on display, smelling of soap, deodorant, and victory, chattering about the game, clearly still pumped from the win.

  The pheromones he radiated in the car were thick and cloying. Practically toxic. Good toxic.

  They really should come with a warning.

  The longer she sat next to him, the less concerned she was about the extent of his injuries and the more focused she became on ways to make him feel better. Her breath was heavy in her lungs and thick in her throat. Her pulse fluttered madly—everywhere.

  Her wrists, her temple, between her legs.

  His inked arms formed a loose circle with the steering wheel as his hands, so sure and capable on the ball, held the wheel with the same confidence. She tried not to think about the kind of havoc those sure, capable hands had created on her. Tried not to think about how she could duck under the circle of those arms, slide the zip of his fly down, and get her mouth on the bulge beneath.

  It might not be a safe manoeuvre in traffic, but she figured that would make him feel a whole lot better.

  Without even touching any of his sore bits.

  “Quit looking at me like that,” he growled suddenly, his fingers wrapping and unwrapping from the steering wheel.

  “Like what?” she asked guiltily, her voice high.

  He raised his steri-stripped eyebrow at her. “Like you’re mentally sucking me off.” She startled at the accuracy of his guess, and Linc laughed as he returned his attention to the road. “Don’t ever play poker.”

  “It was purely with sexual healing in mind,” she said primly.

  He laughed again, but there was a husky quality to his voice. “I think you need to quit being a teacher and become my personal physician.”

  He changed gears as he slowed to make a right turn. Em didn’t know where they were, but Linc seemed to know where he was going. She just hoped they got there fast before she started to drool.

  “I can’t believe I agreed to go to Matilda and Tanner’s when we could be going to bed,” she grouched. “Maybe we could”—she laid her hand on his thigh—“skip it?”

  The faux scandalised look he shot her would have been amusing had Em not been so damn frustrated. “Why, Miss Newman.” He picked her hand up and placed it back on her own thigh. “I do believe you were the one who insisted on proper dates. Where we go out in public?” He grinned at the little growly noise that escaped the back of her throat. “Consider this the first. Of many.”

  Em’s hand curled on her thigh as she dragged her gaze off his body to watch the dark shapes of large trees overhanging the footpath flash by outside her window. She was thrilled to be going out socially with Linc and his friends and their partners. She really was. And hearing him say this was the first of many made her heart do a little giddy-up, but goddamn, she was so aroused, just shifting in the seat was almost triggering an orgasm.

  The fact he was injured didn’t dent her horniness one little bit.

  “You’re right. Thank you. Plus I keep forgetting you might not be…”

  Em groped for a non-emasculating way of saying he might be too sore to get it up.

  “Might not be what?”

  She looked at him. “Might not be…capable of much tonight…with your injuries.”

  He chuckled and it oozed around the car, competing with the pheromones for space. His hand slid off the wheel and landed on top of hers. He picked it up again and shoved it on the bulge between his legs. “I’ve had a hard-on since I saw you walk out of Henley with the others in those sexy stockings. Thank Christ I didn’t know you were wearing them during the game. I’d have probably been knocked flat by the first tackle.”

  His cock was, indeed, hard as a rod beneath her palm, and Em moaned involuntarily as she squeezed the handful. He sucked in a breath, and she did it again. He really was packing some impressive heat behind that zipper.

  The tingle between her legs roared to life.

  “Aren’t you…sore?”

  “Not there.” She shot him an impatient look, and he sighed. “I’ve been sorer.”

  Her breath hitched at his easy dismissal, at the husky edge to his voice. “I don’t want to…hurt you anymore than you already are.”

  He speared her with a look of such frank arousal, Em was amazed she didn’t self-combust. “No pain, no gain.”

  Fuck it. He was right. “Pull the car over.”

  His eyes widened a little at the request. “Tanner’s first. I want to show you off.”

  His sentiment was dizzying, but Em was desperate for the touch of him. She shook her head. “This”—she squeezed his cock again—“first. Then show me off.”

  “It’s fifteen minutes to Tanner’s,” Linc said, his knuckles whitening around the wheel as she massaged his erection. “We can stay an hour. We’ll be home in two hours tops.”

  “I don’t want to wait two hours,” she growled. “Pull the damn car over.”

  His fingers drummed for a second or two before he turned the wheel to the left. “Fuck it.”

  Em was both grateful and impressed, as Linc pulled up under the overhang of a large tree, that they were on the edge of a park in a poorly lit suburban street and that most of the houses lining the non-park side were dark.

  He turned and reached for her as soon as he killed the engine, but Em was already out of her seat belt, condom from her bag already in hand as she manoeuvred herself over the centre console, determined not to let car designers thwart her progress.

  All she could think of right now was feeling his big, beautiful cock hard and perfect inside her, taking her all the way, making her glad she’d been born a woman.

  Making her glad she was his woman.

  Within seconds she was sliding a leg across his lap, her denim skirt riding up to the tops of her thighs as she seated herself on him, panting hard. Not from exertion—from anticipation.

  Her hand headed south, between their bodies, as his hands slid along her thighs to her ass. She moaned as he squeezed it tight, bringing her in closer, his bulge brushing the inside of her thigh as she worked his zipper down.

  “Hurry,” he whispered, his mouth at her neck, at her jaw, at her ear.

  Em’s head spun as his lips created havoc and her senses filled up with soap and deodorant and hard, hot, physical man in wave after dizzying wave.

  He groaned deep when she finally freed him. “Christ, I want to be inside you,” he muttered all low and urgent in her ear.

  Somehow between the hot, wet stroke of his tongue and the desperate roar of her pulse through her ears, she managed to fumble the condom on, grinning at him in triumph.

  “God. Your face,” she murmured, her hands cupping his jaw, wincing at its brutality. “Your beautiful face.”

  “It’s fine,” he dismissed huskily, claiming her mouth, whipping the thought from her head as he greedily sucked every gasp and moan from her throat, his mouth demanding she give him everything.

  He pressed his sheathed cock against her centre and she rode it shamelessly, no thoughts in her head now other than how good it felt right there, right between her legs.


  She was only vaguely aware of his hands restless on her ass. “Christ,” he groaned, ripping his mouth from hers. “It’s like bloody Fort Knox down there.”

  “Just push them aside,” she panted, her head full of fog, her body one giant pulse. A churning ocean of need.

  “Fish nets,” he muttered, plucking at the stockings in frustration.

  Bloody hell. Of course. Why the hell hadn’t she put a bit more thought into this and taken her bloody underwear off before she’d straddled him? That’s what a smart woman would have done.

  But no, she’d been too damn eager.

  “Rip it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Just rip it.”

  “But—”

  Em grabbed him by the nape, pressing her forehead to his as her heart rate beat off the chart and she dragged air in and out of her mouth. “They cost three bucks, Linc. Grab the crutch and pull. Tear them. Shred them to pieces if you have to. For Christ’s sake, you tackle rugby players for a living; it can’t be that hard.”

  The aching flesh between her legs jumped at his touch, the ripping noise loud and gratifying in the confines of the car, streaking like a fork of lightning down her spine.

  “Yes,” she gasped, grabbing for him instantly, rising over him, sweeping aside his hand and the scrap of satin and lace between her legs, centring herself before sinking down onto him in one smooth flex of her hips.

  She cried out at the hot, hard invasion of him, his groan fiery on her neck as he held her clamped to him, his hands splayed on her ass. He stretched and filled her so damn good—so damn deep. She didn’t know where he ended and she began.

  The ragged suck of their breathing was loud as it stuttered into the already-laden air around them, fogging the windows. She undulated her hips, wrenching another groan from his throat as he clamped her ass tighter.

  The urge to flex, to move, to grind, pulsed through the muscles in her thighs and belly and hips, breathtaking in its intensity.

  “Please,” she panted, her heart racing, her mouth near his ear, “I need to move, to…”

  She needed to fuck.