by Sierra Dean
“Cheater,” she said, barely able to get the word out because she was giggling so hard.
“What else did I say?”
“You didn’t get to finish your thought.”
He sat on the bed and pulled her close, undoing her pants while she threaded her fingers through his hair. “How did it start?”
“You said something about the way I squirm.”
Tucker lowered her pants, leaving her in only her panties—skimpy black lace, like she’d been expecting someone to see them—and a matching bra. He cupped her over her underwear, stroking the damp lace with focused caresses until her breaths got short and her fingernails scraped against his scalp.
“Like that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“Yes.”
He teased her, skirting a finger under the elastic near her inner thigh and caressing the wet seam of her sex. She bent her knees, lowering herself onto his exploring finger, guiding him inside her. The way she sighed when he crooked his finger was almost too much to bear. He wanted to have her on top of him, riding him to a fast, powerful finish, but that wasn’t the game they were playing, and it wasn’t the promise he’d made her.
Tucker withdrew his hand, and Emmy made a sad noise, dropping her hands to his shoulders. He licked her nipple through the lace of her bra, drawing the pink bud into a hard peak. She moved closer so she was straddling his lap, and he cupped her bottom, squeezing her every time she ground against him. He’d learned how she liked to be touched, and now he was using that knowledge to play her like an instrument.
In all things, practice made perfect, and he wanted to perfect the art of making her come.
“Tucker…”
“You were supposed to be sitting on my face when you said my name,” he answered, and the way she laughed made his pulse skip.
“Then maybe you should lie back.”
He let her push him back but wanted to protest when she got off his lap. With his belt already out of the picture, she had no difficulty pulling his pants and underwear off, throwing them on top of hers. When she stood before him again, she put her balled hands on her hips and gave him a stern look.
“I thought I told you to lie back.”
He shuffled backwards on the bed, and she slipped off her underwear before she followed him, coming to straddle his chest as he’d done with her just that morning. He guided her to turn around, leaving him with a view of her smooth, golden skin. Tucker trailed his hands from her shoulders down her back, reveling in the warmth of her body.
Emmy leaned forward so she was on all fours, and suddenly the view of her back wasn’t nearly as interesting. God, every part of her was so lovely it made his chest hurt, and he wanted to explore every available inch of her body.
He spread her thighs for a better look at her, rubbing her wetness with two fingers and parting her lips. He groaned, hardening even more every time he touched her. Her scent drove him almost as crazy as the sight of her did.
Emmy, apparently as interested in his hardness as he was fascinated by her wetness, had lowered her mouth, taking his cock in, lavishing his head with hungry attention.
He held her hips firmly and mirrored the gestures of her tongue back onto her, lapping at her clit with the same cruel and wonderful strokes. He was intent on bringing her to climax before her clever mouth distracted him too thoroughly.
The scenario he’d begun spelling out at the park unfolded with perfect abandon as she wriggled against him, and every new twist and draw of his tongue made her lose focus on him. Soon she was panting against his inner thigh, barely able to gasp his name. She dug her nails into the flesh of his calves, and the syllables of his name gave way to moans that would haunt his dreams in the best way possible.
He read the quivering in her taut muscles and held her body firm against his mouth as he brought her to the cusp and then pushed her right over the edge into a body-melting orgasm. She bucked, biting the sensitive skin of his thigh. When she stopped shuddering, she lay still, limp on his body, dragging in ragged breaths.
“You good?” he asked, smoothing his hand over the rise of her ass.
She brushed her hair back off her face, honeyed strands sticking to her brow from the sheen of sweat.
“I didn’t finish you,” she replied, her tone apologetic.
He placed a kiss on her bottom and gave her a playful smack. She rolled off him and pivoted so she could nestle in against his chest, bringing them face-to-face.
“We’ve got all night.”
“Is that a promise?”
Tucker could have easily offered to let her stay for the rest of her life. But if a night was where forever started, he’d take it. “Yes.”
“Good.” Her breathing softened, drifting towards sleep. “I’m starting to like your promises.”
Chapter Thirty
Emmy couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so wildly, head over heels, stupidly distracted by a man the way she was enamored with Tucker. She found herself staring off into space and shivering with recall over the way he touched her.
Now that they were on the road, things were in a cool-down phase. They were going to be away from San Francisco for thirteen games, taking them from Cleveland to New York, west to Seattle and back to California for a four-game stint in Anaheim.
It had only been a week since she’d started sleeping with Tucker, but in that time she’d barely seen her own bed. With the road games, though, there was a wrench thrown in their newly established honeymoon-phase sex life. It would be almost impossible for her to get into his room, or him into hers, without the risk of bumping into other players or staff from the team.
Road games were like high school field trips, boisterous boys trapped in a hotel that was never big enough for all the ego. Some of the men had their wives along, but most of the players were single and took being on the road as an excuse to act out.
Which meant they’d be coming and going at all hours, even though she’d requested everyone get a solid eight hours of sleep before the games. But she wasn’t sure she could deal with running headlong into Chet or Ramon while leaving Tucker’s room with her hair rumpled from a roll in the sheets.
Tucker seemed to be quite the expert at making her hair tangle into a rat’s nest of epic proportions, to the point she joked it had been tuckered. Emmy suspected it wasn’t so much that he aimed to muss her hair, but rather that no man had made her thrash around nearly as much. She’d had orgasms—at least she’d once believed she had—but nothing like what Tucker did to her. If orgasms were poetry, Tucker was the Walt Whitman to Simon’s teen-angst couplets.
She might have expected from his tapered pitcher’s fingers that he’d be good with his hands, but nothing could have prepared her for Tucker. Not sexually, not emotionally.
“That’s a ten-yard stare if I ever saw one.” Miles pulled up the chair beside her at a table in the hotel dining room. Her fork clattered against the plate, sending a fluffy yellow ball of egg flying onto the tablecloth.
“I think the phrase is hundred-yard stare,” Emmy corrected, picking the egg up and putting it on her side plate.
It was early, but a few other players had gotten up and were helping themselves to a five-star continental breakfast.
“Oh yeah. I never remember those sayings right.” He pushed a sausage link around on his plate, leaving a trail of amber grease on the white dish. The table was too clean, too white. Everything in the dining room was begging to get dirty. “What’s got you thinking so hard?”
“Tuck—” Emmy stopped herself abruptly. “Luck.”
“You got any superstitions?”
“I don’t play.”
Miles snorted and stuck the sausage into his mouth with his bare fingers, bypassing the flatware altogether. He continued speaking with his mouth full. “Doesn’t matter. Everyone has superstitions in baseball. Did you know Emilio—the janitor at home—has Felons socks he bought in 1965? He wears the
m every single home game.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. He says his wife has had to patch them like…forty times or something, but he keeps wearing them.”
“Crazy.” She speared a piece of pineapple with her fork, wondering how fresh fruit in Cleveland would compare to that in California.
“So what are your superstitions?” he asked again.
“I don’t think I put much thought into it before. Philz coffee before home games? But that’s more of a life essential than a superstition.”
“What do you do when you’re at away games?”
“Suffer, usually.”
Miles laughed, and she was struck again by how young he was. Emmy barely remembered her early twenties, but she knew she’d been an idiot. Here was Miles, on a near seven-figure annual salary, and he was famous. How the hell could a kid deal with that kind of pressure? She admired how he was able to hold it together.
“What are your superstitions?”
He chewed hard on a chunk of hash brown. “I have one thing. It’s something I’ve done since little league.”
“Lay it on me.” She thought about Tucker and his grape bubble gum and wondered if Miles’s superstition would be as quirky and endearing.
“It’s a bit weird.”
“Aren’t they all? Isn’t that a byproduct of superstition? Wade Boggs ate a full bucket of fried chicken before every game. I’m not totally sure how he didn’t die of a heart attack by thirty-two. But yeah…superstitions are all weird.”
Miles reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew a beat-up leather wallet. From inside he took out a creased, faded baseball card that had obviously been laminated as a last-ditch effort to keep it from falling apart.
“Nolan Ryan?”
“Yup.”
“Good choice. Never a bad call to pick the guy who owns stake in one of your rival teams.” She winked and passed him back the card. “So the card is your superstition?”
“I keep it in my sock when I play.”
“Every game?”
“Every game.”
“Sounds itchy.”
“Nah, you get used to it.”
“So that’s your dirty little secret?”
“That’s it.”
“You need to work on something weirder. Like, Roger Clemens used to wipe his sweat on the Babe Ruth statue at old Yankee Stadium.”
“So I need to be grosser?”
“Grosser about what?” Tucker put his plate down on the other side of Miles and pulled up a chair.
“We’re talking about superstitions,” Emmy explained. “Tell Miles about yours.”
“Is it gross?” Miles asked.
“My dentist thinks so.” He poked a bit of vegetable omelet with his fork, reminding Emmy she still hadn’t touched her pineapple. She popped it into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully while Tucker told Miles about his bubble gum habit.
“We’re trying to figure out Emmy’s superstition. If she has one, she won’t tell me.”
“She listens to Hall and Oates’s ‘Private Eyes’ before she starts any of her warm-ups.”
Emmy stopped chewing, the tart sting of the pineapple filling her mouth and making her cheeks burn. How had Tucker known something about her even she wasn’t aware of?
“I guess I do.”
Miles gave them both an assessing look, as if there was something he was missing—which he was—and trying to put together the pieces. “That’s pretty tame.”
“I’m not exactly a wild child.” Emmy’s gaze landed on Tucker, who had started eating his breakfast. The mischievous glint in his eyes told her he was thinking of all manner of retorts to her statement, none of which he could say with his mouth full and company at the table.
The dining room had begun to fill steadily, and most of the tables were occupied with either players or middle-aged couples. Emmy tried to figure out what might bring one couple in their sixties to Cleveland, Ohio, let alone multiple couples.
Under the table something hard brushed her foot, and she jolted, causing coffee to slosh against the inside of her mug. She felt fantastically stupid when she realized the touch had been Tucker’s foot. He didn’t pull away. Instead, the arch of his foot shimmied higher, making her calf tingle.
She took a sip of her coffee and pretended she wasn’t playing footsie with a grown man at eight in the morning. And she tried not to let it show on her face how much she wanted to do it every single morning from then until forever.
“You ready for tonight?” she asked Tucker, slipping her foot out of her shoe and into his lap. His knee twitched, likely not expecting her to respond so boldly. The table bounced, spilling his orange juice onto the white tablecloth.
“I think this table might be broken.” Miles gave the round surface a test rattle. “It’s super wobbly or something.”
“Yeah. Weird.” Tucker closed his thighs together, trapping Emmy’s foot near his crotch. He wasn’t hard, but he was on his way. She stroked her toes upwards against the inner seam of his pants, and he arched a brow at her. She couldn’t quite read the gesture, if he was challenging her to go on or wasn’t sure why she was going so far.
Her foot stilled.
“I’m good to go,” he said. “And with Emmy’s help I’m sure I’ll go all the way.”
“Complete game? You’re calling it?” Miles looked mildly impressed, even though a complete game wasn’t the most dazzling accomplishment. Emmy suspected he didn’t think Tucker had it in him anymore.
Tucker dropped his hand to his lap and gave Emmy’s foot a squeeze, brushing the pads of her toes with his thumb. “Yeah. I’m pretty confident.”
The Cleveland Indians ballpark had a unique feature that drove Tucker nuts on the mound. Instead of walls of advertising or the blue or green padding favored by other stadiums, the Indians had installed lowered fan seating into caged areas next to the dugout.
He could deal with the bored-looking expressions of the opposing team, but his attention got diverted by the fans who were less inclined to watch with polite disinterest. The seats might have been astronomically expensive, but the fans who could afford them were among the most diehard, and they tended to be the most distracting.
Whoever came up with the idea of putting fans on the same level as the players was an idiot. Sure, it was a great way to sell tickets, but the architect obviously knew nothing about the painstaking effort that went into keeping calm on the mound.
Tucker chewed his grape Bubblicious and stared down the batter, an aging player he’d seen a lot through the years and who’d switched teams once a year over the last few seasons. In the game it was referred to as the journeyman phase of a player’s career. Shuffled from team to team until they were too old or too beaten down to be of value to anyone.
It was rare for a player to quit on their own. Most men held out until they were falling apart at the seams and someone half their age sat them down in a small white room and told them the time had come. Tucker wanted to think he’d know when to call a spade a spade and retire gracefully before he was forty, but he honestly didn’t know.
Wasn’t his elbow giving a sign he should have left the game? Had he taken the clue then? No. He’d gone through a painful surgery and had his own tendons looped through his bones. He’d endured a year of hard, torturous physical therapy, and for what? He was on top of his game again and everyone knew it, but he had the GM breathing down his neck, telling him it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped and he was shipped off to God knows where.
The old batter on the mound held his bat over his head like a Japanese fighter’s sword. It was a flashy batting stance, one that hadn’t changed in all the years and all the cities Tucker had seen him play. Tucker had a mental catalogue of all the stupid batting stances he’d seen, but this was one of his favorites. It had panache and was in no way helpful to getting more leverage on his swing, as evidenced by the .189 batting average the guy currently had.
T
ucker could have struck him out with a T-ball bar.
Alex flashed one finger, calling for a straight-up fastball. Given the age and flagging skill of the batter, it was a good call. A fastball tended to be irresistible to once-great men, since it was such an easy shot right down the middle. The problem for a lot of them was they tended to rely on old instincts rather than adapting to their new, reduced skill.
So they would swing when they used to be able to hit a fastball rather than when they should.
Tucker drew up, dove forward and unleashed the ball straight down the middle for a perfect strike. If he’d been throwing at the pitching target, it would have sailed through one of the cutouts without touching the edges.
As predicted, the batter swung too late, and the ball whizzed by him and into Alex’s glove.
Strike.
The Cleveland crowd booed, but Tucker was buoyed by it. If an away crowd was booing, it meant he was doing something right.
And the longer he did something right, the longer it took for the other shoe to drop.
Chapter Thirty-One
Emmy sat next to Mike, the pitching coach, with the new back-up catcher, Pablo, on her other side. She tried to watch the game with idle, professional interest, but was failing hard. She was going through sunflower seeds at an alarming rate, the little pile of shells at her feet growing larger with each passing inning.
“That little move he does, pulling his arm back,” Mike said, jabbing her with his elbow. “He never used to do that, and I didn’t teach it to him.”
Emmy nodded, spitting another shell on the ground. “He was favoring it too heavily after the surgery, relying more on his wrist instead of using the power in his arm. That’s why he was using the knuckleball. It relies on the hand.” She demonstrated by flicking her fingers out to mirror the pushing movement of a traditional knuckleball. “But with his new elbow there was no reason for him to avoid his upper arm.”