He didn’t wait. He couldn’t.
He slid inside her, and the sweet, hot friction of their bodies wrung a groan from him. Cooper tried to go slow, he did, but even as he told himself to hold on, his hips pumped faster. The slap of their bodies, her whispered curse words and the roar of his blood were the soundtrack to an encounter that was spinning wildly out of control. He dug his fingers into her hips as she used the counter for leverage and pushed back against him, meeting him thrust for thrust.
He ran his hand up her spine, past the clasp of her bra and up the column of her neck. He’d come here expecting a beer, a hard time and temporary respite from his solitude. And now, behind the counter of a run-down sports bar, he’d found heaven.
Cooper caught sight of her in the mirror, and couldn’t look away. She was so fucking gorgeous, so wet, so wild for him. He wanted to make it good for her. At least as good as it was for him. Even as his hips bucked, driving deep, he forced himself to breathe deeply, an attempt to keep from blacking out with pleasure as he tried to focus, to learn her expressions as she told him without words how to please her.
When she bit her lip again and reached between her legs, it took everything Cooper had not to come. Not yet. He grasped her hips even tighter, thrusting high and deep, determined to get her there, gritting his teeth against the exquisite sensation when her fingers brushed his cock as she drove herself to the peak and then she opened her eyes and looked right at him, and finally, finally, he felt her fall over the edge, her muscles pulsing against his cock, legs trembling as he pumped again, and then one more time, his climax hitting hard and fast, wringing everything from him.
He’d never...it had never been like this before. And it wasn’t just the fact that she might be the first woman he’d been with who didn’t porn-moan. The mirror had allowed him watch her expression change, shifting from anticipation to determination to pleasure. He knew, could tell, she’d never meant him to see all that. That she’d forgotten her reflection was selling her out, the way people forgot you could see them singing in their car, that the glass couldn’t hide their love of disco.
And he wanted more.
She straightened, hair sexy and tousled, and Cooper reached for her, because he couldn’t help himself, but she sidestepped his embrace, adjusting her thong and tugging her jeans up her thighs with a series of cute little hops. She struggled for a moment with the button of her jeans, and he let her. She’d made it plenty clear she only needed him for one thing, but as her movements grew less sure, more panicky, he couldn’t just stand by.
“Can I—”
“It’s fine,” she bit out, buckling her belt over her still-unbuttoned jeans. Lainey pulled the zipper up awkwardly with her left hand before she turned to grab her tank off the counter.
Cooper frowned at the dismissal, discreetly taking care of the condom. “Okay, sure. Then maybe we could grab something to eat?” He tugged his jeans into place. If sleep had been elusive before the adrenaline surge he’d just experienced, well... Besides, dinner had been hours ago. “Is there an all-night diner around here? I’ll buy you some eggs.”
He didn’t think he’d ever invited a woman to breakfast after a one-night-stand, but he didn’t stop to analyze his motives.
“I have to close up the bar.” Lainey pulled her tank top over her head and tugged down the hem.
“I can help,” Coop offered, fastening his jeans and pulling his belt back into place.
“You’ve done enough. It’s not a two-person job,” she told him, and though he wasn’t wild about the idea of her in this place alone in the middle of the night with a bunch of cash, he reminded himself that she’d probably locked up a thousand nights before.
“Look, Slick. Tonight was great. The sex was great. But that’s all it was—a night of great sex. So stop trying to turn it into something more.”
She busied herself by grabbing a rag from the sink and wiping the counter down, but Cooper got the impression it was more about avoiding eye contact with him than any actual need for cleanliness.
“Lainey, c’mon. I didn’t propose marriage.” He pulled his T-shirt on, then ran a hand back and forth across his hair. “It’s just breakfast.”
She looked at him then, but there was no coyness in her eyes. Nothing flirty. “I don’t date hockey players.”
“Yeah. Okay. Right.” Cooper shrugged, trying to let her rejection roll off his back. No big deal. He’d eat alone. He preferred it that way. It wasn’t like he was looking for a relationship or anything. He’d just thought...hell, he didn’t know what he’d thought. “Just sex. That’s the best kind, right? Well, it was a pleasure meeting you, Lainey Sillinger.”
“Harper. I took my mother’s maiden name.”
“Harper. Got it,” he relented with tip of his head, grabbing her phone off the counter as he walked by. He was relieved to see it didn’t require a passcode.
“Hey, give that back!”
“Just in case you change your mind and get hungry later,” Coop explained, texting himself a quick message as he stepped out from behind the bar. “And word to the wise? You should lock this. Anyone could pick it up and check out whatever naughty videos you’ve got stored on here.”
He came to a stop beside the stool where he’d left his jacket before relinquishing her phone. She practically lunged at the counter in her haste to snatch it. With a grin designed to rankle, he picked up his coat and he headed for the door.
“Cooper?”
He stopped. There it was. Something vaguely like relief flooded through him as he turned to face her.
“That door is locked. You mind going out the staff entrance in the back?”
“No problem.” He shook his head, hoping it didn’t look as robotic as it felt, even as he followed in the direction she was pointing, past the storage room she’d been coming out of when he’d first laid eyes on her. It felt like a lifetime ago, though it had only been hours. A short hallway with doors on either side brought him to a beat-up metal exit door, and he pushed through it to find himself standing in the parking lot, next to a Dumpster, about ten feet away from his car.
It had been a hell of a day.
4
THE EAR-SPLITTING SHRIEK of the whistle echoed through the chilly arena air, and the rest of the ambient noise—the scraping of skates, the tapping of sticks and the boom of pucks hitting the boards—faded out.
“Okay, guys, last drill of the day. Let’s make it count.” Coach Taggert’s heavy baritone echoed down the rink.
Cooper stood by the boards, elbow resting on the end of his hockey stick, watching as center Eric Jacobs—or Cubs, as he was better known to his teammates—turned on the jets and blew past the rookie on the outside. But instead of hustling back into position, Brett slammed his stick on the ice, upset at getting beat.
That pulled Sillinger’s defensive partner out of position, and Cubs capitalized on the defensive error by sending a beauty of a cross-crease pass to a wide-open Luke Maguire, who easily tapped the puck into the net.
It was all Cooper could do not to roll his eyes as the kid swore and flung his glove at the boards, not even having the grace to look embarrassed when he lumbered over to stand beside Cooper.
“What are you looking at?” Brett demanded, all little-man swagger as he unsnapped the chin strap on his helmet.
“Jesus Christ, Rookie. Get it together. And pick up your glove. You’re embarrassing yourself.” Cooper’s softly worded chastisement deepened Brett’s frown.
“Don’t call me Rookie! Everyone still calls me ‘Rookie’ even though this is my second year.”
“Then stop acting like one.” Cooper banged his stick on the ice a few times to dislodge the snow on the tape of his blade. “Jacobs beat you fair and square. Man up.”
Brett reached down and scooped up his glove. “Easy for you to sa
y. You took my spot on the first line. Every time I screw up, it’s good for you. It means you don’t have competition.”
Okay, now the kid was pissing him off.
“I don’t know if anyone explained this to you, but we’re on the same team, so when you screw up, that’s bad for all of us. And just for the record, you could be playing your best and you still wouldn’t be competition for me. Because I’m better than you.”
Brett’s fuck-you look was oddly satisfying to Cooper.
“Look, you’re a good hockey player. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. But you’re here to play hockey, not to be a hotshot. You’re not thinking about the team. You’re just thinking about yourself. Nobody gives a shit if Jacobs blows by you sometimes. It happens. It’s happened to all of us at one time or another. That’s the game. But if Jacobs blows by you, and you break formation, and we cover for you but you don’t have our backs because you’re out of position, then we’re screwed.”
“Everything okay here, Mead?” Luke Maguire skated up, skates hissing against the ice as he stopped.
Cooper nodded at his captain. “I’m great. How ’bout you, Rookie? You good?”
Brett shoved his hand in his glove, gave a terse nod and skated back to line up for the next drill.
Cooper and Luke shared a knowing look. “Were we such punks when we started out?”
Luke shook his head. “I wasn’t. You definitely were, though.”
The joke earned Mags a punch in the shoulder as he skated away. Then, after a moment of hemming and hawing over whether he should get involved, Cooper gestured Eric Jacobs over.
He blamed the lapse in judgment on the fact that he felt kind of sorry for Sillinger and what he’d gone through. Pro hockey was a different world. Hell, sometimes Cooper still found it tough to navigate. He couldn’t imagine how it was for Brett, who seemed to be going it alone. And after losing his father at nineteen...
Cooper and his father might not see eye-to-eye on everything, but he knew if he ever needed Walter Mead, he’d be there. Brett didn’t have that luxury.
“Do me a favor. Next time you’re on the line against the rookie, run it the same way with the wide left swing. I want to see if he learned his lesson.”
Eric nodded, pushing his helmet up his forehead with the thumb of his glove. “Sure thing. I’ll beat him again, though.”
“You know that and I know that. I need the kid to know it, too.”
Eric nodded thoughtfully. “Once he figures it out, he’s gonna be pretty good.”
“That’s the goal. Let’s just hope it sinks in before you get old and slow.”
“Well, we only have six years before I catch up to you, gramps, so we’d better get a move on.” Eric slapped Cooper in the shin pad with the blade of his stick before he skated back to the center line to rejoin the offensive drill.
Twenty minutes and one intensely frustrated Brett Sillinger later, the whistle blew again.
“Okay, good practice today,” the coach said. “I want to see all of you at the team lunch because someone from PR wants to go over some things before we head to the autograph session at the mall. Now go hit the showers. Not you, Mead. I want to talk to you.”
Damn, damn, damn.
“Sure thing, Coach.”
The team filed off the ice, and Cooper pulled off his helmet and gloves, balancing them on the edge of the boards so he could shove his sweaty hair back off his forehead.
“You know why I called you over?”
Cooper had a sneaking suspicion, but he decided playing dumb was the better option. He raised his eyebrows and gave a shrug of his shoulder pads.
Judging by Taggert’s knowing look, he wasn’t buying it. “There’s a photo of you in a bar that I’m told is making its way around the internet.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes, that. And normally, I wouldn’t even mention it. But little things, well, they have a way of leading to bigger things, and we can’t have that, Mead. Not this year. I...” The gruff bulldog of a man paused to clear his throat. “I trust you know what happened here last season?”
He was referring, of course, to one of the biggest scandals in hockey—hell, in sports in general—to make the front page in recent years. The team’s goaltender, J. C. Lacroix, had been nailed for throwing games to clear up his gambling debts and had received a lifetime ban from hockey and a helluva fine, and there was still the potential for jail time.
The Storm organization had spent the entire summer being poked and prodded and investigated to make sure the bad-apple syndrome hadn’t spread before they got the okay to play this season. The fact that they’d not only been cleared but were on the brink of making a playoff run was nothing short of a miracle.
Coop nodded.
“Then you also know we’re under the microscope this year. We need to not only play better than the competition, we need to be above reproach on and off the ice.” Setting his clipboard on the bench—it was old-school hockey all the way for Taggert—the man sighed, giving Coop a rare glimpse behind the hard-ass reputation.
“We need you on this team. We need your experience. That’s why we made the trades we did. But because of our situation, we also need a guy who’s bringing the right kind of attention to the team. A guy with his head in the game.”
“Understood.” Cooper grabbed up his helmet and gloves and swung a leg over the boards, joining his coach in the players’ box. “And believe me when I say, I want a championship as much as every man on this team.” The sincerity in his voice seemed to ease some of the worry on his coach’s face. “You can count on me.”
“I’m betting on it.” Taggert rubbed a hand over his craggy jaw. “And Mead?”
Cooper stopped, seconds away from making a clean getaway to join his team in the dressing room.
“You’ve been around long enough to know you never take a rookie to a bar.”
Busted.
“Yeah, about that. He’s legal in Canada, and sometimes when I get homesick, I forget your exotic American customs. Won’t happen again, Coach.”
Taggert’s white brows dipped low into a frown. “It damn well better not, after the tongue-lashing I gave him on the subject this morning. Which, uh, brings me to the other reason I wanted to talk to you. I know the kid can be a bit much to take. He’s had trouble making friends on the team because he’s a lot younger than most of you. But he looks up to you, Mead.”
Coach shoved his hands into the pockets of his navy Portland Storm jacket. “And, well, what you did for him out on the ice during that drill? I was hoping you might consider doing a bit of that with him off the ice, too.”
Surprise widened Cooper’s gaze. “Give him a hard time?”
“Mentor him. The kid’s got potential but he needs a nudge in the right direction.”
Sillinger needed a body check in the right direction in Cooper’s opinion. Geez. He was barely keeping his own life together. He wasn’t interested in nannying the rookie.
But that wasn’t the sort of thing you told your coach after a direct order masquerading as a heart-to-heart, so he just nodded and headed for the showers, hoping his “I’ll see what I can do” was vague enough to absolve him of the need to actually do anything.
* * *
THE DAY LAINEY had been waiting for since she’d arrived in Portland had finally arrived, and all she could think about was sex.
She was supposed to be celebrating, dammit! She’d even had Darius pour her a beer.
The real estate agent she’d hired to sell The Drunken Sportsman had brought by a serious client that morning, and judging by the sheer number of words the woman had repeated—“The client is very, very interested. He really, really likes the location. I feel so, so good about this showing”—the bar was as good as sold. Lainey didn’t even need to shell out
for the cosmetic upgrades she’d planned for the space.
But as Lainey sat there, nursing the mug of pale ale, she wasn’t reveling in her looming triumph. She was remembering the play of Cooper’s muscles beneath his T-shirt as he switched out the keg for her. The intensity in his eyes as he drove into her body, never breaking the connection they’d made in the mirror as he’d pushed her toward mindless pleasure and joined her in the free fall.
Lainey pressed a hand to her abdomen to settle the flip of her stomach. He was overbearing and cocky as hell. But he was also charming. And funny. And obsessed with breakfast. And so damn hot.
She tried to silence her hormones with a mouthful of beer, avoiding the aforementioned mirror that mocked her from her seat at the bar.
She was glorifying it. She had to be. She’d had plenty of orgasms before. Good ones. The white-hot pleasure she’d experienced with Coop was just a false memory.
Probably.
But there’s only one way to be sure, a little voice inside her head whispered.
After all, Lainey rationalized, reaching into her purse to pull out her phone, she was celebrating. And selling the bar meant that she’d be back to her hotel consulting gig within a week, maybe two. After that, they’d never see each other again. Hell, with playoffs about to start, they probably wouldn’t see each other after tomorrow. All things considered, it was the perfect time to just get him out of her system and be done with him.
He’d said she could change her mind when he’d hijacked her phone yesterday. As she tapped through to the screen she was looking for, her fingers tingled with the phantom memory of the first time they’d touched, that jolt that had been such a weak preview of what was to come.
Lainey opened the conversation to find that he’d texted himself a single character: the spider emoji. She knew she was in trouble when she realized that she was sort of pleased that he’d chosen something relevant. She would have expected a bunch of cheesy hearts...or the eggplant.
No. No emotions allowed, she reminded herself. Just sext him and get on with it.
Playing Dirty Page 5