The cloud of lust was encroaching on his thoughts like a thunderstorm, but he still had something he wanted to say.
He brushed his lips along the line of her shoulder, up her neck, stalling beside her ear. “With all this media attention, the articles in the tabloids—you know your job at Skyline is safe, right?”
She stiffened in his grip, pulling away, then repositioned herself so they sat perpendicular to each other.
“I have to tell you something.”
Worry increased his heart rate but he kept his voice even. “What?”
She quit. Or she lost her job. If that Swedish asshole fired her, I swear—
“Roland asked me to keep an eye on you down here. You know, make sure you weren’t overdoing it.”
He exhaled slightly. So Roland was an intruding busybody with no boundaries. That wasn’t news.
“That’s okay,” he assured her. “He shouldn’t put you in the middle like that, but you didn’t do anything wrong.”
She spread her hands in front of her, examining her nails. “You found me in the tunnel today because I forced my way down there. I thought they should’ve subbed you once the score hit three-nil. I even considered calling Roland and having him speak to the national-team staff.”
Rio took several slow, deep breaths to quell the rare anger blooming in his chest. He must’ve misunderstood. She couldn’t—she wouldn’t dare. His manager’s meddling was one thing, but he couldn’t deal with her interfering on his behalf. Not in his own country, with his own team. Not after everything he’d shown her. Not after he’d seen her on the sideline and forgotten about the crowds and the match and everything except her face. Not after he realized he was falling in love with her.
“You didn’t, though, right?” he clarified, hoping to verify his disbelief. “You didn’t put Roland through to anyone on the coaching staff.”
She shook her head. “I thought better of it at the last minute. I’m sorry, Rio. It was a mistake, and it won’t happen again, but I wanted to be honest with you.”
He drew her back to his side with a sigh, pushing down the flare of indignation and fury that still fought to rise up through his ribs. “I’m glad you told me. My career is the only thing I have. I’m not smart like you. If I screw this up, I can’t go get a job in an office. While you dreamed of working in soccer, I dreamed of playing it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted, and I’m doing the best I can to keep it going for as long as possible.” He brushed her hair back over her shoulder. “Next time Roland tries to go behind my back, I want you to tell me right away. We’re a team, you and I. Okay?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
He squeezed her, then reached over the side of the tub for a towel. “The water’s getting cold—my muscles are locking up. Let’s order dessert and I’ll show you the best of Chilean TV.”
She stood, water cascading down her body as she watched him with a coy smile. “How about we warm up those muscles in bed and you can have me for dessert.”
He threw the towel across the room, running his hand up her thigh instead. “Done.”
Chapter 16
Eva’s eyes were already wide open when the alarm squealed on Rio’s bedside table.
He silenced his beeping phone and rolled over, pulling her against his stomach and wrapping his arms around her waist. She slid her legs between his and closed her eyes, unable to stop reliving the moment that occurred two hours earlier.
A strange sound jolted her awake sometime after four o’clock in the morning. It took a few seconds for her to get her bearings—Rio’s bed, early Saturday morning, no, she wasn’t late for work—and then register the source of the odd and distressing noise.
Rio was whimpering in his sleep, his brow furrowed with pain.
She whispered his name and ran her hand down his arm, hoping to redirect him from what she assumed was a nightmare without waking him up fully. He mumbled something unintelligible, then rolled over with an anguished groan and opened his eyes.
He shut them again almost instantly, wrapping his hands around his knee and flopping onto his back.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, smoothing her fingers over his forehead. It was damp with cold sweat.
“Nothing,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Just a cramp.”
“In your knee?”
He nodded, eyes squeezed closed.
She wasn’t a doctor, but she was pretty sure knee cramps weren’t really a thing. “Are you sure it’s not something else? Do you want me to call Tony?” she asked, naming Skyline’s medic.
He shook his head forcefully, dragging himself upright and swinging his legs over the edge. “I just need to walk it off. Can you give me a hand?”
“Of course.” She hurried to meet him on the other side of the bed, and used all her strength to support him into a standing position.
His left leg buckled the second he put weight on it. He caught himself with a hand on the bedframe as she dove to prop him up from the other side.
“I’m calling Tony. Sit down,” she instructed, but he refused, slowly putting weight on his left knee.
“See? I’m fine. Took some warming up, that’s all. No need to get Tony out of bed at this hour.”
His words were tight and breathless with pain. She sighed disapprovingly as he hobbled across the room, then held out his palms as if to say, voila.
“Not impressed,” she informed him flatly.
He reached into the bottom drawer of his dresser, pulled out a roll of athletic bandage, and dropped into a chair in the corner of the room.
“You’ve heard of the magic spray,” he said, referring to the topical aerosol anesthetic used by pitch medics as he wrapped his knee. “This is my magic bandage. Works every time.”
She crossed her arms. “That’s the side you were favoring after you fell into the cameras on Friday.”
“So?”
“You can be honest with me. I’m not your manager.”
“No, but you might go running to him with whatever I tell you,” he snapped.
“Don’t you dare,” she shot back, concealing her shock at his uncharacteristic sharpness. “I’m trying to help you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He rubbed a weary hand over his eyes. “Match-day nerves.”
“You can’t play if you’re injured.”
“I’m not injured.”
“You look injured.”
“I’m not,” he repeated firmly. “I get nighttime muscle cramps all the time. It’s not a big deal.”
She pursed her lips, debating whether or not to voice the sentence forming in her head.
She had to. She’d hate herself if she didn’t.
“Obviously I’m not a doctor, but I’ve spent enough time with Hank to know that knee pain usually means there’s something wrong with the joint or the ligament—not muscle. If you’re having an issue with the knee you pretty blatantly smacked against a wooden barrier, you should have him look at it before you make it worse.”
“You’re right, you’re not a doctor.” He made his way back to the bed, his tight expression betraying his effort to conceal his limping progress. “Which is why you need to trust me to make good decisions about my fitness. You know I would never jeopardize my career.”
She slid under the covers beside him, stroking the side of his face as he settled onto his back. “My concern is that you’d rather bet on yourself to play through a minor injury than run the risk of being replaced in the first team if you don’t start.”
His sharp glance told her she’d hit the nail on the head, but within seconds he smoothed his keen gaze into a charming smile.
“I know what I’m doing. Trust me, querida.”
He kissed her lightly on the lips, then lay back and drew her into his side. Within a few minutes he’d gone back to sleep.
She never managed to join him.
Now she squinted resentfully at the light glowing around the
edges of the curtains. She began to prop herself up on her elbow but Rio pinned her to the mattress. He was more awake than she’d realized.
She opened her mouth to remind him of his match-day schedule, but the words stalled and died in her throat as his hand slid beneath the waistband of the boxers she wore—his boxers.
While his left arm kept her tight against him, the index finger of his right hand slipped between her legs. First he gently probed her sex, exploring her slickness until she was so wet she practically leaked onto her thighs. Then the pad of his finger found her clit, and began a series of slow, merciless circles on her hypersensitive flesh.
The sounds she made were primal, her efforts at movement wild, but he held her fast, his lips against the back of her neck and his erection pressed between her buttocks as he perfectly maintained the steady, agonizing rhythm.
He slipped his middle finger inside her and she bucked against his hand, a fine sheen of sweat breaking out across her torso. She moaned his name as her vision blurred, losing herself to the frenzy that preceded release.
She grabbed his wrist, rocked against his fingers, desperate to push him harder, deeper, delirious with the nearing brink of ecstasy.
“I want to make you happy.” His whispered words barely registered above what sounded like a freight train rushing through her ears. “I love you, Eva.”
Her orgasm was like crashing her car into a brick wall. Sudden, jolting, bewildering, the neck-whipping force of impact and the trembling surge of adrenaline. It took a long time for the dust to settle. And when it did, she knew she would never be the same.
“You can go in now.”
Eva nodded her thanks to Roland’s PA as she crossed the reception area to the manager’s office door. She knew Roland hadn’t called her in to tell her what a great job she was doing, and she braced herself for the worst as she stepped inside.
“Eva,” Roland acknowledged her flatly, gesturing to a chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”
She did, her posture straight as an arrow. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and if he dared suggest she—
“I’m worried about Rio.”
She said nothing.
“He passed his medical this morning,” he continued. “I have no reason not to start him in a couple of hours. Except my gut instinct.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she replied.
“Is he really fit to play?”
“That’s between you and him. I’m not his doctor, I’m his—”
“Girlfriend,” Roland supplied, momentarily stopping her heart. “And probably the only one he’ll tell the truth.”
You’d be surprised, she thought tightly, waiting for the backlash. She would take whatever he wanted to throw at her, then apologize profusely. Or maybe she didn’t owe him an apology at all. It wasn’t her fault she and Rio had fallen for each other, and anyway, who was Roland to—
He sat back in his chair, adjusted his trendy waistcoat and crossed his arms. She held her breath, determined to stand up for herself.
“I called his old manager on Monday, in Chile. I asked him if he had problems with Rio overtraining or if it was related to the move to the CSL. He said there was only one thing the two of them ever fought about—Rio’s refusal to self-report his injuries. He loves to play so much—and is so paranoid he’ll lose his spot on the team if he doesn’t keep up this insane work rate—that he trains until he physically can’t anymore. Apparently he had a recurring hamstring strain a couple of years back, and Rio got so depressed that his manager used to put him on the subs bench even though he had zero intention of letting him on the pitch.”
She blinked. Was that it? No mention of professional boundaries? Nothing?
Well, she wasn’t about to bring it up if he didn’t.
“That sounds like Rio,” she acknowledged.
“My point is, even his manager had to learn how to save Rio from himself.” He leaned forward, his expression beseeching. “Lord knows I hate seeing any of my players injured, but I couldn’t forgive myself if Rio pulled up with something serious because I played him when I shouldn’t have. On the other hand, I don’t want him going through the psychological stress of being benched when he’s fit to play. You saw what happened in Tucson—he could barely sit still.” Roland threw up his hands. “I need your help, Eva. I don’t want to put you in a position to betray Rio’s confidence, but I’m at a loss.”
She studied the edge of Roland’s desk, and then the hem of her red Skyline polo.
Dammit. Why couldn’t Roland be more of an asshole, someone she could readily hate and defy? Why did he have to be so fair and understanding and…sincere?
She understood the manager’s perspective. He’d never been interested in policing his players’ personal lives, as long as they didn’t affect their performance. Hector’s relentless sexual appetite was the perfect example. If Roland hadn’t felt he could intervene then, why did she expect him to intervene now?
On the same point, it was hard to trust a player with a history of injury concealment, but at the same time there was no point in benching someone—and losing his contribution to the match—if he was good to play.
Nevertheless, Rio had made it abundantly clear that his readiness to play was a matter for him and his manager. She’d already come close to undermining him once, and couldn’t—wouldn’t—do it again. She wasn’t his doctor or his nanny. It wasn’t her job to inform his manager that knee pain was waking him up at night, making him sweat and grit his teeth in his sleep…
“He insists he’s fit to play,” she said finally, if somewhat uneasily. “If I could tell you more, I would, but I can’t.”
Disappointment etched Roland’s face, but he nodded. “Thank you. And I want you to know I trust you implicitly. You did great work for Hector no matter how much he made that difficult, and now you have Rio’s best interests at heart. I know you’ll do what’s right for him if it comes to it.”
She left his office and headed for the staff lounge, her thoughts running a mile a minute. What should she do about Roland? What should she do about Rio? What should she do about what he’d said to her that morning?
She poured an umpteenth cup of coffee and slumped at one of the café-style tables lining the back wall of the lounge. She hadn’t reacted at all to Rio’s revelation that morning. By the time she’d recovered her wits and basic control of her extremities, the moment had long passed, and she didn’t know how to respond. No one had ever said it to her before.
She could guess the appropriate reply, and it wouldn’t have been a lie to say she loved him too. She did, and she loved him more with each minute that passed. Recognizing that was a challenge in itself. Saying it aloud was another hurdle entirely.
If he was hurt by her lack of reciprocation he didn’t let on. But she knew he had to be thinking about it. Maybe even at this exact second, as he warmed up alongside his teammates, his thoughts were of her. Processing how he felt about her. Wondering how she felt about him.
She cringed into her coffee cup, wishing she’d had the courage to be honest and tell him the truth, that she felt exactly the same.
Had she fallen through a wormhole to an alternate reality? She’d always been confident and sexually fearless, not to mention resilient in the face of successive relationship failures. Now she’d bagged an international soccer star, a man tens of thousands of women would climb over her dead body to date, and she went tongue-tied.
Ugh.
“That’s not the face I would expect on someone just returned from a sexy getaway to Chile.” Olivia dropped into the chair on the other side of the table. “Everything okay?”
“Not really. But what are you doing slumming it with the staff instead of lounging in a VIP box?”
“The PR department needed extra hands with a sponsor photo shoot. One of the assistants called out sick. I was bored—and standing nearby—so I got roped in to holding a light meter.”
“You’ve noticed that too?” She rolled her eyes. “It’s like he’s auditioning for a movie called Straight Outta the Favela.”
Eva laughed, and Olivia pulled her chair closer to the table. “Seriously, I have time. What’s up? And before you say anything, I love Deon with all my heart, but that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally fantasize about taping his mouth shut.”
“Rio has his moments,” she agreed. “But this is about me, not him. My boundaries, my ethics.”
Olivia whistled. “A little more serious than forgetting to pick up his dirty socks, huh?”
“A little.”
She exhaled. “I’d offer you advice, but quite frankly, I made more wrong moves than right ones.”
“Did you know they were wrong when you made them?”
“Sometimes,” Olivia admitted. “Other times only in hindsight.”
Eva propped her chin on her hand. “I’m not used to not knowing exactly what to do and when to do it. It sucks.”
“Welcome to the swamp of ambiguity that is love.” Olivia raised her cardboard coffee cup in a mock toast. Eva joined her, trying not to panic at Olivia’s use of the l-word.
Love. It wasn’t a concept she’d spent a lot of time thinking about. Even her most romantic fantasies were practical and usually material, dreaming of a husband who had an Ivy League degree, wasn’t paying off a car loan, and had a Series 7 license. The emotional angle was assumed—of course love would be a prerequisite—but never explored.
Did that make her shallow? Maybe. More likely it said something about her priorities and how they were changing the longer she and Rio were together. He had greater personal wealth than anyone she’d ever remotely imagined dating, his net worth so high it became more theoretical than comprehensible. And despite that—or maybe because of it—she had to face up to all the emotional complexities she’d ignored until now.
Crossing Hearts Page 20