Intent on doing it all again. Whatever it took. Whatever he could do to help his team.
She sat down again, because of course she’d jumped up too. How could she have helped it? She tried to pull some air back into her lungs, and Katherine laughed at her and said, “Exciting, eh. Those are the moments we live for. The rest of it, to be honest, I can take or leave, but when Kevin has the ball—that’s always a thrill for a mum, no matter what. I don’t have to understand strategy to know when he’s going for the tryline.”
Beyond her, her husband shook his head, caught Chloe’s eye, and raised one sandy eyebrow, and Chloe laughed, high on the moment, on the adrenaline that was flowing so strongly in Kevin’s big body, coursing through him.
Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Her phone, vibrating in the pocket of her coat, where she’d put it so she’d feel it.
The adrenaline, now, turning to something else as she pulled it out. To ice.
Zavy.
She shouldn’t have come, however much she’d wanted to. She should have stayed home with him.
It was a text, but mostly, it was a photo.
Zavy. In his Blues jersey, holding Rainbow Dash. Zavy lying against a pillow on the couch with a blanket over him, his mouth pursed the way it had done in sleep since he’d been a baby, his dark lashes spiky against his cheeks. Fast asleep.
The text said, He didn’t even see the try. But he saw Kevin lead them out.
Chloe’s hand was at her mouth again, and she held the phone toward Katherine, who’d been politely not looking. “It’s Holly,” she said. “It’s so sweet of her to send it. This is my little boy. This is Zavy.”
Katherine looked at the photo with interest, and then Chloe showed it to Josie. “Aw,” Josie said, “that’s a lovely photo of him. What’s he got there?”
Chloe laughed. Maybe it was a little giddy. Maybe so. “That was Kevin too,” she said, then told his mother, “My ex said boys couldn’t like My Little Pony, and the next thing I knew? Kevin gave Zavy his favorite one. He brought him the Blues jersey as well. He’s just ... I’m just ...”
“Ah, yeh,” Katherine said calmly, choosing to overlook Chloe’s emotional moment, “he’s a kind boy. He always was. When Connor was little, he was scared of the bath. It was the echo in there, I think, all that cold, hard tile. So Kevin would go in and sit at the side, play with him in there, marching those green plastic army men up and down the side of the bath, making up stories. And when they were babies, all of them? Oh, yes. He’d climb in the cot with them. Anything. Always good with the littlies, Kevin.”
“What are you on about?” Declan asked in astonishment. “You’ll put the girl straight off him. I’ve never heard anything so naff. You make him sound like a bloody kindy teacher.”
Katherine was laughing. “Nah. I won’t. What do you know about it? Nothing, that’s what.”
Declan leaned around his wife and said, “Don’t you listen to her. Kevin’s a hard man when he has to be. Not as soft as he seems, not a bit of it.”
“No worries,” Chloe said. “I know that, too.”
The Blues lost, and maybe some of that was on Kevin, because he hadn’t prepared right today and he knew it. You did your best to play at the same level every single week, every single match. And sometimes, you lost anyway. Not the way you wanted to earn your hundredth cap, but it was what Chloe had said to Zavy that morning. He didn’t get to choose about that.
Afterwards, they had a wee ceremony. The Hurricanes boys stayed around for it, which was good of them. Most of the spectators didn’t, but this wasn’t for them.
Hugh made the speech, which at least meant it was short. “A good teammate,” he said. “A good New Zealander, a good man, and a pretty good rugby player as well. I’m proud to play my Super Rugby with him, and I’m glad I don’t have to play it against him anymore.”
He stopped, and that appeared to be it. He held out the gift, a huge mere made of pounamu—a war club beautifully fashioned of South Island jade. A taonga, the kind of treasure that would have been handed down for generations.
A chill went down Kevin’s spine at the sight of it. He stepped up and shook Hugh’s hand, the cameras flashed, and when his hand closed around the mere and took it from Hugh? It almost seemed to pulse. A powerful object, full of mana, and the prickles were rising on his scalp along with the hair on his arms.
It took him a second to get his casual back. When he had it, he said into the microphone, “What the skip doesn’t say, as he’s being kind tonight, is how rapt I am not to be playing against him anymore. Glad he’s on the right side of the Bombay Hills at last.” He grinned at the Hurricanes, they grinned back, and he went on. “Time to get serious, I guess. I’ve been lucky to play all my rugby here with the Blues, and it’s a pretty good place to be. I’d like to give my thanks to my brothers on the squad, and to the organization, too. But I’ve had a different team behind me as well, so I’d like to thank my family, and my partner Chloe, for coming out to support me. Cheers, everybody.”
It was done. Photo time, starting with one beside Hugh. Then his parents came forward, and Chloe didn’t. Kevin said, “One sec” to his parents and the photographers, strode across the field, took Chloe in his arms, and kissed her. He was still holding the club, and that seemed fine to him. Then he brought her back to get her photo taken properly.
He hoped they’d snapped that first one, though. He wanted that photo everywhere tomorrow. It was too fast, it was too public, and it was exactly the right time. Exactly when that bastard Rich needed to see it, and, he hoped, exactly when Chloe did.
Or maybe that was just the adrenaline. All he knew was, tonight? He’d wanted to look like a warrior. He’d wanted to look like a winner.
Kevin heard it on the way home, but then, he’d been expecting it.
“Reckon you’d better tell me why you turned up late today,” Hugh said. “Before you have to tell all of us.”
Kevin did, as briefly as he could, and watched his skipper’s face get harder, then harder still.
“Shit,” Hugh said at the end of it.
“Yeh.” Kevin relaxed a fisted hand with a conscious effort. “That’s about the size of it.”
“Don’t know how you kept from doing him over.”
“Yeh, nah. There was a cop around by then, wasn’t there.”
“Pity,” Hugh said, and Kevin couldn’t have agreed more.
Silence for a while, and then Hugh said, “That was why, then, on the park tonight. Afterwards. Kissing her and all.”
“I reckon.”
“Thought that was unusual for you.”
“It was.” Kevin waited a bit, but when Hugh didn’t say anything, added, “Too soon, probably. Too fast. Not how I do things, and not how she does. And it’s complicated as well.”
“Ah,” Hugh said. “Zavy. Josie’s godson. Chloe’s been through heaps, I know.”
“She has. It seems too soon even now, if I stop to think. Doesn’t feel like it, though.”
More silence, then Hugh said, “When I met Josie, it was ... different. Sudden. Fast. She wasn’t even on the market. Seeing somebody else. I kept warning myself off, or she did, and it didn’t matter. I couldn’t stay away. I wanted to tell her every single day to give that fella the push, because he wasn’t good enough for her. I’d never even met him, and I knew she didn’t belong with him. She belonged with me. She still does. And it wasn’t just sex. It was sex, yeh, because ... Josie. But that wasn’t all.”
Kevin stretched out better in the passenger seat, easing the bruises. Hugh wouldn’t have said this on any other night, but after the game was when you said the big things, when you made the big moves. “Could be,” he said, “that you don’t always get a choice.”
“Could be,” Hugh agreed.
Kevin leaned his head back, then, looked out at the night. Clouds covering the moon, and the wind picking up in a way that said rain coming soon, and winter on its way.
A big change. A sea change.
Hugh
dropped him in the drive. Nearly eleven-thirty, and the house was quiet, the lower two floors mostly dark except for a light at the door and in the window of Holly’s room.
And the tower flat. That had a light as well. A faint one, as if it were coming from the bedroom.
He picked up his bag and climbed out of the ute. His leg muscles, which had stiffened during the drive, sent up their usual insistent postgame protest, and he thought once again that he needed to put in a spa pool. It would ruin the aesthetic, maybe, in his pretty garden, but it would feel so good tonight. Especially if he had Chloe in there with him. Those big eyes of hers closing at the heat, the pulsing pressure of a jet of water at the small of her back, and his touch between her legs, making them part for him ...
It was what Hugh had said. It was more than sex, but it was sex as well. Chloe had said he was perfect, and just now, he didn’t want to be perfect. What he wanted was Chloe in that spa pool, and then on her back in his bed.
Or on her couch. On the floor. Against the wall. He wasn’t fussy.
And she was awake.
“Thanks for the lift,” he told Hugh absently. “And the speech,” he thought to add.
“We won’t call it brilliant,” Hugh said, “but it got the job done. Cheers, mate.”
He pulled around the circle and out again, and Kevin carried his bag around the house. And didn’t go in the front door. Instead, he went to Chloe’s staircase, drawn there as if she had a line on him, reeling him in.
Up the stairs, and he was knocking softly on the door, saying, “Chloe. It’s me.”
He waited a minute, then knocked again. No answer, and he wondered if he’d been completely wrong. Utterly stupid. When he’d grabbed her and kissed her in front of a stadium full of people and all those cameras ... had he known that she was good with that?
Never mind. He knew the answer. He hadn’t. He’d just done it.
The door swung open at last. No light inside, only the dim fixture over the door illuminating her. Chloe, her hair mussed, a dressing gown open over stretchy leggings and ribbed white singlet. She looked messy and rumpled, and he could see straight through that singlet.
He tried to be cool. He couldn’t do it. He was still holding his bag, and his other arm was around her, pulling her close, kissing her hard.
All of the day. All of the night. The fear and the relief, the satisfaction and the disappointment and the elation. All of it, and it needed an outlet. It needed this.
Walking her backward, managing to drop his bag and shut the door, getting his shoes off, then taking her all the way to the couch in the dark.
Not the wall. Not the floor. But not any farther than right here, and not any later than right now.
She wasn’t saying anything. She had her hands around his head and was hauling him down, kissing him as desperately as he was kissing her. He had a hand under that singlet, yanking it up, and then her back hit the couch, and he was over her, his mouth and hands on her breasts. Dragging those leggings down, then, pulling back to strip them off her, and running his hands back up her legs. Slowly, the way he’d have done it in that spa pool.
She was still wearing the dressing gown. She still had the singlet on. And he didn’t care. He needed this now.
Shit. It had happened again.
He sat up, and she started to sit as well, asking, “What?”
“Condom. Downstairs.”
“In my nightstand,” she said. She had her hands on him, was pulling the zip down on his warmup jacket, running her hands up under his T-shirt, her hands exactly as avid as his. “But first, I’ve got a man to kiss.”
His heart had long since started to hammer. Now, it picked up the pace. “I want to ... I need to ...”
“Shh.” She stood up, let the dressing gown fall from her slim shoulders, shoved the coffee table back with a foot, and drew the singlet up over her head. She did it slowly, too. She let him watch, there in the dim light from the passage.
Long, lean muscle, delicate bird bones, silken skin. The curve of a hip, and pink-tipped breasts like apples, firm and sweet.
She dropped the singlet to the floor and asked, her voice low and sultry, “Do you like it? Do you want it?”
“Yeh, baby,” he managed to say. “You know I do.”
“Mm.” She was on the couch, straddling him, taking off his jacket, getting rid of his T-shirt exactly as slowly as she’d got rid of her own, her hands brushing over as much of him as she could touch along the way. Then she was kissing a path over his chest, her hands stroking there, up to his shoulders, down his arms, as if that was all she wanted to do. As if she could spend forever caressing and kissing him.
She was naked, and she was over him, the honey scent of her filling his head, her mouth at his ear, whispering into it like the seductress she was. “Do you want me to show you how I treat my hero?”
Oh, God. He so did.
She smiled against his skin, and he felt it, and then she was licking and biting down his body, prowling over him like a cat, every movement languid, and urgent, too. Sliding down to her knees, her hands working at his track pants, pulling everything off him, and urging his hips forward to the edge of the couch.
“Lie back,” she said, her palms moving up his thighs, stroking, lighting him up, and she hadn’t even got there yet. “And enjoy the show. Because I know you like to watch me.”
He couldn’t even answer. He hadn’t taken a deep breath since he’d seen her light shining from that bedroom window, and he didn’t start now.
Whatever breath he had left, he lost over the next minutes as Chloe gave him everything a man could want. She gave him her best, and she didn’t hold back. Her hands. Her mouth. And if Chloe dancing was a sight to heat his blood, Chloe naked on her knees before him ... that was everything.
He enjoyed it. You could say that. Or you could say that, when the top of his head was about to blow off and his mind would have gone with it, when he knew that thirty more seconds would tip him straight over the edge, he pulled gently at the fine hair in which his hands were wrapped and said, “Chloe. Stop.”
She looked up, licked her way slowly up over him like he was her treat, and he just about lost it right there. “What?” she asked. “You don’t like it?”
He was on his feet, and it wasn’t easy. But he knew where he needed to be when this happened. He knew exactly. He needed to be buried deep inside her. All the way to her heart.
When he pulled her to her feet, she came willingly. And when he lifted her in his arms, she wrapped her own arms around him exactly like that swan, kissed his neck again, and said, “Yes. Please.”
He carried her to her bed and felt like exactly what she’d called him. Like her hero. And when he eased his way inside the warm, tight, sweet space that was already his, and she made a low noise deep in her throat ... he felt like whatever was better than that.
She was already wrapping her legs around him, but he needed more tonight. He needed better. He got his hands under her thighs, and she knew exactly what he wanted. He lifted her legs over his shoulders, and she moaned. He started to move, got a choked little cry out of her, and felt a hard rush that nearly ended it right there.
More. Everything. He threaded his fingers through hers, dragged her arms up over her head, and that was it. She was lifted high, held fast, and he was in so deep. So hard, and so strong. Her face was buried in his neck, she was making some noise, and he was lost.
He was hers. But Chloe?
Oh, yes. She was. She was his.
She didn’t mean to fall asleep with him. He was so warm against her, though, and his arm draped over her felt too secure. He smelled like soap and felt like home, and she was so very tired.
The way he’d fallen on her as soon as she’d opened the door, though. The way he’d looked in his uniform, still dirty and sweaty, striding across the field to grab her. She’d been waiting for the release of that orgasm ever since he’d taken her in his arms in front of the world and claimed her.
Most men weren’t anything like the heroes of ballets. But then, most men weren’t rugby players.
The last thing she remembered was Kevin kissing the back of her neck like the victor he was, cradling her breast as if it was exactly the right size for his hand, and saying, his voice low and slow, “The more you give me, the more I want. I can’t stop wanting you. I can’t help myself.”
“Mm,” she said, and that was all she remembered.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting up in the dark, not even sure what had awakened her.
“Mummy!” It was Zavy, sounding distraught. She tumbled out of bed, realized she was naked, and groped for her dressing gown.
No success.
“Chloe? Baby, what?” It came from behind her, fuzzy with sleep, and it took her a second for the message to reach her brain.
Kevin.
The sobs from Zavy’s room continued. She finally realized that her dressing gown was in the lounge, so she switched on the light, squinted against the glare, grabbed a nightdress at random off a hanger, and headed out the door while she was still pulling it on.
When she switched on the bedside light, she found Zavy sitting up in bed, his face red, his hair sticking up in matted clumps. And wailing. She sat down on the edge of the bed, pulled him close, and said, “Shh, darling. Shh. You’re all good. Mummy’s here.”
He didn’t answer, and he didn’t stop crying. He didn’t even seem to know she was here, and it was starting to scare her.
A voice came from the doorway. “All right?”
Kevin shouldn’t be here. Should he? She didn’t have time to think about it, because Zavy was still wailing. Then Kevin was beside her, dressed only in his track pants, his chest bare. Crouching down, his hand on Zavy’s back, saying, “Oi, little mate. It’s all right. Your mum’s right here holding you. She’s got you, mate. Got you tight, see?”
Just Say Yes (Escape to New Zealand Book 10) Page 22