by Cari Quinn
“I didn’t wake you?”
He shook his head, realizing she hadn’t doubted the validity of his bad dream statement. Either she remembered what she’d been dreaming or it happened often enough for her to believe it without question. “I couldn’t sleep.”
Her gaze dropped to his lap. So much for him thinking she’d be too preoccupied to notice. “No wonder.”
Again he cleared his throat. “What were you dreaming about? Do you remember?”
Two flags of color appeared high on her wax-pale cheeks. “I’d really rather talk about your erection, if it’s all the same to you.”
He laughed before he knew he was going to. “Vetoed there, slugger.”
Her flush deepened. “It was worth a shot.”
Rather than press her for answers when he suspected she’d do the same—and he wasn’t about to discuss his hard-on with the reason for it—he reached for the flask and cocked an eyebrow. “Brandy?” he asked as the unmistakable sweetness hit his nose.
She shrugged. “It takes the edge off before I get on stage.”
“And when you get off it?”
“No. I usually only take a couple sips before I sing, but I didn’t need them last night. At least not until we got back from the cop shop.” She tucked the comforter under her arms and sighed, seemingly at ease despite her nudity. She didn’t know he’d seen her bare to the waist, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t have minded even so.
Maybe she wasn’t as innocent as he thought.
That was, undoubtedly, hope speaking. It so rarely made an appearance that he knew the telltale signs immediately. The loosening in the gut, the slight dizziness that came from possibilities stretching out before him like a field glittering with dewy diamonds. Then the constriction in his throat as reality did away with even that tiny ray of light.
Realizing he’d brought the flask closer to his nose out of reflex, he capped the bottle and set it aside. Way aside, near the edge of the coffee table. “When I was a kid, talking about my dreams helped.”
“I’m not a kid, thank you very much, and you’re not my therapist.”
The censure in her tone was much preferable to the whimpers he’d yet to erase from his head. “If I was, I’d expect more payment than a titty flash in a parking lot, just so you know.”
He figured she’d kick him or give him the finger. Instead she threw back her head and laughed. The angle of her neck made him want to suck the delicate pulse point beneath her jaw until she whimpered again for a whole new reason. “It was a joke, something I saw on TV. It went way wrong, but I had no choice.” She shrugged. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
Only through extreme effort did he manage not to grin. “Aw, darlin’, I think I could handle whatever you dish out.”
Apparently forgetting she wasn’t clothed, she sat up too fast, and the comforter shifted down to play peek-a-boo with her nipples. His sudden fascination below her neck clued her into her reveal, but she merely tugged up the cover and narrowed her eyes. “Just because you’re some big athlete doesn’t mean I don’t have ways of bringing you to your knees.”
He couldn’t fight his smirk. “No doubt about that.”
She crossed her arms and tilted her head. “What, no darlin’ this time? Where did your pseudo-Southern charm go all of a sudden?”
“Florida’s south of here, yeah, but I don’t think they consider themselves the south in the strictest sense.”
“Thanks for the geography lesson.” It was her turn to smirk as she leaned forward and pursed her lips. “I didn’t miss your attempt to slot me into my prototypical female role. The little woman who needs protecting, who can only bring a man down—” her gaze shifted to his resistant hard-on with barely a flicker of her eyelashes, “—or up, in your case, with her sexual wiles and not her hands.”
“Oh, I never said you couldn’t bring me up with your hands,” he murmured, well aware he was prodding her raging fire with his burning match. “As for the rest? Unless you want to land ass first in assumptions, cool it.”
She shook her head, sending her hair flying in all directions. Her hair had gone rogue, and she seemed as concerned about controlling it as she was in tamping down the aggravation in her bright blue eyes. “What do you say we do a live demonstration?”
“Of what, exactly?” he asked warily.
Her grin took him aback. “I’ll get you on your knees in under a minute, without flashing you or doing anything shady.” Oh so casually, she reached over and grabbed her slinky bra from the pile of her clothes and dragged it under the comforter, popping her shoulders back as her hands went to work. By the time she tugged the straps up her arms, he was a little dazed and a lot impressed. “So what do you say? Game?”
He glanced down at his towel and cocked a brow. “Can I get dressed first?”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Showing hers, she snatched her flirty panties and whipped them under the comforter, bumping and gyrating until she emerged from beneath the cover dressed in her lingerie. She bounded to her feet and stroked her biceps, making him grin in spite of himself. “Besides, there’s no way I could really take you down, right? I’m a wittle female who needs a big, strong man to protect me.”
Chase stood and checked the knot in his towel to ensure he wouldn’t be giving her another reason to blush besides her certain failure at taking him down. Then he held out his hands, palms first. “Bring it, badass.”
She moved like a viper, so fast that her hair striking his face was the only thing he registered before her small but shockingly strong fingers encircled his wrist.
Did she know he was a southpaw or had she just gotten lucky? It seemed like the announcers mentioned it every game. Especially since the one where his injury had become obvious, though talk still ranged in the realm of occasional speculation. Mark from the club must be a gossip hound.
Summer yanked hard and his gaze swam. Frigging hell, what was she doing to him?
He found himself facing away from her, his left arm bent at an awkward angle as she pressed it against his back and tried unsuccessfully to muscle him to the floor. The pain rocketing from his injured elbow sent him to his knees in surprise, and she let out a triumphant shout. “Gotcha.”
Allowing her the moment she’d partially earned, he hissed out a breath between his clamped teeth. When he thought he could speak without gasping in pain, he managed, “Enough, slugger.”
“But I wanted to show you—”
“Let me up.”
She released him at once and he schooled his features into relaxed lines as he looked over his shoulder. “You did good.” He rose and pivoted toward her, taking in her expression from the wrinkle between her brows to the glow of pride in her eyes. And her sexy pout. There was definitely no missing the pout. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“Tai Kwon Do, Ju Jit Su, Karate.” She ticked a few more styles of martial arts off her fingers. “Plus a couple of self-defense classes. My technique’s sort of a hybrid method not often seen in the concrete jungle.” At her frown, he realized he was unconsciously cradling his tingling left arm. Great. “Hey, did I hurt you?”
“No.” His reply was too sharp, a mixture of disgust at his injury and insult that a tiny brunette thought she could lay him low with barely a twist of her pretty little fingers.
Though that wasn’t all that far from what had actually happened. So much for physical therapy doing him any fucking good.
“Oh God.” She clamped her palm over her mouth then let her hand drop. “I usually skip the gossip rags, but I read something about your arm being injured a while back. It’s not true, is it? People started coming up with crazy theories when you got into that slump—”
“Slump, my ass.” Before she could ask any more questions, he strode toward the door. “I’m going to get dressed. I suggest you do the same. Then we’re going to talk.”
Her muttered curses followed him down the hall.
Chapter Three
Chas
e found Summer in the kitchen, staring at the package of eggs she held as if she expected them to magically jump into the frying pan she’d set on his stove. Two glasses of orange juice stood on the butcher block counter and a slab of bacon waited next to the burners.
He’d stalled for half an hour in his bedroom to avoid talking to her—and to avoid acknowledging the embarrassment that was still heating his ears at being so unpleasantly manhandled—and that was after he’d forced her to sleep on the sofa. Yet she was making him breakfast. What was wrong with this picture?
“Are the eggs expired?” he asked, rubbing his hand over his still damp hair. He’d let it grow since he’d been away from the game and the shaggy length was now creeping past his shoulders. Eventually he’d have to handle it, like he had to handle too many other things.
At least his hair wasn’t keeping him up at night.
She checked the carton. “No, not for another week.” Cutting him a glance, she bit her lip in an unconsciously seductive way that did nothing to help the hard-on he was still sporting after being confronted with her twin weapons of mass destruction.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“I never expected you to be like…this,” she finished lamely, looking from the galley kitchen into the living room in obvious puzzlement. “You do laundry and you have real, actual groceries, which means you must cook. Everything’s so tidy too. Do you have a cook or maid?”
What kind of lazy motherfucker did she think he was? So he played ball. That didn’t mean he needed someone standing at his side with a moistened towelette to wipe his ass. “No. I have me.”
Her frown reached her eyes. “There aren’t even any condoms or sex toys or bottles of Heineken lying around.”
It took effort, but he managed not to grin. “You haven’t been in my bedroom.”
She canted her head and sent her rivulets of dark hair cascading over her shoulders. Even her slight case of bedhead made her more attractive, as well as giving him an uncomfortable reminder she still hadn’t showered. He’d have to step outside onto the balcony and maybe blast some rap music in his ears to block out the sound of the water—and to distract him from thinking about her covered in nothing but soap.
Her voice intruded into his prurient thoughts. “Is that an invitation, Deuce?”
“Don’t call me that.” He moved past her to snag one of the glasses of juice. Tossing it back in several swallows, he set it down and eyed her white-knuckled grip on his eggs. “I usually don’t roll out the red carpet for women who land me in jail on our first date.”
Her lips twitched and he felt an answering smile tug at his own. “Our first date, huh? Since you’ve seen my boobs and I’ve seen you in cuffs, are we going steady now?” The scorching look she aimed over her shoulder would’ve killed the last brain cell left in his head if they hadn’t already all vacated south. Studying her shapely butt as she cracked eggs in the pan and set it on sizzle didn’t exactly help his directional issues. “If so, maybe you should go lie down so I can feed you in bed.”
“If we’re in bed, trust me, food would be the last thing on my mind,” he muttered.
She grinned and started to hum under her breath, a song he soon realized was one from last night’s set list. Ignoring his better judgment, he propped a hip on the counter and reached for her untouched juice without a qualm. It was her fault she was making his damn throat so dry with her hip gyrations.
“What’s the name of that?” he questioned once she stopped humming.
“Hmm? They’re your usual scrambled eggs. If you could grab me those peppers and ’shrooms over there, that would be a huge help.”
Rather than hand her the cutting board with the chopped vegetables, he grabbed the knife she’d set aside and chopped the vegetables more finely. The movement sent a wave of tingling numbness through his hand, and he had to grip the knife twice as hard not to drop it. He’d be paying for her martial arts practice moves for hours, if not days. “The song,” he grated out. “What’s it called?”
“Oh. It’s ‘Deep’.”
“The song is called ‘It’s Deep’?”
“No. Just ‘Deep’.” She cleared her throat and went to work with her spatula in the pan, looking more like she was stir-frying the yolks than scrambling them. Using her other hand, she threw liberal dashes of salt and pepper into the mix.
His arteries winced in silent agony.
“Who wrote it?”
“Me.” Almost to prove it to him, she started to sing in her sultry voice. She vocally caressed the words, coating them in smoke and honey while she swayed to the music she made.
The lyrics were crazy sexual, a sort of melodic aural fucking. She sang them with sly bravado, an experienced seductress who needed no other weapon other than what was between her lips.
And he was mesmerized.
“That was the first thing I ever wrote,” she said when she was finished, evidently unaware that he’d stopped chopping in favor of staring open-mouthed at her back. Drool optional. “Back in high school. You were probably still next door,” she added, laughing.
“You didn’t learn that in church.”
Another laugh, softer this time. Then she glanced at the clock and gasped. “Shit.” She gasped again, probably at her swear word slip. Back in school, she and Cass had been militant about telling him and Jax to mind their language, though Cass wasn’t quite as careful anymore. At least around him. “Church. We have to hurry.”
He nearly dropped the knife again but not because his elbow was acting up. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not home and it’s Sunday morning. We need to find a service.” When he continued to gape at her, she shrugged. “Fine. I do. You can do whatever you want. By the way, I need my veggies. My eggs are drying up.”
Shaking his head, he walked over to her and unceremoniously dumped the pile of peppers and mushrooms into her remarkably fluffy eggs. Dry, my ass. “You go to church every Sunday?”
“Yeah. I do.” She folded the vegetables into the eggs, then made his heart constrict in advance of his looming cardiac event as she liberally soaked the concoction in more salt. Which she then licked off her fingers with a sound that might have been “Mmm.”
“Are you on cholesterol-reducing meds?”
She blinked up at him, all blue-eyed, church-anticipating innocence. “No. Why?”
“Because I think you’ll need to be soon.” Chase snatched the salt and pepper shakers and set them aside before returning to their original conversation. Whether it was about sex music or visiting the house of the Lord, he wasn’t certain. “I can drive you home and you can go to your own church.”
“Yardley is two and a half hours from here. It’s past seven already. We still need to eat breakfast, and I have to take a shower. Washing my hair takes—”
“Got it.” He cut her off to avoid clamping his hands over his ears like a petulant child who didn’t want to go where she insisted on taking him. Repeatedly, with vivid word pictures. She might as well invite him to play chess with the strategically placed bubbles over her erogenous zones. “I’ll take you to one here.”
“You don’t have a home church?”
He resisted busting out laughing. Not that he was against church or organized religion as a whole. He just hadn’t had a lot of time to fit it in during the last decade or so, what with his pretty rigorous schedule of training, games, drinking and indiscriminate screwing.
Time was one thing he had way too much of now.
“I’m not Catholic, Summer.”
She blinked, probably at his use of her actual name. “No? Cass is.”
“Not a practicing Catholic,” he amended. “I always figured it was a little hypocritical to take my weekly host and wine when I was recovering from a hangover.”
“You’re not drunk today.” She started making the bacon, apparently having realized she’d forgotten it due to her obsession with fluffy, well-vegetablized eggs. She’d certainly made herself right at home in his kitchen. �
��Are you?” she prodded when he didn’t reply.
“No,” he said a little too sharply. “I’m working the program.” Or he had been until recently, when he’d started slacking on going to meetings. When she lifted a brow, he added, “AA.”
“Oh.” Then, a longer and more drawn out version. “Ohhh.”
To give himself something to do, he took over for her on the eggs, sliding into the open spot beside her at the stove. He grabbed a couple of dishes from an overhead cabinet and dumped the eggs on the plain white plates, then grabbed a couple of leftover curls of pepper to use as garnish like his mom used to do. Making food look nicer was habit, no different than the two hundred sit-ups he did every morning.
Glancing up at Summer’s amused face, he scowled. “Got a problem?’
“No. You’re so…domesticated. It’s sexy.”
In spite of himself, he laughed. “Nice save, slugger. You’re about to strike out though, so finish up my bacon so we can get you into your Sunday best.”
“You should come to church too. It might do you some good.” She arched up on her tiptoes and flung her hand in the direction of his hair. Her fingers glanced off his cheek. “Your halo’s looking a little rusty, ballboy.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll go if you will sit down with me with your schedule and discuss the possibility of personal security like a mature adult.” The flash in her eyes would’ve made a lesser man retreat. Not him. He had a sister and knew how to talk to emotional women. “It’s only fair,” he added, though he didn’t give a shit about fairness and would’ve gotten her to listen to reason one way or another anyway.
It worked.
“Okay. Fine. I suppose I owe you that much,” she agreed. Then she cocked her head and bit her lip. That thoughtful look of hers was going to kill him. “Did you lose your job at the club because of me?”
“No. I lost it because it wasn’t suited for me.”
“Why’d you take it in the first place? Don’t you have ball to get back to?” She turned back to the stove and traced her fingernail along the edge of the spatula. “It sucks the Daggers let you go. I can’t believe no one else has picked you up yet.”