I took the seat next to him and tipped the book back so I could see what he was reading. The Hunger Games. Not at all what I would have expected.
I raised a brow in question when he looked up.
“You have a problem with me reading this?” he asked, but he did it with a wink.
“Just surprised. Never pegged you for being the futuristic dystopian love triangle sort of guy.”
“I tried Twilight, but I couldn’t get into it. The vampire thing just didn’t work for me.”
“But alternate realities are fine?”
“Depends on the alternate reality. I tried Divergent, too, and I was okay with it until the last book, where everything was explained.”
“Didn’t like the ending?” I asked.
“Didn’t like any piece of the explanation about everything in the world. I was mad. Got all invested in what seemed like a really cool thing, and the answers were stupid.”
“Stupid is bad.”
“Stupid is worse than bad. It’s awful. I had to fix a hole in a wall because I threw the book.”
I laughed.
“It was the hardback,” he explained.
“So what happens if you don’t like the ending to this series?”
“I already know the ending, or at least I assume I do. Saw the movies first, so unless they changed a ton because of it being Hollywood, I have a good sense of it. Seemed like a safer plan, so I wouldn’t have to fix any more holes in the walls.”
“A lot cheaper, at least.”
“You have no idea. Drywall. Paint. We had to repaint the whole room, because we couldn’t match the original color exactly, and that led to doing the entire house.” He gave me a meaningful look. “It was my mom’s wall. I was visiting my parents over the summer. Turned into a massive redecorating project. Dad wanted to murder me before she was done. New paint wasn’t enough. She ended up remodeling the entire kitchen and both bathrooms before he finally put his foot down and insisted she had to stop.”
The bus pulled out into traffic. I hadn’t been paying attention to see if everyone had gotten on board, too caught up in talking young-adult fiction with Nate.
“You know those books are all essentially romances, right?” I pointed out. “Written for teenagers, too.”
“You have a problem with the fact that I read romance?”
I shook my head. “No problem at all. Just surprised, I guess.” Again. He kept surprising me.
“I need a few tips in the romance department.”
I rolled my eyes. “From teenagers?”
“I’ll take them from anyone and anywhere I can find them.”
“Hardly. You did well enough on your own with that dinner cruise.” I’d never been treated to anything as romantic as that before. With most of the guys I had dated over the years, ordering pizza and playing a few rounds of Dungeons and Dragons was as romantic as it got. “Or have I missed the book you got that one from?”
He wrapped a strong arm around my shoulders and drew me in against his side. It was all I could do not to let out an audible sigh of contentment.
“That was one date. It takes more than one night of romance to be considered a romantic.”
“Hmm,” I said, snuggling closer. “So what kind of tips are you getting from this book?”
“Well, it’s too late to throw burned bread to you in the rain while you’re starving as a child, so I’m hoping I run across some better tips once I get further in. Were you ever starving as a kid?” he asked, raising a brow. Then he shook his head. “Probably not.”
“Definitely not,” I said. “Dad always made a good living. We never wanted for anything. You seem like you’re in a good mood.”
“You surprised after everything that happened tonight?”
“A bit.” No point in lying about that.
“I was in a shitty mood. But then Colesy did what he did, and everything changed.”
I lifted my head so I could raise a brow at him. “Everything?”
He shrugged, grinning. “Enough. At least when it came to my mood.”
“Guess I should be glad he opened himself up to be the next media whipping boy, then.”
“Oh yeah? And why is that?”
“Because I thought I was going to have to spend some time putting you in a better mood.”
“No reason why you shouldn’t do that anyway,” Nate murmured, waggling his eyebrows.
I laughed and curled into his side as he marked his page—using a sticky note as a bookmark instead of folding down a corner and desecrating the book, I couldn’t help but notice—and we stayed like that until the bus pulled up in front of the team’s hotel.
A bunch of the guys immediately headed out in groups to get a late-night dinner. I assumed Nate would want to do the same, but he surprised me by taking my hand once I followed him off the bus and leading me inside, heading straight through the lobby and making a beeline for the elevator bay.
“You’re not hungry?” I asked after he pressed the up button.
He glanced around, making sure no one was within earshot, then put his mouth next to my ear. “Different kind of hunger,” he whispered, moments before his lips closed over the lobe of my ear.
A shiver raced up my spine as the elevator doors opened. We went in together. Alone. As the doors closed again, Nate pressed the button for his floor.
I didn’t press the button for mine.
BY THE TIME we reached Nate’s room, my pulse was at a full sprint from a combination of nerves and excitement. We’d managed to keep our hands to ourselves in the elevator, but an unspoken agreement of what was to come filled the space between us.
His hand holding tightly to mine, he flipped on the lights and closed the door behind us. He leaned back against it, his eyes passing over my face in a way that heated me from the belly out in every direction. He looked as calm and unflappable as I felt out of control, especially when he smiled at me. His smile could always do that to me. There was something confident and maybe just a little bit cocky about it. He had an utter and complete belief in himself that I envied. It didn’t matter how successful I might be in anything—I’d never been so self-assured. And right now? I felt as uncertain of myself as I ever had in my life.
How could he be keeping it together like this? He was supposed to be wild and angry and falling to pieces because of those signs in the crowd and the way the press had tried to flog the racism angle to death again, and I was supposed to let him lose himself in me. That had been my plan. I was going to be there for him on a physical level, to let him vent whatever frustrations he needed to vent into me.
Instead, he was acting like nothing out of the ordinary had happened tonight, and I was the one falling apart at the seams. He seemed to be gathering all my loose ends together, too, keeping them safe until I was able to stitch things together again. Still, it annoyed me to no end that our roles were reversed from what I’d been expecting.
“You’re breathing hard,” he said, raising our joined hands. He set mine against his chest, and my fingers curled in toward him.
The whole way back to the hotel, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him. I’d been thinking about it for so long—longer than I should have been. He was right in that the two of us should be off-limits for each other. We both knew it in our heads. Too bad no one bothered getting that message through to our hearts.
I felt my own chest rise and fall, much harder than his was at the moment. He’d said I was breathing hard? That was putting it mildly. “I suppose I am.” I took a step closer to him, my pulse drowning out all sounds other than our unsteady breaths. There was one sign, at least, that he wasn’t quite as cool and collected as I’d imagined at first—his ragged breathing. His heart beat hard and fast beneath my fingertips. Another sign of his struggles. Maybe I wasn’t the only one losing my grip on reality because of lust.
Was it just lust, though? I wasn’t so sure of that anymore. For my part, I was well and truly beyond the lust stage and verging
on falling hard. After the way we’d argued last night… All signs pointed toward us both being in the same place, which was both exhilarating and startling. I couldn’t say that I’d ever been in love before. There’d been plenty of infatuations over the years, and I wasn’t immune to a healthy crush. But was this how love felt? Aching need, mixed with a calming sense of rightness settling over me, and a good dose of aggravation to balance everything out?
With my pumps, we were the same height. He reached behind my head and released the clip that had been holding the mess of my hair captive all day. My hair was long, thick, and curly, an unruly mass that had always been the bane of my mother’s existence. She’d spent years cursing my father for his DNA and lamenting the fact that I wasn’t fully Indian, with the sleek, easily restrained hair that ran in her family.
As an adult, I went back and forth between cursing my hair as much as she had and reveling in the ways I was different from my mother and her family. Nate combed his fingers through my tangled ringlets, and it was all I could do to keep from sighing and falling into him.
“You wore it down like this that night on the cruise,” he said. “I can’t tell you how hard it was to keep from running my fingers through it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He shrugged, but he didn’t take his hand away. Thank goodness. I couldn’t handle it if he stopped now, which only proved I was more of a lost cause than I’d realized. “Thought I should kiss you first,” he said with a half shrug.
“Do you have a list of steps to follow for everything you do?” I let my other hand rest on his chest, too, a smile working its way to my lips. My fingers itched to loosen his tie and undo his buttons, but I didn’t want to rush into anything. If I did, we might both end up with broken limbs or concussions, given the way I always seemed to be hurting myself around him.
“Is it a problem if I do?”
“Not a problem, exactly, no. But does that mean you’ve got a formula in place for how this next part is going to go?”
“Why?” He laughed. “You want a rundown? Let me think… Step one: kiss Anne until her toes curl. Step two: grope Anne until my toes curl.”
I halfheartedly punched him on the shoulder.
“Sorry. Groping isn’t the romantic word I should be using if I’m paying attention to The Hunger Games. Peeta would never talk about groping Katniss. He might think about it, but he’d be a gentleman.”
“Just don’t tell me that step three is bump and grind, and I think I’ll cope well enough.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of bump uglies.”
I rolled my eyes. “Either way.”
He gave me an exaggerated pout. “You mean we aren’t going to get to that step tonight? Because if not, I’ll have to adjust my schedule to account for not making it all the way to home base yet.”
“Please tell me we’re not going to have to use sports analogies for everything.”
“I’m happy to use any form of pop culture references you prefer, and especially those that rank high in the realm of geekdom.”
“You’d do that for me, hmm?”
“I’d do just about anything for you,” he said, sounding as serious as ever. Like he meant it. Like he wasn’t just exaggerating because that’s what you do when you’re flirting. He couldn’t mean any such thing, could he? Anything was an incredibly broad term.
I rolled my eyes, deciding to take it as a simple flirtation, but he stopped me from arguing with him by kissing me. A few torturously long moments after his lips pressed to mine, his tongue traced the seam of my lips. I welcomed him in, taking hold of his jacket lapels to ground myself because I felt ready to float away otherwise. Somehow, gravity ceased to exist. I had to wonder what other basic laws of human life were going to be turned on their heads before this came to a conclusion. He stopped teasing his fingers through my hair, instead sliding them down the column of my neck.
“That’s a lot better than groping,” I murmured when he nipped my lower lip and then broke away.
“You sure about that?” He trailed his other hand down my back until he could grab a palm full of my bottom and squeeze. He winked. “Because I can give you both.”
I laughed out loud, which only led to a deeper kiss. All the sweetness of the first one was gone. This was so much more intense. Harder. Hungrier. It was wet and raw, with teeth and tongue, our bodies rubbing together in a heated frenzy.
But we both had far too much clothing in the way. With shaking hands, I tugged at his tie until I got the knot loose. Nate appeared to be of the same mind. He jerked the tie free from his collar and tossed it on the dresser, then walked me backward into the room, undoing the buttons of my jacket as he went.
Within moments, we were a tangle of limbs and clothes, both partially undressed as we tumbled onto the bed. Our jackets were gone. One of my shoes was still on my foot, but the other was missing. He’d stripped his belt and pants away before we fell on the bed, leaving his powerful thighs bare other than the bands of his boxer-briefs and the bandage on his leg.
Nate rolled us over until I was on top of him. I steadied myself, bracing my knees on either side of his hips and resting my hands on his shoulders. My hair hung down between us, the long ends of it dusting his chest. He freed my shirt from my waistband, shifted the fabric up, and tugged it over my head.
Out of nowhere, panic hit me. I scrabbled to grab my shirt again, or anything at all I could use to cover myself with, but he caught my hands in his, trapping them between us and willing me with his steady gaze to calm down.
I tried. Took deep breaths. Focused on his eyes, like they were my safe space. Couldn’t stop thinking about how no one had ever—ever—seen me this naked before, not since I was a little girl and my parents had bathed me. I’d had sex before, sure, but never with the lights on. Even in high school gym class, I’d gone into a private bathroom stall to change clothes. I wanted to free my hands and cover my body, but Nate’s grip, while gentle, was unrelenting.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I shook my head, trying to get free from him, but he held me still.
He tucked some of my hair behind my ear with his free hand, his fingertips teasing me with a light, gentle touch. I wanted more of that, but…
“I just want to look at you,” he said. As if to prove his point, his gaze roved from my face to my neck. My shoulders. The space between my breasts. I didn’t even spend any more time than necessary looking at my own body in the mirror, covering up as soon as possible. How could I allow him to? But he kept staring. “Is that all right? If I spend some time looking at you? God, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
My breath formed a knot under my breastbone. His touch was soothing, but his gaze had the opposite effect on me. I needed to cover myself, and I needed to do it now. But I was frozen beneath his stare. Couldn’t move, even if Nate wasn’t trapping my hands in his grip.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. He trailed his fingers along the same path his eyes had just taken. Everywhere he touched, my skin jumped. Goose bumps popped up along each inch of his journey, warming me even though the air in the room suddenly felt cold enough to turn my breath to frost—if I had any breath, which, of course, I didn’t. Everything about this moment was a war inside my body, and one I couldn’t understand, let alone explain.
I shook my head. I convinced myself I could tell him nothing was wrong even though it was a lie. But that wasn’t even close to what came out of my mouth.
“Can we turn out the lights?” I spluttered, wishing I could force the words back inside, but it was too late. There they were, out in the open, laughing at me. The most ridiculous part of it was that I wanted to see Nate’s body with everything that was in me. I’d seen him nearly naked so many times before, and he was a gorgeous specimen of a man. Rock-hard abs. Smooth, dark skin that I wanted to taste. A chest like Hercules. A butt like a Speedo model.
I’d been thinking about getting him undressed for longer than was good for me.
But now he was looking at me. And I didn’t think I could cope, which was beyond pathetic. I couldn’t stop thinking about covering myself again. Not only that, but it was all my mother’s fault. She’d gotten so deeply into my head that she was invading my thoughts even now, at a time when she was the last person on earth I ought to be thinking of.
I’d only started wearing shorts and T-shirts to sleep in once I’d moved out of my father’s house to live on my own—once there was no one else around to see my bare arms and legs, or anything else that might be hanging out there. It was one of the vestiges of all the years living with my mother, even if I’d done my best to shake free of her influence in every way possible. Apparently, I’d never been able to rid myself of her voice in my ear anytime I attempted to wear something that was common in America.
My recognition of that fact didn’t do anything to ease the discomfort of the current situation, especially with Nate looking at me like I’d lost my mind.
“You want to turn the lights out,” he repeated, sounding as full of dismay as I’d ever heard him.
“Never mind,” I insisted, shaking my head and trying to convince myself that I could get through this with the lights on. “It’s ridiculous. I’m being—”
“No,” he said, as calm as ever. “If you need the lights off, we’ll turn the lights off. You’re sure you want this, though? Because I don’t want to rush you. If you need more time…” He released my hands, letting me reach for the blankets to cover myself. The way he was looking at me, his gaze so filled with concern, nearly broke me.
“I don’t need more time. I want this. I want you. More than anything.” Even more than my next breath. “I just—” Couldn’t find the words. Definitely couldn’t explain.
“You just need the lights out.”
Game Breaker (Portland Storm Book 14) Page 18