by Luis, Maria
In a text that I’ve read more times than I’ll ever admit out loud, she claimed that I’ve ruined her for other men.
Well, in the last two weeks, she’s ruined my goddamn peace of mind.
Add that to a concussion and I’m lucky I’m still upright and walking.
“Not interested in somethings.” I reach beyond her right shoulder to set my energy drink on the roof of my car, a little more forcefully than the car deserves. “Unless you’ve got something important to say, I’ve got a hot date with my shower and my TV—”
“The guys are worried about you.”
My arm pauses in its downward trajectory, back to my side, as I dip my chin to look down, down, down at Holly blocking my entrance to my car. “The guys need to stay in their own lane.”
In response, she only latches onto my forearm, the soft pads of her fingers digging into my bare skin. “Don’t be a dick, Jackson. They’ve been concerned since the hit with Fitzgerald. You’ve been short-tempered, moody, and definitely not the patient captain everyone knows and loves.”
My exhaustion is at its peak tonight, dragging me down, making me into the prick I reserve exclusively for the ice.
I tell myself that it’s the only reason I do what I do next: dropping my hands onto the car on either side of Holly’s beautiful head, leaning into her body so that her small but pert breasts press into my sternum, my already hard dick making its presence known against her tight stomach.
I drop my mouth to her ear, needing to hunch my shoulders and curl myself around her petite frame to get her exactly where I want her. “Is that the captain you know and love?” My nose rasps along the delicate line of her neck, my tongue coming out to flick the exposed shell of her ear. “The patient man?” Another flick of my tongue, another pulse of my headache forging a stampede in my skull. “The man who walked onto that flight the day after you and him kissed, fully prepared to do what it took to make shit right . . . only to find out you turned into a coward overnight and took a red-eye instead.”
Her sweet voice is reedy thin when she speaks. “Jackson—”
“No.” Stomach twisting, I ball my hands into fists and avert my face. The pulsing in my temples won’t stop, narrowing my vision, making a sheen of sweat break out over my skin, only matched by the throbbing of my cock as I wrestle for control. “If I’m being a moody asshole, it’s got little to do with Fitzgerald.”
I was given the okay by the doc within days of that hit.
That’s how it works in the NHL, how it’s always worked. You get hit. You go down. You get your ass right back up again and give the game everything you’ve got the next time you step out onto the ice.
The NHL doesn’t breed pussies—and we’ve all had our marbles rattled a time or two.
I’m no different.
No, as much as I’ve tried not to let her silence needle me, Holly’s the reason I’ve spent more hours than I can count in the gym. She’s the reason sleep has eluded me. She’s the fucking reason why my bark is definitely as bad as my bite these days.
There’s nothing quite like putting yourself out there—to the woman who has always had your heart in a vice, divorce or not—and being slammed with the bat of rejection after reaching out.
Her small hand folds itself in the loose fabric of my oversized Cornell T-shirt, and I’m not immune to the ironic twist of fate that the day I wear my alma mater’s gear is the same day I run into the girl who’s had me all twisted up since we first met at college.
“Jackson,” she tries again, voice soft but dredged up by steel, “that kiss . . . I’m not denying that it felt good. God, did it.” Her hold on my T tightens, twists a little harder, just like my heart. “I needed to collect my thoughts after what happened. I needed to remember every reason why we didn’t work. I needed space because if I didn’t have that then I knew—” She breaks off with a broken laugh, the sound so completely unlike her that I almost cave, almost cup the back of her head and bring her in for a hug and a promise that it’ll all be fine.
That we can go on pretending that the kiss meant nothing two weeks ago and means nothing still.
I can’t do that, though.
Not when I’m coiled so tight that I’m on the verge of snapping.
Of begging her to reconsider and give us another chance.
“Answer me this.” I sound gruff, voice cut from stone. The tip of my finger goes to her chin, lifting gently so that I can look into her blue eyes. Get a read on her—on everything she’s thinking but won’t allow herself to say out loud because that’s who Holly is, who she’s always been.
I was the first to bring the L-word into the conversation.
The first to mention forever.
And then the one who looked into her gorgeous blue eyes and read what I knew she wouldn’t say out loud: she wanted a divorce.
Fuck that.
“Answer me this,” I hear myself repeat, no less gruffly, “how many times have you thought about what happened in that hotel room?”
Her lids fall shut, severing our connection as though it’s too much for her to take.
Not happening, sweetheart.
I grip her chin, then slip my hand to curl around the nape of her neck. My thumb glosses down the smooth column, the shadows of the night kissing the very same skin that I touch. “Don’t you dare retreat.”
At my low command, her eyes spring open and her fingers yank hard on my T-shirt. “Please, Jackson.”
Dropping my mouth to the fragile skin I’m caressing, I kiss her neck. A gentle nip. A soft tug on her ear. A scrape of my teeth that has her breath rattling loudly in my ears like a white flag of surrender.
Her free hand jumps to my bicep, her nails digging into my muscles as her head falls back, a sultry moan slipping from her lush lips. “Oh, God.”
Not God.
Just me.
The patient man who knows exactly what she needs to drop her steel armor and let him inside.
Let me inside.
“Answer the question, Holls.” My thumb swoops low, along the underside of her jaw to tilt her head just the way I want it—at the perfect angle to catch my kiss. I hover my lips over hers, refusing to eliminate those final few inches to heaven on earth until she answers. My control slips, the rapid tempo of my breathing slipping into a tight race with the thunderous roar in my head. “Answer. The. Question.”
Her warm breath washes over my lips. “Every day,” she whispers, “I’ve thought about that kiss every damn day.”
“Good. Now you can think about this one, too.”
19
Holly
Jackson’s kiss is seduction in its purest form.
And the irony isn’t lost on me: the man kissing me now is the warrior who plays on the ice, the man who elicits fear from his opponents, the man who commands a room simply by existing in it.
He tempts me like no one else ever has.
Slays me with nothing but his dark eyes on mine.
Sabotages my plan to keep things platonic and easy and uncomplicated by backing me up against the side of his car and devouring my mouth with his.
I want to hate him for it.
Instead, I cup his face with my hands, thumbs tracing his stubbled jawline, and sweep my tongue along the seam of his lips.
He growls his approval against my mouth. This kiss, not unlike the one in that hotel room, isn’t sweet. It’s definitely not subtle. Not when he hooks my left leg around his hip and drags his still-clothed hard-on along the seam of my jeans. Not when his other hand gently pulls at my messy bun, releasing the strands, throwing the elastic band away into the darkness. Not when he fists my now loosened hair, breaks from the kiss, and grits out, “I’ve dreamt of this. Your hair tangled between my fingers. Spread across my pillow. Wrapped around my fist as I fit myself into you from behind.”
His mouth lands on my throat, just like it was only minutes ago.
And just like then, words flee my brain on contact.
Not for hi
m, though.
No, he only winds that spell tighter around me, winding me up with nothing but the softness of his lips on my flesh and the dirty words spilling from his mouth, tightening the need between my legs until I’m rubbing shamelessly against his crotch.
“I’d take you just how you like it,” he mutters shamelessly, fingers twining in my hair, mouth slipping down to the crook of my neck and shoulder, “you bent over the bed, your sweet ass in the air, your hands fisting the sheets as you scream my name.”
Jackson Carter.
Captain of the Boston Blades.
The only man to know exactly where I need to be touched, the precise pressure that I need to tip over the edge.
But I know how to touch him, too, how to make him lose control.
If we’re going down in this downward spiral of ecstasy and bad decisions, I refuse to go alone.
My hands move from his rugged face, the latter half-eclipsed by the shadows of the parking lot, to the waistband of his mesh shorts. I don’t give him any opportunity to steal back control before I’m slipping the material down over his narrow hips to his thick, muscular thighs.
Right under his balls.
“Holls—”
I hear the panic in his voice—the almighty Jackson worrying about having his throne of control usurped—and drop my lifted leg back onto the concrete.
Then I drop to my knees completely.
We’re in clear sight of the practice arena, but the security guards are gone for the night, no other cars around but mine and Jackson’s. The practice rink, unlike TD Garden which sits on the cusp of Boston’s touristy North End, is in the suburb of Waltham, tucked away in a thicket of trees and shrubbery, away from prying eyes and reporters and crazy fans.
Our witnesses are the darkened sky, the twinkling stars, the thin slice of the moon peeking out from behind a cluster of clouds.
And not a one of them utters a single protest as I wrap my hand around my ex-husband’s cock and slip my mouth over the crown.
“Oh, fuck.”
Jackson’s weight shifts forward, and I hear his palms land on the roof of the car as though he’s desperate to find stability.
My fist arcs up his thick length, my mouth dropping simultaneously as I suck him deep and meet my hand in the middle.
“Holly,” he works out, his voice nothing more than a guttural groan above me.
I don’t stop. I don’t slow down, my fist twisting steady and fast as I swallow him again and again. My free hand lifts from his thigh to cup his balls, squeezing, gently tugging the way he’s always loved.
My reward is another string of incomprehensible words: “Oh, fuck. Fuck. Christ, you have to stop. I can’t . . . It feels . . . you feel so—oh, fuck.”
It’s not a fair fight. I know what makes him tick. I know what makes him lose control. But in that space where my insecurities live—where I wonder, constantly—if I know him at all anymore, I still give him my everything and hope it’s enough.
Opening my eyes, I pray for a splice of light across his face when I glance up past his Cornell T-shirt, which makes my heart squeeze with the memories.
Wish granted.
He’s watching me, chest heaving with big, uneven breaths, his hands gripping the smooth curve of the car’s roof. He stares at me like I’m a gift he doesn’t deserve, cheeks hollowing with those uneven breaths of his, bulky arms straining with effort.
I make sure he’s watching as I bob my head and take him deep, to the back of my throat.
His rugged features fracture, my name crossing his lips on an exhale, and then he yanks me up off my knees. He pulls open the driver’s side door, his energy drink falling from the roof to the cement, and ducks his big body inside.
There’s a snap! of what sounds like the glovebox closing.
A relieved, masculine sigh.
And then those arms are banded under my butt as he hikes me up into the air and rounds the front of the car. He deposits me gently on the hood, his hand circling mine until I feel something square press into my palm.
A condom.
My heart sinks at the realization that he has one in his car.
Have there been other women? Has there been anyone but me? He said there isn’t anyone in the picture before he kissed me in Chicago, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been anyone else since our breakup. I can’t blame him if there was—we’re divorced—but it feels like knives are diving into my heart at the thought alone of Jackson being with someone else.
Maybe even many someone else’s.
His smoky Texan accent pulls me out of my head. “Don’t go there,” he demands, framing my face with his hands and crushing my mouth with his before coming up for air. “No one. There’s been no one since you. Fuck if I know, but those condoms might already be expired.”
I crack a grin. “Don’t romanticize this with talk about the pull-out method.”
His brown eyes stare down at me, his mouth curving in a wicked grin. “It worked when you were eighteen.”
“You think so?” My fingers dance up his chest, over the C in Cornell, as I marvel at the sinews in his biceps, exposed by the sliced-off sleeves of his T-shirt. “I specifically remember having to put the condom on you for our first time.” I lean in. Kiss his chest, right over his heart. “You were so damn nervous, fingers all a-tremble.”
His familiar boom of laughter settles the frayed nerves of my soul, the worried edges that we’re doing something wrong here, even though the only people we’ll be hurting with this mistake are ourselves. If it is a mistake at all. I’d prefer to think of it as . . . destiny.
“Let me tell you a little secret,” Jackson murmurs against my ear, his nimble, un-trembling fingers undoing the buttons of my jeans with practiced ease. “You had me so worked up, I would have died without you touching me. Yeah, I was shaky. I had the girl of my dreams alone in her dorm room, laid out on a twin-sized bed with pictures of her grandparents and brother staring down at me from the wall.”
I gasp as he tugs my jeans and underwear down the length of my legs, leaving my butt naked on the cold hood of the car. Probably unsanitary—but nothing about this night is classy or white-poster-bed-worthy.
It’s dirty and a little wrong and so many degrees of catch-your-hair-on-fire hot.
I love it.
“Don’t forget the picture of my childhood dog,” I say, still clutching the condom as I lean back to stare at Jackson. His cock bobs confidently, long and thick, against the loose fabric of his T-shirt. “Rex was watching and judging the whole time.”
“Little furry bastard,” Jackson teases, his fingers now dancing along my upper thighs. “He was the worst. First and last time any of them watched us get it on.”
He’d taken the pictures down and bought me proper picture frames, which he never failed to turn facedown whenever he got me naked.
And he’d gotten me naked a hell of a lot back then.
“No one is watching us now.” My voice is huskier than normal, even to my own ears.
“No,” Jackson returns a moment later, his thumbs sliding along the crease of my hip and pelvis, “no one is here to watch us.”
Those dancing fingers of his swoop inward as he leans forward, one hand lifting to grasp the back of my neck and pull me in for a heated kiss that curls my toes. I wait for reason to burst into my brain, all sorts of yellow caution tapes and red stop signs to send my full throttle to a sudden standstill.
It never does.
My brain goes virtually empty when Jackson nips at my bottom lip, chuckling low at my needy whimper. And when he finally gives me what I need, his thumb dragging over my clit—circling so slowly with barely any pressure that I nearly go mad, a glint of naughty playfulness in his dark eyes—all rationale flees the vicinity.
I arch my back at his electric touch.
Grip his forearm in a silent demand for more, more, more.
Open my mouth and beg out loud, “Yes, there. Right there—”
The h
and at my neck goes to my left leg and he pushes it wide, hiking my thigh up onto the car. “I wanna see you, sweetheart,” he growls. “All of you.”
With a finger to my collarbone, he gently tips me backward like a set of Dominos teetering over in submission. My stomach goes concave when I land on my elbows, one leg dangling over the car’s grill, the other bent at a ninety-degree angle on the hood. I’m exposed—or as exposed as one can be in the dark of night—and that’s when he makes his move.
Two of his fingers dragging through my wetness, circling at my entrance, pushing inside on a slow, easy glide.
I’m not sure which one of us is louder: my satisfied moan or his guttural groan.
In this moment, I exist on every thrust of those fingers, drawing life when they curl just so and have me seeing stars. Probably literal stars, given the time of day.
Probably.
Maybe also some fake ones.
“Christ, you’re so damn tight, Holls.”
I feel impossibly tight. But the friction of his big body leveraging over mine as he bolsters his weight on the hand planted by my head, his feet still planted on the concrete, his hard-on grazing my belly . . . God, when was the last time I felt so full? So absolutely complete?
Tears prick my eyes at the thought.
It’s more than just the sex or the good feels. I’ve missed this. Jackson. The way we read each other’s wants and needs before we even voice them out loud. How he knows exactly how to curl his fingers to have me shuddering before him. How, when he knows I’m close, there’s nothing I love more than for him to slip in that third finger, just so I can feel that added pressure—that acute line between pleasure and pain—that thrusts me over the edge into completion.
He teases me with that possibility now, and I beg shamelessly for it.
I wriggle my hips, popping them up off the hood of the car. “Now, Jackson,” I whimper, “please.”
“Not happening.” He removes his hand completely from between my legs, palm pressing down on my pelvis to keep me in place. Then he leans in close, our noses grazing, his eyes locked on mine when he grinds out, “You’re not comin’ on my fingers, not after all this time.”