“I’m tired of letting other people’s opinions matter more than my own. I’ve decided I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”
“Of me?”
“Of you. Of me. Of us.”
Brett’s arms fell to his sides. Damn it to hell. He liked this girl. A lot. More than he meant to. More than he should.
Enough to push the door to his apartment shut.
She smiled at him then, at the confirmation that he wasn’t going to kick her out.
He’d pretty much known he wouldn’t since he’d opened the door to find her standing there, but apparently, she was just catching on now.
…
She was blowing this. He was going to kick her out any second now.
“I owe you a huge apology. And for the record, being with you is hardly slumming it.” She took a step forward on shaky knees. Close enough to reach out and touch him. He shoved his hands in his pockets, so she didn’t.
The first time she’d seen him, he’d been lethal in leather, the second time suave in a suit. Now he was dressed like a frat boy in a backward ball cap, a T-shirt, and sweatpants, and she still wanted him. In fact, she couldn’t decide which version of him she liked best.
The realization made her try again. If he kicked her out, it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t tried.
“You’re…not what I expected. I mean, you’re gorgeous, but I didn’t expect to actually like you.” Wait, that sounded mean. Or slutty. She wasn’t sure which. “What I’m trying to say is that you’re the best thing I’ve ever…” She swallowed down the truth. Too soon. Pull back. “The time we’ve spent together has been awesome. And…” Sexy? Should she say sexy? No, that was dumb. “Awesome.”
Shit. Also dumb.
Despite that, he didn’t smirk or make fun of her. Something shifted in his eyes, and the air around her got thin. She had to breathe harder to get enough oxygen.
“I like how I feel when I’m with you. So, if you don’t feel the same, then I guess…I mean, tell me now, but—”
His hands were out of his pockets and pulling her close before she had to try again, and she welcomed his mouth on hers, partly because it kept her from talking, but also because she’d missed him.
Missed kissing him, touching him. Being in his arms was this weird combination of freedom and safety that she’d started to crave without even realizing it. It made her act like someone completely different, but she’d never felt more herself.
Something in her chest unlocked, spewing relief and lust, and some other more confusing emotions she could worry about later. Right now, she just wanted the giddy high of his mouth on hers, and his skin under her questing fingers.
He pulled her backward down the hall, shedding clothes and bumping into walls in their attempts to walk and make out at the same time.
When they finally got to his bed, they were wearing nothing but their underwear. Scratch that. She reached up and tugged his cap off, revealing his dark tousled curls. Now they were wearing nothing but their underwear. She giggled as Brett picked her up and tossed her onto the bed before belly flopping onto the mattress beside her.
He turned his head, dropping kisses along her arm, and Chelsea’s muscles went rigid with need. She sat up.
“Turn over,” she ordered, and Brett obliged her, rolling onto his back.
Chelsea got onto her hands and knees over the top of him, bending her head to drop open-mouthed kisses to his lips, his jaw, his Adam’s apple.
“Jesus, I missed you,” he groaned as she nipped the crook of his neck before her tongue darted out to ease the sting.
“Okay, we need a condom, stat.” Brett made a move to sit up, but she placed her palm against his chest, holding him where he was.
“But I’m still playing,” she teased, dropping kisses against his collarbone, even as the rasp of his breath picked up. He wanted her. Badly. And it turned her on so much to know it.
“We’ll play later,” he promised, his voice tight with need. “Right now, I need to be inside you.” He swiped a thumb between her legs, pressing the soaked black silk of her underwear against the warm, wet heat of her. She bit her lip at the exquisite sensation, trying not to moan.
She wasn’t successful.
“Condom it is. I’ll get it,” she volunteered, deciding magnanimously that it was only fair that he got to call some of the shots of their makeup sex tonight. And it was important to be fair.
“That drawer, right there.”
She crawled off him, flattening herself onto her stomach so she could reach the handle and tug the drawer open. But when she would have grabbed the foil packet, something stayed her hand.
“You’re killing me here, you know that, right?” The mattress shifted behind her, and Brett’s fingers traced the curve of her ass. Although her body reacted—she shivered at the resulting goose bumps—she still couldn’t tear her attention away from her discovery.
“You kept it?” she asked softly, bypassing the condoms and grabbing the familiar red lace, holding it up. At the sight of her bra, Brett gave an embarrassed wince. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, his back against the headboard.
“Yeah. I kept it.”
Chelsea sat back on her heels, idly rubbing her thumb against the lacy cup. The realization their first night together had meant enough to him to take it, just like she’d wanted him to, made her heart clench. She liked knowing that he’d wanted a souvenir of the woman from the bar. That she’d been worth remembering.
“I know it’s stupid, but you were gone when I woke up, and I thought maybe it was some kind of clue to finding you again.”
He’d wanted to see her again. Something warm suffused her chest, but she covered the sappy emotions with a Cheshire grin. “So you’re saying that if we hadn’t run into each other at the gala the next night, you were going to go full Prince Charming and track me down by scouring all of Billings for the boobs that fit this bra?”
He grabbed her wrist, tugging her over to straddle his lap. His hands settled on her hips.
“Princing isn’t all fun and games like everyone thinks,” he told her, plucking the bra from her fingers and tossing it in the general direction of the drawer. “It’s very serious business.” His palms trekked upward, leaving a trail of goose bumps in their wake. “Come to think of it, I should probably do a thorough inspection of your boobs right now, make sure you’re really the woman I’ve been looking for, and you haven’t been pulling a fast one on me this whole time.”
He pulled her forward and nuzzled her right breast. The soft kisses brought her hands to his shoulders, and when he finally opened his mouth over her, she let her head fall back, savoring the sweet wet heat of his tongue.
“Ha. You just want a happy ending,” she accused breathlessly, sliding her hips forward so that she could press herself against his erection. His groan reverberated against her sensitive nipple before he pulled away.
“So badly,” he agreed. His left hand slid up to cup her breast, his thumb teasing its tip into a hard peak, sending heat coiling through her. “But I promise to give you multiple happy endings first.”
“Sounds like my kind of fairy tale.”
She laughed as he toppled them sideways, so they were horizontal across the width of the mattress as he stretched out over the top of her to grab a condom from the drawer.
“You’re doing it again,” he warned, rolling onto his side on the mattress so he could suit up.
“Doing what?” she asked. Chelsea ran her fingertips over his chest, amazed she got to touch him like this whenever she wanted.
“Being cute-sexy.”
She widened her eyes in sham horror. “Oh no!”
“You know I can’t resist you when you giggle.” Brett shifted back on top of her, and the press of his erection against her belly made her squirm as lust invaded her blood and loosened her limbs.
“Quick, save us.” Chelsea wrapped her arms around his neck. The pace of his breath picked up, mimicking hers. “Say
something dirty.”
“I want to fuck you so slow and deep that you can feel my cock in the back of your throat.”
Her lips rounded into an “oh” of delight as he slid inside her. Her body adjusted to the size of him, relishing the pressure, and her fingernails scored his back, holding him close.
“Too dirty?” he asked, pressing his hips forward.
She shook her head, staring into his eyes as she drew her knees up. The slight shift in position brought him even deeper, and his grunt of pleasure made her blood race in her veins.
“Just right,” she assured him, feeling like the Goldilocks of dirty talk, and then he started to move with hard, purposeful thrusts that had her writhing beneath him, desperate for the pleasure his body promised with every stroke of his cock.
Her eyes fell closed as she concentrated on the delicious build of pressure at the apex of her thighs, the rasp of his breath against her neck as his big, powerful body drove into her, winding her up, pushing her closer to bliss.
“Hey, Chels?”
Her name on his lips stirred her from the drugging pleasure that had invaded her body, and she did her best to surface from the languid spell he’d cast over her. “Mmm-hmmm?”
The rock of his hips slowed, until he went still, deep inside her.
“Did you forget the bra, or did you leave it for me?”
Her eyes popped open in surprise and she looked up at him. Brett’s face was hard with passion, jaw tight, eyes dark and focused. She reached up to push a wayward curl from his forehead. “I left it for you.”
Then he took her mouth with the softest kiss, and his hips withdrew almost completely before plunging hard and deep. Chelsea’s body clenched sharply at the twin sensations, startling a gasp from her as she tumbled down the rabbit hole and into her first happy ending of the night.
Chapter Fourteen
Orgasms were the fucking best, Brett decided, tugging the flushed, naked woman sitting beside him in bed closer so he could press a kiss against her temple. They fixed everything.
Anxiety about his less than stellar play on the road trip?
Gone.
That trickle of Lainey + Cooper = True Love jealousy that had wound through his chest earlier?
Evaporated.
The general unease of how he was going to spend his first night alone in his new place without badgering Nik into hanging out, even though the guy was probably sick of him by now?
Dissolved.
Chelsea smiled up at him, continuing her game of “tell me about your tattoos” by moving her finger to the first set of Roman numerals marching up the outside of his forearm. “How about this one?”
“That’s the year I won my first Stanley Cup.”
She nodded, and her eyes flared slightly, and Brett couldn’t help liking that he’d impressed her. Or at the very least, that she’d heard of hockey’s highest honor. He didn’t have a lot of achievements to his name if you took hockey out of the equation. Impressing a non-puck bunny wasn’t easy for a guy like him.
She inched her finger up a little higher before cocking an eyebrow at him. “So that would make this one…”
He nodded at the implication. “The year I won my second Stanley Cup.”
“And this one?”
He glanced down at the tattoo she was pointing at, the one he’d added to his sleeve to celebrate his liberation. A heart wrapped in barbed wire. The artist had done a stellar job. He couldn’t read his ex-wife’s name on his arm at all anymore, and that helped. A bit. Most of the time.
“That one’s to remind me not to be a dumbass.”
She glanced up at him, eyebrows raised, a thousand questions swirling in her sky-colored eyes. “Does it work?”
Brett stared at her—she was so goddamn beautiful. The boss’s daughter. The last woman in the world he should be messing around with right now. “Not so far.”
“Why a heart with barbed wire?”
No sense delaying the inevitable. “Because that’s what the guy doing my tattoo said would best cover up her name.”
“Your ex-wife?”
Brett nodded.
“How’d you meet her?”
Oh. So they were having that talk then. Brett steeled himself for the flash of pain that usually accompanied talking about the biggest mistake of his life, but it didn’t come.
Huh. Score another one for the magic of orgasms.
“Janelle, my ex, used to have a thing for another guy on my team. My brother-in-law, actually. Before he married my sister, obviously.”
Chelsea’s eyes widened at the revelation. “You mean they…?”
“What? No! He was totally into Lainey by then. Janelle was just rebounding with her Cooper crush anyway. She’d been after our center, Eric Jacobs, but then he started dating someone, and—”
“Your ex-wife was a puck bunny? Didn’t that bother you?”
Brett flushed at the astute question, remembering what a fucking punk he’d been back then.
“Actually—” He dropped his head, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck before he met her eyes again. “I kind of liked it,” he confessed.
At her deer-in-headlights look, he dropped his hand and sighed.
“Neither of them slept with her. I was nineteen, and I thought guys like Eric Jacobs and Cooper Mead hung the moon.” His chuckle was self-deprecating. “They didn’t feel the same way about me. I was just this punk-ass rookie, trying to show off, prove that I could hang with the big dogs—these great hockey players with millions of dollars and beautiful ladies throwing themselves at them. And suddenly, here was this gorgeous woman who’d wanted Eric, who’d wanted Coop, but now she wanted me. I guess that made me feel like maybe I was in their league, you know?”
He saw the thing he didn’t really want to see in her eyes—that look that said her heart ached on his behalf—and he realized that maybe he’d let those damn orgasms relax him a little more than was wise. He hadn’t meant to tell her quite that much. Best wrap this up before he said anything else stupid.
“Anyway, Janelle and I were a mistake right from the beginning. But I couldn’t see it. I thought I was the shit, and when people tried to warn me away, I figured they were just jealous. By the time I realized they’d had my best interests at heart, Janelle already had a divorce lawyer on retainer.”
“I’m so sorry, Brett.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. I mean, I know better now. I never really felt like myself around her. I was always trying to be what she wanted, you know?”
She tucked in closer, resting her head on his shoulder as she pointed to another tattoo. “Tell me about this one. Why a big number forty-two?”
Brett appreciated the change of subject, and he pressed a thank-you kiss against her hair. “Well, that one is actually my first tattoo. Forty-two was my dad’s number. He used to be in the NHL, too. One of the greats. An enforcer, and a total badass.”
Chelsea lifted her head. “Really? That’s amazing! I didn’t know that your dad played hockey.”
“You’ve never even googled me? Guess I know where I stand,” he joked, but the truth was, that made him absurdly happy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d needed to tell anyone anything about himself. That was life in the public eye.
“And your mom? Don’t even tell me she was a figure skater or something. How did they meet? I’ll bet it was romantic, right? Their eyes met across the skating rink at Rockefeller Center one Christmas and the rest is history?”
He liked the way she snuggled back in so he could finish the story, even if it was bound to disappoint her.
“Close. My mom seduced him in a bar one night, even though he was already married. Then she ended up knocked up with me, the son he always wanted but never had time for, and he divorced Lainey’s mom and married my mom instead.”
There was a long beat of silence.
“Wow.”
Brett couldn’t help but chuckle at the distinct lack of pep in that response. “Yep. Pretty
romantic, right?”
She placed a hand on his chest, drawing lazy circles on his sternum. “Where are your parents now?”
“My dad died of cancer a few years back. My mom’s off somewhere tropical, searching for the next in her long line of sugar daddies.”
Her hand stilled over his heart, applying pressure to the wound. He covered it with his palm.
“Maybe she’s in Cabo, having daiquiris with my mom.”
Brett’s eyes widened at the confession.
“After she and my dad got divorced, she took off. But hey, we’re friends on Facebook, so…” She shrugged. “That’s practically as good as having her around, right?”
“How old were you? When she left?”
“Fifteen. I just woke up one morning and she was gone. She left a note and I never heard from her again. And then, about five years ago, she sent me a friend request. I haven’t actually spoken to her in ten years.”
“Well, that’s shitty.”
Chelsea nodded.
“If it makes you feel better, I think I’d prefer the silence to sneak-attack phone calls. My mom makes random contact when she’s broke enough that she wants to bum some money or she’s drunk enough that she wants to remind me that I ruined her life and I’m cursed.”
“Cursed?”
He nodded. “The first time she said it, I was seven. Lainey’s mom had just died in a car accident, so she was spending the summer with us, and I was trying to cheer her up, because I was a kid, and I thought I could. Anyway, I asked my mom why it wasn’t working, why Lainey was so mad at me, and she told me it was because I was cursed. That Lainey would never forgive me because I was the reason my dad had left her mom, and there was nothing I could do to fix that, so I should just give up.”
His mother had said the same thing later that year when his parents had told him about their divorce.
And again, during the implosion of his own marriage.
Taking a Shot Page 12