Energy.
Electricity.
Whatever it was, Allie controlled it just by breathing. Maybe that should have had me turning back to my house, but I cleared my throat quietly and watched her sit up quickly in the water, eyes zeroing in on me instantly.
Not naked. Her strapless swimsuit was blue, the same color as her eyes.
Slowly, she sank back down in the water as I pushed through the hedge.
“Good game tonight,” she said quietly, mirroring what she’d said in the elevator a week earlier. I smirked and folded my arms over my chest. Her jewel eyes lingered on my tattoos. I’d never met a woman who could load the silence with so much visceral, pulsing force.
“Thanks.” I lifted my chin and waited for her to meet my gaze again. Not to be rushed, Allie took her damn time. “I had an idea just now.”
“I hope you didn’t hurt yourself in the process.”
I licked my lips so I didn’t laugh, smothering the smile instantly. That was why I was here. Exactly that. She wasn’t afraid of me. Didn’t elevate the idea of me to some god-like place that was so common for professional athletes. Most guys loved it, sought it out. It was why they did stupid shit like cheat on their wives in public places and not think about the consequences of getting caught. Because they thought they were above it all. That high was as addicting as any drug.
But I didn’t want that. I never had.
Allie looked at me and saw Luke. Not Luke Pierson, professional quarterback.
And maybe that was a drug of its own for me because I was standing in front of her, willing to take this risk.
With a deep breath, I walked forward until I could prop my hip against the edge of her hot tub. “I have a proposition for you.”
Her face didn’t change, except for the slow lifting of a perfectly manicured eyebrow. “Yes?”
“I don’t know about you, but what happened in that hotel room felt too good to ignore.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “And believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Me too.”
“What if we make another truce?” I tilted my head to the side and thought. “Maybe truce isn’t the right word. A suspension of our professional boundaries within a certain agreed upon amount of time.”
Her lips twitched at my delivery. “And this suspension would get us, what, exactly?”
I turned so I could brace my hands on the edge, wet from the water surrounding her, the air thick and hot from the temperature of it. “Activities of the non-professional variety.”
That did it. Heated her eyes to match whatever she was sitting in. It didn’t seem possible that she wasn’t increasing the temperature of the water just from whatever was running through her head.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“My weeks are insane during the season, so I’m thinking one night a week. The only night when I can relax.”
Her smile was instant.
“So Sunday nights then?” she asked, folding her arms under the water.
I pursed my lips. “Unless we have a Monday night game. Then you’re on your own.”
“I can manage that just fine,” she purred.
Now I did laugh. “You are dangerous, Alexandra Sutton.”
Her face went uncharacteristically serious. “Not to you.”
To me most of all, I thought. But I kept it tucked safely in my head.
“Game nights,” she repeated.
“Unless I’m concussed or have a broken limb,” I amended.
Her lips curved. “I could be gentle.”
I lifted my finger. “You just told me you weren’t dangerous. Liar.”
“And everything stays downstairs,” she added an amendment of her own.
“Care to clarify?” I asked carefully, sure that she had a very good reason for asking.
“I like your daughter,” she said quickly. “But I don’t want her accidentally walking in on us in your room.”
“Neither do I.” I raised an eyebrow. “But she can walk downstairs too.”
Allie licked her lips and stared intently at my face. “I don’t want this to come out the wrong way, but I feel like bringing it upstairs, into the spaces that we live most of our lives, changes things. Makes them more serious.”
I nodded. It wasn’t coming out the wrong way to me. I understood exactly what she meant. My bedroom was my personal, private space that I didn’t share with anyone.
I’d never considered sharing it with anyone. And the scariest part, the part I refused to unpack in my thoughts, was that I could picture her in my bed with stunning clarity.
In my silence, she nibbled on her lower lip briefly before she spoke again. “Maybe it’s an arbitrary line. I don’t know. It just feels … like an important boundary.”
Maybe it was arbitrary. Maybe it wasn’t. But I understood what she was saying. Hotel rooms and couches felt different than the beds where we slept each night. Which was why I agreed.
“You’re quite a negotiator,” I said in a quiet voice. I didn’t want to spook her after something like that, but the fact she’d been thinking about my daughter spoke volumes as to what kind of woman she was.
Allie stood, water sluicing down her absolutely insane body. It was entirely possible I was drooling, so I clenched my teeth together to keep my jaw from popping open. The bottoms of her bikini were small, cut high on her long legs, and tied together by only a thin string on either side of her hips. The top could hardly contain her breasts, which, I knew from my limited encounter with them, would be a generous, overflowing handful, even for me. She was backlit by her strings of lights, giving her skin a flawless, golden glow.
At moments like this, it didn’t seem possible that she was real. She must be a figment of my imagination, created by the part of my brain that wanted to stare at someone beautiful, someone sexy and confident. My hands shook from the need to reach out and touch her.
“Do we have a deal?”
I straightened and held out my hand. “We do.”
She glanced at my hand and smirked. “I think we can do better than a handshake to seal the deal.”
Allie exited the hot tub gracefully, picking up a fluffy white towel that was slung over the top of a patio chair. Standing there waiting for me, where I was frozen in place, she patiently toweled off her hair, then wiped it down her arms.
When she bent over to dry her legs, I almost swallowed my tongue. Allie stood and wrapped the towel around her, knotting it tightly before cocking her head. “Are we going in?”
I strode forward, not wanting a repeat of the hotel where I felt like I was chasing after her. Once I was standing in front of her, towering over her, I fisted my hand in the knot of the towel, so my fingers were underneath the edge of her swimsuit top. Her heart was hammering as I walked us backward, my hand refusing to let go of the material, the soft, wet skin under my own.
“I feel like a lamb being led to the slaughter,” she teased as I reached behind me and shoved the slider open into her lower level.
“Good,” I said once she’d cleared the door. I tugged her forward and placed my mouth next to her ear, licking the edge with the tip of my tongue before whispering, “because I am absolutely going to devour you, little lamb.”
With both hands, I ripped the towel off and threw it somewhere. The slider door shut with an awkward clunk, and I backed her against it.
My mouth found hers hungry and hot, her tongue wet and cool, and I ate at her lips with a ferocious, lupine drive to take and take and take. The buzzing I’d felt earlier was nothing compared to this, to having her under my hands and mouth, to being able to sink my fingers into the luscious curves of her ass.
This was raw and unchecked, and I wanted to let my head fall back in a howl when she clutched at my back and dug her nails in. Short, hard puffs of air from my nose were the only reason I hadn’t passed out, but the thought of taking my mouth away from hers made me feel like I’d incinerate from the inside out.
The sharp edge of Allie’s teeth n
ipped at the tip of my tongue, and the bright, visceral tug of pain it gave me made me press into her so hard, I worried that I might hurt her. Step for step, though, she matched me.
Against the front of me, her hips moved restlessly, seeking the same thing that I was. Blinding pleasure, feral release, an unleashing of what we were both capable of.
The front of my T-shirt was wet from her suit, so I ripped at the back of it where it hooked together, unable to find a way to get it off her. Finally, I broke my mouth away and glared at it as if it had done me personal injury.
Which it had. Anything keeping me away from Allie Sutton’s chest was officially out to ruin my life.
“How the hell do you get that thing off?”
Allie laughed. She bit her lip and looked up at me through her long, black lashes. “Come on, I’ve been told you’re good with your hands. You can figure it out.”
I growled, tucking my fingers in the front. Allie’s chest heaved with labored, deep breaths, her eyes daring me. With one hard tug, I yanked it down, groaning when it was rucked around her waist, and she was finally bared to my eyes.
I bent down and kissed, licked, then when she gripped the sides of my head with both hands, I sucked. My fingers gripped her back as it arched sharply away from the glass.
“I love Sunday nights,” she gasped, and I chuckled against her soft, warm flesh.
I leaned back and went to untie one string from the side of her suit over her hips when her doorbell chimed violently.
“No,” she moaned. “No, no, no.”
My forehead dropped into the curve of her neck while my breaths came out with the force of a runaway train. This could not be happening again. I wanted to howl all over again. The kind of desperate, grieving howl of a man who’d just tasted heaven and then had it ripped away with one stupid doorbell.
The bell went off again, and Allie whimpered. Or maybe that was me. Even with the distraction, my hands didn’t stop moving. The tips of my fingers dragged up the line of her spine and around her side to the warm, full weight of her breast, which I tested with my entire palm.
“You evil, evil man,” she whispered.
Ding, dong!
I growled into her skin. “I hate whoever that is.”
With gentle hands, Allie pushed at my chest, and I backed up slowly. Very, very slowly. With narrowed eyes, I watched her tug her swimsuit top back up into place.
“Let me just see who it is.” She glanced up the stairs. “It’s not like I get many visitors, especially on a Sunday night.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said instantly.
She looked at me curiously. “Why?”
I found myself shrugging uncomfortably. “Just in case.” Her slow, sweet smile made me roll my eyes. “It’s not a big deal. I’ll stay out of view.”
Allie nodded and picked up the towel off the floor from where I’d flung it. Silently, I followed her up the stairs and waited just out of view while she carefully glanced out the window.
“Holy shit,” she exclaimed, flinging the door open to reveal a tall, thin young woman with messy red hair piled on the top of her head and suitcases on either side of her. “Paige, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I told you to get my guest room ready,” Paige said with a laugh, embracing Allie tightly.
Allie turned mid-embrace, giving me an apologetic look. I held up my hands and walked back down the stairs as quietly as possible.
“I missed you,” I heard her friend say, just as I cleared the steps.
“You have the worst timing known to man, Paige,” Allie said, and I smiled as I walked out the slider.
It was either that or weep.
And I had to be honest, weeping would probably come in about five minutes when I laid in bed.
Alone.
18
Allie
Something new about Paige since I moved away from Milan was her current obsession with SportsCenter. She said it was so that she could be as knowledgeable about football as I was, but I think she was just bored.
Over the next week, I came home to her curled in the corner of the couch, watching SportsCenter like it was reruns of The O.C.
Which was why I shouldn’t have been surprised to walk in the door after our next game—a particularly grueling home loss—to find she already had a giant glass of merlot waiting for me.
“That was a tough one to watch,” she said by way of greeting.
“Tell me about it.” I toed off my heels and sank onto the couch.
We’d been beat on every level. Even though the TV was muted, the replay currently on a loop was Luke getting sacked.
Hard.
The ball had been stripped from his hand as he hurtled to the ground, and someone from New England had nimbly picked up the stray football and ran it in for an uncontested touchdown. Instead of watching the guy who scored, my eyes stayed on Luke, the way he twisted around to watch the player take what was his. I watched the way his helmet fell back onto the turf, and he punched the ground twice before standing up. Slowly.
He’d gotten hammered tonight. And not in the fun way, the way I’d been thinking about hammering and Luke all week.
“So,” Paige drawled when she noticed what I was staring at. “Are you going to go over there? It is Sunday night. Your first Sunday night,” she clarified as if I hadn’t thought about it all damn week.
I chewed on my lip after another sip of wine. “I want to. But I don’t know what the protocol is when he got his ass kicked, literally, on the field. He must be really freaking sore.”
Paige’s face brightened. “Sexy massage?”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
She held up a finger. “I’ve got this oil I picked up in Venice. Take it with you. Rub all those muscles down and then ... you know, rub something else.”
Her wink was obnoxious, but it made me laugh.
As much as I’d wanted to violently murder her for showing up when she showed up the previous week, it had been good having her in the house. She spent my money very well, helping me furnish the remaining rooms in just a few days’ time. The last of it had been delivered the day before, including a new mattress and mahogany sleigh bed for the guest room that she’d claimed as hers.
Nothing about the house looked like it did when I moved in. It didn’t smell musty with disuse. It was bright and clean and comfortable. Nothing stuffy or ornate. Probably not fitting for a team owner with more money than she’d spend in a lifetime, but I still loved it.
I liked to think that my mom was somewhere up in heaven, obnoxiously pleased that I was living in the home that had once been hers.
Weird how that house was what initially linked Luke and me. What would our relationship be if I’d even been three houses down? I’d never have met him before that first meeting. Never hated him. He never would’ve hated me.
The strength of our emotions was what made our current situation burn even hotter, in my mind. Without those initial exchanges, I couldn’t help but wonder if Luke and I would’ve had the same polite, friendly interactions that I did with every other player, and that made me inexplicably sad.
“Am I crazy?”
Paige, very used to my random thoughts with zero explanation, just shrugged her slim shoulders. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
I gave her a long look. “Not helpful.”
She took a slow sip of her wine and stared out the slider. “I think there’s a lot of potential for a messy fallout.”
Paige wasn’t wrong, but I hated hearing the words come out of her mouth. Even if I’d been circling around the same thing. “I know.”
“You own the team he plays for,” she said, lifting her fingers and checking off each item. “You’re both public figures now; you in a way that’s hugely magnified from before. His daughter idolizes you. And you live next door to each other.”
“Okay,” I interrupted. “You can stop now.”
“You asked,” she pointed out.
“
I know,” I moaned, dropping my head back on the couch. “So why am I ignoring all of those incredibly valid points and still thinking about how badly I want to go over there and see if he’s waiting for me?”
Paige blew a raspberry with her lips. “Well, that is easy. He’s not like any man you’ve ever been with. He’s not a pansy or a neophyte or a narcissist or a creep. He’s a man. And he’s not intimated by you or trying to make you a pet.”
I shook my head slowly. “And, Paige, the things he can do with his tongue, and I have not even been able to properly test drive that thing ...” I paused and laid on a hand on my chest. “It’s a pretty novel experience for me.”
She smiled. “Don’t tell me stuff like that, or I’ll weep into my wine with jealousy.”
“I know that’s part of it,” I conceded. “The attraction is ... potent. But I just need to know it’s enough to risk everything else.”
Paige thought about that. “Risk what?”
I took another sip and let the wine roll around in my mouth. “What if the universe is trying to, I don’t know, tell me something by the fact that we keep getting interrupted? That’s not a coincidence. What if I’m doomed to fail at this owner thing, and getting mixed up with Luke will just make it so much worse if that happens?”
“Oh, my gosh,” Paige said, reaching out to smack my arm. “That’s easy enough, just don’t fail. Luke is completely separate from that.”
“Just don’t fail, she says,” I repeated on a laugh.
“I’m being serious! How many wealthy people, I’m talking obnoxiously wealthy people, own dozens of businesses and have absolutely no interaction with those companies? A lot. You’re smart enough to trust the people to do their jobs, so you show up and make the fans and players happy and keep people interested and let them do their jobs. You won’t fail. You own it; it’s not like they can fire you.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re using this as an excuse because you think Luke and his magic tongue come with a lot of risk. No offense but you haven’t had to take a ton of risk in your life.”
Paige’s face dared me to argue with her. Her stubborn little heart-shaped face dared me, complete with dewy skin and plump lips and wide, heavily lashed eyes that had made her career.
The Bombshell Effect Page 15