by Croix, Ada
18
Marc was trying not to think about Blake taking Allie up to his bedroom. Kelsey had been right there and it wasn’t any of his business. Allie had been nothing but professional with him, as much as he’d tried to push things early on. And it seemed pretty obvious that Blake was the guy that she was interested in, anyway. Especially after she’d seen the beachfront house.
He wasn’t expecting to see either of them for a while, which made it all the more surprising when Blake grabbed his elbow. Luckily Marc’s reflexes stopped at jerking his arm loose rather than popping his teammate in the nose.
Blake put up an easing palm. “Hey man, I’m looking for Adam. Have you seen him?”
“I think he’s out on the patio.” Marc stepped to cut off Blake’s immediate route onward. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” Blake’s look flicked onward. “Allie was feeling sick and wanted to go home, and they walked over here together.”
“She wants to go home?” Marc ducked his head to find Blake’s eye, looking for signs of guilt or anger. Had the little fucker done something to scare her off? Or maybe she was giving him the line about being a professional, too.
“She left.” Blake lifted his gaze to meet Marc’s stare. The kid could keep ice water in his veins as well as anyone on the national stage, that was for sure. For a moment neither of them flinched.
Marc broke it by exhaling a breath. His lips pressed together in a thin line. “You let a drunk girl out the door on her own.” He tapped at Blake’s chest and shifted to move around the other guy towards the door.
“Hey man, she was going. You want me to fucking tackle her?” Blake swiveled to keep Marc in square sights. “Are you seriously giving me advice on this?” He laughed.
Marc paused to shoot the younger guy a look. He’d barely registered the then-eighteen-year-old’s existence during those disastrous ten weeks of training in twenty-eleven, but it sounded like Blake thought he knew enough to comment on his past. “You’re going to say that like you want to step up to me?”
Blake was too good to let his smile slip entirely, but Marc saw it lose its smug. Blake swallowed.
His reputation did have some utility. As much as Marc loathed everything the little punk represented, he wasn’t eager to add a fight with a teammate to a day that had already gone fucking sideways. “Let Adam know I’m making sure she gets home.” Maybe he should have found his roommate himself, but he didn’t want to waste any more time while Allie was out in the dark alone.
It wasn’t hard to catch up with her. She had barely made it to the next corner by the time Marc got out to the street. Her step was weaving and Allie was tapping at her phone. Probably sending more messages to that other chick from Colorado.
She was quick to stuff it away in her pocket when he walked up. “What are you doing here?” Allie asked him with a frown.
“Walking you home.” Marc paused beside her, tilting his head in indication of the street to turn down for their building. The vantage also gave him an opportunity to judge whether she was pissed off or pissed drunk. “Come on.”
“You don’t have a shirt.” Allie was staring at his chest.
Drunk, then. He didn’t exactly relish the role of babysitter, but at least it let Marc feel more justified in coming after her. “I have a drawer of them at home. Let’s go.”
Allie swam her gaze up to meet his, her brow still crumpled. “You’ll get sick.” She swallowed thickly. Her lashes dipped and her weight swayed. “You can’t get sick.”
Always on the job. Marc sighed a long breath. “I heard you’re the one that’s feeling sick.” He reached a hand to the flat between her shoulders to coax her onward. It was maybe the most he’d touched her since that first day they met.
Allie leaned into the pressure, still looking at him. “I’m better, now,” she mumbled.
“Sure. The fresh air is good for you.” It almost sounded like she meant something else. But what Marc knew was that just a few hours ago she’d had Blake wrapped around her with his hand in her hair. “So’s walking. Let’s get you home.”
“I …” Allie swayed, but finally started to shuffle forward. “It would be really irresponsible.” She seemed to be talking to herself. “It’s my job. You have to be …”
“Yeah, your healthiest lab rat.” He’d had so much practice accepting grim reality it was what felt most comfortable. “So get me tucked into bed nice and early so I don’t ruin your results.”
That seemed to make her laugh. The sound was a warm hum. Allie listed to the side and for a moment Marc wondered if he were going to have to carry her. She must have had more to drink than he realized. However, once she was stretched along his side for support she seemed to walk well enough.
They had several blocks to cover and the night was getting cold. It wasn’t just for her benefit that he wrapped his arm around her. He held Allie tight with the cup of his hand gripped over her far hip. They fit well together. Even if he did have to shorten his strides.
“Marc,” Allie finally spoke when they were in view of their building, “did you date a countess?”
Marc wasn’t expecting that to come up. Perhaps it would bother him more if the evening hadn’t already been such a surreal mix of past and present. Allie’s question was less aggravating than Blake’s ignorant insinuations or Natalie’s bizarre attention. Still, he wasn’t exactly eager to talk about it. Especially not with Allie. “She didn’t actually have a title,” he answered with low-voiced dismissiveness.
She nuzzled her cheek against his side. Marc had to hold onto her tighter when Allie’s weight seemed to sag into the hold of his arm. “You dated Natalie four years ago, didn’t you?”
“Eight years ago. I wasn’t on the team four years ago,” Marc reminded tightly. On days like this one, he wasn’t sure he’d be on the team much longer. That asshole Simon might not be the captain anymore, but it seemed like there were plenty of people around still taking his side. “It wasn’t like she was my girlfriend.” He didn’t even know why he was telling her this. “I don’t really date.”
Allie’s fingers curled and uncurled at his waistband pensively. “You were arguing with her.” He heard her phone going off in her pocket, buzzing like it was getting messages. She seemed too focused on him to even notice.
“I wasn’t.” He didn’t actually remember. It seemed like all Marc could hear anymore when Natalie opened her mouth were her words from two thousand eight—Who’s going to believe you?
In the cooling spring night, Allie’s laugh was warm against his skin. “You’re arguing with me.”
That nearly made him smile.
“You’re going home with me.” Allie said it so breathlessly. It sounded like something he wasn’t very familiar with. It sounded like hope.
He could tell himself that it was merely the alcohol talking—that right now she might say the same thing, the same way, to anyone. But Allie had chosen to leave the party alone rather than stay with Blake. After a few more steps, it was enough of a truth for Marc to claim: “We’re almost there.”
They climbed the steps to the entryway. Allie was coherent enough to wrap her arms around his bare ribs while he fished his keys from his pocket. Once they got into the elevator, her arms fell more and more listlessly loose with every tick of the panel’s light. At her door he shifted her from his side until she was balanced with her shoulders leaning against the wall.
Her hips were thrust at him. His gaze drank instinctively along that body which had been pressed with such soft warmth against his. Maybe it was hypocrisy to believe she was any better off with him than with Blake, but Marc couldn’t care. He wanted Allie with a jealous desire that was as hard to keep buried at the party as it was hard now to restrain the bracket of his hands to her hips and force his eyes up to hers.
It would be easier to take her to his apartment. But he had said he would take her home. “Do you have the key?”
Allie was staring at him with serious concentration.
It took her a second to tip her chin into a nod. “Front pocket.”
Marc let his thumb drift before he looked, feeling the key’s outline beneath her stretch denim. His fingerprints pressed into the soft of her flesh through the fabric. He shifted his grip to slip the thick of his knuckles against the hard of her hip to tug out the key. Before he could tuck it safely into his palm, her hand lifted to encircle his wrist below the rubber band of his tracking device.
He froze and his pulse sped beneath the familiar cuff of her hold. Marc looked back up and found her eyes hooded. She wasn’t trying to stop him, or to push him away. Perhaps he’d been right from the start—she kept looking at him like she wanted to fuck.
Allie’s smile spread with drunken slow. “I can feel your heart,” she whispered.
Gooseflesh prickled along his bare skin. No, he couldn’t have been right. He had never seen a look like the one that Allie gave him. Marc didn’t know how to respond to it, so he tugged on a smirk at one corner of his mouth. “All right, doc.”
That at least got her to close her eyes, rolling her head into an argumentative shake. “Not a doc.” Her smile grew dreamily. “Not yet.” Her brows lifted without her eyes opening. “You don’t have a gold star.”
“Medal,” Marc corrected her. “Not yet.” He convinced his lungs to inflate and slipped a step back, keeping his cuffed hand in a steadying hold on Allie while he worked the door.
As it opened she hummed and curled forward with her hands hugging at his arm. Her head bumped into his shoulder.
“Am I going to have to watch you sleep?” Marc threatened. He re-angled his arms to half-carry Allie inside. He stepped out of his sandals and kicked the door closed behind them.
“Because that’s not creepy,” Allie murmured in reflexive retort. Her smile was dreamy when she let her head loll back to look at him from barely opened eyes.
Marc led Allie into the hall while she was gazing at him. Her feet followed the guide of his tug at her waist. Along the way her smile got lost somewhere. Her eyes were more open. Searching.
“You asked me what I wanted,” Allie said, only stumbling a little through the words.
“Did I?”
Maybe Allie was trying to nod. More important was the hand that drifted up to slide across the faintly brine-laced fuzz of his chest. Her delicate fingers reached to slip over the curve of his shoulder and up along the line of his neck. She swallowed deliberately. “Marc.” Allie was gazing at him like there was nothing else she could see. “You’re my Valentine. I want …”
It should have made him run. That word, this day, on too-innocent lips. Instead he was struck still within her gentle hold.
If this was to be his answer to a question from a snowy night, he never got it. Instead her eyes went large and her hand snatched back to press against her mouth. Marc nearly dropped her with the suddenness of her surge when Allie struggled to her feet and reached along the hall towards the—“Bathroom!”
19
Allie couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so horrible. Maybe when her college boyfriend talked her into going out for her twenty-first birthday. Her head pounded and her mouth tasted like death. She woke up on her bathroom floor, snuggled up with a towel she’d pulled down from the drying rack against the shivers that shook her while she lay on the cold tile.
She could hear the TV on in the living room. Eventually, she got herself up to hunch over the sink. She found the glass of water she vaguely remembered Kelsey bringing in during the night. Bracing through her palms, she took a bleary first look in the mirror at the mess she had become.
Something dug into her palm. It was her apartment key. She kind of remembered Marc fishing it out of her pocket last night. Allie lifted a shaky hand to neaten her hair back from where it stuck to her dried-sweat neck. It wasn’t so bad. Someone had gotten it up in a lopsided ponytail. Was that Marc? She thought she remembered hands, but maybe that was from Blake from earlier.
The memory seemed to worsen the throb of her head. She got the Advil out from the cabinet, but careful swallows informed Allie that her stomach didn’t like the idea of forcing anything else into it quite yet. She should have never taken all those shots. Now half the team had seen her acting like an idiot. And they’d seen her with Blake. Allie was so glad she hadn’t gone upstairs with him.
She still didn’t understand how Marc had come to find her. It seemed like Valentine’s Day magic. Although Allie had managed to screw that up, too.
What had she even said to him? Her recollection of the end of her night was mostly a miserable blur confined to the tile of her bathroom. If nothing else, it was going to be hard to maintain an authoritative air after he’d seen her like this.
Tugging the robe that Kelsey must have draped over her into a more proper wrap, Allie finally saw fit to make her exodus from the bathroom.
“Hey hot stuff.” Kelsey leaned her head onto the back of the couch to smile upside-down at Allie. “How’re you doing?”
Allie just groaned. She finished her zombie shuffle to fall onto the cushions beside the other woman. The TV was turned on with a movie playing, something with Amy Adams in it, or maybe it was Isla Fisher.
“You missed an excellent game of Twister.”
“I think I would have killed myself.”
“Too much come in the tum,” Kelsey said sympathetically.
“Ew.” Allie rolled her head back and closed her eyes. “Don’t remind me of those shots. If I never see another blow job again it will be too soon.”
Kelsey laughed weakly. “How about some toast? You can have my other piece.”
“You found gluten somewhere in California?” Allie said in faint wonder. She fought enough strength into her aching stomach to curl forward and find the plate on the coffee table. “Thanks.”
“Funny. Now I know you’ll be okay,” Kelsey said as she snuggled beneath her throw blanket. “Did you have a good time? Apart from the … you know.”
Allie had to think about it while she took nibbles of crispy carbs. Every good thing she could remember seemed to be stained by something she’d rather not. “That house is amazing,” she finally settled on. “It’s easy to see why Blake is … like he is.”
Kelsey spread a smile. “I think he likes you. But I have to tell you, rumor is that he likes to have a girl as a good luck charm going into big tournaments. Someone to relieve his stress before the big game and all that. He’s kind of a serial dater.”
Allie wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know if I’m interested in being a charm. Anyway, I’ve run out on him twice now.” She brushed crumbs off her fingertips onto the plate, thinking of whose heartbeat they instead longed to feel. It wasn’t a reason she could admit to Kelsey. “It would be totally unprofessional to date a client.”
Kelsey hummed like she wasn’t convinced.
“Violet is appalled that I haven’t just gone for it already,” Allie admitted with a weak smile.
“That’s your roommate from Colorado?” Kelsey stretched out a corner of the blanket on offer once Allie set the plate down. “If you’re going to spend all your time focusing on your career, what’s the harm in having a little fun on the side?”
“Maybe I’m crazy.” Allie couldn’t shake her head very much without feeling woozy. “I guess it just doesn’t feel very fun to me. I suppose that’s what a lot of the guys are doing. Focusing on practicing, on the win.” She picked at the blanket’s edge with her fingernails. “When you push hard for your goals, there’s not really time to be serious about anything else.”
“Yeah,” Kelsey agreed. She turned her head to watch the movie as it flashed through a montage of the actress in a plethora of amazing outfits. “Marc was here when I got home.” She said it like an absent thought.
Allie tightened her jaw against the anxious churn of her stomach. “Was he …” Allie didn’t think anything like that had happened. She repeated the phrase lamely, like she could now make it an entire question. “Was he?”
&n
bsp; “He was passed out on the couch.” Kelsey had mercy on Allie’s suspense. “I got back pretty late. He walked you home?”
“I think he carried me home.” Allie was too drained of anything to even blush.
“That’s sweet,” Kelsey said like a joke.
Allie rolled her head to meet Kelsey’s eyes, debating before she confessed: “I think I tried to kiss him.”
Kelsey’s brows lofted. “And?”
“I don’t know.” Allie lifted her hands to cover her face as she groaned. “Did it look like I threw up on him?”
Kelsey at least had the decency to muffle her laugh into the blanket. “Well he wasn’t wearing a shirt.”
Allie groaned. “Oh wait. I’m not sure … I think I was giving him shit, for trying to catch pneumonia on the walk back. Did he … look upset?”
“Honestly, he just looked tired. And I was pretty sloshed myself.”
Allie peeked her eyes open to look at her roommate. “Did he try to kiss you?”
“Oh please.” Kelsey kicked a foot at her hip. “No way am I hooking up with anyone on my brother’s team, or who went out with one of my teammates, but especially not someone who has walked my roommate home. Chicks before dicks.”
One of her teammates—Kelsey must have meant Natalie, despite what Marc had said about not dating. More than Allie’s hangover threatened her expression but in its bleary funk she couldn’t bring herself to face anything more. She offered a weak smile of apology to her roommate. “Sorry.”
“It ain’t a thing,” Kelsey said airily. “Now cuddle up.” She pushed more of the blanket over towards Allie. “I’m going to get us some more water, and then I say we spend the day eating microwave food and watching chick flicks. Will you Netflix and chill with me this Valentine’s Day, baby?” She batted her eyes.
Allie had to laugh. “It’s like you have the remote control to my heart.”