by Jessa Kane
For friction.
But all he does is press and press that big shaft—right there—sliding his hands under my backside to knead, keep me steady, his chiseled mouth punishing mine like a wayward child, giving me strokes of his tongue, smooth nudges of his lips, our heads angling right, then left. Until I’m off the stool and being carried somewhere. Backwards several steps before my back hits a wall.
I make an impatient, strangled sound and wrap my legs around his hips, demanding more without words. With a groan, he obliges, crashing his mouth down over mine, our tongues winding together, his hips beginning to hump me against the wall. That first thrust sets off a warning flare in my mind and I break away, sucking oxygen into my lungs, frantically taking stock of my surroundings. We’re in a deserted back room, reserved for parties, maybe? How did he do this? How did he cause me to completely forget my rules?
To forget that I’ve never even been with a man before?
Because the way things are going, he’s about to have me—all of me—in this club. And if I don’t find a way to break the spell, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. “Stop,” I say huskily. “S-stop. I…”
“Angel.” His hips pump twice. Hard. Pinning me roughly to the wall and grinding, turning my legs to jelly. “Let me. Let me.”
“I can’t.” It comes back to me, the reason I let him kiss me in the first place and the memory gives me the impetus to disengage from him, though he doesn’t like letting me go, not at all, his nostrils flaring ominously. I slide out from between Eric and the wall, righting my clothing with shaky hands. “I haven’t changed my mind.” Even as I say those words, my body is like, are you sure? Minds change! We like him down here! “Look…look at you, trying to sleep with me in a nightclub, ten minutes after we met. If that doesn’t prove you’re just another athlete used to getting anything he wants, nothing will.”
“I got carried away,” he pants, plowing all ten fingers through his hair, coming toward me. “Fuck, the way you taste, Greta. I need more of it. Please.”
“No.” Doesn’t matter that I want to. Doesn’t matter than I ache everywhere. Or that I’m rocked by the gritty sincerity in his tone. I’ve made myself a promise and I’m not going to break it, especially so quickly. There are good reasons that at twenty-one, I’ve trusted not a single man with my heart or body. I’m definitely not taking a chance on this basketball god who can have the world at his feet with a snap of his fingers. “It’s been nice knowing you.”
His fingers flex at his sides. “I lost my head. That…that never happens and I apologize. Come home with me. Give me the chance to do this right.”
I really come close to caving—and that scares me. After everything I’ve witnessed, after what I’ve been subjected to at the hands of my father, I should not be giving this man the time of day, yet I have to force out the words, “I’m not interested, Eric.”
He rakes his eyes over me. “Those stiff little nipples make you a liar.”
Flames steal up my cheeks. “I’m leaving. Good night.”
I turn on the toe of my sneaker and power walk toward the main club floor, but Eric—once again living up to his nickname as the Silent Assassin, blocks my exit before I even hear him move, his mouth moving in my hair. “You really think this is the last time we’ll meet, angel?”
It’s clear he believes the opposite.
“I don’t know,” I whisper, honestly, forcing myself not to lean into him.
“I’ll be seeing you real soon, Greta.”
I escape by the skin of my teeth, his promise ringing in my head all night.
Chapter Three
Eric
I didn’t sleep for a single minute last night.
No, I paced the edges of my new house, replaying that kiss. Her tiny gasps. Replaying every second of my short acquaintance with Greta, from the moment I saw her facing down a man twice her size like a badass lioness, to the way she swung from vulnerable to determined to stubborn in that back room. Rubbing her pussy in my lap one second, telling me goodbye the next.
Jesus, she’s got me so hot, I can’t think straight.
Beating myself off holds no appeal whatsoever. I’m rock hard, distended in my briefs, but I refuse to touch it. Next and last person to lay a finger on that cock is going to be Greta Welding, end of story.
She’s going to be mine.
But I’ve made a living out of reading my opponents and one thing is clear.
If I want her, I’ll have to play dirty.
I’m up against a brick wall when it comes to her past, whatever she’s witnessed as the daughter of a coach of a professional basketball team. Having been around a lot of drama, infidelity and lying myself over the last decade, I have an idea of what’s turned her off regarding athletes. Hell, it’s hard to blame her. But I’m not waiting around for my future wife to meet and marry a doctor or a fucking accountant. It’s going to be me. I’m going to give her everything she’s ever dreamed of. Now. Today. If I have to spend another night without her thighs wrapped around my hips, I’m going to buck my level-headed reputation and go ballistic.
Growing up poor in a backwater Louisiana town, I learned a lot about persistence. No one was going to hand me a career in sports. I had to get up earlier than everyone and practice twice as hard. When it came time for college, I had to send my highlight reel to scouts to bring them down south to recruit me. No one helped me and no one gave a crap. Everything I’ve ever gotten has been a battle. A fight. Maybe that’s why I don’t squander my wealth like my teammates. It’s too easy to blow through money. There’s no challenge in it.
I’m up to the challenge of winning Greta.
Without a doubt, it’s the worthiest one I’ve faced.
That’s why at this very moment, sitting across from her father in the conference room, I know what I have to do in order to make her mine. In order to maintain my sanity. I’ve never been pushed to do something so corrupt or unethical. Never in my life. Honesty and hard work are my modus operandi. But it’s been mere hours since I tasted her and I’m already steadily losing my mind. I haven’t shaved. Haven’t eaten. I’m looking a man in the eye while my cock is hard for his daughter and I don’t give a good goddamn. I need her. Now.
“Well, now, Eric. I don’t mind admitting I’ve been trying to get you in purple and gold since your rookie year.” Rick Welding turns the contract to face me, nodding at me, my agent. Also sitting in the room is the general manager of the team and several executives. “I’m thrilled we’ve finally done it with this Denver trade.”
“Me too. I’m going to do big things in LA.” I turn to look out through the glass wall that overlooks to arena, but I’m really only seeing Greta’s beautiful face. “This time next year, there will be a new banner to hang.”
Rick booms a laugh, slaps a hand down on the table. “There’s that casual confidence that makes you so unique.” He passes me a pen and reaches over to slap the shoulder of his general manager. “We’re pleased as hell to welcome the Silent Assassin into the fold, let me tell you. We—”
“Can we have a minute alone?” I say to the room in general, without taking my attention off Rick. I’m usually a good judge of character and I’ve always liked him well enough, based on our brief meetings. But if he’s the reason Greta is so jaded when it comes to athletes, he might be my new least favorite person. Unless he says yes to what I’m about to propose. “Just something between player and coach.”
Everyone looks thrown off by the request, but the executives, GM and my agent all comply, getting to their feet and leaving the room, closing the door behind them. Coach Rick stares across the table at my curiously, smile intact.
“I know what this is about,” Rick says, leaning forward, elbows on the table. “You’re worried about clashing with some of the bigger personalities on the team—”
“It’s about your daughter.”
The older man does a double take. “My daughter? Greta?”
I nod slowly. This should
feel a lot more wrong than it does. But I had her in my arms last night and my heart, my gut, my soul knows she’s supposed to be mine. I knew it before I even touched her. There isn’t a law or code between men that I wouldn’t break to make her mine in every sense of the word. “She’s now a condition of the contract.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
Gone is the jovial middle-aged man. Sitting in front of me now is an old, battle-worn bastard who knows how to cut through bullshit and get down to brass tacks. “It means, if you want me to play for LA, she’s part of the deal. She wears my ring.” My cock pulses, the weight of my balls brutal. There’s a buzzing in my skull, too, a tick behind my eye. Am I getting physically sick without her? “And I get everything that comes with her being my wife,” I finish thickly.
He sputters. “I can’t just give you my daughter.”
“You will if you want the banner.”
Rick leans back in his chair, folding his fingers together on his broad stomach, considering me closely. “If you want Greta to be your wife, you must have met her. And if you’ve met her, you know she ain’t easy to convince of anything.”
I say nothing. I just wait.
This man has been hounding me for years to consider a trade. I could ask him for real estate on the moon and he’d make it happen. I’m beginning to feel guilty for cornering Greta like this, but I shove it into a box and slap a lid on top. Like I said, I learned from age one that the only way to win is to fight. To find the means of making something happen and commit.
Tongue tucked into his cheek, Rick picks up his phone where it’s resting on the table. He taps the screen a few times and holds the device to his ear. “Greta.” Even the tinny, muffled version of her voice through the speaker turns my blood into a river of fire. “Would you mind coming in to the main conference room?”
He listens a moment and hangs up.
“She’s here,” I say, my attention already on the door, fists balling up in my pockets. “Where?”
“Greta uses the training facilities to work out in the off season,” he explains quietly. We face off across the table until a few minutes later when the handle turns on the door and Greta appears in the entrance, dressed in a white sports bra and red yoga pants, hair in a sweaty bun on top of her head. She looks so wide-eyed and innocent, her gaze bouncing between me and her father that I encounter another hostile flash of guilt, but I banish it quickly. I let the lust win. Let the hunger and need and infatuation with her win.
“What is this about?” she asks, taking a hesitant step into the room.
Rick, looking a little seasick, pushes out a chair. “Have a seat, please.”
Greta sinks into a chair at the far end of the conference table, only a second passing before she peeks up at me through her thick eyelashes, her nipples pebbling inside her sports bra. And this, this is why I shouldn’t feel guilty. When I kissed her last night, it was obvious she felt this electricity between us. This…intensity. This rightness. I’m not letting some rule she made before we met get in the way.
“Mr. Bentley has a condition for signing the contract,” Rick says, staring down hard at the paperwork. “You, Greta. He wants you for his wife.”
Gradually, it sinks in and her chest starts to heave. “But…what? No.”
“He won’t sign otherwise.”
My throat starts to hurt. I don’t like her looking cornered. Or betrayed. So I remind myself I’m going to make her so fucking happy. I’m going to prove her theories about athletes wrong and we’re going to lead a blissful, loyal life together. This is just an obstacle we have to get through.
“What did I tell you?” she says, clearly at a loss for breath. “Athletes and their shiny toys. Money and power get you anything you want, don’t they?” Her eyes flash toward her father. “Same goes for coaches, doesn’t it?”
“Greta…”
“I won’t do it. I don’t care if he signs. You’re can’t just marry me off.”
“You’ll do what’s best for this family, you ungrateful—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” I growl, not liking the impatient, warning tone he takes with her. Nor do I like that he barely put up a token resistance to what I’m doing. I expected a fight. Then I realize I have no right whatsoever to be mad. Look at what I’m doing. Taking away her choices. Letting my obsession with her cloud my sense of right and wrong. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let her walk away, but I don’t want to fulfill her assumptions of me. “Take a walk with me, Greta.”
She wants to tell me to go to hell. That much is painfully obvious.
But she wants a reprieve from making this agreement even more.
When we walk back into this room, I need there to be an understanding between us. Right now, she’s looking at me like the devil and it’s burning me alive. All I want is to be her savior and for her to be mine.
I push back from my place at the table and stand, gratified when her eyes go a little dazed over my height, my strength. I’m built to satisfy you, angel.
Does she read my mind?
When I reach her chair and find those beautiful legs crossed so tightly, it seems possible. I hold out my hand, and after a slight hesitation, she takes it, letting me pull her up and guide her to the door. I’m holding her hand and she isn’t resisting time alone with me, so I incorrectly assume things are going well.
That misconception is cleared up as soon as we step outside the conference room. The second the door closes behind us, Greta rears back and slaps me.
Chapter Four
Greta
I’ve always had a volatile temper. Once, in second grade, my father had to come pick me up from school early from the principal’s office. I’d kicked over a bookshelf in class because the pudding cup was missing from my lunchbox. Some might say that’s an overreaction, but hey. When you’re expecting chocolate, the absence of chocolate is unacceptable. That’s just a basic fact.
Do I not have every right to slap this cocky bastard?
Who demands a wife as a contingency to a sports contract?
That is insane.
Also insane? The fact that when I walked into the conference room and saw the relentlessly gorgeous point guard—the one who haunted my dreams last night—my first reaction was excitement. It started in the crown of my head and traveled all the way down to my toes, leaving a trail of fire behind. That heavy-lidded way he watches me, his strapping body poised to move at all times, touches a place deep inside of me. Makes me ache, makes me want to forget that I don’t trust athletes.
The slap I deliver across his chiseled face is a reminder to the both of us. Furthermore, it’s a rebuke for trying to trap me. For using his influence to steer my life in a direction I didn’t choose myself.
The sharp sound rings down the empty, carpeted hallway.
He doesn’t react how I expect.
I expect him to call me crazy or recoil in shock.
But without missing a beat, Eric surges forward, grabs both of my wrists and walks me backward, pinning me to the wall. Hard enough to make me gasp. His mouth moves open and hot down my neck, then back up to breathe my name heavily into my ear. Cutting sideways to my mouth and kissing me roughly. Possessively.
Eric’s tongue rakes over mine, his thumbs pressing into the pulses of my wrists, hips locking me between him and the wall. Rocking into me, letting me feel the huge outline of flesh behind the belt of his dress pants. The kiss is blatant, sexual. Frenzied. And it pulls me along in its swift current, demanding participation.
Lord, oh lord, he tastes good. Our kiss has this perfectly suctioned pull and push, give and take, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m opening my mouth in shameful invitation, moaning for more of his invasion. Rubbing my breasts on the front of his crisp white button-down, growing lightheaded when my nipples coil.
Just when I’m beginning to wonder if a woman can climax from a kiss alone, Eric breaks away. Frames my jaw in his hand, squeezing lightly, tilting my face up. I
’ve never been more physically vulnerable in my life than in this moment, caught between this athlete in his prime and a hard place, my body weakened from the kiss, jaw cradled in a hand big enough to equal two of mine.
“Are you calm now?” he asks through labored breaths.
The word calm turns my vision red at the edges and I start to struggle, shoving at his chest, only to have his hips scoop me up and flatten me again, this time with that hard, male appendage pressed up tight between my thighs. And he’s still holding my jaw, not in a way that hurts, just in a way that leaves no doubt about who is in charge. God help me, my panties turn sodden. The fight goes out of me and I whimper, rubbing my sex against his, toes curling in my sneakers.
“We don’t hit, little girl,” he rasps in my ear. “You use your words.”
Those words—little girl—should make me want to throat punch somebody, namely Eric, but they don’t. They steal my breath. The way he speaks to me is disciplinary, like I’m a child, but I definitely don’t feel like one. I feel like more of a woman than ever. His tone and chastisement make me feel feminine and coveted and sexy. What is happening here?
“Now I’ll ask you again.” He sucks the sensitive spot just beneath my earlobe. Sucks it long and hard enough to make me pant, my eyelashes fluttering. “Have you calmed down?”
“Yes,” I whisper, unevenly. “Yes.”
“Next time you slap me, angel, you’ll be sucking me off from your knees before the sting wears off. I’ll find a way to make that temper work for both of us. Is that clear?” I think he’s going to back off, but he fists my hair, instead, pulling my head back and slowly licking all the way up my exposed throat. “I’m going to give you this later,” he says hoarsely, bucking his hips once and catching my sharp cry with his mouth. “But right now, angel, we’re going to talk.”