Hoops

by Patricia McLinn

  Nestling closer, she remembered her idle thought about how she might fit with someone so tall, and smiled to herself. They fit perfectly. She shifted a little to feel more of the delicious friction of his skin, still warm and slightly damp, against hers.

  “Don’t do that.” The low growl into her shoulder was barely intelligible.

  A stiletto stab of fear pierced her contentment. Did he regret it? “Why not?”

  He lifted his head to look into her eyes, with their amber darkened to a passion-filled glow. “You’ll make me want you again.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Propping himself on one elbow he studied her. There was no coyness in her. She really wanted to know. So did he. He stroked the damp hair back from her temple. “It’s not if you don’t think so.”

  She lifted her head to quickly kiss the nearest part of him, which happened to be his chin. His grin flashed into existence, then faded to seriousness.

  “You know this doesn’t solve everything, Carolyn.” Again he stroked the hair at her temple. Slipping deeper into her hair, his fingers found the comb caught in thick, twisted strands. Disentangling it would require concentration.

  “There are still things we need to straighten out between us.” His fingers gently tugged at a stubborn lock of hair. “About Ashton. About Frank and the team.” He looked down into her gaze that hadn’t left his face, and his voice dropped to a husky note. “About you and me.”

  “I know.”

  He saw the single crease in her brow and felt a clutch in his gut. He couldn’t let her slip away from him now. He wouldn’t. For four long months he’d wanted her. Now he knew he would continue to want her. The ache for her wasn’t sated. Would it ever be?

  “We’re going to work those things out. All of them.” The comb came free of the last silky knot, and he tossed it aside. “Do you understand, Carolyn?”

  His kiss prevented any answer. It was an openmouthed demand that she answered readily with no consultation with reason.

  As long as he didn’t regret this, she understood only that they would work out anything. She told him so with the means of communication he left her. Her lips softened under his. Her tongue made bold forays to discover the sensitive caverns of his mouth. Her hands stroked and clasped. Her body writhed and tempted.

  “Oh, God, Carolyn.” He pulled back while his lungs made valiant attempts to pull in air. “You feel so damn good. You make me . . . you make me forget everything.” He grinned in mild self-mockery. “All the lectures I’ve given the guys on their responsibilities and I nearly didn’t—”

  She shushed him with her fingers on his lips. “But you did.”

  The self-mockery remained, but it didn’t totally hide from either of them the huskiness in his voice. “Sometimes I’m not exactly levelheaded around you, you know.”

  “Then I’ll be the levelheaded one,” she said with careful lightness.

  “I’m not sure I’d like that, either.”

  Some instinct told her this emotion was something new to C.J., too, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the volatile commodity. “There’s just no pleasing some people,” she murmured as her fingers trailed down his rib cage to his lean hip and onto his thigh.

  “Oh, yes, there is. At least this person.” He covered her body with his and showed her just how much she did please him.

  Chapter Ten

  Carolyn woke with C.J.’s chest as her pillow, C.J.’s body as her blanket.

  To get enough room for his long body, he’d stretched nearly diagonally on the bed. She curled against one side. It was the most wonderful sleeping position she’d ever found.

  She smiled and shifted slowly so that she wouldn’t wake him. She wanted to watch him sleep. A stubble of light whiskers showed in the diluted sunlight of the February morning. The grooves his grin carved were just faint echoes of white in his cheeks. His strong mouth showed a sensitivity she’d never seen before. His mop of multishaded hair was tousled like a little boy’s.

  But the body exposed by the covers drawn down nearly to his waist looked nothing like a boy’s. She remembered his broad shoulders deepening the shadows in the stairwell of Ripon Hall before he’d kissed her. And the way they’d looked in that sleeveless sweatshirt the day she’d interrupted practice. And the way they’d felt in the gym last week and again last night.

  Softly she feathered her fingers across the collarbone that stood out in high relief under his taut skin. Boldly she touched her lips to the webbing of muscle that connected his shoulder and arm. Her tongue made dizzying patterns on his skin.

  C.J. woke with an unexpected heat emanating from his shoulder and pulsing through him. Only one person, one dream, had caused that sensation. He groaned out her name before he was totally conscious.

  “I’m sorry I woke you.”

  She was real. And she looked adorably guilty, even as her hand trailed down his chest to taunt his male nipple into reaction.

  “You can wake me this way anytime you want.” His breath was harsh, irregular, but he wasn’t beyond thought. Not quite. Not yet.

  “Can I?”

  To his ears, she sounded distracted, maybe preoccupied by the way the interconnecting muscles over his ribs contracted at her lightest touch. Still, a persistent mist of anxious thought tugged at him. It felt so damn good, but did she want to do this? Did she really want to touch him with so much tenderness? It didn’t seem possible.

  “Carolyn?”

  “Hmm?” She’d just discovered how easily she could push the covers aside to explore the lean hips and long legs so artfully displayed by those indecent gym shorts she’d seen him wear.

  “Carolyn!”

  The haze of passionate absorption in the intricacies of his body was too thick to allow for anything more than another murmur. Sitting up quickly, he grasped both of her wandering hands in one of his and used the other to take hold of her chin to look into her eyes. The amber glow was there, glazed with the heat of desire and a wondering kind of triumph.

  She smiled at him, then leaned against him to flick her tongue enticingly across his lips as she freed her hands from his unresisting grip. Stroking down his chest, she followed the light covering of hair that narrowed to a line at his navel before flaring out.

  He dropped back against the pillow, letting the agonizing tenderness of her touch wash over him. Last night she had opened herself to him, given herself to him. Now she took. She staked her claim to his body. Maybe she already had his soul.

  A shudder racked C.J. as her exploration with fingers, mouth and tongue continued down the elongated muscles of his thighs. When she got to his knee, she stopped to examine the lines of scars.

  “Oh! I should have thought. Does it hurt when you... I mean last night…”

  The nerves around the scars were dead. He knew they were, but they sent off crazy flashes of sensation under her touch that made it very difficult to focus on her words. “No. It didn’t hurt.” His half laugh, half moan was at his own expense. “It hurts a great deal more when I don’t.”

  Satisfied, she rubbed her mouth across his knee as if to heal past hurts, then traveled on. He was so tight, every muscle clenched, every sinew tense.

  She remembered what Rake had said about how hard it was for C.J. just to sit back and let someone else do the doing. But he was letting her do the loving now. Perhaps he just needed the reassurance that someone else would do the doing, the loving, if he didn’t.

  Her tongue circled his ankle bone, and C.J.’s body contorted in an effort not to explode.

  “Carolyn! For God’s sake.”

  She answered his plea by moving up his body with a string of hot, moist kisses. His urgent hands tugged at her shoulders, and he started to roll her onto her back, but she resisted, and he understood. She rose above him, and he gripped her hips with a gravelly groan. This time she was the one who took him inside her.

  “Carolyn. I have wanted you forever.”

  He was sheathed in her, pulsing wit
h the warmth of her surrounding him.

  “Forever,” she repeated with a moan.

  As the crazy, tightening ascent built, he held on to her for dear life unaware of her fingers digging just as tightly into him.

  * * * *

  Picking her way along a slush-filled path, Carolyn listened to Helene grousing about Marches that came in like lambs.

  “It thaws just enough to cover the entire landscape in slush and mud, and then—just when you get a whiff of spring—wham, we’re back to blizzards. I’m going to retire to Bermuda.”

  They’d left an alumni tea at Stewart’s office and were headed across campus in the damp chill of dusk to Carolyn’s car so that she could drive Helene home.

  “You’ve said that every March for three years that I know of, Helene,” Carolyn said with a laugh. “I don’t think you’ve ever even visited Bermuda. And what would Stewart do without you?”

  Carolyn looked up in time to see an astonished pleasure cross the older woman’s face. Was what she thought of Helene and Stewart’s relationship so important to the older woman? Had she—and possibly Stewart, too—read into Carolyn’s words and actions a disapproval she’d never meant to show?

  Never meant to show. But did she disapprove? She remembered the dinner at Angelo’s and C.J.’s suggesting that when Stewart was ready he’d have someone to love him. Then, she’d thought how inappropriate Helene seemed for a university president. Now, she could only see how well the woman suited Stewart.

  “He needs you,” Carolyn said deliberately. “You’re good for him.”

  A film of tears appeared in Helene’s eyes, and she seemed robbed of her usual chatter.

  Taking Helene’s arm to guide her over a particularly large patch of half-melted ice, Carolyn added more lightly, “Besides, what would you do with all your wonderful wool clothes?”

  Helene patted Carolyn’s gloved hand on her arm in thanks. “You wait and see, Carolyn Trent. I’ll disappear to Bermuda one winter just like the robins. Not all of us have something tall and charming to ward off the chill of these Wisconsin winters.”

  She hardly heard Helene’s discussion of C.J.’s visit with Stewart to view some old campus movies. Color—unrelated to the raw air—flooded her cheeks. In the past three weeks Carolyn had heard several vague comments about her relationship with C.J. She and C.J. had agreed to be discreet. But more and more she wondered if it was a matter of public knowledge that he spent more nights at her place than his.

  “You know I can’t get cable at my place like you do here,” he’d said offhandedly one night while flipping from basketball game to basketball game. “You get a lot more games. I wish I could tape some of these.”

  “You could set your VCR up here.”

  The offer had been carefully casual. She’d adamantly shut off any efforts of her mind to analyze or label her feelings for C.J. Draper. But when his blue eyes had turned toward her, she’d felt her heart hammering. What was she getting herself into? Did he read this as a preliminary step to giving permanency to their relationship? Did she?

  Either he didn’t see her trepidation or he ignored it, because he simply said thanks.

  The next day he brought the machine over.

  It was just a VCR and some videotapes, she’d told herself. A simple practicality so he could tape more games. But when she curled up in his arms to read while he watched the tapes, practicality seemed a very distant concept. And it was even harder to remember that other people observed her and C.J. and did their own analyzing and labeling.

  “That doesn’t change anything,” she said, more in answer to her own thoughts than to Helene.

  “Of course not.” Helene’s look of surprise took on a shade of appraisal. “There’s no reason for it to change anything you don’t want changed. What are you worried about it changing?”

  What was she worried about? That other people knew she was involved with C.J.? She’d never particularly cared for her private life being known, but surely that was one aspect of campus life she’d long accepted.

  “I’m not worried about anything,” she assured Helene.

  And only a tiny voice whispered cautiously to her: except perhaps tempting the fates by feeling so happy.

  “Helene! Carolyn! Hold up there.” Dolph Reems came chugging up to them, already pulling open his satchel-like case. “Boy, am I glad I saw you, Carolyn. I’ve got to get over to my daughter’s for my grandson’s first birthday, or my life won’t be worth living. I’m already ten minutes late, and if I swing by your place, too, it’d take another fifteen. But I promised C.J. I’d get him these tapes from last season’s conference tournament today. He wanted to watch them before tomorrow’s practice.” He pulled out four videotapes and tumbled them into her unresisting hands.

  “You know, I really think we have a shot at winning that tournament.” He continued on his way, still talking to them over his shoulder. “I really appreciate it, Carolyn. Tell C.J. I’m sorry ’bout not getting them to him earlier. I had to pick up the cake. Bye. Bye, Helene.” He climbed into his car, backed up and waved goodbye to them.

  “My God, if Dolph Reems knows, everybody knows,” Carolyn sputtered at last.

  “The secret is definitely out,” Helene said with barely controlled laughter. “Do you mind so terribly?”

  Carolyn looked down at the tapes in her hands and said with a trace of wonder, “No.” She was just surprised. “It’s just Dolph . . . I mean, I’ve known him since I was a little girl, and he’s always seemed so straitlaced, but he . . .” She searched for a phrase to explain Dolph’s attitude and fell back on understatement. “He didn’t seem to mind.”

  “Mind? He positively beamed. The man looked like Christmas and the Fourth of July had arrived together! You’d think he expected a commission as matchmaker!”

  And now laughter overtook Helene. “When everybody knows Stewart and I are splitting it down the middle!”

  * * * *

  C.J. noticed the tapes on the table, but not right away. First, when he deposited the cartons of Chinese food he’d brought for dinner, he wrapped his arms around her from behind and kissed her neck. With the lettuce she was washing for a salad dripping in her hands, Carolyn could do no more than lean back against him and sigh.

  That was enough.

  He spread the fingers of one hand and let them graze the bottom curve of her breast. “Mmm. Salad’ll be good.”

  “There’s not going to be any if you keep doing that.”

  He loved the way her cool voice grew husky under his touch. His hand covered her breast, sensing it tighten through the slippery silk.

  “If that’s the choice, I’ll take this,” he murmured against her neck. “I like this blouse.” His fingers began adeptly unbuttoning the white mother-of-pearl buttons down the front of the peach silk.

  “Then why are you taking it off?”

  “I like what’s underneath better.” His fingertips slipped inside the opened blouse and delved under the lacy edge of slip and bra to the ivory-smooth skin. One touch brought the rosy tip to tight attention.

  “Oh, C.J.” She dropped the lettuce into the sink and twisted in his arms to face him, trying, still, to keep her wet hands away from him.

  He bent to trail his lips along her jaw, then down her throat and lower. Slipping the straps from her shoulder helped him clear the way for his mouth to follow where his fingers had prepared. Wet hands were forgotten in the need to hold his head closer.

  The phone jolted her back to the present. The sound of water running and the smell of Chinese food slipped back into her consciousness.

  “Let it ring,” C.J. growled.

  “We did that last night, remember? And never got any dinner. Tonight we eat, first,” she said as he helped her restore her clothing. Then she picked up the phone. “Hello? Oh, hello, Stewart.” She listened just a moment, then handed the phone to C.J. without looking at him. “It’s for you. Stewart.”

  Even as he talked to Stewart about arrangemen
ts for the team’s tournament trip, he watched her. Searching, she knew, for some reaction to Stewart’s easy assumption that C.J. could be reached at her apartment. She wasn’t sure herself if her lack of reaction resulted from the numbness of shock or disinterest in something basically trivial.

  Quickly she finished the salad and set the table. By the time she’d brought the food, C.J. was hanging up. He sat down with his usual easy motion, but she sensed an added tension in him. Perhaps Stewart’s assumption bothered him. He wasn’t a man accustomed to being considered part of a twosome.

  “What are these?” He patted the stack of videotapes as she served the salads.

  “Dolph gave them to me.” Her casualness was impressive. “I ran into him this afternoon and he asked me to bring them . . . here to you.” She’d almost said “home to you,” but had faltered at the last second.

  He tightened momentarily. More a stillness of his face than an obvious tension in his muscles. Then he relaxed.

  Carolyn felt her breath come again as they dug into the cartons of Chinese food. Some milestone had been passed.

  She didn’t have to identify it to be glad it was behind them.

  “Must be the tapes of last year’s conference tournament. I wanted to look at them again. With only a week left we’ve got a lot of practicing to do.”

  C.J. talked on about basketball while they ate chicken cashew and shrimp and vegetables, but all the while one level of his mind tried to weigh Carolyn’s reaction. For his part he didn’t give a damn who knew. She was the one who wanted discretion. He would shout it from the chapel’s bell tower if they’d let him. But she didn’t want it that way.

  Her marble mask had been held in place by a lot of ideas of what a proper professor should and should not do. He’d wondered—and tried hard not to—how she’d feel when the pairing of Professor Trent of the English Department and Coach Draper of the basketball team became public knowledge. He hadn’t acknowledged the possibility that she’d recoil, but it had been there.