Just for Christmas Night

by Lisa Marie Perry

  “It wasn’t always for me, either,” he admitted, joining her on the stoop and deactivating the security system. He’d regret the honesty later. “More of an acquired taste. Like vodka.”

  “Sure. Compare violence to vodka.”

  “That’s a lot of criticism coming from a pro football publicist.” Joaquin moved ahead of her through the corridor. Off-hours LED bulbs dimly lit their path deeper into the gym.

  In an effort to accommodate Joaquin’s rigorous training regimen without shutting the door on paying members, Jules had offered him unlimited after-hours access to the building.

  Joaquin preferred this concrete haven when it was purged of other people and personalities, decorated in shadows, accented with echoing creaks and yawns. He hadn’t wanted to share the solitude with anyone.

  Except bringing Martha here had been vital. If they could rehash what had gone wrong in this space four Decembers ago, maybe she’d table her resentment and he could more easily persuade her away from whatever had given her the shot-to-hell reputation that had her job in jeopardy.

  If his conversation with Marshall Blue had made anything clear, it was that the Las Vegas Slayers’ sexy young publicist was one scandal away from severance pay and unemployment.

  And she didn’t know it.

  Martha meandered to a row of weight benches, stopping at the nearest one to trail her fingers over the various-size plates. “Most kids’ early memories of their parents include stuff like bedtime story readings or baking lessons. Mine include counting my father’s reps on the weight bench and watching my mother practice her pageant walk.”

  “I thought Tem quit chasing tiaras when you were born. And didn’t Marshall stop bodybuilding even before that?”

  “True and true. But they’re sticklers for maintenance. Being beautiful or packing on muscles is hard, so why not reap the rewards for as long as possible?”

  It made perfect practical sense.

  “Pop can lift over two-fifty, I think. What about you?”

  “I bench three-ten.”

  “That’s…a lot.” Martha turned away from the weight-lifting equipment. “You can hold almost three of me?”

  “I’m finding one of you to be more than enough to handle.”

  Joaquin’s unfiltered retort earned him the softest of smiles as she moved on to the ring, where she batted a pair of boxing gloves that hung from a bottom rope.

  “Good news. There’s only one. There’ll never be another me.”

  He could agree that, nah, there never would be another woman whose absence in his life could drench him with both relief and grief. Before her, and after her, there would never be another woman he wanted when he had every reason to stay away.

  “Violence isn’t vodka, and boxing isn’t football, Joaquin,” Martha said, doggedly pursuing a point he thought they’d dropped at the door. She slapped the gloves together. “Football’s more…dignified. The league—my own sister, even—is constantly researching ways to make the sport safer. We—we use helmets, for cripe’s sake.”

  “Boxing gloves serve a purpose.” He tugged the pair of gloves from her grasp and unwound them from the rope to set aside.

  “A player would be fined, if not booted off our roster, for the assault I’ve seen you lay on a competitor,” she continued, stepping over his argument as if it were trash on the street. “Anyway, I’ve caught only a few of your matches. Weren’t all that memorable.”

  As the last word crept past her lips, Martha’s gaze swung away from his. She was lying to him—and it cut clean through his ego to nick his heart. The last time they’d been together in this gym with the doors locked and the lights down, she’d been so honest that he’d barely been able to stand so much messy, screwup-everything truth.

  But in the years since, he’d faced so much deception that he was still feeling the aftereffects. Let her discount his victories as forgettable. At least then she could take a swipe at his pride without compromising her integrity.

  Because liars, he neither trusted nor forgave.

  A half turn brought him to her. “Respect me.”

  “Yeah? And tell you stuff you want to hear?”

  “Tell me the truth.” He rested his palm at the base of her neck. Martha’s features tensed in protest for a moment; then, her eyelashes trembled softly as her lids closed. Surrender. “Rehashing this—it ain’t gonna be pretty. Can you handle that?”

  A fragile sigh escaped her lips with the stroke of his thumb up her throat. “Easy.”

  “Let’s see how you do without flirting and jokes to hide behind.”

  A spark of something that had been absent a minute ago brightened Martha’s eyes, as though she’d found inspiration in something he’d said. Grayish light illuminated her strut to the ringside stairs.

  “Flirting got us to this point,” she said. The sound of her skinny-heeled shoes on the steps reverberated through the room. Ducking between the third and fourth ropes, she invaded the ring. His ring. “We were in this square, right?”

  Kneading his forehead with the heel of his hand—which did nothing to assuage the painfully seductive sight of Martha crossing the competition ring in ripped-up jeans and tall shoes—he answered, “If you want those kind of details, then, yeah, we were flirting in the ring.”

  “Uh-huh. We. As in mutual.” She crooked a finger and he found himself taking the stairs with a little too much energy, and coming to her with a little too much power in his stride. “As in, part of you wanted me, Joaquin.”

  Wants, he almost corrected. Only by the grace of God had his common sense strangled the blunt confession.

  Casting a languid look from his face to his pelvis, she grinned. “Thanks for the reminder, but I already knew exactly which part that was.”

  Joaquin had been half-hard from the moment Martha danced on his crotch at the hotel, and if she could tap into his current thoughts, she’d see an image of him drilling into her on the canvas. No soft beds. No candles. No fairy-tale seduction.

  None of the things she had carefully planned for them four years ago, when she’d worked up a crush and had chosen her first Christmas home from college in New York to get to him.

  If he’d paid enough attention to something other than his catapulting career and his crumbling relationship—supposing a relationship was what he’d had with India—then he would’ve seen that Martha was after more than the short term, more than sex he could lose himself in. Her attention, her presence, had consoled him out of the type of hell that provoked some men to seek comfort from the depths of a bottle or the contents of a syringe.

  Martha sagged against the top rope, arching her spine. “What are you thinking?”

  “One of us should’ve said no. It should’ve been me.” Ten years her senior… Why hadn’t he been wiser, instead of shortsighted, fixated on loss and lust and what her touch and taste could do for him?

  “Said no to what?” she pressed. “Letting me in here that night? Or do you regret the time we spent standing here talking and laughing?”

  Conversation had flowed so easily, drifting from one topic to the next, cresting into laughs that rang throughout the darkened gym, and ebbing into slow, relaxed pauses.

  Martha pushed off the ropes and positioned herself against a corner post. “C’mere. We do this accurately, or we don’t do it at all.”

  “I hadn’t laughed, cracked a smile—none of it—in weeks,” he recalled, advancing toward her in a few careful steps. As he had four years ago, he gripped the top rope on her left and the one on her right. “And you told the lamest-ass joke I’d ever heard.”

  “It was beautiful, your laugh,” she whispered, pensive, her expression drawn in a frown. “So rough. Unexpected. I felt it everywhere. All over me.”

  “Then you put your hands on me, Martha.”

  She coiled her fingers over his forearms, her nails imprinting on his jacket. “I wanted to make you feel the heat I felt just to be near you.”

  Past and present collided, as
her palms skimmed his arms. He’d lived this moment before, only there was more. More sizzle in his blood at the brush of her hands on his collar. More urgency in the crash of their bodies and his grip on her ass.

  Joaquin rocked her against him. That night she’d been in a party dress, something fancy and silky. And when he’d touched her, the fabric had molded to her curves. Tonight, denim covered her flesh.

  “Jeans.” The word came out on a harsh exhale.

  Studying her through the filmy overhead lights for a lengthy moment, not touching her, giving her ample time to slip out of the ring, Joaquin knew that the reenactment was an invitation to trouble. To be accurate, they would cross the line again…go too far again.

  “What kind of champion waves the white flag for a pair of two-hundred-dollar jeans?”

  Joaquin had a choice. He could interpret her comment as a snide remark to ignore, or a challenge that he needed to accept. Hooking a finger into the waistband of her torn jeans, he yanked her forward.

  Eager. Impatient. Martha met him with a look of desperation so similar to what he’d seen this morning in the mirror when he’d let himself into the gym before dawn. Caught between awake and asleep, he’d tried to kick her out of his head. But she’d been too stubborn, too quick to catch.

  Now she was too much like him, grappling for a full-body rush of pleasure.

  Prying her hands from his jacket lapels, he curled them around the ropes again, pinning her flush against the post. Martha tipped her face back, offering her throat…yielding.

  Could a kiss fulfill him? Heal him? Anxious, reckless, he bent, eclipsing her under the dull lights. Bringing his mouth down on her throat, he dived his fingers into her hair. The springy, feather-soft curls felt so good, he flexed his hands into fists, tightening his hold.

  In response, Martha swayed against him. And when she moaned, he was ready. His mouth on hers, he caught the sound in a hard kiss. Plunging into her with his tongue, he could drink in her taste, swallow down her eager sighs.

  “Your nose,” she said when they parted once for air. “It’s been broken before, hasn’t it?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “I’ve never kissed a man with a broken nose. Those men, they were storybook hot—not real-life, scarred hot.”

  “Then you’ve been kissing the wrong men, Martha.”

  Joaquin released her hair, but not her mouth. Eyes shut, he blindly let his hands navigate her body—the roundness of her tits, the taut line of her abdomen, the curve of her hips—until they met the front of her jeans.

  Working the row of buttons free—yeah, there would be three to get past when he was all but feenin’ to get reacquainted with her heat—he shoved the jeans and thong down past her hips. In tune with him, she parted her thighs and received his touch with a whimper that shook him from head to toe.

  This part was different—her reaction, their connection. Working two fingers into her, and finding her tight but slick, he decided to give her pleasure that was different from the first time. Teasing her with only one brush of his palm on her sensitive flesh, he stroked into her. Faster. Deeper. More.

  Martha broke away from his mouth. “Joaquin, I can’t…uh…”

  “Can’t what? Come?”

  Jaw tight, she said, “Yeah. Come. I can’t, not this way. Not without—” She let go of the ropes and tried to bring a hand down to the bead of flesh that would take her to the top much too quickly.

  But he batted it away, growling, “Again, you’ve been with the wrong men.” He plunged in even deeper, drawing a gasp. “Put your hands on those ropes, or on me. You’re in my ring, and right now, this is mine.”

  Martha cursed and took his mouth in a biting kiss that was barely shy of brutal, and he couldn’t remember ever wanting her more. His body was in sweet torment, desperate for her hands, her mouth, but the release he wanted wouldn’t come from burying himself in her. He wanted to be released from the guilt he’d carried since the last time they’d been this close. And if he couldn’t have that, at least he could give her a sample of the ecstasy she thought she was incapable of experiencing.

  “No lies, Martha,” he groaned against her lips. “The rule’s always in effect here. So don’t fake anything with me. Want me to go faster? Even deeper?”

  “No.” She shook her head frantically. “Don’t change a thing. Don’t stop. This is perfect.”

  “I know. You wouldn’t be so wet if it wasn’t.”

  “Why’d you ask me, then?”

  “Just wanted to hear you say it.”

  She dug her fingers into his shoulders. “Remind me to slug you later. Right now, prove that I’m with the right man.”

  Aside from sex, he certainly wasn’t the right man for her—and they both knew it. But he was the man to make her come in a way she hadn’t before, and that had to be enough.

  Strumming her, he watched, fascinated, as she slammed back into the post and screamed out her orgasm. The sound vibrated through the gym and flowed through him until her breathing started to even out again.

  He withdrew, and she continued to tremble gently.

  “It didn’t happen that way,” she finally said, staring at the hand he’d had between her legs, the fingers he’d had inside her. Then she searched his gaze. “We didn’t kiss.”

  No, they hadn’t. Four years ago, he’d peeled off her silky dress, kneeled and, with one of her legs thrown over his shoulder, feasted slowly. After his tongue’s attention had made her climax, he’d tried to stroke into her and her body had resisted him.

  And the realization had hit hard. She’d lied to him.

  You’re a virgin… The words had shot out as an accusation and, the selfish idiot that he’d been, he’d acted as though her manipulation had given him license to hurt her pride.

  “I told you that I’d been with someone before,” Martha said now. “I knew you would’ve backed off if you’d known the truth.”

  Oh, he’d backed off, all right. He’d demanded the full truth, found out that she’d booked them a hotel suite all set with rose petals and fancy candles and had hoped that he would say yes to driving her there and making love to her.

  She’d said “making love” when all he could handle was sex. She’d been hoping for sweetness and commitment, when he’d been enduring life one day at a time.

  Unable to see past the fact that she’d almost tricked him into taking her virginity, that she was yet another woman who’d lied to him, he’d harshly ordered her the hell off the gym’s premises…off his territory.

  I want a real woman, he’d snapped. One who doesn’t need flowers and candles. One who knows what to do with a man.

  It sickened him to recall what he’d said, to remember her naked, vulnerable and heartbroken.

  “I shouldn’t have treated you that way,” Joaquin said.

  “You were in a bad place.” Martha eased her underwear up over her hips, following with her shredded jeans. “You’d just broken off your engagement. Your suffering was my opportunity.”

  “No excuses.” They weren’t deserved or wanted. He shook his head, but the memories remained lodged there. “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.” Martha began buttoning up. “And about what just happened—”

  “I’m not sorry for touching you. You deserve to feel that good, and often. But that’s all I can offer.”

  “I was going to just say thanks.” Martha lifted her brows. “Maybe the Martha of four years ago couldn’t handle the reality of what we did tonight, but I can. I’m not a virgin anymore.”

  Joaquin bent and kissed her, even as he tried to warn himself against it. “In some ways you are. I just showed you there are still things you haven’t experienced.”

  “Then the same could be said about you,” she served back, climbing out of the ring. “You’re a trust virgin.”

  “A what?”

  “You never trusted anyone you claimed to love, even your fiancée.”

  “Turns out I was right, you know, since
I walked in on her screwing my friend. After that, what’d she do? She tried to pin his kid on me.” He’d lost time, money and a touch of his fans’ respect when India had lured him into a public, drawn-out courtroom battle that included tampered DNA results and an unnecessary scandal that had done nothing but rip her credibility to shreds and leave her open to eventually lose custody of her baby to the kid’s father.

  “Yes, but you don’t know what it’s like to trust—really trust—someone. My love for you? Trust was built into it.”

  Martha’s “love” hadn’t been more than infatuation—he was convinced of that. But he didn’t say so as he hopped out of the ring and walked toward the restroom to clean up.

  “Joaquin.”

  He stopped.

  “Do what works for you. I’m only saying that you haven’t seen it all, lived it all.” Martha hesitated, then traced his jaw. “And yeah, what happened here before doesn’t matter anymore. ’Cause I’m not asking for a night in a hotel room. Just a ride home.” Blinking, she let him go. “Get washed up. I’ll wait by the door.”

  Chapter 5

  Midnight rolled as the Escalade swung a left onto Opal Canyon Court. At the center of the cul-de-sac, Martha’s house stood at the arc in the road, flanked by a scatter of gated, mountain-view properties. The street, canopied with trees and lined with wrought-iron lamps, was hushed, as it usually was this time of night. Aside from the occasional blare of music, the most noise Martha heard tucked away in this nook of town was the whisper of a gate opening and closing, and the yawn of wind.

  Privacy was practically a guarantee—her sister’s high-profile ex had chosen the property smartly. So Martha didn’t feel especially nervous now about anyone getting a peek at her gates sliding open for a dark-windowed luxury truck.

  Assuming that Joaquin would drop her off on the sidewalk and keep driving—putting her and what they’d done at Ryder’s Boxing Club in his rearview mirror—Martha had started to push open the door to get out when he’d said, “I want to see you get inside safely.”