by Leslie North
“Willow, what are you…?” He glanced around at his feet then added his duffle to her mountain of belongings. “Are you leaving?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why didn’t you wait for me?”
“I can’t do this anymore, Chase.”
“If this is about the stupid bet…”
“It isn’t. Not anymore. I need all the seasons, not just summer. If I stay here, you’ll be my summer. A white-hot, sweaty, amazing summer but a fleeting season, nevertheless. Just like your game.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This isn’t real, Chase. You’re photo shoots and trips to Fiji and the lead bachelor story on the gossip mags, and I’m the mascot girl who smells like ball sweat and got evicted because I can’t focus on any one thing long enough to make a go of it.”
He crossed his arms, as defensive a move as any he had ever displayed on the court. “That why you agreed to this? Because you had nowhere else to go?”
“Yes.”
“Whose house was that yesterday?”
“Estelle. Treasurer and Lead Historian of the Alloys’ Senior Hoops Club.”
“She did know who I was.”
“The woman sleeps in Magnum underwear.”
Chase chuckled. The sound, rich and resonant, released some of the stifling tension. He uncrossed his arms and inched closer.
The vacuum his nearness created in her core suppressed her breath.
“None of those things are me, Willow.”
Another step closer, like his pursuit across the court at two a.m., but painstaking, deliberate.
“And the women?”
“Never made me feel like this, like a better person just for being around them.”
“That’s me. Mother Theresa.” Cast-off clothes, mismatched socks, self-haircuts in the mirror. She would never measure up to the exotic, jet-setting women with which Chase aligned himself. Any affection would be strictly charity in comparison.
“Mother Theresa wouldn’t have me emptying my wallet in the lust jar over there.”
“You added the money after your date with Fallon.”
“That money wasn’t because of Fallon.”
“No?” She kept her voice light, coy, innocent so he would have to go there—reassure her that he didn’t think of her as some asexual missionary whose proximity made him feel good about himself.
He reached for her hips, his wide hands firm but agile, and guided her into a union that left no space between them. It was the first time their bodies had been flush, he so much taller than she. Had they been on the court, a moving violation—a progressive pick, a full-body charge, something. “No.”
His erection, veiled behind the thin, flexible fibers of athletic pants, pressed against her abdomen.
She blocked the urge of her answering heat-seeking apex to scale him like a tree until she found full, blissful alignment. Eyes clenched tight, she reminded herself Chase was a season, nothing more. He had always been a summer. He would always be a summer.
It’s okay to enjoy the summer every now and then.
“What about the bet?” She needed that money.
“Fuck the bet. I don’t care about that anymore. Not the way I care about you.”
She sifted that development through her mind. Tarek wins. Goodbye, ten grand. Goodbye, Dylan. She felt sick. Making this about the money was no different a crime than the shallowness of which she was accusing Chase. She was better than that. If she was going to make a choice here, it couldn’t be about the money.
“And your record?”
Chase scooped her up—her, emitting a tiny, surprised yelp, and him, barely breaking breath from her added weight. He placed her on the kitchen counter so they were nose to nose. “Since you, I’ve played my best ball ever.”
“And what about after? What’s your end here?”
Willow hoped her meaning was clear. She wouldn’t be just another knot on his drawstring.
“Since you, I’ve played my best life ever. That won’t change with a record.” That dimple. Gah. He nuzzled her ear, his voice barely rising above a thought. “Let me put you first. For once in your life, let someone put you first.”
The prospect roused her. Sometimes, it was exhausting to think about everyone else, to suppress her needs and wants. Sometimes, she just wanted to be selfish.
It’s okay to enjoy the summer every now and then.
Her honorable intent collapsed like a cream puff mixed at conflicting temperatures—her resolve frosty, her body sizzling.
“One request,” she said, bashfully biting her lip.
“Anything.”
11
Actually, she had more than one request. Currently, the list was reproducing like it was on a circular loop. All the ways she wanted the most beautiful man in the world to put her first. But her numero uno request was of paramount importance.
There was no effing way Willow was checking into Holbrook Hotel and Hump Spa smelling like Bolt.
At the prospect of exploring each other first in the shower, Chase stripped off his athletic warm-up jacket, an action she had seen him perform a thousand times courtside. Of course, he usually had a number twenty-eight jersey on underneath. Nope, no jersey this time. Just the close-cropped shrubbery of a manscape, sprouted from smooth, contoured granite.
He wagged his brows as if to say your turn.
“No fair. Show me something I don’t see on a commercial every night.”
Chase stepped out of his shoe.
“Sock too.”
He was trying not to laugh. Really. But he reached down to slip off his athletic sock, lost his balance and had to grab the countertop to right himself. At his smile, locked inside an exquisite frame of nakedness, he could have stuck a nearby fork in her. She was cooked.
“Blood no longer in your ears for balance, eh?”
He wagged his brows, again.
So they were going to do this. Strip in his kitchen. Take turns. Go up in flames.
She removed her ponytail holders and shook out her hair—a complete wreck from sixty-plus minutes inside a fifty-pound costume.
He shook his head. More dimples. Shit. Because brain waves ceased in his nearness, she glanced down at her options: her Elephants Can’t Jump basketball shirt, red spandex boy shorts. Literally, nothing else. Blue fur was an inferno made no better with underthings. She reached for the hem of her shirt, Holbrook-style, and went for it.
Chase’s eyes went all half-court, blind-folded, win-season-tickets shot. To distract him from the smallness of her breasts, she propped one heel on the granite and arched her back. Provocative couldn’t hurt.
In fact, it brought out his best play.
He dropped his pants and Magnums, one sporty maneuver so magnificently executed despite his rather sizeable erection, she thought she might reward his flair with a round of applause. All of her late-night cheese ball raids in front of Estelle’s TV had not prepared her for Chase’s magnum opus just beyond the camera’s lens. She supposed it came with the territory, an athlete so comfortable with what God gave him because part of his job description involved stripping down and suiting up. But damn if he wasn’t preening—feet wide as if he had just stepped off a pirate ship, hands slung low and indifferent on his notched hips, a mega-watt smile that would have landed him a toothpaste commercial on a planet with no clothes.
What does one say to perfection? “I’m speechless. Can I just pop some popcorn and watch The Chase Show? I’ve been wanting to see it for so long.”
“Not a chance.”
“So much for putting me first.”
She answered him with a bold attempt to mimic his grace, but her shorts were practically painted on. All legs and arms and less-than-dignified wiggles. Once, the back of her hand tagged his silky member.
“For the foul of standing too close to someone exiting spandex, a penalty shot.”
A chuckle formed deep in his chest cavity and erupted through his slackened lips. His eyes w
ere heat-glazed on her nether parts. He scooped her in his arms and carried her through the light-dappled shadows to his wing of the penthouse. His fingertips splayed at the side of her left nipple, already swelled and taut from the chill in the air. If a moment of incidental contact could send a jolt of sensuous torment straight to her crux, she might spontaneously combust at his focused game plan.
Already, she was damp.
Confession time. Mostly to keep her from climaxing at the feel of his outlandishly hot dick playing her tailbone like an instrument.
“I peeked in your room while you were away.”
“Did you?” He carried her past the threshold to his bedroom. Automatic sensors cast dim, golden cones of light near their feet to push back the darkness. “I peeked in your room while you were here.”
“Did not.”
“Yep.”
“That might be creepy if I wasn’t so turned on right now.”
His laugh was beyond sexy. “I wanted to make sure you had enough blankets.”
“Aww. I take back my creepy comment.”
“Don’t. I caught sight of your nipple through the arm hole of the jersey. Cost me twenty bucks.”
He planted her feet on a white rug that felt like a cloud and reached inside a set of glass double-doors to turn on the hot water spigot. A flick to the switches near the towel rack and the enclosure became the most vibrant display of illuminated, flowing water Willow had ever seen.
“I had no idea what this was. I thought it was a steam room or something.” The glass mini-room had no visible shower heads. A lowered black panel in the ceiling rained down fifty streams, collectively wide enough for two. A raised, black-tile block provided seating on one side. Opposite, a slab of smooth gray marble invited the occupant to lie down at waist-height while five over-body panels, lit blue, sprayed the length of the shower bed. As if all of that weren’t magical enough, a hundred or more mini-lights cored out of the surrounding marble gave the impression of a galaxy of stars.
“It’s that, too. Some pros spend their money on cars. I figured that I spend enough time in a shower, I wanted the best.”
“You could have a party in here.” The moment her words left her mouth, she wanted to scour them from her mind. No doubt, other women have enjoyed this space with him. Maybe at the same time.
As if he could sense where her mind strayed, he stroked her chin and lifted her face to his. His fervent gaze sought hers. “I won’t lie and say there haven’t been others in here with me. But I’m here with you now because there’s no place I’d rather be and no one I’d rather share it with than you.”
His hand trailed down her arm and tugged at her fingertips. Colored steam churned like neon thunderclouds out of the glass opening, a gateway to the pleasures that lay beyond, a barrier to the outside world they left behind. Here, in this otherworldly space, there were no delineations of status or fame. They entered the main flow of water as Chase and Willow, two unlikely souls who intersected by circumstance, drawn together out of an intangible something that surpassed mutual respect and fondness.
Water flowed cottony against her skin—not at all the stinging sensation of every shower she had ever known. Streams cascaded in rivulets to her scalp, flowed past her hard nipples, and joined with the wetness already present between her legs.
As when he was sweat-soaked in the heat of battle on the court, dripping wet was his most disarming look.
Chase lifted her fingertip to a touch-panel and tapped it. A digital readout added flames or subtracted them, based on the location tapped. He was giving her authority over their pleasure. She loaded up the heat and tugged at his neck so their lips merged.
The bond was tenuous, slippery. Forsaking the natural friction of their earlier kiss, they skated their lips against each other. They explored each other’s mouths as if they were hidden grottos sheltered from the rain. His erection twitched and bobbed between them, growing ever-harder with each new erotic exploration: earlobe, neck, collarbone. Down, down, down…
He led her to the bench and encouraged her to sit. After adjusting the spray so that she was warm but not engulfed, he spread her legs wide, knelt, and filled the space before her. He reached for a nearby bottle and pumped out a pearly citrus shampoo then set about lathering her hair and rinsing, stopping every so often to pepper her body with kisses. His hands were gentle; his fingers were long and skillful. Needles of mind-numbing desire penetrated her scalp and ran a course straight for her exposed clit. He reached for a rigid bar of man-soap, label still imprinted at its center, and mapped out a musky-coconut trail over every inch of her skin—shoulders, ankles, and everything in between but the trinity of touchpoints where she most ached to feel his touch.
“Please…”
“Yes?”
“Nipples…”
He leveled her with a wickedly hot smile and teased the rigid bar across the peak of her left nipple. Everything low inside lurched toward him as if he had triggered a magnetic field that could only be neutralized by more touch, harder touch, deeper touch. She arched her back and slid lower, knees wider, her right breast angled for equal attention, inviting him on a moan that filled the glass space when the soap was no longer enough.
He nestled the bar so that it was touching her spread pussy, one short, clipped contact of his fingertips that nearly drizzled her to the shower floor. His lips and fingers and teeth zeroed in on her nipples, each taking turns introducing sensations until waves of heightened pleasure turned to gratifying pain then back to an ecstasy greater than she had ever known.
In a liquid world, she longed for something to ground her against the ecstasy. She reached for his dick the same moment his attentions turned toward her deluged folds. He watched as she cupped the weight of his testicles, massaged their pliable girth then wrapped his shaft in her palm and dished back the same tortured bliss she had endured.
His neck relaxed on his wide shoulders. His head tipped toward the waterfall above. In ecstasy, as in the throes of competition, his brow tensed, his mouth slackened in its hunger for oxygen, and he cursed. Under his breath, walking the tightrope of control, half-groan and half-rasp, he reminded her of their game plan.
“This…oh, fuck…was supposed…to be all you.”
“Well, all of me wants to see what happens when you let yourself go.”
He filled her grip, his excess demanding more ambitious strokes and the help of her other hand to ensure no part of his manhood was left neglected. Alternating between closed-eyed transcendence and razing stares that were a precursor to hard, ravenous kisses, he lost his ability to kneel before her. He sat back. With his elbows, he braced himself against the pristine shower floor. She stalked him, hands propped on either side of his lean body, from his enormous feet to calves and thighs dusted with hair to a rigidly veined and plum-tipped cock that begged for her mouth.
At lick one, it was word one—her name enfolded on his gravelly tongue. From his soft nest of hair at the base, past his banded ridge to his smooth, weeping peak, she forged a circuitous trail with the tip of her tongue until his penis bobbed in anguish for something more.
Again, he spoke her name, barely audible above the rush of the water. The sound was infinitely erogenous, as if he knew she needed that, needed confirmation that she was not just anyone to him, but someone special. She rewarded him by taking him fully into her mouth until his downy head skimmed the back of her throat, again and again.
At this, he collapsed against the drain and prayed to a holy deity for her to stop, to keep going, to stop, to keep going. When she explored his thickness with her best tongue gymnastics, he reached for her shoulders and hauled her against his chest.
“So very Willow,” he said around labored pants. “Always giving.”
He helped her to her feet and onto the shower bed. His eyes devoured her body as if she were a carnal buffet. He adjusted the water splashing her, neck to feet so it was a mere trickle of burning-hot water running the lines of her body. He captured her f
eet, at a loss for where to be, what to do and hooked her heels around and over the shower head panel keeping her awash in light and steam.
After a slippery tug toward the end of the table, she was mercilessly, unabashedly exposed. As vulnerable as she had ever been with anyone.
“Chase?”
He slurped his way back up her body, his lips sipping in the pools at her belly and streams below the swell of her breasts. When he reached her neck and face, he pulled back and drank in her expression.
“No one has ever done…that…for me before.”
She watched his face for a reaction—of censure, of pity, something. But he was a man at his best when challenged. She had seen that look before. Little time to make up for a deficit. Everything riding on him. “Then I’d say it’s long past time.”
Let the game begin…
“Chase?”
“Hmm?” He had become distracted by her body’s angles, stroking his large hands down to where they joined her spread thighs, as if he was working out the perfect man-to-woman play in his mind.
“I liked the soap.”
He halted his hand’s progress, smiled, and reached for the bar, cast forgotten onto the shower floor. His assets hung heavy and low, adding to the visual ass-banquet from behind.
She giggled. Wasn’t that a cardinal rule for athletes?
“You, bending for that soap, is just about the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. You’re as gorgeous from the back as you are from the front.” She was sure he didn’t need to hear that—he must have heard it every day of his adult life—but she needed to say it.
He positioned himself at the end of the shower bed she occupied, spread eagle, and trailed circles and squiggly lines of musky-coconut scent along her inner thigh. “And you, sweet Willow, are addictive in every possible way. I’ve forgotten how to be anything but with you, and the thought of being inside you makes me want to scale these fucking walls.”
Willow was glad she was lying down because his bold declaration steamrolled her.
The bar of soap meandered a path lower, lower, until her pubic hairs bogged its progress. When she thought Chase might retreat, give the other thigh the same attention, he surprised her by skipping her mound altogether and using the soap’s rigid lines to enter her.
