In the Zone (Portland Storm 5)

by Catherine Gayle

  “Not a chance,” she scoffed. “That wouldn’t do a thing to hold me up. What would I want with a few scraps of lace?”

  “I don’t know,” I murmured, thinking about all the reasons I might want to see her in a few scraps of lace and leaning my head down closer to hers so that my breath tickled her ear. “Maybe so you could feel sexy when I undress you.” I had one hand resting on her shoulder. I drew it up higher until my fingers rested over the pulse that was jumping in her throat. “So you could make me crazy with wanting to know what you had on underneath your clothes. So you could watch the need in my eyes as I found out for myself.”

  “There’s not much sexy about saggy, baggy boobs drooping halfway to my waist draped in something that doesn’t have enough support to do them any good.”

  “Ah,” I said softly. I slipped my hand down the column of her neck, my fingers teasing the skin of her chest. I dipped my hand beneath the fabric of her dress, only stopping when my fingertips rested at the upper curve of her breasts, just where her bra stopped. “You mean these boobs? Because I can promise you there’s not a damn thing that you could put them in to keep me from getting hard in an instant. Truss them up, wrap them tight, let them jiggle and wobble and bounce—it’s all going to turn me on.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “Maybe so, but I know an amazing pair of breasts when I see them, and that’s what these are.” With that same hand, I undid the top button of her dress, watching from above as the fabric spread a bit. Her breathing turned shallow when I undid the next button, and one more, then dipped my fingers under the top of her bra and slid my hand in to cup one breast in my palm.

  Her nipple pebbled as soon as I made contact, and she sucked in a breath, her head falling back against my shoulder. I kissed her, first her mouth, then the long column of her throat. Her pulse thundered beneath my lips and tongue.

  “If you don’t stop touching me, I’m not going to end up ordering anything.”

  I grinned down at her. “I don’t know. I kind of like the idea of you going around half naked.” I waited a beat, savoring her pursed lips and narrowed eyes. “Or all naked.” I waggled my brows at her, only withdrawing my hand right before she aimed a throw pillow at my head.

  She tugged on the collar of her dress, as though that would do anything to keep me from thinking about everything she had hidden underneath it. “Do you constantly think about sex?”

  “Not constantly, no.” I headed into the kitchen for a bottle of wine and some glasses. “Well, maybe I do now. Since you.”

  I could hear her fingers tapping on the keys, so she must be putting an order in. Probably without the lacy bra. Too bad. I’d give my left nut to see her in something like that. But then again, there was nothing preventing me from ordering a few things for her and having them shipped here so I could surprise her. Nothing too crazy, of course. Just a few things that weren’t quite as sensible as the rest, to see what might strike her fancy.

  When I sat down next to her and passed a wineglass into her hand, she closed down the browser and shut the lid of the laptop. I slid it off her lap and set it on the coffee table, next to my own glass and the bottle, and took the sticky note from her hand, placing it on top of the computer where I’d be able to find those numbers later.

  She took a sip, her gaze focused squarely on me, although I couldn’t even attempt to interpret what was behind it. “Since me?” she finally said. I cocked a brow, and she set her glass next to mine. “Since a week ago, or since…”

  “Since that night over the summer. I’ve hardly been able to get you off my mind.” I took her hand and laid her palm out flat on my thigh, tracing the creases and lines until she shivered. “I tried dating a couple of girls when I got back here, hoping they’d help me forget you since I doubted I’d ever see you again. It didn’t work.”

  She raised a skeptical brow. “A couple?”

  I shrugged. “Three? I don’t know. They all blur together.”

  Brie shook her head as though that could change the truth. “I’d think I would have been a blur right along with them. Maybe even more of a blur since we’d only been together the one night.”

  “No, not you. You’re all bold colors and defined lines in my mind.” I eased my hand up her wrist and forearm, stopping at her elbow. Her skin was as silken as butter, and a trail of goose bumps popped up in the wake of my touch.

  When I leaned in to kiss her again, she put a hand on my chest, stopping me.

  “Keith?”

  I closed my eyes, and a bedraggled sigh left my lips. “Yeah?” The heat of her hand only made me want to touch her more, to get her hands and mouth and tongue on me, but apparently that was going to have to wait.

  “You said you wanted to come to my performance. And you’ve asked me to come to one of your games.”

  “I want you to come to as many of my games as you can,” I said.

  “So this… Well, this,” she said, as though that would encompass everything around and between us. “You don’t want it to just be physical then? At first it was only about sex—”

  “It was never only about sex. You’re lying to yourself if you think it was, even that first night.” I’d known before she ever walked through the door of my hotel room that, at least for her, it would go much deeper than skin. I hadn’t had any idea how much it would affect me, but there was no turning back.

  “Be that as it may, it was never supposed to be about an actual relationship. But if you’re coming to my performances, and if I end up going to your games…”

  “Then it might be more like a real relationship,” I finished for her. I chucked her under the chin so she’d meet my eyes again, since she’d been looking down at her lap for the last little bit. “That’s what I want it to be. I was cursing myself for months for not getting you to give me your real name, your phone number…something. What we have together is good, Brie.” Better than good.

  “I know it is. But sometimes I feel like it really is only about sex between us.”

  My jaw ground, almost of its own accord, thinking back to that look she got every time I steered the conversation away from my family, my past. “That’s because we don’t really know each other well enough yet. The more time we spend together, the better that’ll get.” Within limits.

  She gave me a sly, cheeky sort of look. “As long as we don’t spend all our time in bed together, at least.”

  “Well, there is that. But we haven’t been. Not really.” This had been our second date, and we hadn’t been in bed the whole time for either of them.

  “No, I suppose we haven’t.”

  “We could get there now, though.” I tried moving in closer, but she kept her hand on my chest, shaking her head. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?”

  “Not yet. Let’s talk some more. It’s still early.”

  Not if you asked my cock, but then again, I’d been hard for what seemed like hours.

  “Besides,” she said, raising a brow, “aren’t you supposed to be explaining hockey to me?” She reached for her wineglass and put a little more space between us.

  Damn. That was what I’d told her. I gave her a playful scowl as I reached for the remote and my own glass of wine. “Fine. Hockey it is, then.”

  At least hockey was a subject that would be easy for me to talk to her about. I wouldn’t have to constantly evade her questions or try to force the conversation back to her. I turned on the game between Dallas and San Jose that was just getting started and settled in, reminding myself that she wasn’t saying no to going to bed with me. She was only saying not right this instant.

  Now I had to figure out how to let her get to know me without delving into a past too painful to confront.

  I’D BEEN HALF glad when Keith had told me he’d have to be gone for a few days for a road trip. Our fledgling relationship was insanely good on a physical level. I’d never had this kind of chemistry with a man before—not with Val, for sure, nor with anyone who’d c
ome before him. But in terms of emotional intimacy, there was a huge gap between us that I didn’t have the first clue how to bridge.

  It seemed as though Keith was more interested in glossing over the fact that we didn’t know each other on a personal level by getting to know one another as well as possible on a physical level. Every time we’d been alone together and I’d tried to get him to talk, he had done one of two things: either he had turned the conversation around so that we were talking about me and my past or he had deftly caused the end of our conversation entirely by distracting me so thoroughly with his touch that I’d been unable to think straight.

  I had no complaints about the sexual side of things. That certainly wasn’t the problem. The longer it went on, though, the more I started to feel as though our relationship was entirely one-dimensional, whether he claimed he wanted it to be deeper than that or not. The old saying was definitely proving true in this situation—actions spoke louder than words.

  Maybe I was asking for too much by expecting more of him at this point—we had only been on two dates, after all, and we’d only been talking over the course of a week—but the fact remained that he still seemed entirely disinclined to reveal almost anything of substance about himself. I couldn’t understand why he felt the need to hide his past from me, especially considering what I knew about his brother. What was he hiding, and why? Or was it simply that Keith’s emotions about Garrett’s death were still too raw, too painful, for him to talk about it?

  I had no way of knowing since he wouldn’t go there at all.

  Because of that, I’d hoped the physical distance between us over those few days would help me to build a new aspect to whatever this was we were building, if we were going to have a chance for that at all. While he was gone, the only way we would have contact would be on the phone—talking, texting, maybe getting on FaceTime if he insisted. No sex. No touching me to distract me. I’d hoped that he would begin to give me a nugget here and a morsel there because without that, we probably didn’t have much chance of a future.

  As it turned out, hoping hadn’t done me a whole heck of a lot of good. Oh, we’d talked plenty over the five days he was gone. The problem was that most of our conversations had centered on the things currently going on in our lives, nothing about what had brought us here. He knew that I’d known Garrett, and that hadn’t made him any more willing to talk to me about his past. That made it hard to trust that I was really getting to know him. Instead, it felt more like I was getting to know some sort of front he’d put on.

  On his side, we talked about his games, the teams he was playing against, the cities he was visiting, and the pranks he and his teammates had played on one another. On my side, I told him about my rehearsals with Devin, some of the students in my classes, and the crazy situation Tanya and I had run into with a man who’d come in off the street trying to get us to hire him as an instructor when he couldn’t dance at all. I’d made a few attempts at getting Keith to tell me more about his parents, his brothers, his childhood, but my efforts had fallen on deaf ears. Each time, he had given me a brief, clipped response and quickly redirected the conversation to something else.

  Now he was back in town. He’d sent me a text message very late last night to let me know he was home—in case I was still up, he’d said, an obvious hint that he hoped I was so maybe we could get together—and to ask me if he could take me out tonight since he had an afternoon game tomorrow and then plans with the guys later that night. I saw it when he sent it, but I ignored it until morning. I sent him a brief response, saying only that I had to rush off to work and I’d talk to him later. I didn’t give him an answer one way or another about seeing him tonight. Even now, on my lunch break, I was debating what I should do and say.

  I wanted to see him; my body craved his touch in a way that was downright pathetic. But there was a niggling voice at the back of my mind warning me to put some distance between us before I let my heart get involved, as all current signs pointed toward me ending up getting hurt. We definitely seemed to be heading down a path that led to becoming emotionally invested and he still wouldn’t let me in. I wasn’t to that point…yet. I was still managing to keep my heart from getting involved too much. It was coming, though. Every date we went on, every night I spent wrapped up in his arms, drew me closer to heartache.

  I sat down in the chair opposite Tanya, turning my phone on briefly as I opened my lunch, to see if he’d responded. No new text messages. I wasn’t sure what to think of that.

  Tanya leaned over, reaching for a packet of Italian dressing. She’d ordered delivery for us from a nearby sub-and-salad place, and we were using her desk as a lunch table, all her books and notepads shoved to the side for the moment. She opened the dressing and squeezed a little on her sandwich then held the rest of the packet out to me with question marks for eyebrows.

  I shook my head and took another bite of my dry salad, turning my phone off again.

  “Wanna talk about it?” she asked me.

  My head shot up at that. “Talk about what?”

  “Whatever it is that has you looking like you can’t decide if you want to throw up or eat some more because neither seems like an appealing prospect. And why the hell are you eating a salad at a time like this? Brownies and wine are what the doctor ordered for that expression.”

  Choosing to ignore that part about brownies and wine since it only made my salad less appealing than it already was, I met her eyes but shoveled another big forkful of veggies into my mouth in lieu of answering.

  “I haven’t seen Sex on a Stick in a few days,” she prodded. “Things going okay there?”

  “Fine,” I mumbled. “He was gone with the team on a road trip.”

  “Was, hmm?” She waggled her brows. “That means they’re not gone now, right? They’re here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re pissed that you’re at work instead of bumping uglies with him? Lord knows I would be, too.”

  “No! I’m just… It’s nothing.” Nothing I wanted to talk to her about just yet. Actually, I was glad I wasn’t with him since I hadn’t sorted out what I wanted to do. That didn’t do anything to stop the heat from rushing up my neck and face at the thought of being with him, though.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “Keep on denying it.” She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully, then wiped her mouth with a napkin. “So should I expect him to show up and hang out in my office for a while before you get off today?”

  “I don’t know what he’s planning to do.”

  “Why not?”

  Because I haven’t given him an answer, I thought as Tanya reached for a potato chip. My mouth watered at the sight of it. But no potato chips for me. And no brownies. Just thinking about them was enough to make me gain a couple of pounds.

  I dutifully put another bite of vegetables in my mouth and chewed like I meant it, ignoring the cardboard flavor. “I haven’t talked to him yet. They got in late last night,” I said evasively.

  “So why are you sitting here and moping over your lunch with me instead of on the phone with him now? Or better yet, letting him toss your salad?” She pursed her lips and raised her brows suggestively, leaving me no doubt that she wasn’t talking about food.

  I didn’t want any more of my lunch after thinking about it that way. I threw out my trash, holding the recyclables aside so I could rinse them. “I don’t know how much of a future there could be with him,” I said cautiously, not wanting to reveal too much. “We’ll see. It’s all still really early.”

  “What? Come on!” She grabbed the disposable bowl from me, putting it with some other things she’d set aside for the recycle bin. “I’ve seen how he looks at you, and that is not the look of a man who intends to move on so soon. I’d lean toward the opposite, more like.” She dropped her voice, her eyes wide. “Is he bad in the sack? No, wait.” She held out a hand, shaking her head with her eyes closed. “Don’t tell me that. I want to keep my fantasies pure, not have them
tainted with the painful truth if he’s not the most amazing lay ever.”

  I let out a humorless laugh. “It’s nothing like that.” If anything, he was too good in bed. That was one of many reasons that might make it difficult to end things.

  “Then what? Poor hygiene? Bad manners? He wants to offer you up as a sacrifice as part of a ritualistic orgy with his satanic cult?”

  “Who’s having an orgy and didn’t invite me?” said a deep male voice from directly behind me.

  Well, crap. I’d know that voice anywhere. It had been saying deliciously naughty things to me in my dreams for months.

  The look on Tanya’s face made it clear that my hearing hadn’t failed me. For that matter, I could practically feel Keith standing there, and the scent of his cologne filled my nostrils in a way that made me want to bury my nose against his neck and never move away. His heat radiated all over me. He had to be close enough that if I took a half-step backward, I’d bump into him.

  I resisted the urge to do exactly that. My body was ready to betray me, though. It was a fight to keep myself from sliding toward him.

  “Hey, Tanya,” he said cheerfully, and then his voice dropped down a notch or two, turning sensual and needy. “Hi, Brie. I thought I’d drop by and see what your lunch plans were since I knew you were here.”

  “Ju-just finished eating, actually,” I stammered.

  “But she’s got half an hour still before her next class,” Tanya put in oh so helpfully.

  I shot her a glare.

  Keith put a hand on my shoulder. His touch was barely there, but it was so hot he might as well have branded me. “Perfect. So will you sneak out with me for a bit so we can talk? I thought maybe we could go for a walk or something.”

  There wasn’t any good way for me to get out of that, and I had never been one to shy away from confrontation. Generally, I’d rather face things as they came.

  I took a breath to settle my thoughts, then turned to him. The sight of him—leather jacket hugging his muscular frame, amber eyes boring through me with unchecked hunger, lips curling in a smile that made Sex on a Stick seem entirely inadequate—made me nearly lose my nerve. I broke eye contact before I froze in that moment and couldn’t move. “Let me go grab my coat.”