by Lexi Cross
“Coach, I’m sorry,” was all I could say.
“Don’t worry about it, kid. You’ll be fine,” he assured me as they checked my leg and lifted me onto a board to carry me out.
The crowd was silent as they watched one of the team’s star players get carted off the field.
“Coach, tell my fiancée to go on home after the game. Tell her I’m going to get the team physician to look at me and I’ll meet her there,” I told him at the sideline before the guys carried me inside.
“Got it. I didn’t know you were engaged,” he said.
“Yeah, it just happened. I’ll tell you about it another time.” I winced. Even talking was painful. Every movement just made my leg hurt much more.
It was starting to feel cold, it hurt so much.
“What’s the word, doc?” I asked the physician after he looked at me.
“It’s not broken, but it’s not good either,” he said.
“Are you sure it’s not broken?” I asked.
“Yeah, the bone seems to be fine, but I think you tore the shit out of your muscles. It could heal on its own, but then again, it could be bad enough to need surgery.”
“Surgery?” That sounded like a career-ending injury, and it made me wonder. Had I been targeted for stepping away from the network? There was no way. I was one of the heads of the network.
The team physician hooked me up with some pain killers and a pair of crutches. He then told me to sit out at least the next three games to see how I was healing. He said I definitely needed to seek further medical attention if I wasn’t ready to get back on the field in three or four weeks.
Being off the field for that long was a terrifying thought. Realizing that my injury could easily have been threatening to my career was even worse.
On the ride home, in the back of the car, I had some time to think about what it would have meant to be out of the game for good. I had a marketing degree, but I didn’t have any real marketing experience. I had to start thinking of a backup plan, because being out of the game would have meant being out of the network, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the network and the injury were related.
As coincidental as it seemed, it also didn’t seem right, not even for us.
The pain meds kicked in, and by the time I hobbled in the door, I wasn’t feeling anything.
“Oh my god, Jake, are you okay?” Brooke was up and running to the door as soon as my driver opened it for me to enter the house.
“Right now, I’m fine. When these meds wear off, I’m going to be hurting.” I laughed.
She took my face in her hands. “I saw what happened. I was so worried,” she said, and then it happened.
Our lips finally met, for the first time in over ten years. My hands on the crutches at my sides, unable to grab her, I was completely at her mercy while she kissed me. She held my face to hers in her thin hands and worked my lips over with her own. Our tongues met and reacquainted themselves with one another, and I could feel myself drifting towards her.
She pulled back and I could feel her lips curl into a smile against mine.
“It’s been too long,” she said.
“It has,” I agreed. “You taste like wine.”
“What else was I supposed to do while I waited?” she asked.
I smiled. “You taste even better than I remember,” I told her.
She kissed me again and wrapped her arms around my neck. I dropped my crutches and put my weight on my left foot as I wrapped my arms around her waist. Despite the pain I had been in, I felt my body responding appropriately to her advances. I pressed my hardening desire against her, and she rocked her hips against mine.
She turned and pulled my right arm over her shoulders to walk upstairs with me, leading me up to my room. She pushed the door open and let me fall back onto the bed.
“Jake Hall,” she said, standing before me, “I know this is just business, but it’s been coming since the night I saw you in the grocery store.” She pulled her silk pajama top off, revealing her perky breasts and hardening pink nipples.
She climbed onto the bed and began working the buttons on my shirt with her thin fingers. She spread my shirt open, exposing my chest to her hungry hands and lips. She rubbed my chest with those strong fingers and kissed my skin with her lips.
She worked my belt and pants open, sliding them down with my boxers to my feet and dropping them to the floor, exposing my hardened desire. She gripped me with her little hands and stroked me, bringing me up even harder.
Then, she kissed the tip of my head with her closed lips.
“Oh, Brooke,” I groaned, putting one of my hands in her long blonde hair and pushing her down gently on my shaft.
Her lips parted, and her mouth slid slowly down, taking all of me into her mouth, all the way to her throat. She pulled back, sucking on me the whole way, and then she came back down, taking me back into her mouth.
I felt her arms moving while she was dragging her lips along my shaft, and when she let me fall out of her mouth, she took me back in her hand and climbed up my body again with her lips, finding her way up to my mouth again.
I held the back of her head with both of my hands, and she held my shaft with one of hers, guiding me in between her wet lips. She slid her hips down onto me, and I could feel her muscles tightening to grip me just as her fingers had done a moment before.
I was inside her. I grabbed her hips and pulled her down onto me, pushing myself up into her at the same time. Her body shook above me, and she pulled her breath in sharply between her teeth as she sat up.
“Damn, baby,” I said, “you’re still tight as hell.”
She bit her lower lip and moaned as she rocked herself against me. She ran her hands up her sides and grabbed her perky tits while she rode me.
“Fuck me, Jake,” she said. “Fuck me like you used to.”
I pushed my hips up against hers and started rocking her back and forth along my shaft with my hands against her hips. I controlled her movements, and she gasped with each thrust.
I felt her body jerk as I rocked her harder and faster against me.
“I’m going to come, Jake.” She lunged forward, putting both hands on my shoulders to hold herself up as she gasped and panted.
I felt her body clench against mine, and she whined as she slowly rocked her trembling hips against me.
I rolled her over so that I was on top of her, and I lifted her legs to expose her delicate sex to me better. I rammed into her and listened to her moan as she gripped the sheets.
I gripped her breasts and squeezed them under my thick fingers as I pressed myself deep inside of her.
“It’s my turn,” I told her in a heavy voice. I pushed harder and harder as I got closer and closer to letting myself go.
I pulled out and spread her legs so I could spill myself on her stomach. I looked down at her fair skin as I came onto the soft flesh just below her belly button. She arched her back and moaned as she squeezed her breasts and rolled her nipples between her fingers.
“Yes, Jake. Yes!” she called out as I worked myself out onto her stomach with my hand.
As I finished, I lay down next to her on my bed, my body spent, my head spinning from the exertion and the pain killers.
I felt her weight shift on the bed, assuming she was getting up to grab a towel. I felt it shift again, figuring she was getting back on the bed with me. I vaguely noticed her body pressing against mine as I drifted off to sleep, thinking I should have told her how much I enjoyed getting to have her again after all those years.
I never would have admitted it if it hadn’t been for the pain meds, but I had thought about her often over the years. The one who got away was back in my arms, and we were planning on getting married.
Chapter Eleven
Brooke
It happened. The sexual tension between us had grown to the point that we couldn’t fight it any longer. There was no denying it anymore. There was no denying my attraction to him
, or that I had thought about him so often over the years since we broke up. He’d had me in his bed, and he’d given himself to me as well.
I had wanted it. I had wanted it since the first time I saw him in that damn grocery store. But that didn’t mean we should have done it. I couldn’t have guaranteed that my decision was completely my own. I had been drinking wine all night and worrying about the injury I had watched him sustain on the field during their first game. I knew that he was going to be worried about that injury once he woke up and got his head cleared from the pain meds the doctors gave him before sending him home. I had been under a lot of stress from fighting with my dad to having a real fight with Jake, from trying to figure out how to make our fake relationship work to the incident with my tire.
We shouldn’t have slept together. Our relationship was supposed to be a purely business transaction. It wasn’t supposed to be personal in any way, and yet, there we were, fucking on the bed the night after his first game.
I couldn’t deny how much it had turned me on to see him vulnerable before me, though. The night he’d gone out drinking, I’d caught a glimpse of how he really felt about me. I had suspected it the whole time. I knew he valued my company beyond our little arrangement, and when he came home apologizing for leaving me there alone, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cared.
Then, to see him come home hurt and in need of more than just medical attention, I had been unable to help myself. I had thrown myself at him. No matter what, Jake was always going to be mine. And I had to get that thought out of my head, right away, if we were going to make our arrangement work.
Real relationships were so flawed, and we were also so flawed, that there was no way we would be able to make a real relationship between the two of us work long enough to get what we needed out of our marriage. Physical attachment was a mistake. It would lead to an emotional attachment, and that would undo us.
I woke up next to him, and he hadn’t moved all night. He still lay next to me snoring. Apparently, he needed the sleep so much that even the pain in his leg wasn’t enough to wake him up. I slid out of the bed and hurried to my room.
I hadn’t been able to sleep all night. I lay in bed next to him, feeling him and listening to him beside me. I dozed off a few times, but when morning finally came with sunlight through the window, I knew it was time to go before he had a chance to wake up and realize what we had done.
I grabbed some clothes and threw them into a bag. I threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. I figured I could shower at the gym at the office before going in. I didn’t want to shower at the house. I didn’t want him to find me still there.
I needed time to think about what we had done. I wanted him to have to take some time to think about it, too, before he came to talk to me, but I knew he would end up coming to the office once he realized I wasn’t there.
I dreaded the coming conversations.
What we had done was wrong, and when Hollie prepared the prenuptial agreement for me, I was going to make sure she included a couple of clauses about our sexual behavior. We were to have no more sexual relations. If he needed to get laid, he’d have to go out and find some skank at a bar or something, or pick up some tramp off the street. I didn’t care. I just knew we couldn’t sleep together again.
Sex threatened to undermine the whole thing. Part of what had kept me up overnight was having to sort through my emotions. By sleeping with him, I had forced myself to remember how I had felt when we broke it off the first time.
For years, it had felt like we had unfinished business between us. I had buried that feeling in my work, and I had given myself over to my career completely. I had assumed he had done the same. The last thing either one of us needed at the moment was to let our old emotions cloud our judgement moving forward.
I hurried into the building at work, realizing I was there before anyone else. I ran downstairs to the gym and hit the shower. The hot water washed over my tired, sleepless body.
I could still feel him inside me.
“It’s all in your head, Brooke,” I said with a groan, trying to convince myself that I was just imagining it.
But no, I could still feel him. My body ached to have him in me again. My tits ached for his hands to touch them again. I leaned my head against the tile wall. There were so many things I wanted to do with him in bed, but I knew that we couldn’t do any of those things if we were to continue pursuing our business arrangement.
“Fuck the arrangement,” I yelled in the shower with my eyes closed.
I wanted Jake, but I didn’t know what to do about it anymore. I didn’t know if I should have just given in or if I should have just walked away at that point. The only thing that made sense was washing the sex away and going to work. Work was great for burying my emotions and ignoring my feelings.
I turned off the water and put on my work clothes. As I buttoned my blouse and pulled up my skirt, the world outside the walls of my father’s office building disappeared. Well, it didn’t disappear; it changed. It was no longer full of people like Jake Hall. It was full of customers, investors, and consumers. It was full of business opportunities.
I took a deep breath and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink as I did my hair and makeup for the day. I was no longer the vulnerable little girl trying to figure out where she stood in a relationship that had ended ten years ago.
I was the powerful boss of a multi-million-dollar nationwide operation. I was the founder’s daughter and future owner of Scott Enterprises. I could remember when the company was founded, and I had watched my father build it from the ground up. I had then proceeded to climb the tower from the ground up myself.
I was ready to take on the world and leave my thoughts of Jake Hall behind.
Chapter Twelve
Jake
I woke up alone. It was to be expected. It would have been nice to wake up with Brooke next to me in my bed, but I wasn’t surprised to find that she had left me there either at some point overnight or in the morning. I wasn’t even surprised when I went to her room, knocked on the door, and didn’t get a response. I crept in and found an empty bed.
I still wasn’t surprised. I knew where she was. She had run off to her safety net. She was a bit of a workaholic, a little too devoted to her job at times, but as a professional athlete, I couldn’t really fault her for it. It was pretty hard to climb up to the top without that kind of devotion.
I decided to go to her office to talk to her about what happened between us the night before. I was torn between keeping things purely professional and exploring what could have been if we hadn’t given up on each other so easily after high school. Our arrangement would have given us the perfect opportunity if we would just not run from it.
I took an elevator up to her floor and walked passed the receptionist, who was trying to say something to me about how I couldn’t enter. She must not have received the memo that I was her boss’s fiancé. I wasn’t sure which office was hers, but I was going to make my presence known. Someone would eventually tell me where she was.
As I passed men and women in suits, I did receive a few confused looks as people recognized me but couldn’t figure out why I was in their office building. It was amusing that no one had the gall to speak to me. My presence was so out of the ordinary, no one knew how to deal with it.
I found Brooke in a large office overlooking the neighboring buildings. She stood at the windows behind her desk when I entered. Even in her business skirt and suit jacket, I remembered all too well what the body underneath had looked like the night before. I felt my desire starting to grow again.
The clean top of her desk would have been the perfect surface for round two. There was just a small lamp to push aside, and we would have had enough room. The walls on either side of her office were lined with shelves, mostly full of books and plaques that Brooke or the company had earned over the years.
I understood bookshelves in someone’s home providing a place for their private co
llections, but I never understood why so many executives had books lining their office walls. It was obvious for teachers, doctors, lawyers, and the like, whose professions relied heavily on having printed resources available. I wondered what Brooke had on her shelves other than the section of company records collected in binders.
I was able to approach her desk before she said anything or even seemed to notice I was there. Whatever it was she was focusing on at the window had her full attention.
“Brooke,” I said in a calm, gentle tone as I reached her desk.
She jumped, startled, and turned around. Her beautiful blue eyes still had a distracted look in them. They barely focused on me.
