Hard to Lose (The Play Hard Series Book 4)

by K. Bromberg

Holy fucking shit.

  And it’s only seconds—but it’s too damn long between the time she shuts the oven, puts the pie on top of the stove—and I have her whirled around with my mouth on hers.

  She still has the oven mitts on, but I don’t care.

  All I can think about is her.

  Right now.

  “No regrets,” I say between kisses as I lift her up and sit her ass on the island. She yelps from the chill of the granite, all while heating up every part of me.

  Our kisses are hot and hungry and laced with desperation. The kind that feels like it is going to eat you alive if you don’t have more. Take more. Give more.

  We’re both frenzied. Her hands pulling my shirt over my head while mine are on her ass pulling her to the edge of the counter. My fingers pushing my shorts down, as hers thread through my hair at the back of my neck.

  The only time we slowdown is when I jacket up and push into her. Our kisses swallow each other’s gasps as she tightens around me—a desirous torture in and of itself—as I bury all that I can within her slick, merciless heat.

  There is no thought of anything but driving to the endgame. Of fucking her into oblivion.

  I try to hold still.

  I try to go slow.

  But Chase writhes against me, her teeth nipping my bottom lip, her heels digging into my ass, as she begs me to take her there.

  “Fuck me, Gunner,” is the whisper in my ear, and it’s all I need to hear.

  Nothing else matters except for her and me, and the way she looks as she lies back on the slab on her elbows, her tits bouncing with each thrust, her pussy growing wetter with each pull back out. She is so fucking hot.

  Even sexier is when she slides her perfectly painted red fingernails between her thighs and starts working her clit from the outside, while I work her from the inside.

  It takes everything I have to hold out, to not come, because Jesus fucking Christ. Does she have any clue how goddamn hot she is in that apron with the red of her nails against the pink of her pussy, and her eyes glazing over with pleasure? Does she have any idea how she feels wrapped around me?

  There is no sweet seduction this time around.

  No soothing words or gentle requests. It’s her and me and want that’s turned to greed and greed that’s given way to need.

  The orgasm slams into her, robbing her of breath and tightening every damn thing in her body.

  I’m not complaining, because that tightening, that writhing, that pulsing around me yanks me by the balls and pulls me over the edge.

  “Chase,” I groan, losing all sense of everything other than the shockwaves slowly reverberating through my every nerve.

  I rest my head against hers as our breathing evens out and our pulses decelerate.

  “No regrets?” she asks. When I straighten up to leave her still propped on her elbows, she has a coy smile on her lips and one of her brows is lifted.

  I chuckle. “Sorry. I had a conversation with Ellie today. We discussed basically how you only live once and have to do it with no regrets. I thought it seemed fitting.”

  “I agree.” She pushes herself up and kisses me. It’s long and slow and void of the promise for sex, which I never knew could be just as much of a turn-on as when it did.

  It means she wants me.

  It means this is more for her too.

  “Did you really bake me an apple pie?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder at where it rests on the top of the stove.

  She laughs. “No. I bought one and stuck it in the oven to play the part. It was either sexy Chase or domestic Chase, and I chose the former for you.”

  “Good choice. Sexy Chase was definitely a good choice.” I kiss her again.

  “No regrets.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Chase

  Days pass in laughter.

  Nights crawl slowly as we make love.

  Regardless of what we’re doing, we can never get enough of each other.

  I can never get enough of him.

  And even now, staring at Gunner as he looks over his shoulder and parallel parks his truck, I’m not sure if I ever will.

  He’s so different than my norm, but maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I needed to think outside the box. Maybe what I thought I needed wasn’t it.

  But is Gunner it?

  I shake loose the thought, which is more and more frequent after spending so much time together. You can learn a lot about a person in a short amount of time when you’re sharing space with them.

  Like how clean someone is, how they like to spend their downtime, what their pet peeves are, and how they act when they’re tired or hangry. The funny thing is Gunner is like me in all of those aspects other than he never puts things back where they belong. And I’m not talking in places I think they belong, but rather in the places he had them to begin with.

  We’ve had banter over it. And tiffs.

  Regardless, in the end, we’ve laughed and then snuggled on the couch . . . or more often than not, kissed each other until the kissing turned to snuggling in other ways.

  But it’s nice waking up in someone’s arms. I’m not sure why I never knew that. I’m a person who always wants her space and time to decompress or sit in silence. The fact that I can do all those things without feeling smothered is new and insanely unexpected.

  When Gunner looks back to the front of the truck, he catches my eye and smiles. “What?”

  “Dare I ask where you’ve taken me?” I look around at the nondescript strip mall where we’re parked. It’s in the downtown area of a town about thirty miles east of Destiny Falls. There’s a decent-sized sports bar across the street, a park in the distance, with huge swaying trees and a busy playground. The parking lot houses a nail salon on one end, a dog groomer on the other, and in the center is a large shop with blacked-out windows and a huge sign above the door—in font that looks like it’s blurry—that reads RAGE.

  “We’re going there.” Gunner points.

  “The haunted house-looking place?” I ask, referring to the place called Rage. “Should I worry that you’re trying to off me in some creepy ritual?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. He leans forward to press a chaste kiss to my lips before getting out of the truck, leaving me staring at him with curiosity.

  When he opens my door, I simply lift an eyebrow at him, asking for more information.

  “It’s a rage room.”

  “What the hell is a rage room?” I ask as I climb out of the truck.

  “After you told me about your mom the other night, about losing her at such a young age like I did my dad, about how sudden it was, and how you’re not one hundred percent certain you ever really dealt with it, I figured this is exactly where you need to be.”

  I stare, blinking at his handsome face and kind eyes as I try to figure out what I did to deserve him. To deserve a man who actually listens to the things I say and tries to make them better.

  “Gunner—”

  “You mentioned in passing—maybe you didn’t even mean to let it slip—that this week was the anniversary of her death. And while I don’t want to pry, ask how it makes you feel, or any of that other psychobabble shit that would only serve to piss you off or make things awkward, I thought this might be a place where you can let it all out. Even for just a little bit. A place where there will be no judgment for however you choose to express yourself.”

  I stare at him—at this man who doesn’t just listen, but really hears me—and am more than touched that he thought to bring me here. That he caught my slip the other night about my mom, didn’t choose to call me on it, but rather opted to give me an avenue to express the mixture of grief, discord, and anger, which has been hitting me haphazardly at random times throughout this week.

  Just further proof that he gets me in a way I’m not one hundred percent certain I even get myself some days.

  “Look, I’ve been there. I’ve tried to shove death away, reason why it happened, you name it—
and all that succeeded in doing was make me angrier. So I understand where you are, I get you, and I hate for your sake that I do.” He takes my hand and points our linked fingers at the entry to Rage. “But today, we’re going to take a small step towards healing the tiny cuts inside of you that break open every now and again.”

  “Thank you. I don’t even—” I tug on his hand for him to stop, so I can lean up and press a kiss to his lips.

  “You can keep thanking me if you want,” he murmurs against my lips.

  “I will once you explain to me what the hell we’re about to do.”

  “Let me show you.”

  Over the next few minutes, I’m signed in, waivered up, and put in plastic hazmat-looking plastic coveralls.

  Gunner is grinning ear to ear.

  A rage room. A place where you’re given time in a room to break shit. Whether it be for fun or to relieve stress or to get your anger out.

  “How in the world did you ever find this place?” I ask Gunner, as he adjusts his very sexy (not) goggles over his eyes.

  “Someone mentioned it in the bar a while back. Some of the guys and I came here to check it out. I thought it might be a good way to let some of that bottled-up emotion out.”

  Normally I’d be pissed if someone said that to me, as if they were judging me or telling me what to do, but Gunner’s words don’t elicit that reaction.

  He’s lost his father.

  He’s lost his friends.

  He understands.

  And maybe, just maybe, I want him to understand me better. In fact, I like the fact that he understands me.

  “To make the most of your experience, change your weapon every few minutes,” the employee tells us as he stands at the door to the rage room. “There are bats, hammers, clubs—you name it. Also, music helps. You can change that as often as you want as well or pick a theme song and stick with it. Loud is good. Blaring is better.” His grin is infectious and implies he’s had some fun in here before. “Oh, and make sure to scream and yell and get whatever it is you’re here for, all out.”

  I look around the padded square room where a row of weapons of sorts hang on one side of the wall and a table sits in the middle. The table has electronics on it, glass vases. There are metal—what looks like kegs—in another area right below the row of shelves of stacked dishes.

  “Some people even prefer to write what they’re angry about in Sharpie on the plates so when they smash them, they can feel like they’re breaking it.” He steps toward the door. “I’m going to give you five minutes to get ready, and then I’ll start the music and timer for you.”

  Gunner and I both nod in agreement and then the minute the door shuts, we both start laughing. “This is crazy,” I say.

  “Just wait till you see how good you feel after.” He walks toward the plates. “Now I, for one, am going to write some things on the plates so I can enjoy smashing them.”

  “Like what?”

  “Sal is pretty much one of my go-tos.” And the way he says it, as if he’s completely okay with letting me into the struggles he still has over his asshole stepfather, makes him even more endearing to me.

  “Let’s do two for him,” I say and he laughs.

  But then I find myself looking at plates with a Sharpie in hand and too many things I want to write and let go of. I take the first plate and write Mom. She’s the one thing I’m most angry at. Not her, of course, but that she was taken away from me and missed out on so much of the important things in life. Then I write Finn. He is my ex—the man I first let in, who cheated on me—a man who strangely hurt me deeply. And then when the siren warns that we only have a minute left to prepare to rage, I write on two more plates. The first is “time,” because my time here with Gunner is running out when I don’t want it to be.

  And for the last one, I write my name. Chase. Because I hate myself for deceiving Gunner . . . and for knowing that when I leave Destiny Falls it has to be like I was never here. Like I never existed. It’s not like I can give him my address and tell him to come and visit me. It’s not like he can ever know who I really am.

  So I write my name down because I hate myself for deceiving him, and I hate myself even more for not allowing this to be anything more than it is.

  “You good?” Gunner asks as he glances over at my stack of plates and probably mistakes the tears welling in my eyes to be over the loss of my mother. They’re equally for knowing I’m going to lose him too.

  I nod and force a smile, still thinking this is a little silly. “I’m ready.”

  The siren sounds and Gunner picks up his first plate and throws it against the wall as hard as he can. It shatters into a million fragments, the sound of it breaking just above the fray of Jagger singing about how he can’t get any satisfaction.

  I take my first plate in my hand and follow suit. There’s something to be said about the crunch of glass and the exertion you’ve given to make that happen.

  It’s satisfying. Cathartic. And with each item thrown, each smash of the hammer against the computer monitor, every swing of the bat against the metal barrels, I feel parts of myself unwind.

  Is this going to fix the brain aneurysm that took my mom from me, the fact that she’s gone, and how she missed all the milestones in my life? No, but it feels damn good to be thinking about it and angry over it while I’m swinging the bat as hard as I can.

  I lose myself in the task. In the smashing and aggression, so much so that when the buzzer rings telling us our time is up, besides being out of breath, I am completely unaware that there are tears staining both of my cheeks.

  Gunner notices but only nods. In fact, he doesn’t say a word to me while we’re removing our protective equipment and gathering our personal belongings.

  And I’m glad he doesn’t, because I’m a mess.

  His hand on my lower back ushering me out of the place—and his absolute silence—shows me he understands the tumult of emotion I’m going through. He’s giving me time to sort through it.

  And it’s only when we clear the building and we’re about to get in his truck that the tidal wave of feelings hits me and drags me under its hold. Gunner wraps his arms around me while I sob.

  I’m angry that she’s gone. I hate that I haven’t had a mom for more than half of my life. I hate that my dad lost the love of his life. I loathe that I let Finn’s infidelity affect me. I’m furious that Gunner’s mom and stepdad hurt him so remorselessly. I’m crushed that I’ve met this amazing, wonderful man, and I can’t have him in my life after I leave.

  And I’m angry at myself.

  Because I might be another person to cause him pain.

  The pain and hurt surges in a whirl of sorrow. I’ve never felt this before. Never known I was capable of feeling this . . . distress. And if you asked me a month ago, I would have said I was a pretty happy person. In this moment, I can see why I’m so driven. Why I keep pushing forward. Why I stick to lists and spreadsheets.

  They can’t hurt you.

  And through this mess, Gunner holds me. He continues to silently comfort me. When the sobs subside, he grabs my hand and says, “Some fresh air and a walk might do some good.”

  So we walk.

  Toward the park and on its meandering path. Around games of hopscotch and between kids riding their bikes.

  He allows me to sort out my feelings without asking, and there’s something so powerful in that to me. That he knew me well enough, understands this well enough, knowing what I needed when I didn’t even know.

  “I can admit that I’m mortified I just had a major meltdown, but it’s not going to do anything to take it back,” I say as we circle around the small lake that edges the park.

  “Why be mortified? Death is permanent while coping with it is a living, breathing emotion that you have to adapt to on the daily,” he says, his words making more sense than most people’s. “I just hope it helped. It’s bizarre, because at first, you think it’s a weird idea. And then you get the spiel from the guy a
nd figure you’ll just go along with it. Then before you know it, you’re smashing shit and getting caught up in the emotions that only you know and understand, but it feels so damn good to let it all out.”

  “How do you know exactly what to say and how to say it so that I hear you?” I ask, prompting him to stop and stare at me.

  His hands come up to frame my face and his eyes hold mine. “Because we’re two peas in a pod, Chase. We may have gotten in that pod by different routes, but somehow, we fit there. Somehow, we understand each other. Somehow, we know it works.” He presses a tender kiss against my lips. “Who are we to question it?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Chase

  “Are you not calling me on purpose or should I just assume you’re super busy and not feel hurt over it?” my dad asks as a greeting when I answer his call.

  “Funny. Very funny.” I glance to the backyard where Gunner is mowing the grass. He’s deliciously shirtless—his every muscle glistening with a mist of sweat. And as much as I’d like to admire him, I’ll take this time while he’s outside to discuss work things with my dad. That’s been the hardest thing about this whole setup with living at Gunner’s.

  I can do work just fine on my computer without him thinking I’m doing anything other than my thesis, but it’s the phone calls that pose problems.

  And me being on the phone is an essential element of my job.

  “I could also think that you’re avoiding me, but I’ll assume you’ll refute that handily, so do you want to tell me what exactly you’re doing?”

  “Brexton and Dekker haven’t told you?” Shock filters through me. My sisters are always first to run and tattle about what little Chase is doing. I love and I hate it—depending on the day—because as annoying as it is, it also shows me that even with their busy lives, they care.

  “They told me about the pitcher—Gunner or is it Ryan—but I was hoping you’d at least call and fill me in.”

  “I only know him as Gunner. So that’s what I call him, but I found him, Dad. I found him and he’s nothing like I expected.” And like everything I never knew I wanted.