Center Stage: A Hot Baseball Romance (Diamond Brides Book 8) (14 page)

And she shattered against him.

She gasped his name, blurring the two syllables as she breathed them over and over. He shifted his feet, matched her thighs to his, pillowing her body as she collapsed against him, liquid and boneless. He cupped her with one hand, and he waited for the storm to pass.

He slipped his free hand up her back, cradling her neck, turning her head so her cheek rested against his chest. His lips brushed against her hair.

Ormond was going to kill him. Throw him out of the plane tomorrow, thirty thousand feet in the air, high above Washington, or Baltimore, or Philadelphia, somewhere on the way to New York. He’d make an example of Ryan, like he’d made an example of Barton, warning off any other ballplayer who thought he might be good enough for Zach’s sister, any other man who dared to look at Lindsey for the rest of her life.

Or else, you know. Ormond would fire Dad.

But standing there in his foyer, drowning in the smell of excited girl, covered in sweat, with his cock still twitching toward the smoothest fingers he’d ever felt in his life, none of that mattered. Because Lindsey was a grown woman. She’d made her own decision coming here.

He didn’t have any delusions. He’d seen the steady determination on her face, the same grave certainty when she’d driven away from the church last week, when she’d demanded his car keys for the ride to Chester Beach. Lindsey was here because her life was still going to hell. She hadn’t gotten the role she wanted. She wasn’t going to be some lead in a play.

Because if she’d been happy with her life, she would have been laughing. She would have been light-hearted and easy-going—a girl who was having fun for a night. But Lindsey was a woman working through disappointment, working through the shit life can pull. She was a woman, coming back to her own body after offering him an intimacy he wasn’t sure he deserved.

“Um, wow,” she said, shifting enough to stand on her own two feet.

“Hell of a night,” he said, forcing a smile onto his lips, making it match his tone of voice.

“It’s only just beginning,” she said. And there was that sly smile again, the sexy one that reached down to his balls and made him as hard as when he’d first seen her standing on the porch.

He shook his head, though. He could at least pretend that she didn’t feel him twitching against her thigh. “That’s not necessary.”

“Screw necessary,” she said. “I didn’t come here for necessary. I came here for fun.”

~~~

As she said the words, she knew they were true. It hadn’t been
necessary
to wait for Ryan tonight. But she’d wanted to.

From the moment she’d logged into the website, the second she saw the cast list, confirmed that her name wasn’t on it, she’d said to herself, “Get over to Ryan’s.”

She’d tracked down his address easily enough. The Internet was a wonderful thing. She’d worried about security, about a locked gate, about people waiting for him at home.

But there’d been none of that. Nothing to keep her from the course she’d set. Nothing to change her mind.

Ryan had been there on the worst night of her life, when she’d been left at the altar for a second time. He’d taken care of her when no one else could, when she’d thought she wanted to crawl into the hole Will Templeton had dug for her, to curl up and die.

Losing out on a real role in
Streetcar
was bad. She had no idea what the rest of her career would look like. She couldn’t keep on playing animals, and no one would consider her for true theater.

But none of that mattered right now. She’d come to Ryan because she’d known she could be herself with him. Good girl or bad girl, he didn’t care. She could just be Killer. Just be Lindsey.

And so, as Lindsey, she took his hand in hers, guiding them both up the stairs. She walked beside him down the hall, to the huge master bedroom, to the gigantic king-size bed.

She was astonished to discover that the embers inside her had scarcely banked—she burst back to flame at the first touch of his lips on hers. She wanted to feel him inside her, so she asked him for protection. No. Not protection. A
rubber
.

He dug the foil square out of his nightstand, but she took it from him. She tore open the package and rolled the rubber over his cock. She lowered herself onto him, confident, in control.

This time, they built each other’s hunger. This time, they moved together. This time, they helped each other, finding better angles, stoking deeper responses. They stared into each other’s eyes, balancing, measuring. She saw him reach the edge, knew the instant he was about to break, no, to
come
beneath her. Slowly, purposely, she raised herself one last time, and as she folded around him, they both cried out—needy and desperate and one.

They collapsed against each other and held each close in the cool, dark peace of the bedroom.

Lindsey woke up to the smell of coffee. She rolled over to find Ryan staring at her from the doorway, the largest mug she’d ever seen dwarfed in his hands. “Is that for me?” she asked.

“You take it with cream and sugar?”

“I do this morning.” She sat up against the headboard, pulling the navy sheets high against her chest. She shouldn’t feel bashful—not after showing up naked on the man’s doorstep, not after all the things they’d done during the night. But there was a difference between the sultry summer darkness and the cool quiet of a weekday morning.

Ryan crossed the room and deposited the mug on the nightstand. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at her with an intensity that made her shrink beneath the sheet. “God,” he said at last. “You are gorgeous.”

“I bet you say that to all your women.”

“Naw,” he said. “Just the ones who greet me on the porch, stark naked.” He reached out to snag a lock of her hair. As he twisted it around his index finger, she barely resisted the urge to lean forward, to see just what it would take to get those hands on her skin, running down her back, pulling her close to his hard, muscled body…

She blushed, fairly certain her thoughts had been transparent, but just in case he wasn’t a mind-reader, she said, “Come back to bed.”

“I can’t. I have to be at the airport in an hour.”

“That gives us thirty minutes.”

He shook his head. “Not long enough. Not for everything I want to do with you.”

Realizing she needed to raise her game, she leaned back against the headboard. She calculated the motion perfectly—the sheet fell down to her waist as her hair slipped free from Ryan’s grasp. A flame licked across her belly as his eyes widened, and she used the heat to fuel a cat-like stretch.

“So?” she asked. “Let’s choose one of those things.”

She wasn’t expecting his hands to close around her hips, sheltered as they were beneath the bedclothes. She yelped as he pulled her beneath him on the bed, her cry turning into a laugh as he pinned her legs with his. His lips were hot, sweet with coffee and cream. She threw back her head and reveled in the kiss, in the flickers that rippled through her body.

But he didn’t take things further. Instead, he threw himself onto his back and pulled her down beside him, cradling her head against his chest. From that vantage point, she could imagine walking her fingers down the buttons of his broadcloth shirt, slipping her hand beneath his belt to test the limits of the erection that clearly tented his jeans.

Instead, though, she listened to his heartbeat, strong and steady beneath her ear. “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry if I made things difficult by coming here, if I complicated things with Zach.”

He raised her palm to his lips and dusted the briefest of kisses against her lifeline. “Don’t be sorry.”

“He’s a lot more talk than he is action.”

“I’m not afraid of Zach,” Ryan said. “He and I already talked about this. About you.”

She sat up, fighting the nervous clenching of her stomach. “When?”

“Wednesday. Before the game.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“What was I supposed to say? Hey, Lindsey—just want you to know I got your brother’s permission to take you to bed.”

Well, when he put it that way…
 

Ryan made it sound simple. Easy. And maybe he was right. She wasn’t a kid any more, not like she’d been with Jesse Barton. She wasn’t even the same person she’d been a couple of weeks ago, when Will left her at the altar. With Ryan, she was a thinking woman, an adult woman, with opinions and options and a vocabulary all her own.

She thought about how she’d woken up next to him in the middle of the night. She’d pulled his hands to her body and told him what she wanted him to do. She’d never done that with a man before, used her words, spoken her thoughts out loud. She’d never been in control—of herself, of lovemaking, of everything around her.

She laced her fingers between his. “How long is this road trip?”

“Ten days. New York, Toronto, and Philly.”

“You’ll call me?” She tried to keep her voice light, but the question sliced something deep inside her.

“Try and stop me.”

They were down to fifteen minutes now. But Ryan had a Ferrari. He could make up the time on his way to the airport. And this time, he followed through when she told him exactly what she wanted.

~~~

It was a good thing the day started out with hot sex, because everything went downhill from there.

The entire team was out of sorts on the plane, each guy sulking in his seat, dwelling on the Rockets’ losing streak. They hit traffic on the drive to the hotel, finally giving up and heading straight to the park. It was raining like a mother, so there wasn’t any batting practice; the tarp on the field was held down by half a dozen John Deere tractors.

And when the game finally started, after a three-hour rain delay, the Rockets lost four-three.

The worst part was, Ryan kept checking his phone—all day long—like he was some sort of lovelorn teenager. He told himself she wouldn’t text. She wasn’t going to call when she knew the routine of a road trip. She knew he’d be rushing to make game time. She knew he wouldn’t be around until nearly midnight, if then.

When he texted his father, asking about the Satellites’ afternoon game, he wasn’t willing to admit even the slightest possibility that he was testing whether his phone still worked. He wasn’t that whipped. Yet.

His father’s return message just added to the gloom. The Satellites’ hottest prospect, the shortstop the Rockets had taken in the first round of the draft, still wasn’t hitting. Dad texted a picture of the guy at the plate, and it sure
looked
like he was following orders, swinging from his hips, focusing on his balance. But the guy couldn’t get a hit past the infield to save his life.

Dad needed to get his shit together. The Sats needed to start hitting.

Until then, Ryan couldn’t pull Zach aside, couldn’t say, “Your sister and I are together. Get over it.”

Sure, he’d let Lindsey believe his first conversation with Zach had gone a hell of a lot better than it had. He would set things straight with the guy, really. Just not when the Rockets’ season was slipping into the toilet. Not when Dad was still scrambling for his footing in Chester Beach.

By the time Ryan got back to the hotel, the only thing he wanted was a shot of Jack and a pair of extra pillows. He stripped down to his shorts in the over-heated room, waiting for the air-conditioning to kick in. Flipping around the TV dial, he found highlights from the night’s games. In the first sign of good luck since he’d left Lindsey that morning, the coverage was just wrapping up the Rockets’ defeat, so he didn’t have to relive the entire fucking game.

He watched the rest of the show half-heartedly, shaking his head over the plays some guys were making, even if the Rockets seemed dead in the water. Five minutes in to some idiot’s commentary about which teams were out of contention for the championship, Ryan’s phone buzzed loud against the nightstand.

One look at the screen slammed his stomach down to toes. “Lindsey,” he said, after wetting his mouth with a healthy swallow of whiskey.

“Is this a good time?”

It was a shitty time. He should be switching off the TV, spilling out the liquor that remained in his glass, turning off the lights, and getting a good night’s sleep before the next afternoon’s game. “It’s a great time,” he said.

He imagined her smiling as she said, “I thought about you today.”

“And why would you do that?” He stretched out on the bed, cradling the phone against one shoulder. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine she was lying beside him. She could be tangled up in the sheets, spent and sweaty, the way he’d left her that morning.

“I went shopping.”

He barked out a laugh. “And
I
make you think of shopping.”

“You make me think of leather.”

Leather
. The word shot straight to his dick. It hardly mattered how she answered the next question, but he had to ask. “What leather did you buy?”

“A skirt,” she answered, and he heard the satisfied smile behind her words. “A black skirt that comes to the middle of my thighs. It’s tight. It has a zipper up the back.”

He was sure it did. He could picture her now, hotter in her new purchase than she’d been standing naked on his porch—and that was saying a hell of a lot. He groaned.

“But that’s not all I bought.” She knew what she was doing to him. She had to, with her voice all low and throaty, with her words purring into his ear, like she was arching against him.

“Let me guess,” he said, the words grinding against the back of his throat like gravel. “You bought something with lace, too.”

Her laugh was a secret, just for him. “It’s like you can see me, right now. A little half-cup bra. In red of course.”

“Nothing little about it,” he growled.

She might not have heard him, for the way she mewed her response. “They match my panties. Down to the tiny lace bows.”

“You’re killing me here,” he said. Because a gulp of Jack wasn’t anywhere near enough to chase away the images seared into his mind.

“Poor baby,” she said. “I wish I could be there with you. I’d kiss it, and make it all better.”