Discovering Us (15 page)

“Crude.”

He puffed his chest out with pride. “That’s me.”

I shook my head. “Your turn.”

“Favorite position?”

Almost every one of his questions had been sexual, so instead of fighting it like I had the others, I just went with it. Although I still blushed like mad. “I really liked that one time…”

He glanced at me in surprise that I was actually going to answer him. Then he looked at me again, not so patiently waiting to hear my answer. I bit my lip, feeling stupid that I was still shy about talking about sex with him.

“That one time… Got me curious, El.”

Damn it. Okay, I could do this. “The time I woke up and you were, uh, spooning me…” He looked at me, brows drawn down as if he didn’t remember. Jerk. He was going to make me say it. Ugh. “We’d been asleep, and I woke up… and you had your hand, um, down there…”

“Down where, El?” And there he was: super, alpha male Jag, getting all bossy whenever it came to sex, forcing me to say the words out loud.

“Down
there
.”

“El…”

“And you were rolling your fingers over my…”

“Over your clit?” He looked over at me with a sexy grin.

Bastard.

“Yes,” I said quietly. I
had
to get over this being shy when it came to talking about sex crap.

“Then what?”

I had to admit. This
was
kind of hot. I shifted in my seat feeling myself getting a little turned on. “Then you… you entered me… from behind…”

“Liked that, didn’t you?” His voice was deeper now, and I knew he was turned on.

I had liked it. A lot. With my face burning, I looked directly at him. “Yes. I did. I loved it, actually.” Then I uncharacteristically reached over and rubbed my hand on his crotch. He was halfway hard. Wow.

He groaned. “God, El, you’re getting me hard. We’ve still got over an hour to Omaha. You don’t stop, I’m gonna pull over and have you right here.”

I didn’t stop, and we wound up in Des Moines and got a hotel for the night. Ha. Maybe I wasn’t so bad at this sex talk stuff. Score one for me.

We’d stopped in Denver the next evening, and left the next morning for Las Vegas. I was having a great time and I think Jag was too. I’d been a little afraid that spending so much time together might make us a little irritated with each other since it wasn’t the norm, but we were having a blast, discussing everything from personal stuff to the landscape to the weather. We’d both thought it was cool how the snow had just slowly disappeared the farther west we went. Denver had been covered in it, and then it was just… gone.

We arrived in Vegas around eleven that night, and after checking into the Bellagio (
the Bellagio!)
we walked The Strip taking in all the sights, stopping in several hotels to play the slots and Jag even tried his hand at Blackjack and Roulette several times. We stayed out a little later than we’d expected to, but we only had about a four and a half our drive the next day, so it wasn’t a big deal. We finally went up to the room and he told me that the next time we went to Vegas, he’d be “known” and would arrange for us to have a villa. The room we had was beyond gorgeous so I could only imagine what a villa would look like.

We left around one the next afternoon, and arrived at Jag’s condo at six that evening, and boy, was I just dazzled as hell. His place was spectacular! It
so
hadn’t translated at all in the pictures he’d sent. I don’t know how he’d kept from telling me more about it than he had because it was all kinds of fabulous. I ran to the French doors off the kitchen right off the bat, looking out to see the beach and squealing at how freaking cool that was. He took me through them and out on the patio and I fell absolutely in love with his place. I could hear the sounds from the Pier and I looked at him with a huge grin on my face.

“We’ll go down there in a bit if you want.”

Oh, I wanted! I went up on my tiptoes, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissed the fool out of him. This was going to be good. I knew it to my bones that my coming there to be with him was where I was supposed to be.

Chapter 15

I was almost twenty-two when I discovered that Jag was likely the most wanted man on the planet.

January in Santa Monica was awesome.

Jag wasn’t very busy at all. Besides meeting with his trainer every day or having meetings with the team’s manager or other staff, I had him to myself most of the time, which was cool. He’d shown me around the city and taken me on the I-10 over to the university, which had been a piece of cake. It was a straight shot to get there so I wasn’t worried about finding it. We’d driven around campus so I could see where my classes would be and it was all I could do to keep from bouncing up and down in my seat I was so ready to start.

Besides walking to the Santa Monica Pier, we took in various other sites including, of course,  Hollywood Boulevard where we saw the handprints of the stars outside of Mann’s Chinese Theater, the Walk of Fame, and went on one of those cheesy tours of the stars homes, because I wanted to see where George Clooney lived because he was one of my favorite actors… and single… and everyone knows that your Hollywood crush is just waiting for you to turn up so they can marry you. It’s a well-known fact. Google it.

We ran every weekday morning on the bike path, the best part of which was we got to watch the sun rise. We window shopped on the Third Street Promenade. We swam in the ocean at least once a week. And we made love in every room of his condo and on every piece of furniture he had. Life was good.

Then one night at the end of January, we were sitting on the patio eating salmon that we’d grilled, Jag told me that he’d be leaving to go to Glendale, Arizona, for spring training the week before Valentine’s Day. I was shocked. I’d forgotten about spring training, and when he told me he’d be gone for more than six weeks, my mouth hung open.

“Sorry, baby. I thought you knew.”

“I-I, uh, did!” I sputtered. Duh. My brothers would’ve been so ashamed of me at that moment. How could I have forgotten? Jeez.

“I’ll be back home end of March or first of April.” He cupped my face and rubbed his thumb over my cheek.

“O-okay,” I replied, my head still whirling from information I’d so stupidly forgotten.

“You’ll be fine here, right?”

“Yeah! Oh, yeah, it’s all good. You go get ready to be a star,” I replied with a smile.

“I’ll definitely try,” he said with a grin.

I was settled into my class schedule, the labs kept me busy, we were getting ready to work with cadavers (ick), so I knew I’d be focused on school and it wouldn’t be so bad being without him for a month and a half. Or at least I tried convincing myself it wouldn’t.

One evening as I was walking out of the condo—I was dressed in a Dodgers hoodie, my ripped-at-the-knees jeans, and had my ponytail pulled through a Dodgers cap, totally a walking billboard for my boyfriend’s team—I had my head down since I was texting Rebecca, and I all but ran into a gorgeous woman who was coming up the walk.

“Oh! I’m so sorry!” I said. When I looked up, I had another jaw-dropping moment in less than a month as I recognized her as one of those underwear models for a lingerie store. Holy shit, she was stunning.

“It’s okay,” she said with a sexy accent as she smiled at me.

“D-do you live here?” I asked, smiling back, totally fangirling over this chick.

“Yes. In number 248.”

Number 248… just down the hall from Jag’s condo. Hm. “Oh, cool. So how long have you lived here?”

“For about a year. I usually come here when we have a beach shoot. But I also have places in Brazil and New York, so I’m not here a lot. Which condo is yours?”

“Number 243.”

She thought for a second before her eyes lit up. “Oh! The sexy American baseball player, right?”

“Right,” I answered, narrowing my eyes at her suspiciously.

“I told my agent that he and I should do some commercials together. We’d be so hot together,” she said with a giggle.

“Right,” I repeated. Is it possible to be enthralled with someone while at the same time you just want to stab them in the eye?

“Are you his sister?”
Sister
came out as
seester
and it sounded beautiful and I totally
needed
to stab her in the eye then just for the fact that she hadn’t even presumed that Jag and I were together.

“No, I’m his girlfriend.” I kept my eyes narrowed at her, sizing her up. She was around five foot ten and weighed maybe a buck fifteen. I was pretty sure I could take her.

“Oh,” she said, looking me up and down with a shitty smirk on her face as if she’d found me lacking.

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” I lied. “I was heading to the grocery store,” I said, turning to go.

“Is your baseball player home? My car was making a noise and I wondered if he could take a look at it again. He did one time before when he was alone.” Her eyes now sparkled wickedly at me as she smiled, which made her cheekbones so beautiful and pronounced and I wanted to stab her in them too. I thought back to Thanksgiving when Jag had said he’d feel a lot better when I moved out here. I wondered if that was because he’d been tempted by her… Oh, who was I fooling? He was a red-blooded, American male.
Of course
he’d been tempted. Ugh.

And seriously? This chick could probably have George Clooney, so why’d it seem as if she was challenging me with Jag? Not that Jag wasn’t as hot, if not hotter, than Clooney, but this woman could probably have any man she wanted. I let out a breath and looked out at the parking lot to see some fancy, little red convertible that probably cost a mint and I was sure there was nothing wrong with it.

“No, he’s not home. Sorry.” I started moving down the walk to my car wanting to get away from her and her superior looks.

“What was your name?” she hollered after me.

I glanced back at her, all perfect in her skinny jeans and heels and blouse that was opened to show her cleavage, her long, beautiful, highlighted brown hair flowing so lovely around her face, past her shoulders, and sighed, sure that she wanted to laugh at my outfit and it was obvious she felt threatened by me not one little bit. “Ellen.”

“Ellen.” Then she humphed. She humphed at my name! What a bitch. “I’m Alessandra. It was nice meeting you,” she said on a hair flip and with another gorgeous smile, turned and model-walked her way to her condo, leaving me standing alone there feeling like the ugly, illegitimate child of Keith Richards and Steven Tyler.

Now, I didn’t think that I had self-esteem issues, I’d always felt pretty good about myself, but I’d bet that any woman who ran into someone who looked like
that
and that woman knew that the woman looking like
that
had been around her man… alone… would have felt the same way I was feeling right then.

I got in my car, started it and took off, all the while mumbling, “Ales
san
dra” the way she’d said her name. God, even her name was beautiful and just saying it made
me
want to flip
my
hair back.

“Hey, babe, how’re things going in PT land?” Jag asked that night when he called.

“They’re good. How’re things going in ST land?”

“Good. Got my arm on ice right now. Threw around thirty pitches today. Haven’t thrown that much in a while, so I’m dragging a little.”

“Dang. You’re a damned workhorse.”

“Yep. That’s me,” he said with a chuckle.

“So… I met our neighbor today.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep.” I couldn’t help but pop the
P
, having gotten a little pissed off the more I thought of Jag checking out Ales
san
dra’s car for her.

There was silence for a couple seconds until he asked, “You gonna tell me which one?”

“I’ll give you a hint. Little, red sports car. Legs up to her flippin’ neck.”

I heard him clear his throat. “Oh. So you met Alessandra?”

“Yeahhhhhh.” I drew that out about three seconds too long. I didn’t want to come off as the jealous girlfriend, but give me a break here.

“Babe.”

“Don’t you ‘babe’ me, Jagger Knox Jensen.”

“El, she was coming back from the beach and she asked me to loo—”

“Wait.” Dear God. If she’d been in a fucking bikini I was
so
seriously gonna stab the cow now. “She was coming back from the
beach
?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Jag. I’d like to think that I have a pretty good handle on who I am. But when it comes to
underwear models coming back from the
beach
then asking
my boyfriend
to help with her car that I
know
there wasn’t a goddamned thing wrong with, then I tend to get just a little irritated!”

“El, calm down, baby.”

“Is
she
the reason when, at Thanksgiving, you said you needed me out here?”

I could hear him sigh into the phone. Was I wrong to argue about this? I mean, really, was I? Besides, Mom’s always said that sometimes couples have to argue to be reminded that their love’s worth fighting for.

“The reason I said I needed you was because I fucking needed you.”

Oh.

Well, now I felt like a first-class bitch. He hadn’t been gone for even a week and I was already ripping into him. Yay me.

It was my turn to sigh. “I’m sorry, Jag. It’s just that she’s… well, she’s beautiful. I got a little jealous, I guess.”

Lame. I was so lame.

“El, if I wanted anyone else, don’t you think I’d have found someone else by now?”

Well, that wasn’t very nice. My hackles rose on that little pronouncement. And, by golly, two could play that game. So, stupid, stupid me antied up and went for it. “Same here, Jag. There’ve been lots of opportunities that I could’ve taken, but I’ve always chosen you.” (Can I use the excuse that I was only twenty-one and that’s why my maturity level was lacking? Didn’t think so. Damn.)

I swear a blast of cold air hit me smack dab in the face from my phone’s receiver.