Drive You Wild: A Love Between the Bases Novel (16 page)

In the darkness behind her eyelids, she saw a vision of the first time she’d laid eyes on Trevor, striding across the parking lot, powerful but so terribly alone, until that other dark figure had approached him.

You couldn’t escape fate, whether in the form of a man with a BB gun or a troubled slugger.

She felt the exact moment when he gave in, when he surrendered to the desire vibrating between them. He swept her flat against him so there was no room for breath, no room for doubt. “If we do this, you gotta
know a few things,” he muttered in her ear. “I can’t make any promises. I don’t lie, and I don’t say things I can’t stand behind. I’ve never felt the way I do with you, but I don’t want to hurt you, and—”

To shut him up, she plastered her mouth against his, throwing her body against him with so much force that anyone with less sheer strength would have stumbled backward. But he received her weight as if she were a tumbleweed, cradling her against his hard chest, those powerful hands gripping the flesh of her rear.

He spun her around so the back of her legs touched the side of the bed, then she was airborne, suddenly weightless, an armful of cotton fluff secured in the muscular circle of his embrace.

Next thing she knew, she was on her back on the bed, a Trevor she’d never seen braced over her. This Trevor was wild, with fever-bright eyes that promised unimaginable things. The heat from his body seared everywhere he touched, even through her clothing. She twisted her body against him, laughing out loud because it felt so amazing, so beyond anything normal.

“Laugh it up, Paige. You’ll be screaming before you know it.” With a growl, he nuzzled his face against her neck. He nudged her legs apart with one knee, and she nearly came just from that. Her dress rode up to her thighs. He drew a possessive hand up the inside of her leg, the roughness of his palm lighting up her skin like fireworks. If he reached her mound, he’d find her already wet and open. But he didn’t get that far, only to the edge of her panties.

He looked down. She knew what he saw: red silk. Selected to state her intentions loud and clear.

“Damn,” he swore softly. With that one word, dripping with lust and awe, all the feminine pride Hudson had stolen from her came rushing back. Doubled, tri
pled, because this was Trevor Stark. And Trevor had a hold on her heart and imagination no one had ever had.

From the restraint that vibrated in his forearms, she knew what he intended. Some kind of slow seduction, taking his time arousing her with his mouth and touch. That’s not what
she
had in mind. Oh no.

She wrapped her legs around his hips and thrust her pelvis against his. His erection was hard as a club behind his jeans. Sensation beat hot and fast in the place between her legs—the current center of her world. Wildfire flooded her system, need thundering like a timpani. She rubbed against him, the throbbing in her clit now an electric feverish craving.

“What are you doing?” He groaned painfully, a man in the throes of battling temptation. “I can’t last if you do that. You’re going to make me—”

“I want you to fuck me.” Her rawness shocked her. That wasn’t how nice-girl Paige talked. She didn’t say things like that. At least not until now. “I don’t want slow. I want fast and hard. Come on, Trevor. Do it. You want it just like I do. Touch me.”

She snaked a hand between them, working her way past his pants to take hold of his hard penis. It filled her hand with its thick urgency. God, how she wanted him.

With a groan, he pulled her hand away from his cock. He joined both her hands together over her head, pinning them to the bedspread.

She peeked up at him. Had she ever thought he was icy and distant? Not this man, with his fierce electric gaze and hot mouth. Words were pouring out of him now, just as dirty as hers had been. “I want you hot and wild for me, baby. I want your sweet little body spread out naked and begging. Keep your hands up there and open your legs for me, baby.”

She spread her legs apart, gasping at how it made her
feel to do that—exposing herself, surrendering, giving in to him. He sat back on his heels and ran one big palm up one thigh, across her crotch, then down the inner thigh. The silk against her sex turned the caress into a maddening tease. She sobbed and pushed wordlessly toward his hand again.
More,
she wanted to say.
I need more
.

But he knew what she meant. Right now, in this moment, he owned her and he knew it.

Slowly, torturously, he dragged his hand back between her legs, taking his time as he reached her clit. He used one knuckle to circle that nest of nerves, to pull a deep moan from the very pit of her stomach. She panted, lungs heaving, about to burst.

He pushed her dress up as far as it would go, then dragged her panties down to her knees. The look on his face, all-consuming and feral, nearly sent her over the edge again.

“God, you’re fucking gorgeous.”

“Please, Trevor. Touch me.” She lifted her hips, need vibrating in every nerve ending.

“You’re such a hot thing,” he murmured. He ran his hands from the undersides of her breasts down her torso to her hips. She writhed under his touch. So rough and tender. So knowing.

His touch was everything.

When he reached between her legs to the wetness crying out for him, she released a whimper. “Oh please . . .”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I got you.” His deep, lust-roughened voice worked on her like another hand, like another set of fingers playing havoc with her nerves. He cupped her mound—oh God, she wanted to cry from the piercing pleasure. The inside of his wrist pushed against her clit, his fingers tangled in her soft curls. He
tugged lightly. Lightning sizzled through her system. But the edge of everything was still out there . . . out of reach . . . taunting . . .

“Oh fuck,” she moaned, hips thrashing. “I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

“I told you not to worry,” he reminded her, his tone drenched in stern command. A rush of pure emotion made her body relax.

“I won’t,” she whispered. “Just . . . just . . .”

“Just what? This?” He stroked a thumb across her clit. “I feel you swelling for me. Plumping up nice and full. Let it go, sweetheart . . . let it go . . .” He pressed and circled, creating delirious friction between his callused thumb and her own hot juices. “Come for me, Paige. I want to see you come. Don’t hold back. Come on.”

With his palm still hot against her clit, he inserted two big fingers inside her, the extra pressure releasing a deep flood of heat. It carried her up, up, higher and higher, a wave transporting her into a wide starry sky and hurling her to the wind. And then it broke into a cascade of shuddering release. She lost track of where she was and what she was doing, barely seeing Trevor’s head bent intently over her, his hand holding her firm, anchoring her to the bed.

When she was still pulsing from that climax, trying to catch her breath and retrieve her sanity, he snatched a condom from his bedside table and worked it over his rock-hard erection. “How can you be so fucking hot when you look so innocent?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She heaved in a lungful of air, but there was no getting her pulse back to normal. It kept skipping and jumping all over the place. Trevor poised his body over hers. The lamplight caught the little golden hairs peppering his thighs. Fascinated, she stroked the front of his thighs, amazed at
their honed, sculpted hardness. They seemed to have more muscles than other men’s thighs, even though she knew that couldn’t be anatomically true. His muscles were just more obvious, more defined. Like iron turned to warm flesh.

Between his thighs reared his penis, straight and true and wanting her. She touched it too, feeling the heat burning through the clear latex. “I got tested after I found out about Nessa,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“I always use a condom. I won’t put you at risk. I can at least promise you that.”

For a moment the magical connection she felt to him wavered. That word “always” made her think of all the other women he’d done this with. Was she just another woman to him, was this just another situation requiring a condom?

But when he pushed his erection into the soft opening between her legs, none of that mattered anymore. The only thing that mattered was the way he swelled inside her, the way he filled her, inch by glorious inch, until there was absolutely no extra room for anything resembling a doubt or a second thought or any sensation other than pleasure.

“Paige” he whispered as he moved with aching control within her. “Beautiful Paige.” He flexed his hips, going deeper inside her. Flutters danced along her inner channel, along her spine, down to her fingertips. She closed her eyes because the sight of him was just too overwhelming. She could look or she could feel, but not both. And right now she wanted feeling. She wanted him driving deep. She wanted his shudders, his restraint. His abandon. And then a wild, intoxicating explosion. This orgasm was different from the first. Deeper. It was a thorough surrender of her being to the powerful man who shook in her arms.

The man who was claiming her heart, bit by bit.

W
HAT HAD HE
just done?
He’d had sex with Paige Taylor, after vowing to stay away from her.
What was wrong with him?
Sex with the owner’s daughter, the girl who knew things about him no one else did. Worse, it had been even better than he’d imagined—wild and uninhibited and electrifying. Fucking terrifying.

Trevor didn’t want to face any of those facts, so he lay on his back on his impersonal bed in his rented motel room and pretended to sleep. He manufactured a slight snore, which masked the rapid beating of his heart. Did any of it fool Paige? He didn’t know, but he didn’t want her to stop twining her finger through the hair on his chest. So he didn’t move, like a coward.

Eventually Paige’s breathing evened out. Then he lay still as a statue, every muscle screaming at him to get up. To get away from the clean apple fragrance of her hair as it draped over his arm, the soft feather weight of her hand still on his chest.

He couldn’t do this. This wasn’t him. He didn’t know
how
to do this. Whatever
it
was. And now she was asleep and what the hell was he supposed to do next?

When Paige woke up, he’d tell her this had been a
major mistake and the smartest thing would be to move on as if it had never happened.

He always offered women exactly the same deal. His intense sexuality in exchange for absolutely no emotion. That’s who he was. Made of ice, except when he let his sexual drive off the leash. He’d let himself detonate in the body of a consenting woman, someone who wanted it hard and furious and didn’t mind walking away when it was over. Because that’s all there was to Trevor Stark. Ice or fire. Nothing in between.

But now Paige was draped over him like a blanket of living silk, and the wires in his brain were cross-firing and sparking like crazy. What was this? Who was he? What now? How could he get the hell out without hurting the kindest, hottest, smartest, wildest girl he’d ever laid hands on?

With his thoughts still churning, he fell asleep. When he woke up, the lamp was on, his cock was in her mouth and pleasure was flooding his veins. “What are you—”

She lifted her head, all pink moist lips and sleepy sapphire eyes. “I couldn’t find any more condoms, so I had to improvise. I didn’t think you’d mind, but I can stop.”

He groaned deeply and spread his arms wide to the sides. “If you stop I might explode.”

“I like it when you explode.” She smiled wickedly and ducked her head back to his cock. Her tongue passed across the tip, slow and thorough, as if she was experiencing each pulse of pleasure right along with him. As if she could see inside him and feel exactly what he felt.

He fumbled for the train of thought he’d been following when he fell asleep. Something about this being a mistake and . . . “I think . . . uh . . .”

She sucked him deeper into her mouth and his words dried up to dust.

“Don’t think.” His cock had slid from her mouth as she raised her head to speak. He wanted to cry. “Isn’t that what you do at the plate? Swing the bat, don’t think?”

“I think. Up until I can’t think anymore because there’s a fastball coming at my head. Then I let it all go.” Yeah, thinking was way overrated. “Come on, baby. Put me back in your mouth.”

All his resolutions forgotten, he drew her head back to his cock. He kept his grip loose around her head, suggesting a rhythm with his hips and hands. She picked it up immediately, her thick hair tumbling over his thighs as her head bobbed up and down, her warm mouth a moving velvet sheath around his cock.

“Oh fuck, honey. That feels so goddamn mother—” More swear words clamored to get out, but he clamped his jaws shut, his body tensing like an archer’s bow.

Pressure built in the base of his spine, in his balls, release screaming toward him like a bullet train, and it was either going to happen in her mouth or in her sweet, tight channel, and he had to be back inside her . . . had to be . . .

He flipped her over in a motion so quick she squeaked. With his hard-on jutting in front of him like some sort of flagpole, he fumbled for his last condom, which, he remembered now, had fallen behind the nightstand.

“Hang tight,” he told her, scooting past her to grab it. He brushed against the wire of the lamp, which was plugged into an outlet on the back wall. The lamp teetered.

“Watch out!” Paige scrambled out from under him and reached up to stop the lamp from falling on his head. Except that in the meantime he had twisted to look at it and his chin intercepted the path of her hand. She knocked him in the jaw at the same moment that the lamp bonked him on the head.

“Ow.”

“Oops,” she said simultaneously. “Are you okay?”

He tried to wrestle the lamp off his head, but the shade had gotten lodged there, somehow, and the cord was getting in the way, and . . . he burst out laughing. It was just too ridiculous, and now Paige was laughing too, on her heels trying to juggle with the lamp. It crashed to the floor, the cord yanked from the outlet. Out went the light, and there they were, giggling like two kids in the dark.

“These things always happen to me, haven’t you noticed that yet?” Her laughing voice warmed the darkness.

Trevor wrapped his arms around her and curled her body against his chest. God, she felt so good and smelled so sweet. “Um . . . where were we?”

“You were trying to find a condom, remember?”

“Right. Fuck.”

“Forget that. Stay right where you are, big boy.”

Her soft form slid down his front and her wet mouth claimed him again. It took no time, a few deep suckles and he was coming. He bucked his hips and yelled something at the ceiling. No light in the room, but as she pulled the orgasm from him, the whole world flashed bright.

Magic Paige, source of light.

F
or a few precious days nothing happened. Well, things happened, of course. He played baseball, made his weekly visit to the Boys and Girls Club, even signed up to help with Paige’s fund-raiser. Normal things. Precious, normal, wonderful things. But he knew it couldn’t last.

In his experience, disaster liked to sandbag you out of nowhere. While you weren’t looking, your dad could
get hooked on meth. Then one day everything could blow and you’d be sentenced to Wayne County Juvenile Detention, your entire future a question mark.

But this time disaster had sounded a warning bell. He couldn’t forget what the stalker—Tom MacPhail, he learned—had yelled.
Get off me or I’ll tell the cops everything I know about you. About Wayne County.

Was there a way MacPhail could have learned about his sealed juvenile records? Did he mean something more innocent, that he knew Trevor’s place of birth? That his last name was Leonov, not Stark? Each day that passed with no public bombshell, Trevor relaxed a little more, back to his normal, unheightened state of alertness.

Which freed him to plunge fully into his affair with Paige Mattingly Austin Taylor. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. At the stadium, they ignored each other completely, because if they didn’t, they’d be on each other like animals. But after hours, in his hotel room, the leash was off.

Sometimes they didn’t even make it to his room. He’d taken her in the hotel stairwell, late one night, when they couldn’t wait a second longer. Just opened his jeans, pushed up her skirt, and made her bury a scream in his shoulder. During one epic morning before batting practice, he tongued her up one side and down the other. He bent her over the bed, piled pillows under her ass, and stimulated her with hands and mouth until the sheets were drenched and her throat raw with her moans.

When she couldn’t bear another second, she’d rolled over and punched him. “Make me come or you die! I’m serious.”

Laughing, he wrapped her legs around his waist and walked her into the shower. Made her hang onto the
shower head while he soaped her, nipples to toes, her moans lost in the cascading water. When she finally came into his hand, and he felt her liquid heat against his palm, he was so turned on he had only to grip his own cock and he came all over the shower tiles.

The amount of sexual chemistry they generated was off the charts. He’d fucked her on the carpet, the desk, the kitchenette counter, the bathroom floor, and, very nearly, the hallway floor just outside his room.

After a few days of this they were completely in tune with each other. Once, at the ballpark, he ran into her in an empty hallway. One look from under her lashes and he craved her. His cock went hard as stone, and when he brushed past her, he slid a hand across her mound, and by the way her breath caught, he knew she was just as wet as he was hard.

Then his hand fell away and they continued in their opposite directions. Already he hungered for the next time he’d have her in his bed.

When he was with her, nothing else in the world mattered. Not the past, not her future. All that mattered was the way she looked at him and the light in her eyes.

It wasn’t just sex either. Paige had a way of breaking down his barriers and making him talk. She asked a million questions about his experiences in juvenile hall. He told her about Grizz, the old baseball coach who volunteered there. Grizz had believed in him from the first. He’d taken Trevor under his wing and kept him on track. He talked about how baseball was the only thing he’d ever wanted to do but that he’d decided it wasn’t safe, until Nina had insisted he go for it. He hadn’t had the money for college, so instead he read constantly—a passion Paige shared. That’s how she’d passed the time in all those Italian hotel rooms.

Paige had plenty to share too. She told him how she’d adopted Jerome in Milan to help her deal with the loneliness of living in a foreign country. She talked about her split childhood and her ambitious parents. How she’d never felt that she measured up, because she didn’t have their drive. What she had instead was a deep desire to help people, to be of use to people. Hudson had benefited from that, and his betrayal decimated her self-confidence.

He had to wonder how Hudson could walk away from someone like Paige. The only clue she dropped was when she told him that they’d hung out in college and had more of a “pal” relationship before they got romantic. Maybe they just didn’t have the sizzle he and Paige shared.

It was the same on his end. None of his involvements—he wouldn’t call them relationships—had come close to this thing with Paige.

They didn’t discuss what sort of “thing” it was. The intensity of their connection blocked out everything else. All he knew was that he wanted her all the time, in every possible way. Sexually and otherwise. But the parameters of his life hadn’t changed. At any moment he might have to drop out of sight. At any moment he might get dragged back to Detroit to face more retribution. At any moment he might have to come to Nina’s rescue in some way. How could he ask another person—especially one who meant as much as Paige—to share that with him?

No. He’d give her what he could for now. Lots of hot sex. The return of her feminine confidence. The knowledge that he found her to be the most beautiful and desirable woman he’d ever known. More than that? Not possible.

And then the hammer dropped.

C
rush stormed into Paige’s cubicle in the accounting department, where she was trying to work on spreadsheets but was actually doodling dreamy patterns on pieces of scrap paper. He held a copy of the
Kilby Press-Herald
in one fist. “Have you seen this article about Stark?”

She jumped up and snatched the paper from him. It was open to the sports section, and the headline read:
CATFISH STAR REVEALED TO BE JUVENILE DELINQUENT.

“Juvenile delinquent? Do people even say that anymore?” Wasn’t it like calling someone retarded? It sounded so insulting and wrong.

“He did time in Wayne County Juvenile Detention. Seems pretty accurate to me.”

As she scanned the article, her stomach cratered.
Assault and battery . . . third degree felony . . . fifteen years old . . .

Trevor had warned her this might be coming, but a week of nonstop, heavenly lovemaking had lulled her into complacency. Even though he’d described the incident, seeing it in black and white was shocking.

Crush was still raging, stamping back and forth across her cubicle. “And he dares to go near my daughter. He probably didn’t even tell you—that kind of person never does. They just take what they want.”

“Dad,” she said sharply. “I knew. He told me.”

“You
knew
?”

“Yes. He wanted me to know before we . . . did anything.”

A slow wave of red inched up Crush’s neck. “I’ll bury him.”

“Would you cut it out? You don’t know the whole story. He was protecting his father. A gang member was trying to kill his father and he defended him.”

Crush shook his head. “I’m not buying it. That’s self-defense and wouldn’t have gotten him incarcerated. You can’t believe what he tells you. He can’t be trusted. He’s a juvenile delinquent.”

She shoved the newspaper back into his hands. “You should talk to him yourself. It’s his story to tell. But you have to give him a chance, Dad. Keep an open mind and listen to him.”

“If he wants to come to me and explain, he’s welcome to.”

Would Trevor do that? He’d refused to talk to Crush earlier. But now the secret was out, and maybe he’d feel differently. “If he does, will you promise to keep an open mind?”

“Oh, I’ll keep an open mind.” He grimaced. “Right next to my cocked and loaded rifle.”

“Dad! Why do you automatically think the worst of him? You should really get to know him before you make all these judgments.”

“I know all I need to.” He shook the sports page, now crumpled in his fist. “And so do you. Are you going to end it, or do you want me to do the dirty work? It’ll be my pleasure.”

“I’m not ending it.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And it’s not your business.”

“The hell it isn’t.” He shook the newspaper again, as if wishing it was Trevor himself. “How can this not be my business? You’re my daughter and he’s on my team. For now, anyway.”

Her chest tightened. “What does that mean?”