On the Fly (29 page)

“
I don’t know. I’m not too
sure I’m ready to share you any more than I already have to.” We
hardly ever got to be alone, not like this.

She turned around in my arms and
looked up at me. “Then I suggest you’d better make good use of the
time you’ve got me alone beforehand.”

My cock jerked to life, which wasn’t
all that surprising. The more time I’d been around her, the more I
wanted her. I didn’t think now was the most appropriate time for it
to make itself known, though. She was a single mom, and she hadn’t
dated since she was a teen. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an
invitation to screw her silly, no matter how much I might want to
do just that.

I met her eyes, suddenly dark and
needy, fighting the urge to pick her up and set her on the counter
and kiss her everywhere she’d allow me to. “And how do you suggest
I do that?” My voice sounded strangled, but I kept my hands where
they were, right at her waist.

“
Kiss me.”

Fuck
. She was going to kill me.

I swallowed hard,
determined to keep myself from crossing the line. There were kids
just down the hall. She wasn’t ready for what I wanted. I could
damn well fucking kiss her and keep my hands where they belonged,
keep my cock in my fucking pants. I
could
do this. I would.

I put one hand up and cupped her
cheek, inching my fingers into her hair. She was trembling. I might
have been, too, from trying to keep myself in check. It was hard to
be sure.

She tilted her head up and back, her
mouth already open and welcoming when our lips met. I groaned and
let my tongue delve inside to explore. Hers met mine, tentatively
at first and then with more confidence.

Kissing Rachel was unlike kissing any
other woman in recent memory. It was more like kissing my first
girlfriend, when everything was new and exciting and a little
terrifying, when every tiny movement or sound she made was like an
electric jolt straight to my already painfully hard
dick.

Her hands were driving me crazy with
need, tickling over my chest, first teasing and then more insistent
as she explored my pecs and shoulders and upper abs. Everywhere she
touched my muscles pulsed. My hands itched to touch her in the same
ways, to learn every hollow and curve of her body, to discover the
places where a simple touch could steal her breath and make her
shudder with need like she was doing to me.

She put both hands on my waist and
pulled me closer to her, so close my hard-on was pressed against
her stomach. “Touch me,” she said. She stretched up on her toes and
kissed my jaw and the hollow of my throat, hot, wet kisses that
only made me need her more. “I want to feel your hands on me. Don’t
make me beg.”

I was pretty close to begging, myself,
but I still wasn’t sure I could trust myself.

I couldn’t stop, though. I did exactly
what I’d just told myself I wouldn’t do—I picked her up and set her
on the counter, sliding my hips between her parted thighs. She
wrapped her legs around me, drawing me closer to her heat. I moved
my hands to her ribs, settling them just beneath her breasts.
Rachel sucked in a breath when I let my thumbs slide along the
undersides, smoothing the pads over her silky sweater.

As soon as I palmed her breasts, her
back arched into me. She was so fucking perfect, so absolutely
fucking perfect I could barely remember to breathe. These almost
voiceless sounds kept coming from her mouth, and I wanted more of
them. So many more. I lifted her sweater, let my hands slide up her
rib cage beneath it and touch her bare skin, smooth and fevered and
the exact opposite of mine. I had more scars than I could count,
from skate blades and surgeries and God only knew what else.
Imperfections everywhere the eye could see. Her skin was silken and
flawless.

With my fingers, I pushed her
underwire up until it slid over her breasts and they bounced free.
Her nipples were puckered and hard, and she cried out when my
thumbs grazed over them.

I stifled her shout with a kiss,
desperate to quiet her. We might wake the kids up, and the last
thing they needed to wake up to was me mauling their mom on the
kitchen counter.

Rachel squirmed, trying to pull her
sweater over her head, but I put my hands over hers to stop her.
Her eyes flashed up to mine, questioning me without saying a
word.

“
Not like this,” I ground
out. “The kids…”

Her chest was rising and falling
rapidly, her breathing erratic. But she nodded and let her hands
drop to her sides. I stayed close, holding her close to me and
dropping my forehead down to rest against hers while we got
ourselves back under control.

“
Brenden?” she said after
we’d been in that position for a few minutes.

I lifted one hand to her hair, teasing
my fingers through the curls. “Yeah?”

“
I want to ask you to stay
tonight.”

My pulse kicked into gear, and I held
my breath. I wanted to stay. I wanted to hold her all night and
learn if she slept just as hard as Tuck did.

“
But I’m not ready to have
the kids wake up and find you here. I need to talk to them
first.”

“
I know.” Hell, I needed to
talk to them first, too.

“
Soon,” she
whispered.

Soon couldn’t come soon
enough.

I was a
fucking idiot for pulling those kids around on the sled all
day yesterday. I was an even bigger idiot for not icing my ankle
last night.

Now I was paying for it, and at the
worst possible time—right in the middle of a game.

Every time I tried to really dig in,
either to get some traction so I could gain some speed or change
directions, it hurt worse than it did only a moment before. We were
playing the Canucks again, the last time we would face them until
the final game of the season.

It had been chippy out on the ice
since the opening puck drop. Hell, even during warm ups, there’d
been a lot of chirping back and forth between our teams. We didn’t
really like each other, the Storm and the Canucks. The game had
been full of lots of hard hits, some of them skirting the edge of
being legal—and the Canucks were getting the best of us, even if
the game was scoreless late in the second period. They were
dominating us at face-offs, they had peppered Hunter with over
thirty shots already, and every time one of us touched the puck, we
knew we were going to get hit. Hard.

At the moment, I just wanted to get
the hell off the ice. I’d nearly screwed the team over by passing
the puck right in front of our goal crease. I’d been trying to hit
Zee with it to let him take it out of the zone, but one of the
Sedin twins had picked my pass off and got a point-blank shot
against Hunter. When I’d spun around to try to cover my mistake,
I’d twisted my ankle again. Now it hurt like a son of a
bitch—easily twice as bad as it had been before that dumbass
move.

Thank God Hunter had bailed me out of
that one. Several of the games he’d started lately had been a
struggle for him, but today he was playing lights-out hockey.
Nothing was getting past him, no matter how bad we screwed up in
front of him, and we’d screwed up a hell of a lot. No one quite as
blatantly as me, though.

Jens gathered the puck behind our net
and set up our breakout. He took it to the boards behind me on the
left-wing side. I was waiting just on the other side of center ice,
and he sent a hard pass my way, angling it past a Canuck with the
boards. As soon as it hit my stick, I shot it deep into the zone.
Half a second after the puck left my stick, Canucks defenseman
Kevin Bieksa caught me with his hip and sent me sprawling to the
ice.

I got up, made sure the coast was
still clear for me to get off for a line change, and climbed over
the boards. Jonny took my place and went to work, and I tried to
will the shooting pain in my ankle away.

Zee slid into place beside me on the
bench a second later. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“
Nothing. Worry about
yourself for once.”

“
I would if I didn’t have
to worry about you making bonehead moves like that.”

I normally wouldn’t have done
something so stupid. Maybe my ankle was getting to me even more
than I’d thought—messing with my ability to think through the game.
I couldn’t tell the trainers, though. As soon as I said anything
about another fucking injury, I’d be back up in the press box with
Nicklas Ericsson watching for God only knew how long this time. Not
that I had anything against Nicky, but I wasn’t really keen to join
him right now.

Our fourth line was out there doing a
better job than my line had. Jonny forced a turnover in the neutral
zone and took the puck into the corner. His linemates, Jared Tucker
and Philippe Lafleur—better known as JT and Pepe—joined him. All
three of those guys were speedy and tenacious. They cycled the puck
down low, playing keep-away with the Canucks defenders.

From the corner, JT sent a no-look
pass over to Pepe, who had parked himself in front of the Canucks
goal. Pepe tipped it, and it almost went in. JT and Jonny both
converged on the net, and all three of them poked away at it. Jonny
lost an edge on his way to the net, crashing into Roberto Luongo,
the Canucks goaltender. Luongo finally covered the puck and got the
whistle.

That should have taken us
to the final TV timeout of the period, but the Canucks
defensemen
weren’t too happy about all that
activity right in front of their guy, the way our boys had been
poking and slashing to get the puck free. They shoved our guys
around, one of them cross-checking Jonny in the back hard enough to
get a reaction. Jonny flung off his gloves to fight even before
spinning around to see who it was, but the linesmen broke them
apart before either of them got a good punch in.

They both got sent to the penalty box
with minor penalties for roughing, and so we played four-on-four
for the next two minutes.

Scotty sent Gags out with Zee.
Normally he would send me. I tried not to let it get to me,
especially since I still didn’t know how well I could skate on my
ankle, but it did. It pissed me off. Zee and I had chemistry on the
ice that we’d been honing since we were kids, and a four-on-four
situation was the perfect way to use us together.

When they came off for a change, he
sent Pavel Spanov and Sergei Ivanov over the boards. Pasha and
Sarge pretty much always played together. There weren’t many people
who could read what Sarge was going to do like Pasha could. It
probably helped that they both spoke much better Russian than they
did English. Communication on the ice was one of the most important
parts of the game at any level.

Babs went out next, along with Henrik
Markusson. At that point, I shot a look up at Scotty, but he
wouldn’t meet my eyes. Babs and I had played together a lot in my
time with the Storm. We each knew what the other would do. Hank
never got put out there with players as skilled as Babs. He was
more of a checking-line type of player. He couldn’t play off
skilled guys like I could.

The four-on-four ended without me
getting a chance out there, and both teams were back to full
strength. When the guys on the ice came off for a change, Scotty
sent out my line—without me. He sent Jonny in my place.