The Player Next Door (8 page)

“Sounds like you’ve done some research.”

She smiled. “My whims always get a thorough Google search. Anything else would just be lazy.”

“Of course.”

She grinned. “I think five hundred dollars can buy a lot of beer.”

He looked to the bills and laughed. “I think your sister would consider a thorough understanding of alcohol is just as important as a new roof.”

“Only if we bought really expensive beer.”

“I’m pretty sure that can be arranged.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d like to start with that German one with the guy who looks like Uncle Bob on the label.”

He looked in and picked it up. “St. Bernardus Prior 8. I’ve never seen a beer bottle with a cork before.”

She picked up her phone. “Should I check the ratings first?”

“Of course not,” he said in mock outrage. “A proper experiment should try to eliminate bias.”

“I completely agree.”

He unwound the metal and worked out the cork as he crossed to her side. Then he wrapped his hand around hers—the one that was holding her empty glass—and tilted it to the side enough to pour the beer in carefully. She watched the dark liquid roll smoothly into her glass, but her thoughts were on the heat of his hand around hers. The strength in his fingers and the way he seemed to cradle her hand even as he guided it exactly as he wanted.

Heat expanded in her belly. The slow simmer of attraction that had been present for days heated up a notch. She looked up into his face, so large and so opposite from everyone else in her world. How could she feel so comfortable with someone so different?

He noticed her look and smiled back at her and again she saw that twinkle of deviltry in his eyes. No one challenged her like that, with an expression that said
I see you looking at me. Want to play?

She did. She really did.

So when he released her hand to pour the rest of the bottle into his glass, she licked her lips. She settled into that warming burn of attraction and decided to let it go as it wanted. A flash fire of wild abandon or a steadily increasing want. Either way was fine with her.

He set the bottle on the counter, then dropped down beside her on the floor. She was still in a chair, but he was so large, his head nearly made it up to hers. Then he held up his glass.

“Let the experiment begin,” he said.

“Carpe Beer,” she said. Then at his look, she shrugged. “It’s something I saw on a student’s T-shirt.”

“Carpe Beer,” he echoed.

Then together they drank.

A lot.

...

The beer was good and in plentiful quantity.They were splitting beers, but she was pouring the lion’s share into his glass. If he didn’t know better, he might think she was trying to get him drunk, but he didn’t care. He was having too good a time talking with her.

He loved the random way her mind worked. They’d be talking about basketball one second then she’d be off on bees, comparing basketball plays to the lifecycle of a hive. It made no sense, but it had them both laughing because from a certain drunken perspective, it was completely logical.

She got him to talk about his childhood in Detroit. He’d barely known his father except that he was a gambler, but his uncle was the best. And his stepdad was a close second. She liked her father because he was as air-headed as she was—her words, not his. Her mother, sister, and older brother were the psycho driven ones. Which started him talking about his not-driven cousins—freeloaders every one of them—and pretty soon she was off on the child-rearing habits of Aborigines and how it related to their religion.

He loved it.

Then they started talking about weird relatives. That took them through the next five beers. Then came another Aunt Mabel story. He’d just finished talking about his great uncle the hoarder who’d died before they had a name for hoarding when she’d lurched forward and said in a husky whisper, “Guess what I found in my aunt’s bathroom.”

Given what he’d already learned about her family, he couldn’t begin to guess, but he did anyway. “A worm farm?”

“No, Uncle Bob sold that off years ago.”

He blinked at her. “Seriously?”

“Well, he sold off the property. The worms had already died.”

“So no farm, then.”

“Nope. Condoms.”

He paused in the middle of draining his glass. “What?”

“Yup. She bought them two months before she died.”

“No kidding.” He already knew the woman had died of cancer, so to be frisky at the end was unusual.

“Yup. I think she had a boyfriend. I think he took her to chemo. Which, you know, is really sweet.”

“Do you know who it was?”

She shook her head. “Only that two of the condoms were missing.” Then she started laughing. It began as a snort, but eventually became a real laugh that she didn’t try to hold back. She’d long since abandoned the chair to sprawl on the floor beside him. Now she fell against his shoulder, holding her arms to her belly.

“You really think she got it on with her guy?” he asked, loving the feel of her whole body shaking in laughter.

“I hope so,” she said. “I really do.”

She looked at him then. She rolled her face toward him, right there on his shoulder. Her lips were cherry red, her eyes sparkling blue pools. And a thought formed in his brain: she was so different than the women he usually met. Basketball bunnies had no subtlety. But Tori? She was different. She was amazing.

“Tori?”

“Hmmm?” She smiled up at him, and he had trouble focusing on anything but the dark red of her lips.

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

She giggled, but she didn’t look away. “Maybe. Am I doing it badly?”

“Nope.” He’d been rock hard and aching for her by the second beer. “But we’re both drunk.” So much for everything in moderation, but he’d been having too much fun to stop. “I don’t want you regretting anything in the morning.”

She thought about it for a moment, but when she spoke, her words were crystal clear. “Can I tell you a secret?”

He grinned. “Sure.”

“I never regret anything. Ever. People try to make me regret things. They tell me how I was stupid or not thinking or something. Usually they’re right, so I pretend to be sad so they’ll go away. But really and truly, I never regret anything.”

He tried to imagine living like that. Never looking back and wishing you could do it all over again. He averaged three regrets a game. A moment where he’d made the wrong choice or had been too slow or too stupid. He obsessed over his mistakes, endlessly replaying them in his mind at night. Had that choice cost them the game? The championship?

Those regrets were just the basketball ones. Sometimes he thought he obsessed over those because it was too hard to think about the other choices. The life choices where he hurt someone or forgot something or… Damn. There were a million.

“Not a single regret?” he pressed. “Really?”

“I’ve been stupid. Lots. I’m not even sure a year with the Dalai Lama was the right choice.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Gave up an internship with the Gates Foundation.”

Okay, so maybe there were choices there. Career paths that could have gone one way or another.

“But regret doesn’t change the choice. It just distracts me from the cool things right in front of me now.” She set her hand on his chest, small and so white. He took it in his, wrapping her fingers around two of his. White on brown. Small and large.

Lust surged through him, hard and hot and…

“We’re drunk, Tori. We can’t
—
”

“No regrets.”

“For you, baby,” he said as he pressed his mouth to hers. Just one kiss. One slow, drugging taste. And maybe a little more. After all, what was one more regret to him?

She kissed him back with her whole body. Not just her mouth and tongue, but her breasts as she arched into him, and her hands as they roved across his chest. She clutched at him and would have climbed on top of him if she’d had the angle.

“Whoa, baby,” he said, trying to hold her back. His heart was pounding and the need to take her was nearly overwhelming. But he was a big man and he’d learned to be careful with his strength. “Wait a second.”

She was licking along his jaw, nibbling up to his ear. The feel was hot and wet and made his fingers clench in hunger, but her pace was too fast, her need almost frantic. So this time he did use his strength. He grabbed her shoulders and gently set her back from him.

The look of her dazed eyes and red wet lips weakened his resolve. But then she blinked and focused on him. “I’m of German descent,” she said.

He almost chuckled. “Another non-sequitur?”

“I process alcohol very quickly.” Then when he didn’t answer, she huffed and pulled the tie out of her hair, letting the straight blond hair drop around her shoulders. God she was beautiful and he wanted her more than he wanted his next breath.

Meanwhile, she pressed her head against his shoulder. Her breath was warm where it cascaded over his chest and he wrapped her tight in his arms.

“Tori—” he groaned.

“Will you wait here? Just for five minutes?”

What could he say to that? Of course he’d wait. He was dying to know what she’d do next.

Chapter Six

Tori spit out the toothpaste, rinsed her mouth, and then took a good long look at herself in the mirror. She absently noted that her cheeks were flushed, and her hair was a mess. But rather than focus on those trivialities, she stared into her own eyes and did something she absolutely hated to do: she thought about what she was about to do.

As a rule, she hated weighing pros and cons, thinking her actions through, and all that ponderous head stuff. Her mind was better suited to philosophy and comparative religions. Ask her to describe the different myths attached to the Egyptian god Set, and she could recite them from memory. Ask her to plan her next week, and she was hopeless.

Ask her to decide exactly what she wanted to do with her next door neighbor, and she broke out into a cold sweat. But not thinking about her relationships is how she’d ended up with Edward for so many years. It was time to change that pattern. Besides, she got the feeling that Mike was worth the extra work.

So she thought.

She thought about the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed. And that he laughed often with her. She thought about running her hands down his entire ripped torso
—
front and back
—
and seeing if she could name every single muscle as it popped under her fingers. She thought about how very big he was, and yet she didn’t feel dwarfed or stifled around him. If anything, he was too careful
—
physically
—
with her and she found that really sweet.

She tried to think of the cons, and frankly there was one really big one. He was a sports god and she was clueless. Worse, she thought what he did for a living was shortsighted. Who picked such an unstable career? Forget being too old by age forty. One twisted ankle
—
or a torn rotator cuff
—
and he was out of work for the rest of his life. It was nuts, and by extension that made him nuts.

And yet…she still liked him. She still wanted him. She still
—

“Tori? You okay in there?”

“Um. Yeah. Just a second.” She hurriedly flushed the toilet then rinsed her hands, splashing water on her face as an extra boost. It was what she always did when she started thinking in the bathroom and took too long.

A quick brush through her hair and she opened the bathroom door to see him leaning against the wall right outside the door, a look of wariness in his eyes. He scanned her from head to toe and then opened his mouth to say something. She didn’t give him the chance.

“I want a rebound boyfriend.”

He blinked at her, his gaze turning laser sharp. And he didn’t say a damned thing. Which was really uncomfortable.

So rather than face his weird expression, her mind skittered away to something irrelevant. “Wait. That’s a basketball reference, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “It is.”

Nothing more. Damn, this was harder than she thought. Most men usually didn’t require so much thought on her part. They needed little prompting to fill the conversation, but he actually listened to her which required her to say intelligent things or explain herself. That was harder than it should be, but she gave it a shot anyway.

“I’ve decided I want a boyfriend to help me get over Edward.”

“Do you need help getting over Edward?”

She swallowed. No, not really. “Maybe,” she hedged. “Maybe I need to experience other men.”

“That would require more than one man. And not a boyfriend, which implies a commitment. Or at least exclusivity.”

Good point. “I’ve tried sleeping around. It wasn’t nearly as fun as it sounds.”

His eyebrows rose at that even as he relaxed backward against the wall. “That’s something we have in common then,” he said in the way she sometimes said things that weren’t on point, but filled the silence while she thought of something else to say.

And yet she was pretty curious about that. “So you’ve slept around?” Then she winced. Of course he slept around. All she had to do was Google his name and a zillion images of him appeared. Take out the game shots, and she got to see his women. At least a dozen different ones in the last year alone.

Meanwhile, he managed to shrug without moving his hurt shoulder. “I had some wild days.”

She nodded as if her wildness could even remotely compare to his. But whatever. “I explored during my freshman year in college. There were lots of opportunities.”

He chuckled. “I explored up through my freshman year in the NBA.”

“Bet you had more fun than I did.”

He chuckled. “This is one area in which I have no interest in competing.”

Right. Back to the point. “So I figure you’re next door until your shoulder heals, right? Then it’s back to the east coast.”

He nodded.

“And I’ll go back to teaching in the fall. So for the summer…” She tilted her head. “Would you prefer we call it a summer fling?”

“No.”

Oh. Right. “You hate this idea.”