Dirty Tackle: A Football Romance (5 page)

I grinned at her as I made my way back over to her. I sat down on the bench next to her and handed her the glass. I set my glass just above the keys and let my hands drift down to gently test them. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d played. The piano had been far more of a conversation piece in the room than something useful. I doubted that anyone on the team knew that it had once been a hobby of mine.
 

“Any special requests?” I asked.

“Just something slow and pretty,” she replied.

Immediately, I knew what would work beautifully. I let my fingers do the talking and closed my eyes. The haunting notes of Beethoven’s Sonata in D minor came to me, and I drifted away losing myself in the music and the smell of Maddy’s perfume.

What in the world am I doing?
 

I shouldn’t have agreed to a drink with Shane. I shouldn’t have let him kiss me. I damn well shouldn’t be sitting in his condo looking out at the skyline and listening to him play the piano thinking it was hands down the most romantic date I’d been on in years.
 

It wasn’t a date. I wasn’t supposed to be on a date at all, but I was the one who agreed to a drink “between friends.” He had gotten me into his gravitational pull as surely as if I was nineteen years old all over again, planning my one night of ecstasy with him. I had been the dumb one to think that after all of this time, I’d be able to keep my cool around him. I thought he was out of my system.

I thought I could contain myself.

The joke was on me.
 

I took another sip of my drink and let the warm liquid burn a not unwelcome trial of fire down the back of my throat. I felt as if my skin was on fire too. Everywhere that Shane touched—hell, everywhere that he even looked, lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree. I was hyperaware of everything about him, and I wanted to kick myself for being there, even though, if I was honest with myself, there was no place else I’d rather be.

Being this close to him, talking to him for any length of time, would surely bring us back to the reason we had parted ways all those years ago. Every time that happened, I could try to deflect him from the truth of why I
stayed
out of touch, but if he could read me the way that I thought he could, he’d know. He’d know there was something that I was hiding from him. Something big.

Even though I promised myself I would eventually talk to him and figure out a way to tell him about Scarlet, I figured I would ease into it. It had been nine years. A bit more time until I figured out the lay of the land and where things stood between us was the smartest play by far.

But within the very first week of seeing him again, here I was, sitting next to him in the semi-lit living room of his condo acting as if we were on a date. Which we weren’t. I had to keep reminding myself of that.

I had always loved listening to Shane play the piano. We’d sometimes go to the music store after school, and he’d play me song after song on the pianos that had been on display there. Shane told me that his mother had been the one who had pestered him to keep up with his lessons, but his father had sold the baby grand that his mother had owned shortly after she died. He’d sold it for drinking money.
 

We didn’t talk much about Shane’s father back then. It hadn’t taken a genius to see that he preferred anywhere to going home after his mom died. Our friendship had begun simply enough. Although he and I ran in separate social circles most of high school, we had occasionally run into each other at the salon where his mother had worked, and my mother spent every Saturday afternoon getting her nails done.

Even then, Shane had been the kind of guy you couldn’t help but notice. He was tall for his age, and when he joined the high school football team, he’d filled out in the most delicious ways. He’d stopped coming to the salon after his mother passed away, and so it wasn’t until our paths crossed at a couple of parties late in our senior year that we struck up a kind of strange and wonderful friendship.

Shane never lacked for female company, and I had been the quiet, studious girl who almost always said no when her friends asked her to go out. But by the end of my senior year, I’d been ready to cut loose a little bit. I was already accepted into Brooks, but I never got up enough nerve to tell Shane how I felt.

It took me until the end of my freshman year, and it was the night before I was leaving—for good.
 

I figured it would be fun, easy. No strings attached. No consequences.

That had been another time in my life when the joke had been on me.

I couldn’t help but lean against Shane ever so gently as I listened to him play. Watching his fingers dance across the keyboard was magical purely because of how big his hands were. He was a big guy, but he was as graceful off the field as he was on it.

Ever since he had been drafted by the Redskins, I’d made it a point to watch his games. I’d record them if I had rounds at the hospital or got called in during one of the weekends when I was on call. It was all part of the gig of being a doctor. That part of my life, pursuing my dream career, had been better than I had ever imagined it could be.

Too bad I’d made such a mess of my personal life. I gave myself a mental shake. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything, but sitting there at that moment made me feel more melancholy than I’d felt in a long time.

The song ended, and Shane turned to me. I saw the question in his eyes, and I felt that girl of nineteen again rising up inside me. The one who said, “No strings attached?”

I moved closer to him. I was surprised when he pushed me backward, but it was only for a moment while he swung his leg over the bench so that he could straddle it. Then he turned me around so that my back was to him.
 

I felt my breath hitch as he pulled me backward into him. He wrapped his arms around my waist, and we stared out the window at the sky. I couldn’t help but note the hard thrust of his cock against the small of my back, though, and my mouth went dry.
 

“I want you to stay with me tonight,” he whispered in my ear. I felt him nuzzle it with first his nose and then his lips, and I felt my nipples tighten and lift against his hands, which he had cupped as if to feel their weight. “Will you stay with me, Maddy?”
 

His husky question mixed with the sensations of desire that he was drilling up from the depths of my inner being made me feel drunk and wild, even though I’d barely had more than a single drink. This man drove me crazy in a way that no other man could. He made me want to throw caution to the wind and be free.
 

I didn’t respond to his question, because really there was no point. I could pretend to fight him and this desire that I had for him, but it would overwhelm me. He would overwhelm me. Not because his will was greater than mine, but because I wanted it as badly as he did. He knew it as well as I did.

Arching my back against his chest, my hands rose up to clasp around the base of his neck. I knew that this movement offered my breasts to him in a kind of erotic sacrifice. His hands palmed their weight again and flicked the tight nubs of my nipples, causing me to moan. Then he began the slow, methodical unbuttoning of each one of the buttons on my staid, professional shirt.

He took his time, and I shifted back against him as to urge him forward, and I heard his chuckle against my ear. “Eager, are we? Don’t worry, baby. You won’t be disappointed. We’ve got all night.”

Actually, we didn’t. I would have to go home at some point, if for no other reason than I had to be there to see Scarlet before she left for school. Those were questions I didn’t want to answer quite yet. Plus, it wouldn’t do to show up on my second day of work wearing the exact same clothes I had been wearing on the first day.

I could see our reflection in the glass of the doors and saw Shane was watching my reaction carefully even as his hands pulled the sides of the shirt apart. I let him pull it down and slip it off my shoulders. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I had unpacked my sexier lingerie earlier that week. Maybe there was a part of me that had known this was where I would end up, even if I hadn’t been consciously aware of it.

His eyes held mine in the glass even as I felt the loosening of the fabric as he unlatched the clasp of my bra. I felt myself begin to tremble as he slid the straps down my shoulders, and the thin bit of silk was gone. I was bare before his hungry eyes,

“You are so fucking beautiful,” he said. His voice was so low that the vibration sent a thrill through my body. His eyes were bright with unspoken need. “Stand up.”

I didn’t hesitate to push to my feet. He took my hips and spun me around to face him, his face at eye level with my breasts. His hands skimmed up and down my curves, and his eyes followed them. It was as if he was memorizing every inch of my skin.

The few extra pounds I’d always carried around had gained a few friends since college, but I felt as if Shane was worshiping me, not looking for flaws. I settled my hands on his shoulders and felt the jump of his muscles under my fingertips. The man was nothing but a hard rock of muscles everywhere. In the office earlier that day, he had been wearing that tight gray t-shirt. And now I could explore every last inch of his body, just as I’d wanted this morning.
 

It had taken every bit of sheer willpower to tear my eyes away from him. I had somehow managed to pull it together enough to say a few words, but I didn’t remember what they were. I had managed to leave the room without throwing myself at Shane’s feet. Barely.

Now, as his lips closed the gap between us and his lips settled on my nipple, I felt myself pushing toward him again. Everything about this felt right. Perhaps that’s why I had been so adamant about closing him out before.
 

The one night we were together, it felt as if we belonged together. He could read every twitch and tremble of my body like the sheet music for his piano. His hands found every delicate spot and touched me in a way that was reverent, yet demanding. There was nothing that I wouldn’t do if he asked me to.

He shifted me again so that my butt hit the keys of the piano, and they made a sharp, rattling noise that barely broke through the haze of my consciousness. All I was aware of was Shane’s hands, and his mouth, and his tongue.
 

It swirled around my nipple, and then he gave it a slight tug with his teeth that should have been painful, but it was just on the edge of that threshold between pleasure and pain. I heard the sound of a zipper and didn’t realize it was mine until the skirt I was wearing fell to the floor to puddle around my heels. My black thong panties followed a moment later.
 

Shane stood then and loomed over me before sweeping me up into his arms. I thought he was going to take me to the bedroom, but instead, he set me on top of the piano. He nudged my thighs apart so that he stood between them. We were almost at eye level.

I saw a nakedness in his expression that took my breath away. It seemed hard to believe that a man like Shane could be vulnerable, but I could read it there. For as far as he’d come from that boy who had avoided his father’s fists and dealt with the mental anguish of his mother’s untimely death, that boy was still there beneath the surface.

He was waiting for something. He was waiting for me to say something.

I rested my palms against this hard planes of his cheekbones. He was handsome in a rugged, hard kind of way. I pushed forward on the piano until my butt was on the very edge, and I pressed myself up against him just reaching his lips. He didn’t move. He was as still as a statue.

My lips met his, but he didn’t even twitch. What was it he wanted from me? I didn’t know why I even bothered asking myself that question. Shane wanted what he had wanted all along. Verbal confirmation of something that I kept holding back from him.
 

“I’ll stay with you, Shane,” I whispered against his lips.

It was as if my words released a torrent of desire inside of him. I barely had time to catch my breath before his lips plunged down on mine and rocked me backward. His lips and hands were everywhere, and I stretched backward onto the cool top of the piano bracing my body with my hands behind me.

I allowed him to touch me wherever he wanted because everywhere, every single touch caused the beginning of a build of warmth in my core. It wasn’t just that it had been years since I’d had a decent orgasm with anyone other than myself, but it was also the breaking through of emotions that I thought I had long ago buried.

When Shane dropped to his knees, and I felt his tongue begin its slow ascent from the back of my knee up my thigh, I let out a small moan of delight. His hot breath against my skin was a stark contrast to the cool, hard surface underneath me. The feeling was exquisite, but it had nothing on the sparks of liquid fire that shot off inside of me when his tongue dove between my wet folds.

I stiffened even as I sat up enough so that I could dig my fingers deep into his short hair.