Romance: SCREWED (An Arranged Marriage to the NFL Bad Boy) (A New Adult Contemporary Athlete Sports Football Romance) (8 page)

Dean found his way to consciousness slowly, the blaring of his alarm clock an unwelcome guide back to the land of the living. The first thing he was aware of was a pounding in his head, a familiar remnant of a night spent in a bottle. As he reached over to stop the offensive resounding blare of his alarm the memory of the night before came crashing over him, bringing a smile to his lips and a shot of lust straight to his groin. He took a deep breath, remembering the vivacious curves of her body, the feel of her hot, soft lips…damn, the woman knew how to use those lips, and that tongue… Just the memory had him hot and ready for her again. He reached down, stroking the shaft of his erect cock thinking of her gorgeous bare ass, her scent on his tongue, and the way her pussy lips clung to his cock as has withdrew before plunging back into her silky depths. He brought himself quickly to release, but it was a poor substitute for the real thing.

She hadn’t told him her name when he’d asked. For that he was grateful. She was one woman he might want to see again, and that kind of complication was the last thing he needed in his life- especially right now. One-night stands were all that he was cut out for.

All that he would ever be cut out for.

He rolled out of bed and stumbled to the shower. A steaming hot shower and a strong cup of coffee brought him back to life. Somewhat. He’d drunk quite a bit the night before. Most military men were no stranger to a hangover, and Dean had learned long ago to shrug them off and carry on. He would make it through the day, running on willpower through the dehydration and sleep deprivation. Then tonight he would crash out early, and tomorrow he’d be good as new.

He quickly dressed in uniform. He could have worn civilian clothes today, but putting on the uniform seemed like a promise to himself that he would be back to work by the end of the day.

He was going to get cleared by mental health today, he was certain. Any shrink worth his salt would be able to see that there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with his head. A quick meeting and then he could get back to work. Yes, that was how it would go. It had to. The Navy was the only thing that mattered to him. It was his home, his family, his passion. The navy was what he lived for, the only thing that lent meaning to his solitary existence.

He wasn’t a monster at heart, but sometimes you had to become one in order to hunt them. He was, he reminded himself with an ironic twist of his lips, a damned hero. However, he was a hero without a cause at the moment.

Fuck, what a mess.

He realized—better than any other soul on Earth—that his last mission had gone to shit. He hadn’t needed his CO to tell him that. It wasn’t the first mission that had gone seriously sideways, but his losses were few and far between. That was why they had given him a task that was damned near impossible. He’d followed orders, done the impossible. And now? Now they were punishing him for it? Had they expected that shit to go off without a single god damned casualty?

They hadn’t called it a punishment of course. They’d just looked at him with sympathy—the fastest way to piss him off—told him that it had been a rough run (understatement of the fucking century) and that they needed him to take a knee for a few months. That alone he could have handled. He had some leave saved up and could have spent time on a beach somewhere, beautiful women at his side and a drink in his hand. He lived for the job, but surely with enough distraction he could have enjoyed some downtime.

They wanted him to see a shrink though. That was just fucking insulting. He’d been handling everything they’d thrown at him just fine on his own for 10 years, since the week after he’d turned eighteen and bid his hometown—and long string of foster homes—goodbye. He’d never needed a shrink before, and he didn’t fucking need one now.

On the drive to the clinic, Dean’s thoughts kept straying back to his mystery woman and each time it brought a small smile to his lips. He didn’t have a single regret from last night. He’d seldom had a partner who so readily agreed to his no strings, no commitment lifestyle.

A lot of women said they did, but inevitably he would catch them staring at him with the wistful look of someone gazing upon something they would never truly own. Not her though. She’d met him on his own ground and then some.

He almost wished he’d gotten her phone number. Not because he wanted anything more permanent, he assured himself. He just would have liked to keep the option of seeing her again open.

He could go back to the 6 D’s tonight, just to see if she showed up again. No. He wouldn’t do that. There wasn’t much of a chance of seeing her there again. He hadn’t before last night, after all. He was sure he would have noticed a woman that looked as good as she did.

The mental health clinic loomed before him, and Dean took a deep breath and he set aside his musings to face this small obstacle.
In and out,
he reminded himself.
No problem.
The wait was blessedly brief—a rare occurrence in military health facilities of any kind—and Dean found himself quickly questioned before being sent back to the waiting room until his assigned counselor was free.

“Petty Officer Mitchell?”

For a split second Dean thought he must still be drunk, or maybe hallucinating. The damn shrink sounded just like the woman from last night. He didn’t catch more than a glimpse as she moved back into her office, confident that he would follow.

He did, but what he saw left him rooted to the floor. There she was. The woman from last night. The woman he’d been fantasizing about all morning. Lust, followed by alarm tinged with anger shot through him.

He didn’t
do
emotional entanglements for a reason, but here stood the woman he’d been with last night, and he would be expected to tell her all the details of the most horrifying moments of his life. Just the thought made him feel vulnerable.

Nothing brought Dean to anger faster than feeling vulnerable.

He tamped down on the emotions. No sense in letting her know she’d unsettled him. He felt the emotions drain as he replaced them with the cocky grin that she’d found so appealing the night before. Somehow it felt wrong, like a stiff mask. He didn’t let the smile fade though.

His arrogant smirk was armor every bit as much as the flak vest and Kevlar he wore into enemy territory, and Dean Mitchell didn’t let
anyone
slip inside his defenses.

Ava felt a pang of sympathy as she read through the file of the first patient in her new clinic. She always hurt right along with the service men and women she counseled. She knew what it was to suffer the after effects of trauma.

Ava’s own brother had put a bullet through his head shortly after returning from the Middle East. She had just started high school and came home one day to find his bedroom door ajar. When she gently pressed it open… 

While logic told her that there was nothing she could have done—she’d still been a child at the time—there was still a part of her that felt like she should have done
something
, that somehow she should have known.

Ava couldn’t rewrite her family’s tragic history, but should could certainly help men and women suffering with PTSD. Thinking of her brother still hurt, but she was comforted by the thought that every day she might be sparing someone from the pain she suffered.

Many of her colleagues distanced themselves and had advised her to do the same. They’d told her that if she couldn’t turn it off to some degree then she’d never hold up. Their criticism hadn’t changed her though, it had only made her more reluctant to admit that she hurt, at least a little bit, right along with all of the service members she treated.

After she called Petty Officer Mitchell in, she turned back and seated herself behind her desk. Mentally she recalled the details of this case. Petty Officer Mitchell had been on multiple deployments as a Navy SEAL, all of them covert ops. Because of the nature of his missions she didn’t have access to many of the details. She knew enough of what he’d been through, though to be quite concerned.

Petty Officer Mitchell was a man who had been constantly surrounded by violence and death. Deaths had a way of piling up, one upon another, until they formed burdens heavier than any man should have to bear.

He was here because of his last mission. He’d led the squad, and the entire squad had been killed. One of the casualties was his own best friend, a man by the name of James Mills. An investigation had been subsequently launched.

While she was to provide her opinion on Mitchell’s mental fitness, Petty Officer Mitchell’s commander had been concerned because, Mitchell had no family and very few friends. The CO was worried about what losing the one person on Earth that Mitchell was close to would do to his mental health.

Truth be told, Ava was worried too, and she hadn’t even evaluated Mitchell yet. Support systems were a crucial part of working through PTSD, even more than most people realized. She glanced up expectantly as the door to her office closed, a polite, professional smile on her face.

The smile froze, along with the greeting on the tip of her tongue. The blood drained from Ava’s face. It was him. Dean.  She watched as lust, hurt, and anger quickly flashed over his face before he put the damper on his emotions.

This could not be happening. It just couldn’t.

What were the chances that the first one night stand she’d had in years would be with her very first patient? “Devil take it, please tell me I’m hallucinating,” she mumbled to herself.

“Oh you’re not, Beautiful.”

She could almost
feel
his hands on her as his eyes moved up and down her body. She couldn’t help remembering how it had felt last night to have his lips trace molten trails across her skin. An unwelcome ribbon of desire unfurled low in her belly, quickly followed by a blush that had to be visible since her cheeks felt like they were on fire.

“So, I guess I know your name now, don’t I, Doctor Andrews?”

She took a deep breath.
Don’t stare at his mouth when he talks. Be professional. You can do this.
She opened her mouth, intent on asking him to keep their encounters professional.

“Ava, not Doctor Andrews.” She cringed at the breathy, flirtatious tone the innocent words had taken on. Hell’s bells…she did
not
need this man calling her by her first name.

“Okay,
Ava
.” Somehow his lips forming her name seemed like a caress against her skin. Damn, this man was smooth…He was around the desk and standing before her in an instant. To her horror, she couldn’t stop her eyes from raking across finely-toned body hungrily as they traveled up to meet his gaze.

It was obvious from his cocky grin, and from the glimmer of craving in his eyes, that he hadn’t missed her perusal. He crouched slowly before her until his lips were a breath away from hers.

“I didn’t think I’d feel better after this visit, but I think you might be just what the doctor ordered.” He closed the distance between them then, and Ava didn’t stop his soft questioning kiss. She couldn’t fight the passion welling up in her at the memory of last night.

Her nipples became hardened pebbles at the memory of how his tongue had licked at them last night. As if he could read her mind he gently stroked them, teasing the nipples to harder peaks before he twisted them gently between his fingers.

The sound of her own breathless groan, torn from her throat against her will, broke through the haze that clouded her mind. She jumped up abruptly, tearing her mouth from his even as her body cried out at the loss of his touch.

“Dean…Petty Officer…Just… Please. Please have a seat!”

His questioning gaze searched her until he saw something that made him smile tightly and, thank goodness, take a seat in one of the padded leather chairs opposite her desk.

“Okay, Ava. How about, if you don’t want a repeat of last night—” A pointed look at her hardened nipples, still showing clearly through the fabric of her silk shirt, told her that he knew as well as she did what she really wanted. “Then at least give the okay for me to get back to work.”

She cleared her throat and willed herself to be the professional she knew she was, whether he wanted it or not. She could do this. There was no way she was going to blow off—or hand off to another psychologist—her first case. Not. Happening.

“I can’t do that, Petty Officer. I’m not putting my license on the line to lie and say—”

“I’m fine.”

“To say that you are fine, when I haven’t evaluated you. I know you’ve been on missions where men were lost before, but this time from what I understand, you lost a friend. Do you want to talk about James?”

Raw, naked agony showed in his eyes, but only for a split second. She could see the emotional wall that he’d built to hold in his pain and keep the world out. Then he was on his feet.

“No, Sweetheart. I don’t want to talk about James.” He walked around the desk and leaned over her, his huge biceps flexing as he grasped the arms of her office chair. “I don’t want to talk at all,” He whispered into her ear.

His mouth was on hers again, this time in a hard, bruising kiss that she couldn’t help but respond to completely. His hands were on her, everywhere, bringing back all of the sensations from last night. Without alcohol to dull the effect of his touch, every caress sent pleasure so intense it bordered on pain shooting through her core.

By the time he picked her up and sat her on her desk she was gone. She was beyond caring about proper. He pushed her skirt up around her full hips, then stroked his hand between her legs feeling how wet she was for him. It was all she could do when he slid one finger into her not to cry out. Instead she whimpered and writhed against him.

He seemed to know what she craved. One finger moved up after he moistened it with her glistening juices to lightly circle her tight bundle of nerves while the other hand traveled up her shirt to massage her large breast. He slid is finger in and out of her slick pussy until he brought her to the brink. When he whispered in her ear, “Come for me, baby,” she was gone. His words threw her over the edge and she came hard, her pussy pulsing around his hand before falling forward against his solid chest. Dean held her to him, kissed her forehead and stroked her hair gently, a bemused smile on his face.

She melted into him, but only for a moment.

“Well, doc…is this the initial work-up you give all your crazies?”

The caring man she’d glimpsed for an instant was gone. The moment was shattered, reality returned, and mortification filled her. She quickly jumped off her desk and set herself to rights with shaking hands. She couldn’t even bring herself to meet his eyes, instead focusing on the floor while she spoke.

“I think you need to leave Petty Officer. If you want to be cleared for duty, schedule another appointment.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Ava.” The tone was mocking, an obvious effort to distance himself after the lapse in his defenses he’d shown her in an unguarded moment.

“I’m serious…Will Thursday work for our next appointment? I can’t help you unless you want it, Dean.” She finally looked up to meet his eyes so that he could see her sincerity for himself.

His gaze was one of  pure masculine heat.

“Oh, I want it alright. You can help me
anytime
.”