The Devil in Denim (23 page)

As good as he looked, she was willing to bet a large sum of money that the view was going to be even better without a stitch on.

She got to her feet, walked a few steps, then, without really thinking what she was doing, sank to her knees in front of him, tugging at his zipper.

“Maggie?” he said.

“Ssh, I’m busy.” She pulled the jeans down firmly and let him step out of them. Leaving him in plain black cotton boxer briefs that were currently having the limits of the manufacturing tolerance of their elastic tested. She smiled. Alex was a big guy. Tall. Well built. Apparently that extended to all of him. Including the parts that were currently telegraphing that they were pretty damned happy to see her.

“Maggie, as much as I’m in favor of doing anything that involves your current position,” Alex said, “I’m more in favor of finding out exactly where in this apartment you keep your bed.”

She craned her neck back to look at him. “You sure about that?” She laid her hand over his straining erection, leaned closer, and blew on the fabric right where the outline of the head of his cock was clear against the tight black cotton. “Really?”

He made a strangled noise. “Really.”

“But you got to do third base the other day and I didn’t.”

“We’ll come back to it,” he said with a determined tone. “Trust me, it’s not going anywhere.”

She arched an eyebrow. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

“You can do whatever you want to me,” he said fervently. He reached down and helped her to her feet. “Just take me to the damned bedroom.”

“So conventional.”

“So much for Saint Maggie.” His delighted smile made her warm all over. “Call me old-fashioned but I prefer comfortable for first encounters. I’ll give you all the unconventional your heart desires after this.”

“Truly?”

“Didn’t I say your wish was my command?”

“Makes me wish I had a gray silk tie handy,” she quipped.

“Wouldn’t that mean I was the one doing the commanding?” he said.

She grinned at him. “That depends what I do with the tie, now, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so. Okay. I hate ties but I swear I’ll go shopping tomorrow if that’s what you want. Only, bedroom. Please. Now.” He bent and picked up his jeans, pulled his wallet from the back pocket.

“Are you planning on leaving me a tip?” she teased.

He fished in the wallet, pulled out two condoms. “Planning on leaving you unimpregnated.”

She fluttered her eyelashes. “I do like a man who comes prepared. But I’m on the pill.”

“Planning on not leaving you with anything else either. Not that I have anything else,” he added hastily. “Had my last physical when I was setting up the financing for the Saints. One hundred percent certified in good working order. And the condoms are new.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Feeling sure of yourself, were you?”

He grinned. “Not sure. Hopeful.”

“Good to know.” She reached over and plucked the condoms out of his hand. “Still, better safe than sorry.”

“Woman after my own heart. Except for your steadfast refusal to show me the damned bed.”

“Patience is a virtue.”

“You’re the saint, I’m the devil, remember? I have no virtue.”

Her eyes drifted down toward his boxers again. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

He shook his head. “Okay. That does it.” He bent down and scooped her up. “This damned apartment can’t be that big. I’ll find the bed myself.”

She twined her arms round his neck. “Excellent plan. But I’ll give you a hint. It’s the last door on the right at the end of the hall.”

“Good hint. Now shut up so I don’t drop you while I decipher it.”

She laughed as he moved faster than she would’ve thought possible for a man with an armful of woman toward the hall. Thankfully she’d left her bedroom door open and there was no need for him to put her down to negotiate the door. At this point she wasn’t sure she wanted him to ever put her down again.

Then they got to the bed. She looked down at the peacock-green comforter, thought about everything that they could do on a mattress versus her current position.

“Unhand me, devil,” she said.

“Whatever you say.” He tossed her onto the bed, shucked off his shirt, and crawled up the mattress toward her. She tossed the condoms she’d been gripping onto the bedside table and rolled onto her back, reaching for him.

“Come back here.”

Their noses bumped as they came together for a fast and frantic kiss. Suddenly, here in the bedroom, they were all elbows and fingers and incoherent sentences as they lost underwear and slid and rolled and twisted, desperate for skin on skin.

Surely someone had let a bomb off beneath her skin? Heat rushed through her as she pressed against Alex, kissing him madly, drinking him down and letting him devour her in turn. An explosion would explain the roaring in her ears and the heat and the dizzying swirl of her senses. But if there’d been an explosion there wouldn’t be the pleasure singing beneath it all. The pleasure beating between her legs and pulsing in her breasts and flooding her skin everywhere he touched. The pleasure that was gradually becoming louder and more insistent and drowning out everything except the urgency.

She rolled and reached and groped for a condom, tearing the foil open with her teeth and rolling it onto the length of Alex’s cock with as much speed as she could muster. She wanted to take her time. Wanted to explore the contrasts of him more. Hard muscle. Hot skin. The glorious masculine solidity and scent of him.

But that would have to wait. Because the song had changed to a frantic beat of “now now now” and she found herself on her back once more, drawing him down and twining herself around him as he positioned himself and then thrust into her.

God.
Yes
.

For a moment the world stopped. Frozen. Just the two of them. Just hot green eyes meeting hers with a look of dazzled pleasure and the pulse of him inside her. One long moment and then the urgency built again. Alex began to move, slow and steady and sure at first, mouth on hers, one hand slipping between them to find her clit and push her further … higher. Deeper. She couldn’t catch her breath, wasn’t sure of where she was anymore. Didn’t know anything except the man above her and the sensation inside her and the need to stay here and now and move with him as his breath roughened and so did hers and they went faster and harder. Messy and sweaty and so, so good.

He pushed her right out of her head. Out of all the worry and the thinking until she was just Maggie. Maggie drowning in pleasure and tensing, reaching for the sensation that was building and building and building until it hit and she held onto him as she went over the edge and disappeared.

Chapter Thirteen

The clattering buzz of his phone woke him. Alex squinted one eye open and then looked toward the phone where it was jiggling over the surface of the bedside table. Not his bedside table. He registered the warm weight against his side.

Maggie
.

She murmured something in her sleep and curled closer against him, and he was suddenly far less interested in whoever was on the other end of the phone line. Surely they’d give up?

As if to validate his theory, the phone went still and silent. Alex started to roll back to Maggie when it buzzed into life again.

Shit.

That wasn’t a good sign.

He scooped the phone up and looked at the caller ID. Lucas.

He pushed himself out of bed, grabbed his boxers off the floor, and headed for the bedroom door, not wanting to wake Maggie. “Yes?”

“Are you near a TV?” Lucas asked.

“Not exactly. Why are you calling so early? It’s Saturday.” He tried to hold the cell still while he pulled on the boxers.

“It’s nearly nine,” Lucas said. “Hardly early.”

It was when you’d had very little sleep because you’d finally gotten your hands on the woman who’d been driving you crazy. But that wasn’t exactly an excuse that he could use with Lucas. “I went to the game, remember? Late night.”

“Are you near a TV yet?”

“Lucas, just tell me what the fuck is going on.”

“You want to be near a TV. Because Will Sutter is holding a press conference.”

“Sutter? He was at the game last night.”

“Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Did you, by any chance, do anything to piss him off?”

“Not really. Why?” Fuck. What had Sutter done?

“Because he’s launching a bid for the Saints. Says we don’t have the votes and that he’ll pay more. Does he have more?”

Alex scraped through his brain for the little he knew about Will Sutter and Sutter Corp. Will’s dad had been good at what he’d done. His group of companies had been quite the empire. He must’ve left Will a few billion at least, though most of that would be in the value of the companies themselves rather than cold hard cash. So the question was how well Will had been managing the companies since his father had died. And how much cash he could scrape up. More than their offer?

“It’s possible,” he admitted. “Particularly if he’s got some joint investors.” Maggie’s living room. TV. Check. Now he just had to find the remote. And his jeans.

“Nothing about that yet. Piss anyone else off lately?”

Half the Saints organization probably. Anyone who liked Tom Jameson. Not to mention he had a few other non-baseball-related deals in the works. “Probably. But I wouldn’t have thought that anybody would want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to take something away from me. What about you? Chop off the wrong leg or something?” He found his jeans, yanked them on, then looked around for the remote.

“Funny man. No. Completely free of vengeful patients. Not even the faintest whiff of a malpractice suit.”

No remote on the coffee table. Who didn’t leave the remote on their coffee table? “Maybe Mal … no. It’s Sutter. It might not even be about us. He apparently used to work for the Saints and the Preachers. Tom fired him. Maybe he’s just got a grudge.” He flipped up the couch cushions. Score. One remote. Hopefully the right one. Maggie’s entertainment system was as complicated as his.

He pressed the power button and the TV came on. “What channel?”

Lucas told him and he flipped to it. There was nothing to see yet … they were playing the morning news, but there was an information banner running across the screen that said the press conference was scheduled for nine
A.M.
According to the time showing in the top corner of the screen that left him about fifteen minutes.

“Have you told Mal?” he asked Lucas.

“He’s next.”

Okay. Alex thought fast. “I’ll talk to Tom, see if he knows anything about this. There’s not enough time to meet up before the press conference so just watch it where you are and then we can get together. Come up with our strategy. I’m in the city, where are you?”

“My place.”

Alex did mental math, trying to figure out how long he needed to call Tom and then make it back to his apartment. He didn’t want Lucas and Mal arriving before he did and figuring out he hadn’t spent the night at home. “Okay. Let’s meet at my place in an hour.”

“An hour?” Lucas sounded surprised. “How long is this call with Tom going to take? Wait,” his voice turned suspicious. “Where are you?”

“Watching TV,” Alex said evasively. “And now I’m hanging up. I need to call Tom.” He hung up before Lucas could process. He started to hit the button to bring up Tom’s number but then remembered Maggie, sleeping down the hallway. He should wake her but the clock was ticking.

“Fuck,” he muttered again, and then dialed Tom.

*   *   *

There should be a man in her bed. Maggie wasn’t sure what time it was or exactly how much sleep she’d had but she was clear on that particular detail. Her body protested in a sleepy, pleased manner as she rolled over and the man who’d put her muscles through the workout causing that protest should’ve still been beside her. Even ready for another round though she wasn’t sure that was humanly possible unless he really was the devil or possessed of a supply of little blue pills. Somehow she didn’t think Alex Winters was the kind of guy to turn to little blue pills.

Nope. He’d managed to do damned fine work au naturel last night. Several times.

She grinned at the memories, then shivered as remembered pleasure swept over her.

Where exactly was he? She wanted more. He wouldn’t have left … surely? He’d pulled her against him as they’d finally succumbed to sleep, tucking her body into his and curling his arm around her protectively. Not the actions of the man who was desperate to make a getaway.

Hoisting herself upright, she listened. He wasn’t in the bathroom but she thought she could hear something in the apartment.

She found a pair of Saints boxers and a shirt and pulled them on, pausing in front of the mirror to see if her bedhead was dire enough to need rectification before she ventured out.

But her curls seemed as pleased with the night’s activities as she was … and hadn’t morphed themselves into an imitation of Medusa overnight. She decided the smudged eye makeup was sexy, not messy, and that, really, Alex wasn’t going to notice anyway. Not if she made him breakfast and dragged him back to bed.

It was Saturday. Surely they could take a lazy Saturday? Figure out a plan on how to handle what had happened.

Because she knew she wanted it to happen again, but she was also damn sure that she wasn’t ready for the fact she’d slept with Alex to become public knowledge. So they needed a plan on how to be discreet.

A sneaking-around plan. That sounded good. Not forever. Just until they figured out what might happen next.

And that part she wasn’t ready to think about so she put it out of her head with a mental shove—and stuck out her tongue at the inner therapist who was busy writing notes about denial and facing challenges directly—and went in search of Alex.

She found him, not in the kitchen as she’d half expected, but instead parked on her sofa, face intent as he studied her TV. His hair was rumpled and stubble shaded his jaw. He wore jeans but no shirt, and his feet were bare. He looked like a man who’d spent half the night having hot sex. But he didn’t look happy.