Page 41 of Playing for Keeps

“That’s right. I forgot.” She gives me a teasing smile. “You’ll have to forgive me, my brain is a little foggy because I’ve been fucked senseless by your mouth.”

I laugh. “It’s true.” She laughs, it’s a giddy laugh like a teenage girl and I wonder what her teenage years were like. Nothing conventional like mine.

“Tell me about life with your father, Chloe—and I don’t mean the stories that you tell people, I mean the constant traveling, not having friends your age, dealing with dirty old men and late nights after games when all you wanted to do was go home and sleep—except you couldn’t go home because you were staying in another motel somewhere in an unfamiliar bed.”

She stares at me with something like amazement on her face.

“Looks like I don’t need to tell you a thing. You have it all figured out.” She bites her lip and looks away.

“I’m sorry—you’re right. I shouldn’t make assumptions. Tell me about it.”

She leans into me and shrugs. “A lot of it was like you said. It wore on me, left me without much comfort, except I didn’t know that’s what I needed. A home, family.”

“Your mother.”

Looking up at me with a vulnerable, almost wounded look, she says, “I never really knew what it was like to have a mother. She was gone when I was so young. But Grandma was there for a while, in between road trips. She begged for my dad to leave me with her for longer, but he said he couldn’t bear it. I heard them argue when I was eleven after he’d been fired from his last print job and he’d got a new job in broadcasting after a short stint on a radio show. They liked his personality.” The pride on her face transforms her from vulnerable, banishing the wounded underbelly she carries around with her. But the reprieve is momentary.

She shares her broken heart unabashedly, telling me about losing her mother when she was really young, living with her grandmother off and on.

“But Grandma died soon after that and Dad took me on the road with him permanently and we didn’t look back. Even during my college years, I went on the road with him on summer breaks. Until he got sick a few years ago. Then we stayed put in Georgia in Grandma’s house. It had always been our home base.” She paused and got an intense look, almost guilty, “I still own that house. I always will.”

“He was too young to die,” I say. She shoots a look at me and there’s a moment of recognition between us, a spark of connection that goes beyond the lusty physical thing we have. I know she’s a reporter, but for the life of me I can’t see past the beautiful, giving, loving woman, strong to a fault and hurting inside with fresh sorrow I recognize though mine is buried and overgrown with success and new friendships. And this burning lust that I can’t get past. My hand reaches out for her all by itself, knowing what the rest of me is still grappling with.

That I need to feel her, to get a taste of her elemental womanly core or I’ll go crazy with wanting, not remembering why I shouldn’t. Not giving a fuck right now.

Reaching my hand between her legs, I nuzzle her. “Why can’t I keep my hands off you?” I hold her pussy and she throws her head back against the couch, surrendering herself to me completely, trusting me.

“I want to watch your face as you come,” I whisper, breathing the words into her ear, the soft shell turning pink as I speak. “I want to see your expression as an earth-shattering orgasm takes you, chasing away all the loss and the hurt.” I gently circle my finger through her still moist folds, finding the nub, whispering all the unguarded thoughts I have about her in her ear, about how strong she is, how beautiful and sexy, because I can’t get over how much I’m into her. I tell her how much I admire her passion, how absolutely she loved her father, and her ambition to honor his legacy.

I don’t tell her how much I identify with her, feel the identical ambition to make up for my uncle Frank’s death and to honor his legacy of giving all he had left of his own ambitions to me.

But then I probably don’t need to tell her because she knows. That’s why she made that donation to my foundation. Because she gets it. She gets me. I take her mouth with mine and pinch her clit, making her cry out into my mouth and arch under my hand as I continue to stroke her, caress and flick her sensitive nub until she wraps her arms and legs around me in a shuddering grip.

“Come back to bed with me, Tate,” she whispers in my ear.

Shaking my head, I say, “I’ve already gone too far.”

“And not far enough.”

“You’re a lot to handle. This is . . .” I search for a word that won’t offend her because I don’t want to take advantage of her vulnerable state. She waits. “Complicated,” I finally say. “This attraction—or whatever it is—that we have is . . . unhealthy.” I force the words from my conscience. “We’re enemies.” I look at her, wanting her to understand—and not wanting to hurt her because, Lord help me, I care about her.

“Not enemies,” she says, sitting up, her face stalwart, the vulnerable sex kitten gone.

“All right. Then on opposing sides.”

“Like players on opposing teams? Where you can shake hands and be friends when you’re not playing?”

“Except I don’t want to shake your hand. I want to shake your world, Chloe, to bury myself in you until I don’t know the meaning of the word enemy or what a reporter is.” I tell myself I’m not admitting anything to her she doesn’t already know as she reaches for my cock.

“Stay, Tate.”

I don’t know how I have it in me to say no, to stand up and walk out her door, to leave her raw and needy. Those violet eyes of hers pleading and hurting. I do what I don’t want to do, what I didn’t realize I’d be doing—hurting her, hitting her while that soft underbelly of hers is vulnerable and open. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m the worse kind of SOB.

But standing in her doorway, looking at her, unmoving as she gathers her wits, my survival instincts are too ingrained when it comes to media and protecting myself, my team, and my family from the enemy. So I go. Feeling like a piece of shit as I see her close her eyes, head back on the couch, shedding a tear, before I pull the door shut behind me.

Fucking damn shit.Am I really this much of a bastard? But I don’t stop as I walk down the stairs and out to my car. I am a full-fledged fucking bastard. But I’m whole. No piece of me bitten off by any reporters today.

Human beings. Reporters are human beings.

That’s what my dad, of all people, tells me when he’s in a philosophical mood, away from my mother. Chloe is flesh and blood and I know it, know exactly how vulnerable she is and that’s what makes me question everything: my truths, my fears, and my judgment.

That’s what drives me to the edge of exploding.