Page 36 of The Virgin Game Plan (Rules of Love 2)
I move down to her eyelids.
Leaving gentle kisses there.
She whimpers.
I take my time, letting her know how I have missed this. She responds with body language, inching closer, shuddering, sighing. I drag my thumb down her cheek.
“So soft, so sexy,” I whisper.
“Kiss me, please,” she says as she trembles.
“I’m getting there,” I say as I kiss her jaw, inching along her gorgeous face. Then I pull back, taking in her expression.
It’s one of exquisite torture.
Her lips part. Her breath comes fast.
I need to have her.
I capture her mouth with mine, and I kiss those red lips.
Moaning and sighing, we consume each other like lovers reunited.
She tastes sweet and sultry, like the woman I couldn’t get enough of. I drag her against me, hauling her as close as can be, feeling the press of her body as I kiss her with the same ferocity I felt that night.
Is this lust?
Desire?
Two years of horniness, pent-up and unleashed?
Who knows? Who cares?
All I know is this kiss is going to my head.
We kiss hard and passionately, then slow and soft, and when we break apart, I laugh softly—a relieved, joyful laugh.
“Nice to see you again,” I whisper.
“It’s very good to see you,” she says, and that mix of sexy yet still innocent is such a delicious cocktail. A drink that makes me want more, makes me want to get closer to her.
I play with a strand of her hair. “Want to pick up where we left off?”
“I do.”
“Good. Because I want to see you, take you out, take you home with me. I want to start up again,” I tell her, determined to make this happen. When your What-If Woman walks back into your life, you don’t let her go. Especially since we’ve got the same click, the same connection as before. Or maybe, a connection that’s even stronger.
One we both want to nurture.
“I want all that too,” she says, seeming giddy over the prospect of an us. The us we wanted to have before—the chance to date, to be a thing, to be more than one night.
We were never going to be a hookup then, and we aren’t now either.
Funny how I was with my college girlfriend for a year and never felt this intensity. But with Reese, I feel so much damn certainty, so much possibility.
I won’t let her slip away this time.
No way.
Here in the alcove, we talk, catching up on life, as she tells me about her friends and her new job, then asks me more questions about baseball and what I’ve been up to.
I tell her the good news I got just before the party about the new manager. “I’ve been on edge, hoping for a great new manager. Someone to help revamp the team. And this guy is terrific. I even met him a year or so ago, randomly in Seattle. And he gave me a great piece of advice about my stance that changed my game.”
“That’s awesome,” she says, eyes alight with excitement. “Who is he?”
“Edward Thompson,” I say, still stoked that he’s coming to town. “He has a great reputation from what I know of him. Solid utility player over eight years. Terrific minor league manager. Amazing broadcaster.”
All the color drains from her face. She gulps. Winces. Clears her throat.
“What’s wrong, beautiful?”
A deep line creases her forehead. “He’s my father.”
14
Reese
That’s my father for you.
He can ruin a night faster than a speeding bullet, crush new romance more powerfully than a locomotive, and destroy hope in a single headline.
He’s Super Dream Destroyer.
So typical of the man to find a way to steal my joy yet again. I bet this is the real reason he returned to California, not for Becky’s job. I bet he’s been squirreling away this little nugget of news to spring whenever it suited him, never thinking how it would affect anyone else.
Clenching my jaw, I start to grind my teeth, something I haven’t done since I was younger.
Something I did when I was thirteen, when I discovered he was cheating. I’d gone one evening to a minor league game he was coaching—at his invitation. Attending was no hardship because I loved baseball—loved it to the marrow of my bones.
My mom was working late at the hospital, so I went alone. My volleyball game was canceled, so I left San Francisco early, catching a bus to Sacramento. When I arrived at the ballpark, I found him locked in an embrace with a woman who was not my mother, his wife.
Tears stinging my eyes, hurt squeezing my chest, I turned around, caught another bus home, and told him later I’d never made it to the ballpark.
I could barely sleep that night.
And the next, and the next.
In bed, nothing drowned out the siege of questions. Do I tell Mom? Do I tell Dad I know? Do I tell my sister?
