Completing the Pass Page 14

  “That’s a sound I’ll never get tired of hearing. Let’s just get you a little closer,” he murmured before kissing her. His fingers never stopped playing until she clenched around him, close to the edge of orgasm. Then he slid from her—ignoring her protests—and grabbed the condom.

  It did her heart some good to realize he was a bit shaky as he tried to unwrap the protection. That she wasn’t the only one whose world was being turned upside down with this step they were taking together.

  Then he was sheathed and pushing inside her, and all thoughts of who shook, who was worried, who wanted whom first . . . vanished. His thickness stretched her until she felt incredibly full. She angled her hips just a little by raising her knees, and he sank in just a little farther.

  He hissed a breath. “Carri, God, you feel amazing.”

  “Back at ya,” she managed to whisper before he kissed her again and moved. Their hips bumped, silently learning each other’s preferences while their mouths fused together. One of his hands crept up, fingers trailing up her arm until they linked with hers above her head.

  The sweet, innocent gesture in the midst of their lovemaking—sex, Carri, it’s just sex—tipped her over the edge. No more slow, even pulsing. She thrust up against him, unable to help it. Their rhythm was disrupted until Josh pushed down hard against her, pressing her into the mattress, making it impossible for her to pulse back up.

  “Easy,” he whispered below her ear. “You’re about to send me into orbit, and we just got started.”

  She was already in orbit. How was he so damn calm? But his heavy weight over the top of her, his scent, the way his lips moved against the skin of her neck . . . it all soothed her into compliance.

  They lay there for who knew how many minutes, just breathing and soaking in each other’s presence. Carri ran her free hand down his back, squeezing his ass, chuckling when he tightened it on reflex. “Cute tush, Leeman.”

  That caused him to flex into her, and she groaned.

  “You want me to move,” he guessed.

  She stayed silent, but squeezed again.

  “It’s working,” he growled, teeth grazing her jugular before he pulled almost all the way out of her, until just the tip of his cock remained, then slammed back in. “You asked for it.”

  “I did,” she agreed, then gasped when he pulled out and came back in hard, fast, without any of the gentleness he’d shown that last few times. “Yes, just like that. Just . . . like that. Please.”

  And then she didn’t have any breath left to beg with. His thrusts pushed into her so deeply she thought for a second he might hurt her. But it always stopped just short of pain, staying fully in pleasure and making her ache and want and . . .

  “Josh,” she begged, working with him, grinding herself against him with every downward thrust. “Josh, Josh, Joooosh!” her voice rose with each word until she came again, rendering her speechless.

  “There it is.” His voice was almost smug, and his smile was, too, before he buried his face in the crook of her neck and let his climax own him.

  ***

  “Holy . . . shit.” Carri rolled over to stare at the ceiling, taking the covers with her out of habit. “That just happened.”

  “What, sex?” Josh rolled with her, grabbing the sheet and pulling it down to her waist. Any hope she had of modesty—useless, she knew, but still—were dashed. “If you have doubts about what happened, I clearly need a second chance. Let me redeem myself.”

  She pushed a palm against his shoulder as his grinning face came within an inch of hers. “Easy there, buster. That’s not . . . entirely what I meant.”

  He kissed her anyway, ignoring her protesting push, then propped himself up on one elbow and began drawing lazy circles over her stomach with one hand. Her ab muscles clenched and her flesh shivered with the contact.

  “Then what did you mean?”

  “I just mean that it’s you, and me, and . . .” She gestured to the general direction of the sheet-covered areas of their bodies. “That. And how, if someone went back in time and asked seventeen-year-old me if I’d ever have sex with Josh Leeman, I’d have had some very colorful language to spew about that idea.”

  “Because having sex with me was the worst thing you could ever think of,” he said dryly. “Being a teenage serial killer and all.”

  “Because having sex with you would have been exactly what my mom wanted.” She bit her lip when he raised a brow at that. “Fine. Not exactly what she wanted. I doubt Maeve would have been spinning circles at her teenager having sex. But you and me, together. Us. You know. The moms.”

  “Yeah. The moms.” He sighed and rolled onto his back. “Can we, maybe, not bring them into bed with us while the sheets are still warm? Is that a little too much to ask?”

  “How can I not? It’s this whole weird circle-of-life thing, and I’m not really a fan.”

  “So, even if I wanted to date you—which I didn’t ask you to, if you recall—you’d always say no, because your mom would like it.” He looked at her from the side. “You do realize how fucked up that sounds, right?”

  “I’ll see a therapist when I get back to Utah. But yeah, as fucked up as it sounds, it’s almost Pavlovian to do the opposite of what my mom wants me to do. At heart, I’m still the seventeen-year-old rebel.”

  “The rebel who came running home when her dad was in the hospital, and who still hasn’t left town because her dad needs around-the-clock care and she refuses to see him put in a home.” Softly, he gathered her to him. “Yeah. What a rebel. So hard-hearted and cruel to the needs of others.”

  “Stop,” she said, unconvincing even to herself.

  Josh just nestled her closer to him. “How about, just for today, while we’re in bed, we ignore everything outside of this room? Everybody else’s wants, needs, thoughts. Work and play and friends and family . . . gone. In here it’s you, and me, and our bodies and our needs and wants. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds . . .” Heavenly. Another thing seventeen-year-old Carri would never have said with regard to Josh Leeman. “Sounds doable.”

  “So pleased,” he said dryly, then kissed her. “Now, nap time.”

  “Nap time?” Incredulous, she sat up and looked down at him, ignoring how the sheet once again fell to bare her breasts. “You’ve got a naked woman in your bed and nothing else to worry about—your rules, not mine—and you want to sleep?”

  “The naked woman in question took a lot of energy out of me earlier. I need to be fully rested up for round two. Since I have nothing and nobody to worry about for a while, I want to give my first attempt a real run for its money.”

  There’s no way to beat round one, she wanted to say. But instead, she rolled her eyes and laid down beside him, cradled in his hold. God, it felt good to relinquish everything to someone else for a bit.

  His lips brushed her forehead sweetly as he said, “Just for a few minutes.”

  It was the last thing she heard before her system turned off for some much-needed rest.

  ***

  “How did we fall asleep?” Carri asked, still pulling at her hair with one of Josh’s combs from his apartment. She used his visor mirror to do the best she could with her appearance before he dropped her back off at home. “You’ve got to go faster.”

  Josh sighed. She’d asked the same thing when they’d woken at nine PM with a start. Neither had expected to be out for so long. Josh had been willing to take time for round two; Carri had flown into a panic and began dressing immediately.

  He sighed again at the lost opportunity.

  “I can’t . . . can’t fix my makeup when you’re driving like this,” she complained, doing something with an eye wide open that he didn’t want to know about.

  “First I was diving too slow. Now it’s too fast. Make up your mind, Gray.”

  She shot him a sideways glance t
hat spoke wonders . . . and none of the silent words were flattering.

  “Put the makeup away, then. Nobody’s going to know.”

  She shot him a look with uneven eyes—though damned if he knew what made them uneven—that said, You’re kidding, right? “One word: Maeve.”

  Okay, so Maeve would notice. Hell, with what her puffed lips and slightly panicked eyes projected, even Herb might snap out of it enough to realize what had happened. “Just put it away for a minute. I don’t want to have to rush to the hospital to have that colored-pencil thing surgically removed from your cornea. I’ll pull over before we get to your house and you can fix it in safety.”

  She made a huffing sound, but dropped the pencil back into the tiny case that sat on her lap.

  Thirty seconds later, he pulled into the back entrance of the neighborhood and once more into the driveway of the abandoned house. He put the car in park—no need to turn it off—and waited for Carri to flip the visor back down and get to work. Instead, she just stared at the house, as if she were somewhere else entirely. As if the house wasn’t what she was seeing, at all.

  “Carri. Carrington Gray, where the hell did you go?”

  “Hmm?” She blinked uneven eyes at him, then blinked once more, and clarity returned. “Right, sorry. This house, though . . . I don’t know. Something about it.” She lowered the visor and continued fixing her make up.

  He fiddled with the radio, not wanting to watch her because that might make her go slower, or stop and glare at him again. But he tried to catch glimpses out of the corner of his eye. He’d seen women put on makeup before. He’d had girlfriends. It wasn’t a total mystery to him. But Carri was so different in every way from any woman he’d ever been with before, he found himself desperate to watch. To see how she did it. Not to compare, but because he just wanted to know one more tiny piece of her that he didn’t already know. Wanted to own that memory of her, too.

  So to avoid getting caught, he looked at the house. And wondered what had entranced her about the damn thing. It looked like a god-awful mess. Weeds up to his kneecaps, peeling paint on every surface of the outside, what looked like a broken window upstairs—boarded up—and a driveway so cracked he debated if it was the site of an earthquake at some point.

  And yet, for a moment, he’d seen something as Carri had stared hard at the house. Something close to the way she’d looked at him, as he’d hovered over her in his bedroom not so long ago.

  Desire.

  He shifted in the driver’s seat, trying to subtly arrange himself so his emerging boner wouldn’t be so obvious.

  “Okay,” Carri said after another moment. “I think . . .” She ran her hands through her hair once more, fluffed, then nodded. “Close enough. Let’s roll.”

  He started to take the car out of park, then went on impulse and reached over to kiss her. She stiffened, then leaned into it, giving herself to his exploring tongue, cupping his face with one hand.

  When he pulled back, he smiled. “You look good, Carrington.”

  Her eyes were a little dazed when she rasped, “What was that for?”

  “Because I won’t be kissing you on your doorstep. And I want to.”

  That seemed to confuse her. As far as he was concerned, he could keep on confusing her until she gave in to the idea of them being together. Period.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Preseason game one, and Josh had his head in a toilet.

  Someone banged on the stall door and he choked out, “Just a sec,” before trying to quietly dry heave again. But, as he found out, there was no way to quietly dry heave. His eyes watered and his throat felt like it was on fire.

  “There are about fifty guys who are standing just on the other side of this bathroom wall who think you’re in here taking a pregame shit and not puking your guts out.” Trey’s voice was low, but firm from the other side of the metal stall door. “Don’t show your fucking fear, man. Tell your stomach who’s boss and move on.”

  Josh grumbled, but flushed and stood before opening the stall door to a pissed Trey. Or maybe not pissed so much as uneasy. It was in his team captain’s eyes . . . the concern that bubbled beneath the surface.

  “It’s just preseason. You’ve done this four times before.” Trey started to clap him on the back, then let his hand hover a few inches above his shoulder. “Uh, rinse first. Then pep talk.”

  Josh rolled his eyes, but went to the sink and did a quick rinse and hand wash before splashing his face with cold water. “It’s different.” He looked at Trey in the mirror. His teammate didn’t argue. “This time, it’s different. They’re looking at me like I’m going to lead a revolution. I’m not leading shit. I’m a Band-Aid over a bullet wound.”

  “Nah, man.” Trey stepped up to the counter beside him and gripped it, leaning toward the mirror. “You’re the gun. You’re the one who is going to walk out there and shoot bullets at every receiver we’ve got.”

  Josh thought about that for a moment. “We’re still talking metaphorically, right? Because I’m not licensed to carry.”

  Trey punched his throwing arm and shook his head. “Wrong gun, man. Wrong gun.”

  Josh followed him out into the main locker room, doing his best not to avoid eye contact.

  His quarterback coach approached him with a stern face. “You ready for this, son?”

  “Yeah.” He looked at his teammates who stood in a circle, waiting for Coach Jordan’s final pep talk. But their eyes weren’t on Coach Jordan. They were on him. “Let’s do this.”

  A few guys nodded in acknowledgement. He saw one teammate’s shoulders release in a sigh of relief.

  And all he could think, as they gathered shoulder pad to shoulder pad, knee to knee on the carpet with the Bobcats logo on it was . . .

  I need Carri.

  ***

  “Hey, Daddy.” Carri sank onto the couch beside her father, laptop in hand. She let the reclining leg rest pop up and started to open her Internet browser.

  “I’m not changing the channel,” Herb warned her sharply. “The Bobcats’ first preseason game is on, and it’s staying on.”

  “Got it.” Carri shrugged innocently, then blinked at her father’s attire. “Where in the world did that shirt come from?”

  Herb looked down for a moment, then back up at her and blinked, emptiness in his eyes.

  Oh Daddy, no, please . . . Her gut clenched just a little, as it always did when she sensed him slipping away.

  Then he shook his head and lifted one shoulder. “Josh brought it by sometime last year. Or maybe the year before. It’s his number, you know.”

  She’d known Josh’s number was eleven since he’d first joined the Bobcats. But as she’d always pretended she knew nothing of Josh’s career to her parents. She just smiled and did her own one-shoulder shrug. “Good to know. Go eleven, and stuff.”

  “And stuff,” Herb muttered, turning the volume up a little more on the chatter from the commentators. “Maeve! Better get your sweet tush in here before the game starts or you’re gonna miss our boy!”

  Our boy. Carri had to pry her fingers off her laptop in order to start surfing the Internet. “Despite your desires, Dad, Josh isn’t your son.”

  “He could be,” Herb snapped back, obviously annoyed with her interruptions of his precious football game. “If you’d just give the man a chance. Why are you always so stubborn, Carrington?”

  “Carri,” Maeve said softly from the doorway. “Could you help me with something?”

  Carri looked at her father, but he’d already turned back to the screen and tuned her out. With a sigh, she left the laptop on the couch and walked toward the kitchen, scooting as fast as she could out of her father’s direct line to the television. “What’s up, Mom?”

  “Don’t push him,” Maeve said instantly, pouring a lemonade and pushing the glass into Carri’s hand. The s
udden chill against her laptop-warmed hands sent a shiver up her arm. “He’s having a good day, but his temper’s shorter than it used to be. Just let it go.”

  Carri wanted to argue, wanted to push. Wanted the back father she grew up with, the one who would argue and push her and debate with her, force her to see another side, listen to hers, and then agree to disagree with a hug and a kiss. That Herb was growing more and more distant by the day. “Mom—”

  “Oh, I hear them starting. Go, go, go!” Maeve pushed at her back so Carri was propelled into the living room. “And if you can’t stand listening to the game without a word, then take your computer elsewhere. There are seven other rooms in this house.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Carri slunk back to her seat, relieved to find her father contentedly watching the coverage of the Bobcats game. Though what Carri knew about the sport from a technical standpoint could fill a thimble, she kept one ear open while she opened up some webpages and did a little mindless browsing.

  “And Leeman’s got a tough road ahead of him,” a huge black man with short-cropped graying hair and a pearly smile said from behind a desk somewhere. Carri glanced over the top of her laptop screen, trying not to be too obvious about it. “He’s a regular starter in these preseason matchups, as are other second-string quarterbacks.”

  Second-string . . . How rude.

  “But with Trey Owens not even fully in uniform, I think the Bobcats are sending a message here. Leeman is our go-to. I think it shows he’s not going to be back for a while from this ankle injury.”

  “I don’t know if that’s quite the message they’re sending,” another commentator, with a horrid mustard-yellow sports jacket argued, leaning forward and gathering a few papers. “I think they’re just saving Owens, like always. Why bother having the guy suit up when he’s going to see zero field time this go-round? Owens is the kind of player coaches dream about. Hardworking, dedicated. There’s no way he’s going to miss out on the season over a little ankle sprain.”

  “I’ve heard, and this is just rumor,” a third, smaller man said from the corner of the table, “that Owens is leaning heavily on the team using Leeman. Whether that’s for his injury’s benefit or some personal gain, who knows. It’s fishy, if you ask me.”