Qualified: A Sports Romance (13 page)

Allie snatched her hand back and clung to her
purse. A quick gasp of breath escaped from her parted lips. His sense of humor
put her completely off balance. At least she assumed he must be teasing. The
thought that Marc might be serious made her feel like she was treading in water
way beyond her depth. She fixed him with a scolding look in an attempt to
remain professional. “Not if you say it like that.”

She may have assumed she was safely
on shore, but that perception was dashed during the drive back to the apartments.
Allie had a hard time concentrating on her weave through the evening traffic
with the way Marc was looking at her from the passenger seat. For once he
plugged his music into the stereo. The rock songs of his playlist were a bit
older than her generation, but they were still familiar. He reached over at one
point to brush a fallen lock of her hair from the heated flush of her cheek.

Allie parked in the assigned garage spot and helped
Marc tug his bag out from the car. She raced him for the doors but his long
stride won out. He held them open with a roll of his left shoulder so he
wouldn’t have to use his injured hand. She turned to lean her back against the
elevator’s side once they got in, watching him from across the small space. He
looked a little like he was smiling.

“Did they give you anything,” Allie blurted as the
thought occurred as an explanation for the rare expression.

“Ibuprofen.” So nothing hallucinogenic or euphoric.

Allie stalled at the elevator’s threshold once it
reached their floor. She peeked furtively towards Marc’s door, and then turned
a longer look in the other direction. Nervous butterflies churned in her
stomach. She could make some excuse and go home to her own apartment. It would
be the safe thing to do. The predictable thing.

“You were going to wrap me after I ice,” Marc
helpfully reminded her.

“Right.” Allie left the elevator to follow in his
wake.

Marc tossed his keys in a basket by the door once
they entered his living room and immediately started shedding clothes. Allie
took a second to get her bearings in the floorplan. It was a flip from the one
she shared with Kelsey. “Do you have a mixing bowl or something?” she asked as
she moved towards the kitchen.

“I’ll get it.” Marc didn’t leave her any space as
he brushed around her. She felt the warmth of his skin against her back through
the thin cotton of her shirt.

“Careful …” She started to remind him not to
use his right hand, but she stopped when she saw he was using his left to flick
open a cabinet. “I’ll get the ice.” Allie went to the freezer and started to
shuffle through the trays to find one that was mostly full. She brought it over
to crack into the large bowl Marc set beside the sink, grabbing the extender
faucet afterward to add water.

His hand was resting on her left hip. When she
turned her chin over her shoulder, Marc was right there behind her. She
struggled to remember what she’d come to the apartment to do. “Do you need help
with the tape?” Allie asked.

“I can get it.” He let go of her so that he could
pick at the old binding on his right fingers.

But he wasn’t gone. The curve of his body pressed
him hard against her rear and Allie had to bite down on a gasp. Marc probably
did this all the time, she told herself while her thoughts raced with giddy
uncertainty. She had seen girls climbing on him,
licking
him, without
Marc having to do so much as smile at them.

Yet he had gone home with her. He’d gone home with
her in Colorado, too, and she’d seen him ease his impressive walls enough to
admit that he cared about being on the water polo team. So Allie knew he could
care. Had she just imagined it, that he seemed upset to see his teammate’s name
on her phone? It was Marc whose room she wanted to go back to that night. It
was Marc whose hands she wanted in her hair, and whose dark eyes she wanted to
search until she found the secret worth such indomitable defenses. It was Marc …

Allie fumbled at the faucet to make sure the water
was slammed to the cold side and dunked her own fingers into the bowl. As if
she needed to test that ice was actually freezing. It didn’t have as much of an
affect on her pulse as she may have hoped.

Lindsey had given her the responsibility of taking
care of Marc. He was still a subject in the trial she was helping conduct. She
couldn’t forget. “Why don’t you go sit down,” Allie suggested through the
tightness which had laced into her throat.

“Can you handle that?” Marc asked. “It’s big.”

He probably meant the bowl, but he was still rubbed
up against her and Allie’s mind was short circuiting. His voice vibrated in her
ear and she was too aware of his mouth. Too aware of her own mouth. She licked
her lips and swallowed awkwardly. She forgot that the water was on until it
started to spill out over the tight-curled grip of her knuckles at the bowl’s
edge. “Fuck.”

She heard Marc’s breath exhale heavy behind her,
like that was the suggestion he’d rather take.

“Go sit down,” Allie commanded with more
deliberateness than she felt. A glance to the side found where the guys’
kitchen table was dominated by a bowl of fruit topped off daily by the
housekeeping service. She pointed towards one of the chairs. “I can do it.”

Marc didn’t shift.

It was a risk, looking up into his eyes. Allie
didn’t know what would happen. Once their gazes latched, she felt Marc’s hand
grip hard at her nape.

They
must
have given him something
hallucinogenic and she was experiencing the bystander effect. Marc Belmont was
going to kiss her, and Allie was going to let him.

Until a little look of triumph flickered into his
expression.

All he cared about was the win, she reminded
herself. Kelsey had suggested that he was the reigning champion when it came to
notches on his bedpost. Although how that fit with what he said in the
restaurant about his ex cheating on him, Allie didn’t know.

She lifted a chill-dampened hand to press at his
chest. His solid, heartbeat-holding chest.

Marc was her patient.

Lindsey was trusting her.

“Go,” she said firmly.

Marc paused, a faint laugh chuckling on his breath.
His chin tipped as he looked at her incredulously. But the pressure released
and he paced the few backward steps that brought him to the chair. He dropped
into it heavily, his gaze never losing its fix upon her.

Allie rolled her wrist against her forehead to
brush off an escaped tendril of hair and tried to focus upon her patient care.
Her hands were shaky as she tipped the bowl to slop some of the water back into
the sink before carrying it across to the kitchen table. She tried to stay as
far out of Marc’s reach as possible when she set it up beside his hand.

“Twenty minutes,” Allie ordered as she got out her
phone to set a timer.

“Are you just going to stand there and stare at
me?” Allie hadn’t gone far enough. Marc caught a toe behind her ankle and
reached forward to hook her waistband with his good hand. “How am I going to
stay entertained while I sit here?”

“I have to get ready to wrap it,” Allie protested.
There wasn’t much strength in the hand she pushed off his shoulder. She was
lost again in his eyes.

“That will only take you a second.” Marc was
undeterred. “We have more than a thousand of them.”

“I have to report to Lindsey,” Allie tried as a
last resort of reason. Her traitorous fingers were finding their way up the
slope of Marc’s shoulder to the muscled curve of his neck.

“You can tell her that you’ve earned my compliance
with your treatment plan.” His good hand pressed along the weakening arc of her
spine.

“You’re not compliant at all,” Allie breathed, but
it was more like a marvel than a censure.

Marc smiled.

A little gasp escaped her lips as his fingers
crawled beneath the hem of her shirt to spark electricity along her spine.

“This is a terrible idea,” Allie whispered. All of
her arguments seemed distant and his arm was right there, feeling so good as he
held her. She found herself dipping to satisfy her want of his seldom-smiling
lips.

Allie whimpered as he arched into her. She drowned
in the intensity of his kiss. Her phone clattered to the floor and she couldn’t
even worry about it. Her last act of responsibility was the run of her hand
down his arm, ensuring that he kept his knuckles dunked in the bowl of ice. The
chill water did nothing to cool the heat of his mouth which pressed to taste
deeply from hers. From their startled splay along the line of his neck, her
fingers twined into the soft-lick curls of his hair and held him to her.

Some part of Allie was aware that she could not
kiss him forever. But that seemed less important than the heady heat and hunger
Marc poured into her. His hand drew a firepath beneath her shirt as he felt greedily
along her skin and up to the satin cupping her breast. In timelessness she was
lost from her thoughts, dragged instead into the animal now of this man. A body
alive with force and heat.

The timer would have been a shrill enough
awakening. Worse was the door and the sound of Adam’s voice. “Fucking hell, I
could sleep for a week.”

Marc hardly reacted, but Allie jolted sharply away.
Failing to keep professional distance was bad enough without being caught in
the act. She wiped her wrist at her mouth and fussed her shirt straight and
checked her hair. Like somehow she could get her ponytail to cover her damning
blush.

Marc was still gripping at her waist. “Why don’t
you start now?” he called to Adam. His eyes never left Allie.

She could see the trace of her kiss shining at his
lips. Allie wanted to reach out and wipe it away, but beneath her shame was a
yearning to keep touching him. She worried that if she fell into Marc’s lap she
would never escape. With both her hands she peeled his fingers from her waist
instead. He only put up a little resistance.

“You okay, Marc?” Adam was coming into the kitchen,
his bag thumping as he tossed it over the back of the couch on the way in. “I
heard your hand was fucked up. Oh. Hey, Allie.”

“I was just leaving,” Allie said in panic. She bent
hurriedly to scoop up her phone from where it had fallen on the water-spotted
floor. The minutes were still ticking down to zero.

Adam turned her a briefly confused look.

“Caught the ball badly this morning,” Marc said
without missing a beat. “My hand was giving me trouble in the gym and so
they’re making sure it’s not broken.” His eyes slid from Adam to where Allie
was standing uncertainly. “An abundance of caution, you know how it goes.”

“Yeah.” Adam reflected Marc’s nonchalance readily.
He swept past Allie to go to the fridge and pull out the orange juice. “You
want to hang around for dinner, Allie?”

“Uhm.” Allie was watching as Marc slowly licked his
lips. Like he wanted her for dinner. “We already ate,” she found herself saying
before she could worry about whether she wanted to admit to going out with Marc
or not.

“All right.” Adam unceremoniously took a plate of
cold pizza and wandered off to flop in front of the TV in the other room.

Her phone’s timer went off. Marc stood up and started
stalking towards her. Allie backed up until her hips checked against the
counter. She fluttered her eyes closed as he leaned in, but when she opened
them she found that he had grabbed the dish towel to dab the moisture from his
skin.

“I know you want me.”

“Marc,” Allie pleaded in a whisper. She set her
hand against his chest again. Like it might work better on the second go. “I’m
here to do a job. I want to do my job.”

“I want to do you.”

Allie almost let a moan free from her lips as his
hardness rolled against her. “Please,” she begged. “Please don’t get in the way
of my goals. I’m trying to help you with yours.”

Marc’s heavy sigh spilled against the soft of her
throat. The way he flicked her earlobe with his tongue was an indecent promise
which made her shudder. “Good things don’t last forever.”

She almost crumbled beneath the feel of his mouth.
Allie was pulled in two directions. She wanted to jump him right then. But she
was also too aware of his warning about things that didn’t last. Allie knew how
it felt to be left with nothing. The press of her palm became less conflicted
and more insistent.

Allie pinned her lips and slid a quick glance over
towards the living room to where Adam was paying them no attention. She set her
gaze bravely back upon Marc. “I’m not going to be another girl who falls for
you and watches you go.”

“You can’t live in the future, Allie.” Marc tested
her resolve by reaching to route her hair back from her forehead. “It might not
show up the way you think.” But he shifted a step back and offered her his
ice-chilled hand with palm-up relinquishment.

Allie spent a moment searching his eyes before
settling herself with a determined breath. She took his hand with a touch that
was trained and she focused on all the things that she’d spent so many hours
preparing herself for. Third digit. Proximal joint. She needed her tape, and
she’d wrap it in the pattern she’d been taught to support the structure and
reduce inflammation. The best way to promote healing was to minimize the things
that got in the way of the body’s natural process.

The stupid part of her wished that Marc would kiss
her again. But with Adam in the living room, it proved possible to finish up
her tasks and escape out the front door with no more than the promise that she’d
see the both of them at the van the next morning.

“How long does it take to get
there?”

“It should be about an hour.”

Allie didn’t know why she asked. Apparently,
everything took about an hour to get to in the Los Angeles area. And it wasn’t
like knowing how much time they had left would make Kelsey apply her fake
lashes any faster. All the training and recovery protocols Allie had been a
party to, and it still looked like one of the most torturously annoying
processes ever as far as she could tell.

In a search for patience, she reminded herself that
it was her choice to wait and go with her roommate straight to the club. She
could have jammed in with the bigger caravan chartered to take their group out
on the town for Vince’s birthday. Because of Kelsey’s work hours it had been a
given that they’d miss the dinner, but Allie wasn’t sure if she were ready to
face Marc at a social gathering without a good friend by her side. She hadn’t
had a chance to talk to him alone since the night Adam interrupted them. Maybe
Allie had been deliberately avoiding a chance, afraid of what might happen.

Unlike the house party, Allie let Kelsey convince
her to get properly dressed up into a bindingly tight scrap of stretchy dress.
Violet would be proud of her shoes but Allie was worried she might turn an
ankle. Her hair smelled like the product her roommate had helped her pick out
and while she didn’t have fake lashes, she did finish off her makeup with extra
length mascara.

In truth, it hadn’t taken much convincing. The
voice that she worked so hard to ignore yearned for an excuse to touch him
again. To kiss him again. Allie felt silly for wanting it so much, when surely
it meant so little to him. How many clubs had he been to over the years, how
many girls eagerly waiting for his hands to swarm over their bodies and his
lips to claim theirs? The way his touch had slid over her as they stood in his
kitchen …

“Allie.” It didn’t sound like the first time Kelsey
had said her name, and yet it was the first time Allie heard her. She blushed
as she blinked out of her daydreaming. “Are you ready?” Kelsey asked as if
Allie was the one that had been holding them up for the last half hour.

“Yes.” Allie slipped off Kelsey’s bed to the
unfamiliar wobble of her feet. “My clutch is by the front door. Do you think
we’re going to have any trouble getting in, if we’re late?”

“Oh honey.” Kelsey wiggled her way across the room
to pluck up her bag from the bed, the exposed squeeze of her boobs rippling.
“The only trouble is the kind we’ll be bringing.” She winked at Allie and swept
towards the door. “Besides, all we have to do is flash that message I have from
Blake’s number and they’ll let us in with a quickness.”

It did take them about an hour
before they reached their exit. From the freeway it was hard for Allie to tell
where they were going since there were multiple sky-scraping clusters of
buildings which made up the disconnected centers of Los Angeles. But this was
definitely Hollywood, even if it wasn’t quite as glamorous as she might have
imagined. When the car turned onto traffic-dense surface streets she could see
pink stars marching along grimy sidewalks in the dark.

Allie let Kelsey handle the Uber with her app. The
driver pulled up to the curb beside a tall building where men who looked like
linebackers tended ropes and guarded a street-level door. A shoulder-packed
mass of hopeful clubgoers stretched back farther than Allie could see to one
side while the guest-list line took up half the block in the other direction.
Kelsey laced her fingers through Allie’s and headed straight for the entrance.

“Hi.” Kelsey beamed at the dour-faced doorman as
she walked up, ignoring the death stares from the impacted lines. “We’re with
Blake Ellsley. We should be on his list?” She held up her phone so that the man
could lean over and see.

He gave a single nod, watching the street instead
of them as he reached back to unhook the rope. “Please have your IDs out
ladies.” He lifted a hand to squeeze the button of the radio snapped to his
shoulder. “Two arriving for the Ellsley party.”

Allie paused, looking up to him in uncertainty of
what they were supposed to do as she fumbled with her free hand to unsnap her
clutch.

Kelsey was more familiar with the procedure for
entry. The pull of her hand dragged Allie along towards the box office by the
door. Standing beside the window was a man who looked like he had spent longer
on his hair than Allie had on hers.

“Good evening, ladies.” He flashed a snake smile
when they walked up. “If you’ll just check in with Rhonda, I have someone
coming down to escort you to your table.”

“Good evening,” Kelsey chimed happily back. She
slid her ID over to the woman behind the counter. Rhonda clicked a few buttons
on her computer with one hand as she got out a pair of silver wristbands with
the other.

“If I may have your wrists please?”

Allie felt a weird sense of déjà vu as she mimicked
Kelsey, showing her ID and offering her arm so that she could be banded. Light
sparkled from the plastic strip when she slid the cuff of it against her skin.

“Are we ready?” Fancy hair guy was beckoning them
onward towards the bump of music and flickering strobe light. “This is Tina,”
he indicated the cocktail waitress who had appeared. She dipped her head as she
smiled. “She’ll show you to your party and can help you with anything you need.
I am Stephan, and will do likewise. I hope you enjoy your evening.”

“Thank you,” Allie echoed Kelsey as the two of them
left the lobby behind to follow the girl whose work uniform seemed to be little
more than lingerie. There were already people milling on the stairs, and then
they were swallowed into the belly of the club.