Qualified: A Sports Romance (20 page)

The temperature had dropped with the
sun but the convertible in the Southern California evening was too much of a
treat to forego. Allie tapped out a quick apology to Everett for not returning
his car on time before she called up the GPS to plot the route south. They
stopped at a gas station on the way. Marc hopped out of the car to work the pump
and make a run into the convenience store. While he was gone Allie sat
squirming in her rumpled skirt, her underwear wadded somewhere in the back seat
and the feel of his hands still burning on her bare thighs.

The big car was gone when they got back to the
garage. Allie left the convertible in its space.

Marc pinned her against the wall in the elevator
and kissed her breathless. With every ding of the ascending floors, her heart
raced with fear that the doors would open and they’d be discovered by someone
on the team. They made it to their floor without any stops and the hall was
dark and quiet.

It was difficult to go slow opening the door to her
apartment with Marc running his hands over her nude backside beneath her skirt.
She bit her lip to keep from squealing and cupped her keychain in her palm so
it wouldn’t chime. Peeking in through the cracked door she found that Kelsey’s
room looked closed up and there was just the one light on in the kitchen.

“My room.” Allie pointed down the hall towards the
open door. “Give me a minute.”

Allie stepped into the bathroom before following
him.

A full fairy’s court of wings danced in her
stomach. She stared and stared at her own reflection, wondering if she were
really this girl. The girl who fucked the troublemaker. Her hair was wild from
the drive and there were smudges of mascara beneath her eyes from her earlier
crying. That wasn’t who she wanted to be.

Allie slid her rumpled clothes from her body and
kicked them away into the corner. Turning on the water, she rinsed off her
smeared makeup and the day’s grit from her face. She brushed her teeth and
combed her fingers through her wind-teased hair. Her robe was on its hook on
the wall so she plucked it down to wrap around herself.

She’d told Marc that wasn’t how she saw him, and it
was true. To Allie, he was someone who had decided what was important to him
and went after it with everything he had. He was someone she hoped that she
could be like. She looked in the mirror and wondered if she already was—the
girl who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to try.

It was disconcerting, to walk into the space that
was hers and find a naked man going through her bookshelves. Allie leaned back
against her bedroom door, letting it click closed.

“Tolkien,” Marc tracked a step back to tap the book
spines with his fingertip once he noticed she’d entered. “You are such a nerd.”

“It’s as pop culture as … as Star Wars.” Allie
tucked the thin cotton of her robe a little more tightly, crossing her arms as
she watched him move in the low light.

Marc wasn’t self-conscious at all. He touched her
things with one hand and absently stroked at his length with the other. “These
aren’t the post-film covers,” he pointed out with a knowing smile.

Perhaps for him it felt perfectly normal to be naked
in front of her, but Allie struggled to maintain the conversation. It helped to
keep her gaze pinned up, looking to the dark of his eyes rather than the
promise of all that flesh. “Yes, I read books before films are made of them,”
Allie said like it was a confession. “Do you?”

“I guess they have made movies of Michael Crichton
and Tom Clancy novels.” Marc shrugged carelessly.

“Oh, is that what you like. Marc, are you secretly
a spy?” Allie tried to tease. “Don’t tell me that’s why you were in eastern Europe
all those years.”

“The US team did send us to military training.”
Marc lifted a cryptic brow. “… For a day.” He didn’t maintain the act long,
breaking it with a chuckle. “Have you secretly been injecting me with dino
DNA?” Marc countered.

“I shall hereafter call you Marcosaurus Rex.” Allie
licked at the edge of her mouth as her smile spread wide. “I don’t need to give
you anything for you to be the king of beasts.” She lost the fight to keep her
gaze from flicking in fascination over his naked form.

Marc stalked towards her with predatory slow. There
was a picture that he didn’t really look at before picking up. He must have
noticed it while she was in the bathroom and been waiting to ask about it. “Is
this you with a cow?”

“Steer.” Allie pressed away from the door to take
the frame from him. She reached to set it face down on her desk. “I was in FFA.
It’s—”

“I know what FFA is.” Marc hooked her by her robe’s
belt. “There was a place literally called ‘cow town’ near where I grew up.”

“Were you a farm boy, Marc?” Allie smiled up at
him, enchanted, as she ran her hands over the ridged solidity of his bare
torso.

“No. I was a nerd and a swimmer. And then …” A
brief shadow flickered over his face. “And then I got sick of staying within
the lines.” He picked her belt’s knot loose and let the ends fall. “Luckily the
water polo coach saw me before I was kicked out of school for fighting. He told
me there was a way to beat people up and still swim.”

“So you’re saying you’ve always been a model
teammate.”

“Yeah.” Marc paused a moment to meet Allie’s eyes
and appreciate her sarcasm with a half smile. His attention was divided,
though, since the removal of the belt let her robe fall open. The broad of his
hands skimmed in to find the shape of her waist beneath its edges. “What was
your progression from steer to aquatic animals?”

“You mean that most fascinating of water species,
Marcosaurus Rex?” Allie’s eyes sparkled. She shook her head, dropping her
attention to the run of her palms over his skin. “I thought maybe I’d be a vet.
And then I had a really great teacher, and I realized that I loved learning
about how bodies work.” She should have known that it would have been too much
of an invitation for his roving hands. As if in tutorial, he pinched at the
hardening flesh of her nipples. It pulled an arch to her spine and a gasp from
her throat.

Her line of thought was nearly derailed, but Allie
slanted a still-private smile up at him to finish her answer. “I liked the idea
of being able to do something that would help people. So now I’ve spent years
trying to climb academia’s ivory tower.” Her fingers climbed up to his
shoulders and reached to lace behind his nape. “But I look around, and …”
She turned her chin to give the room a brief glance and it all looked like
someone else’s life. All of it, until she lost herself in the captivating dark
of his gaze to conclude with a murmur. “Maybe I’m homesick, too.”

For a moment, there was nothing but the lock of
their eyes. Marc ended the seriousness of the moment with one of his rare
smiles. “You’ve been focused on climbing the wrong tower.” His hips bumped
against hers.

Allie caught her lip in her teeth but it didn’t do
much to control her nervous grin. “Is that so?”

Marc nodded, wicked amusement curled onto his
features. He dipped to kiss along the curve of her neck. “I’m happy to help
contribute to your education.”

Allie’s exhale came out shaky. She
tilted her jaw to give him more room along the line of her throat. Her hands
skimmed back down to explore the muscular slope of his sides. “With this kind
of altruism, I don’t know why they don’t make you the poster boy for the team.”

Her joke succeeded in making Marc laugh. His breath
bloomed hot against the thin skin over her speeding pulse. A nudge of his nose
aligned his whisper with the shell of her ear. “I’m going to make you come so
hard.”

“That’s …” Allie’s concentration was shredding
along with her breath. “… The most …” She didn’t remember what she was
trying to say. His arms wrapped around her beneath the falling cotton of her
robe and Marc pulled her close. She felt the hardness of his length trapped
against her naked belly and it caused a thrill of nerves to shiver up her
spine.

“Is that what you want, Allie?” Marc’s voice was a
low thrum against her throat. Their feet were moving. His steps wandered back
towards the bed while he used one arm to peel the robe’s cuffs free from her
wrists. “Tell me what you want.”

“You.” It was the simplest and the most profound
truth and Allie exhaled it from the depths of her very core. Her need for him
clenched achingly below her navel and smoldered between her legs. “Marc,” she
whimpered as his hands grabbed roughly at her curves. Her fingers arched,
clawing her nails at his muscle-padded ribs as if she could pull him into her. “I
want you.” Her mouth was shapeless and desperate when she turned it against his
bristle-shadowed cheek. “I want …” Her breath panted. With fear. With
longing. “I want you inside me.”

His answer was a growl and she wanted that, too.
Allie clung to him when Marc lifted her. With a twist he tossed her
effortlessly onto the bed. At first it was a confusion of grabbing hands and
colliding knees while Allie wriggled towards the pillows and Marc prowled up
alongside her. She huffed a fuller breath through her lungs once she found
supporting soft beneath her head. For a second she paused in uncertainty.
Self-consciousness began to claw at her starkly bare skin. She could feel the
cool whisper of the evening seeping in through the cracked window.

“You look nervous.” Marc wasn’t. His hand slid
confidently along her leg and pushed open the spread of her thighs.

“I—”
am
, Allie began to say. She stopped
because he looked up and caught her eye and everything was all right again. A
grin spilled across her face and she reached for him, her palms cupped to his
jaw. She stretched up to meet him in a kiss as Marc hovered over her on the
prop of a forearm. Her tongue tentatively sampled the taste of his mouth while
she shivered from his daring touch between her legs.

“Good?” Marc asked against her lips.

Allie nodded, her forehead bumping against his. She
tried to remember to be quiet so her roommate wouldn’t hear, but her blood was
already hot from all that had come before and both thought and moans escaped
her. The flush spilling across her skin felt like a borderless radiance. It
didn’t take long before Marc’s attentions between her legs set her off to
shuddering climax.

While she curled around his wrist in a static of
sparking nerves, she was only vaguely aware of him shifting beside her to reach
for what he’d left on her nightstand. Marc tore the packaging open with his
teeth so he didn’t have to stop touching her. Allie’s hands fussed over the
shifting firmness of his biceps as Marc reached down to get himself ready. Want
still thrilled in her belly, mixing with nervous butterflies. There was no such
conflict in the heat between her thighs.

She quivered from the stretch of tightly-wound
muscle as his knees bumped between hers when he took position above her. It was
so different than the awkward fumbling she remembered with Jimmy. Marc was
sleek and sure. She felt raw and vulnerable splayed naked beneath him, but
every time she came close to losing her nerve his eyes would find her again.
There was a promise in them—that she would not be left alone. Allie touched
reverently at the edges of the smile she hadn’t known existed.

“Are you with me?” Marc asked as his hand reached
up from the brace of his forearm to stroke fingers into her hair.

Allie took a breath and tried to fit her mouth to a
sassy curl. “Not yet.” The nervousness was in her voice, but the upward nudge
of her hips against where he held himself against her was decisive. “I want …”

Allie couldn’t bring herself to say any more, so
she let her body and her kiss do the talking.

It was a language Marc spoke well. His kiss was so
consuming that she kept hold of the sensation of their mingled breath. That
despite the rest, which was impossible to ignore. She may have been slick with
want, but there was no being ready for the size of him. Allie gasped against
the twinge of him pushing into her.

“You all right?” Marc whispered to her.

Allie nodded quick, her eyes closed beneath the
pinch of her brow and her lip caught between her teeth. She gripped her hands
at his waist, pushing him into a pause while she breathed through the flinching
clutch of her body. Her eyes flickered unguardedly open to his watch. Animal
impatience crackled in the frozen poise of all that muscle and the tight curl
of his knuckles which had caught her hair. But he was waiting for her with a
quiet attention and masterful control.

In that moment Allie was fearless. She had never
wanted anything as badly as she wanted him to be hers. With a twitch, her
fingers shifted to a beckoning pull of his hips.

Marc’s smile broadened. He arced with controlled
power, easing into her with an inevitability that shook little noises free of
Allie’s lungs like he was compressing the sound out of her. He seemed to
delight in all of them. In all of her.

“Too much?”

Allie choked out a needy whine. “I want all of
you,” she gasped breathlessly. Her nails dragged across his skin. He gave it to
her with a shove that cracked a moan free from her lips in pain-laced ecstasy.
The searing saturation of being filled by him dazzled across her senses. Her
head rolled back into the pillow, the unbidden kick of her hips grinding her
most sensitive flesh against him. It caused a shatter of new sparks and she
cried out helplessly.

“Are you going to come for me already?” Marc’s
exhale laughed soft against her pulse.

Allie moaned shakily through her grit teeth as she
felt him begin to stir inside her. Despite the overwhelmed quaking of her body
she held him tight with the wrap of her legs.

Marc stretched up higher on his knees. Allie
whimpered impatiently as he rearranged her legs and reached down to where they
were joined. The feel of his fingers to check that the condom was still rolled
to his base turned into a rub at her clit that made her shiver.

“Does this feel all right?”

“Uh huh,” Allie said thickly between gasps. It was
an inadequate answer.
All right
was inadequate. But she still couldn’t
bring herself to tell him how much she wanted it. Her hands twisted with shy
obedience into the sheets. And yet her body knew how to tell the truth. The slink
of her hips encouraged the wicked cleverness of his fingers. The arch of her
spine welcomed the impact of his deepening thrusts.

And her eyes—from beneath the heaviness of her
lashes she watched him watching her. Her softer flesh shivered and her weaker
muscle quaked. Marc noticed her gaze and it deepened his smile. All of his
intensity was focused wholly on her, and what was more, he seemed satisfied by
what he found.

It was so much. Maybe too much. Allie’s eyes rolled
back and she lost all control of her expression. Her features twisted with
torturous rapture as his thrusts rammed harder. The ravenous yearning of her
breath started to sound like sobs and she shaped them to say: “
Yes, yes.
”
Over and over.

The grunt of his exhalations became more purposed.
Marc folded down to where his elbows bracketed her shoulders. “I’m gonna come,”
he huffed hastily into her ear.

Allie nodded, wrapping her limbs around him
tightly. She clutched encouragement both with her fingers and with the flutter
of unsteady inner muscles. He sank into her with a final thrust and she
trembled like struck glass as she felt his release from within.