Redemption (17 page)

I relaxed in the pool at the deep end and kept an eye on the entrance for Michelle to arrive. The rooftop pool was contained within a glass conservatory which was just as well because there weren’t many days in London that were nice enough to use an outdoor pool. 

The water was unnaturally warm. Personally, I preferred to jump into a cold pool. It woke me up and reinvigorated me instantly, but that might just be me. My club made me take ice baths after games sometimes, so a cold pool didn’t bother me much. 

This one was nearly warm, but if I was going to be in a pool with a beautiful woman, warm was better than cold. Michelle should be in no doubt about my size, but I didn’t want cold water making my little fella, well, little.

I leaned over to grab my phone from the side of the pool and checked the time. Michelle was running fifteen minutes late. That wasn’t like her. She would be nervous about coming up here, but when she left this morning she looked determined to make it work. 

There was a timer on the wall for marking lap times, so I waited until the hand hit the top and then ducked my head under water. My physio always remarked on my lung capacity, which was the second highest at the club. The lung capacity made me fitter than most other players which was a large factor in my ability to score late drop goals. 

Near the end of games, when the opposition was starting to tire, there were usually opportunities to sneak in a drop goal, but most kickers were just as tired as everyone else. Not me. I felt as fresh at the beginning of games as I did at the end. I never missed the late kicks. 

Except that one time. But that was different. It just so happened to be the biggest kick I’ve ever taken in my life, and I missed it.

The water blurred my vision, but I managed to see the red hand creep back around past the top of the timer. That meant I’d been under for one minute. Two minutes was attainable, but it depended on all sorts of factors, like how much sleep I’d had and what I’d eaten for breakfast. 

My body began to float towards the surface in an instinctive battle to reach oxygen. I moved my arms in an effort to send my body back down, but that exuded energy and burned up what little oxygen I had left. 

I took another look at the timer. Damn, thirty more seconds to go. I pushed myself down to the bottom again, eating up a few more seconds. I closed my eyes to avoid the temptation to look at the timer, and pictured Michelle the way she looked last night in my living room. She’d been stunning, burn mark or not. Her chest practically pulsed with each breath she took. Shit. Don’t think about breathing right now. Her stomach. Her flat, smooth stomach had moved almost imperceptibly with each… Shit. 

I opened my eyes and looked up at the timer as it moved past the two-minute mark. My legs went down and made contact with the bottom of the pool, before pushing my body up through the surface where I took a huge gasp of air the second my mouth was out of the water.

My lungs filled with air and then emptied, before filling with air again. I wiped the water from my eyes and regained my focus as the blood rushed back to my brain. No sooner had the blood reached my brain then it went somewhere else. 

Standing next to the pool in a yellow bikini was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She stood with her right arm angled slightly away from me; the result of a self-conscious habit, developed over years of being paranoid about her appearance.

“I thought you were playing hide-and-seek there for a minute,” Michelle said, looking down on me with a smile I could stare at for days. “Is the water cold?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Jump in.”

Michelle braced herself, clearly still expecting the water to be cold, and then jumped in. She screamed in imagined shock as she hit the water, but quickly relaxed. 

“Okay, it’s not that bad,” she said. “What do you think of the swimsuit?”

“Put your hands between my legs and you’ll find out,” I joked. 

Michelle splashed me with the water in a way that was cute, despite being somewhat pointless. Was there anything this woman could do that I wouldn’t find adorable?

“Why are we here anyway?” Michelle asked. “This wasn’t what I had in mind for our next meeting.”

“Would you rather have gone for dinner?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Me neither. And to be honest, I wanted to look at your body. I got a glimpse the other night and now I want to see more.”

“You saw my arm.”

“Yes, I did.” 

“And I suppose you have questions?”

“Not really,” I said. “I know exactly what happened and why you covered it up?”

“You’re such a know-it-all sometimes,” she teased. “Go on then, tell me what you think happened.”

“Well, I already know about that night. The only new information I now have is that you were hit by the acid as well. You kept it a secret because it just reminded you that you got off lightly compared to Maisie. You think you failed to protect her.”

“It’s pretty clear I
did
fail to protect her.” 

“You protected her from some of it,” I said. “I’ve read the police report of that night.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be private?”

“Yeah, but Hodgson let me look at it. There’s not a lot in it; neither you nor Maisie knew much information about the attack so there was little to tell the police. Anyway, it says you were walking with Maisie on your left. The attackers came out from the left hand side and threw the acid. You have a burn mark on your right arm. The only way you would have got that is if you turned to your left and grabbed Maisie. You tried to put your body in the way, didn’t you? You had a split second to react and in that time you threw yourself between the acid and your little sister.”

Michelle was silent for a few seconds and I realized I might have gotten a little carried away. I’d recounted the facts like an excited detective who’d figured out a murder mystery. This was a real-life attack that still resonated with Michelle and Maisie, yet I’d been an insensitive arsehole about it as usual.

“So what if I did?” Michelle said at last. “It didn’t work, did it? I got away with a burn that most people never see, while Maisie’s face is disfigured.”

“Things might have been worse if you hadn’t stepped in. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. The point is that you are an incredible person, and I won’t rest until you accept that about yourself.”

“Is that why you asked me here today? To talk about what happened eight years ago?”

“No, I brought you here so that we would be on an even footing.”

“Even footing? I don’t understand.”

“Look at my body,” I said. “Without going underwater. Just look down at my chest.”

“If I have to,” she said with a smile. “I can’t exactly make much out. You’re just a blurry chest and a pair of legs under there.”

“So are you,” I said. “You’re practically naked in front of me, but your arm looks the same as the rest of you from here. I thought it might help you relax around me.”

“Oh,” she said, looking down at her arm. “I suppose it did. I haven’t given much thought to it since I’ve been in the pool.”

“Good. Now, we could stay here and chill out, but you do have an empty hotel room and Maisie won’t need picking up for a few hours yet, so…”

“Mr. Cornish,” she said slowly, with a knowing grin, “are you proposing what I think you’re proposing? I’ll have you know, I’m not that easy.”

“Trust me, nothing about this has been easy.”

“Tell you what, if you can beat me in a race then you can do with me as you please.” 

“A race?” 

“Four lengths of the pool. Come on.” 

Michelle quickly got ready by the edge of the pool and I immediately knew she was an experienced swimmer. I was a strong swimmer but not a fast one. I had far too much bulk to move gracefully through the water. 

Michelle gave a countdown and pushed off the edge, going into a lead before I had even done one stroke. She slipped through the water like an otter and extended the gap between us with every second that passed. Screw this.

I stopped swimming and waited for Michelle to come back in my direction. She had a good technique and took a breath on every third stroke, but it meant she wasn’t particularly looking where she was going. Her arm smashed into my chest and she gasped as she crashed into me. 

“What the hell?” she muttered, wiping the water from her eyes. “You’re not much of a swimmer, you know?”

“No more games,” I said, as I pulled her face towards mine and kissed her. 

No more games. His lips touched mine and awakened my body from the sexless slumber I’d been in for the past few months. My legs moved frustratingly slowly under the water, but I managed to lock them around him and pull myself in close.  

Oliver moved his lips down to my neck, seemingly determined to kiss every part of my body that was above the water. I held him tightly against me as I tried to get hold of his wet back. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since I laid eyes on him in the limousine. Scratch that; I’d been waiting for this moment for eight years.

One of Oliver’s hand gripped my ass firmly, while the other went between my legs, quickly moving the bikini bottoms to one side and parting my folds. I gasped as two fingers slid inside me, while the palm of his hand rubbed lightly against my clit.  

I had little control over my body as I half floated and half rested on Oliver, so I just wrapped my arms around him and held tight while he explored inside me. The weirdness of being penetrated in the water combined with a sensation of weightlessness soon had the blood rushing through my body as I panted loudly in his ear.  

The glass surrounding the pool meant that potentially anyone could see inside, but for some reason I didn’t care. I usually avoided any kind of public displays of affection, but right now Oliver could have fucked me up against the glass without me even thinking twice about it.

I kissed and bit down on Oliver’s neck as his fingers kept moving inside me. I needed more. I needed his cock inside me, but I didn’t want him to stop. He had me so close.

“I’ve been waiting so long for this,” Oliver whispered in my ear. “I always knew you’d have a nice tight pussy. I want to see if you can take my cock inside you.”

“I can,” I moaned. “Please give it to me.” I reached down between my legs and grabbed his hard cock through my shorts. I couldn’t tell how long it was, but it was definitely thick. Real thick.

“You sure you can take that?” he asked, still slowly moving his fingers inside me. “You’re so tight; it might hurt.”

“I want to try.”

I’d fantasized so much about this moment. The worst thing about Maisie teasing me for being boring and not having a sex life, was that it wasn’t true. Well, the sex life bit was I suppose, but not because I was boring.  

I was more adventurous than any of the men I’d been with, but they had never been able to bring that side out of me. When I was by myself, with my fingers between my legs, I thought about Oliver and how we would do the things I’d not been able to do with others. I’d been doing that for eight years, and now here I was straddling him in the pool while his fingers explored my sex.

Oliver kissed me again, and his fingers slipped slowly out of my pussy. My hands reached down and tried to pull down his swimming trunks, but he grabbed me by the wrists and stopped me.  

“We’ll have to go back to your room,” he said, between kisses. “Condoms don’t work too well underwater.”  

I reluctantly let go of Oliver and quickly swam to the edge of the pool. I climbed out and dried myself off with the towel I’d brought up with me, and watched Oliver as he walked up the stairs at the shallow end of the pool. He reminded me of Daniel Craig as he came out of the ocean, except Oliver was at least a foot taller and had far more muscle. Unfortunately, I was no Bond girl.

Oliver grabbed his clothes and we practically ran back to my room, passing a bewildered looking guard that Oliver had paid to keep the pool restricted. I would usually have been embarrassed for acting like a horny school child, but right now I didn’t care.  

The second the door closed, Oliver pulled the string to undo my top and then did the same for the bottoms. My clothes dropped to the floor and now I was naked. Completely naked and he could see my scar. He could see everything.