Romance: New Adult: One Game at a Time - A College Football Romance (Bad Boy Romance) (Sports Contemporary Short Stories) (24 page)

“Sir,” the auctioneer started. “That’s quite a sum.”

“I’m good for it,” I growled. Vlad made his way over to me from the other side of the stage.

“What are you doing kid?” He asked.

“What I can,” I said. I was saving the beautiful woman. Saving her from that horrid fat man, saving her from a horrible life. I had to do something. I had to do something for her. I pulled my checkbook out of my pocket. I wrote a check and handed it to the auctioneer, and then I took the woman by the hand and undid the rope there at her wrist. When she was
free,
I took her by the hand and pulled her off the stage.

“Kid,” Vlad said to my back. He trailed off, but there was a lot of unspoken meaning. I knew what he was saying, and I didn’t care. I led the woman outside, and then across to my car. I helped her
in
and then climbed behind the wheel. I looked over to her. She was terrified.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, wishing that she wasn’t afraid of me. She didn’t say anything, just stared at me with wide eyes. I turned the key in the
ignition,
and my car roared to
life
, and I sped off towards my downtown apartment.

2

I knew I was in trouble. I knew I had no right to do what
I
had done, and I knew Mr. Black was going to be coming after me. I didn’t care. I welcomed it, in a way.
My boss was
involved in sex trafficking? It was too much. It wasn’t something I was comfortable with, and it wasn’t something I was going to put
up with
. I would have to run, or end it. As I pulled into my apartment’s parking garage, I swore to
end
it. I wasn’t going to run. I had saved one woman, the beautiful woman who sat beside me, who hadn’t taken her eyes off of me, who looked terrified. But what about the rest of the women there that night? The ones who had
been sold
before the
Mediterranean
beauty I bought? What about those who
were sold
after.

“We have to hurry,” I told the scared woman. “I want to make sure you’re safe, and then you can go. You can go home, I can help you, but you can’t yet. You’re going to have to
stay with
me for a bit.”

“You’re letting me go?” She asked. Her voice was
low
and
soft; it
sounded sweet like honey. I had
looked
to her before I climbed out of my car.

“Yes,” I said
simply
, and then I was out and rushing around to her side. I opened her door and helped her out.

“You saved me,” she said. And then she threw her arms around me. I let her, and slid my
own
arms around her, and took in her scent as she buried her face in my chest. She smelled wonderful, like peppermint. She looked up to me, placed her hand on my face. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. They’ll be coming for me, and you. Both of us. We have to get safe, and then we’ll get you home. We have to get out of Brighton Beach,” I said.

Brighton Beach was the Russian equivalent of Chinatown. It was in New York, ocean on one side,
city
on the other. From my bedroom
window,
I had a view of the water. We rushed
upstairs,
and I took a minute to glance at it. Silver moonlight was reflecting on the slow rolling waves. A boat slid through the dark water, churning up white behind it.

My new bride of sorts stood by the door while I packed. I took my guns, took some clothes, and took the fifty grand I kept in cash
hidden
in a safe behind a painting hanging in my bedroom. We hurried down to my car. We had only been in the apartment for five or so minutes before we were peeling out of the parking lot.

“What’s your name?” I asked the woman. She had an accent, and I was confident that I had been right about her being from Greece.

“Chloe,” the woman
said softly
.

“I’m Peter,” I said. We drove through the city, the night traffic not as bad as the
day time
traffic, but still forcing us to go much more slowly than I would have preferred. We were stopped at a red light when a dark sedan pulled up behind us. I kept my eyes on my rear view mirror. It was exactly like my
own
car, exactly like the ones Mr. Black gave all of his grunts. I realized that I was an idiot for driving my
own
car, but there was nothing I could do about it now. I watched the vehicle behind us, waiting
for the door
to open, waiting for Vlad or someone else to step out and
open fire
. The light turned
green,
and I pulled through the intersection. The car behind me turned, and I realized I had been holding my breath the whole time. I let it out in a gasp and glanced over to Chloe. She was looking at me, her legs pulled up, her knees to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled at me, and I
was reminded
why I was throwing my life away in the first place. There was something about that woman, something that made it all worth it.

We got out of the city and drove for two hours before we finally stopped at a small motel. It
was situated
along a lonely
two-lane
highway. The clock on the dash read one in the morning. An hour previous I had stopped in a diner parking lot and swapped my plates with another dark sedan. It wouldn’t stand up to a cop running the plates, but it passed the eye test. I hoped I wouldn't get anyone hurt, but years of being
the bad guy
had given me a healthy sense of
self-preservation
.

We parked behind the motel and walked around to the front office. The clerk was
a guy
of only about twenty, and his eyes
were glued
to a small TV with some superhero movie playing. I paid for a room and took Chloe to it before getting my bag and joining her.

“I could use a shower,” she
said
and I nodded. She went into the bathroom and shut the door, but she seemed to rethink it and left it open halfway. From where I sat on the end of the bed I could see the bathroom mirror, and her reflection, facing away, as she undressed. She pulled the dress off, up and over her head. She wore no bra, and tossed the dress to the floor, standing in just a pair of black silk panties which hugged the rounded curves of her ass perfectly. I felt myself harden. She bent then, sliding the panties down, and I got a glimpse of her pink slit from behind as she bent, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the mirror.

She stepped out of her panties and
bent
again, starting the water in the shower. I yearned to go to her, to take her there, bent over the side of the tub, but I knew I wouldn’t do that. The woman
was sold
into sexual slavery. She just wanted to go home. I wouldn’t take advantage of Chloe like that.

As she
showered,
I went over
by
the window, curling one finger around the edge of the blind so I could pull it away from the window and peek out. I didn’t see anyone. In the
bathroom,
the water stopped. I hear the floor creak as she stepped out of the tub. I glanced into the bathroom from where I stood, but I could only see a sliver of the mirror, just her arm reflected as she dried off. I was still trying to peek when the door opened all the way
suddenly,
and she was standing there, nude save for a towel wrapped around herself.

“I have no other clothes,” she said. I nodded, cursing myself on the inside. That was something I should have
thought of
.

“I have some gym shorts you could wear,” I said. “And a tee shirt. It will be big, but we can stop tomorrow.”

Chloe shrugged and then pulled the towel off of her, letting it fall to the floor. She stood before me, nude, in all of her glory. I couldn’t help but look her over. Her breasts were rounded and heavy, her nipples dark and hard. She had a strip of pubic hair above her cunt, and her hips were round and feminine. I grew hard again. She reached up, tying her dark hair which fell past her shoulders back into a ponytail, holding it in place with a small elastic band she was wearing around her wrist. I saw a scar there on her wrist, white and shiny in the dim light of the motel room. I didn’t ask her about it.

“I can sleep naked,” she said, as she made her way to the bed and got in. There was only one bed, something else I hadn’t thought about enough. I had just asked for a room, and the clerk must have assumed we were together. Would she expect me to sleep on the floor? I wasn’t sure. “I’m hungry,” she said from under the blanket. It wasn’t a complaint, and she wasn’t whining, she was just telling me.

“I can
go check
out the vending machine,” I said, turning and heading for the door. I turned back to her as I opened it. “Don’t answer the door, not for anyone. I have the key.”

She nodded, and I left. I was back quickly, worried to
be seen
. I had chips and candy bars and a couple of danishes wrapped in plastic. She sat up, the blanket falling from her magnificent breasts. I tried not to stare at them, but I was just a man, and I
surely
took a
couple of
looks, but I tried to keep it on the sly.

For her part, Chloe didn’t seem embarrassed. Maybe it was a Greek thing, but in America, no woman was so comfortable with her
own
breasts or nudity. We ate on the junk food, both of us realizing we were famished and
starving
. We laughed a lot, and at one point she bent forward and wiped a bit of chocolate from the corner of my mouth.

When the food was
gone,
we grew more somber.

“What are we going to do?” The woman asked me, lying down and pulling the blanket to her chin once more. I missed her breasts immediately.

“We’re going to keep you safe.”

She laughed, but there wasn’t much mirth in it. “How are we going to do that?”

“I’m going to have to go after them. The
men
running it. My old boss. They’ll never leave us alone.”

“Are you
a bad
man?” Chloe asked me. I looked
to
her, not sure of how to answer.

“I’ve done things I’m not proud of,” I said finally. Chloe shrugged her shoulders under the blanket.

“You don’t seem like a bad man to me.”

I smiled and stood, and threw the wrappers from our junk food feast in the small wastebasket near the bed. “I’m going to shower,” I said.

“I’m going to sleep,” she replied. And I went into the bathroom. As I stood under the hot
water,
I had time to think about what
I
was doing What I had done. I had put it all on the line, for a woman I didn’t even know. And I wasn’t sorry about it. I knew it was the right thing. I had spent my whole adult life doing the opposite of the right thing, and
finally,
I was doing something I could be
proud of
.

When I was
clean,
I turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub. I stood in front of the sink, wiping my hand across the mirror there, cleaning the fog away so I could see myself. I still looked the same, so why did I feel like a different person?

When I left the
bathroom,
I was clad in just boxers. The room was dark, and Chloe was just a lump under the blanket that I could hardly see. I hesitated, and then climbed into the bed next to her. I lay on my back, hoping she wouldn’t wake up, hoping she wouldn’t kick me out of the bed.

She wasn’t even sleeping. Shortly after I lay
down,
I felt her move, and then her hand was on my chest, under the covers. I turned and could see her eyes, open and reflecting what little light there was in the room, coming from a bit of blue from a sign outside, squeezing in past the closed blind.

“I was supposed to be someone’s bride,” she
said softly
.

“I can get you home.”

“They told me
what’s expected
of me. I’m supposed to do what my husband says.”

“You don’t have a
husband,
though. I didn’t want that for you.”

“You bought me. You paid for me. I’m yours.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t think like that.”

She slid closer to me under the blanket. I could feel one of her breasts pushed against my
arm
. Her
nipple
hardened. I felt myself growing hard, my cock pulsing against the front of my boxers.

“You are a good man,” Chloe
said softly
, and when I turned my head to look at
her,
she pressed her lips to mine.

She tasted like
chocolate
since we had eaten the junk food. She had brushed her teeth with a spare toothbrush I had brought after her shower, and I tasted the toothpaste too. I pressed my tongue against her bottom lip, and she parted those plump lips to me, and our tongues dance together. Her hand slid down my stomach, fingertips running over my abs, sliding her hand under the waistband of my boxers, and then through the shock of brown pubic
hair,
I had between my legs before she was at my cock, wrapping her thin, petite fingers around my rigid member.

“Chloe,” I
said softly
, breaking the kiss, but she shook her head and pressed her lips to mine again. I turned on my side as she tugged the front of my boxers down, fully freeing my cock. My swollen head pressed against her pelvis, nestled in that strip of pubic hair she had, and she jerked me, sliding her fingers up and down my shaft.

I placed my hand on her breast, squeezing the fatty tissue, feeling her nipple on my palm. Her grip on my cock tightened and I groaned. She pulled away from me then, throwing the blanket off of us and to the floor. She pushed me lightly, and I rolled onto my back as she hovered her head over my crotch. She glanced at me sideways and then opened her mouth and lowered her face until my cock was sliding into her
mouth
. She sucked the head of my hard member first, swirling her tongue in a circle motion around it. Her hand was still on me, jerking me slowly up and down. She was on her knees beside my hips, and I reached down and squeezed her ass before sliding two fingers along her wet slit.