Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) (73 page)

“Where are we?” I asked. I wondered if
this was where Marie and Victor were staying, but that couldn’t be right, he
said they were in Long Beach.

“This is where I grew up,” he said. I
noticed as he walked me up to one of the houses, a single-story white western
style house with a small front porch and attached garage that there was also a
“Foreclosed” notice on the front door.

“Your whole life?” I asked him.

“Yeah, until I was old enough to leave.”

That was something for me. Mom and I moved
a lot. Every time she used the rent money for her “entertainment” instead, one
too many times, we would get an eviction notice and have to move to another
creepy apartment.

“No one lives here now?”

“No. When my parents left for Florida
after my dad retired, they sold it. The people who bought it lost it in a year.
It’s been empty since then.” He had ahold of my hand and he led me around the
side of the house. We went through a wooden gate that he reached over and
unlocked and we were standing in the back yard.

Smiling, I said, “So what are we going to
do, break in?”

He laughed and then said, “Yep. That’s
exactly what we’re going to do.”

“Paul…”

“It’s okay. I’m not going to break
anything.” He went over to one of the big windows and took off the screen. He
pressed his hands against the glass and raised it up. As he climbed through he
said, “I’ll be right back.” A few minutes later, he opened the sliding glass
door and said, “Welcome. Please come in.”

I followed him in, but once we were standing
in the empty kitchen I said, “You’re a little bit crazy, you know that?”

He smiled and nodded. “Come on, I’ll show
you around.”

The house wasn’t huge but it was a lot
nicer than any place I had ever lived. I know you never know what went on
inside someone else’s family behind closed doors but I know when I was a kid I
would have given my right arm to live in a “real” house like this. It was four
bedrooms and two baths. He showed me Marie’s old room and his parents room and
told me the extra bedroom had been his dad’s home office. There was a living
room and a den. The living room had a fireplace that took up one whole wall. He
looked at it fondly and said, “When I have my own house someday, it’s going to
have to have a fireplace.”

“I’ve never had one,” I told him. We had
fire pits outside for the homeless in some of the places I lived.

“Some of the best memories I have as a kid
are about the fireplace. Marie and I used to roast marshmallows in it when my
mom would make a fire and my dad wasn’t around. He was always bitching at us
that we’d start a fire and he took all the fun out of it. At Christmas we would
peel pine needles off the tree and toss them into the fire and watch it flare
up. We couldn’t do that when he was home either. Luckily, he was gone a lot. I
used to sit on the bricks there and do my homework when it was cold. And lay in
front of it for hours when I was home from school sick…Come on.” He took my
hand again and led me to the other end of the hall. We went into a bedroom that
was smaller than the others and he said, “This was my room.”

“You were at the complete opposite end of
the house from everyone else.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The old man liked it
that way. He and I fought…a lot. Argued, not physically. He treated my mom and
my sister like shit. He had no respect for them at all. He tried to do it out
of my earshot as I got older. Especially after I started fighting. I think he
was never sure when I was going to snap. I always tried to get my mom to
leave…but she never would. They’ve been married over thirty years now and I’d
be willing to bet he’s still dishing it out and she’s still taking it.”

“I’m sorry. That had to really suck.”

“It did. It kept me from being a normal
teenager. I would take girls out once and never call them again. I was so
afraid that I was like him. I didn’t want to get into a relationship with a
girl and end up treating her like dirt the way he did. I guess it wasn’t just
my teens that were messed up from it. I’ve still never had a real relationship.
Just so you know I have a reason behind my weirdness.” He smiled, but it was a
sad smile. He went on to say, “Marie went the opposite direction. She picked
boys just like him. Her boyfriends were all verbally abusive and she and I
didn’t have a good relationship as she got older because it bothered me so
badly. I would go off on them if I heard them talking crap to her. I even got
in a few physical fights with them. She always got mad at me and took their
side…Then later she would tell me she was sorry and she loved and appreciated
it. She was so much like my mom.”

“But before that, when you were kids the
relationship was good?”

“Yeah, we were so close in age that when
we were little we did everything together. It’s easier not to notice how
dysfunctional things are when you’re young. My mom did her best to be a good
mother. She had issues; she was depressed and anxious a lot. I didn’t know it
until I got older, but I’m sure living with my asshole father was
ninety-percent of it.”

“I don’t think you would mistreat a woman.”
I hated that he thought that. I was still in awe at the difference between the
fighter in the cage and the lover in my bed.

He smiled and brushed the hair off my
face. It was a simple gesture, but an intimate one. It made me feel all warm
and tingly. “Thanks,” he said. “It hurts me to look at your bruises and think
about what Mitch did to you. I can’t imagine ever wanting to hurt something as
beautiful as you.”

I reached up and put my hand on the back
of his neck. I pulled him down so that our lips could meet. It was the first
really passionate kiss we had shared since I’d gotten out of the hospital and I
felt it all the way to my toes. He took me gently by the waist and lowered us
to the floor, breaking the kiss long enough to look into my eyes and say, “Are
you sure about this?”

“Absolutely,” I told him in a breathless
voice.

“You’ll stop me if it hurts.”

“Promise,” I said, finding his lips with
mine once again.

As we kissed I could feel him unhooking my
bra and unbuttoning my jeans. I lie back on the carpet and let him pull it all
off. With my right arm still casted, it was nice to have the help. He was
kneeling over me when he leaned down to kiss me again. I got hold of his
t-shirt with my left hand and pulled on it. He took the hint and pulled it off.
The sight of his hard chest and abs sent shock waves straight through me,
culminating in my panties being soaking wet. It never failed to have that
effect on me.

He stood up and took off his pants and
boxers and I shuddered all over again. When he came back down he took the
elastic of my panties in each hand and pulled them off. Then he leaned forward
and kissed my side where the black bruises still covered my ribs. His kiss was
so soft I hardly felt it, but it was the sweetest thing he could have done and
it stoked the fire burning inside of me. Things like that were what told me
that he could never be abusive. Sometimes the cycle repeats itself, but
sometimes it helps teach people the wrong way to do things.

He sat there next to me, looking at me and
very lightly brushing his fingers down my body. He would brush them across my
breasts, making sure not to touch my engorged nipples, and then he brought them
up to my still sore neck and shoulders and began using them and his palms to
massage and knead the aching muscles there. It was comforting and sweet and
erotic all at the same time.

He swept my hair to the side and leaned
down and ran his full lips across my neck. Then he moved back to my lips and
this time he wasn’t quite as gentle. I felt his pushed against mine and his
tongue probing around inside of my mouth like it was searching for something.
Sore or not, the force of the kiss caused me to arch my back and rub my hips
against his hard thigh. I’d missed him so much, I physically ached for him. He lay
down next to me as we kissed and with one of his legs draped across mine and
his rock hard erection pushed up against me, he rubbed against my pussy with
his thigh. I felt the hand that was still exploring my body slide up and cup
one of my breasts and squeeze it. His fingers finally found the throbbing
nipple and he pinched it softly as he rolled it between his fingers. I moaned
and I saw his eyes flutter open to look at my face. I know he was worried about
hurting me, so I smiled to let him know that what he was doing was anything but
pain.

I felt him touching himself against me and
I knew he was sliding the condom on. This man was so thoughtful and so
responsible and so gentle…there was no possible way that he could ever be like
he told me his father was. Once he had that task out of the way, he let his
lips travel down to my chest and he took the one breast that wasn’t in his hand
between his lips. He used his tongue to torture my sensitive nipple as he
sucked the whole breast in and out of his mouth. I was moaning loudly now. My
pussy was drenched. I wanted him inside of me. When I felt his mouth traveling
from my nipple down across my stomach though, I realized that I could wait.

He gently pushed my legs apart with his
hand and in one deft move his face was between my legs and I was in heaven. He
slipped his big arms underneath my legs on each side and lifting them just
slightly, he began at the back and ran his hot tongue up my slit causing my
body to convulse when it came into contact with the tip of my clit that was
swollen and sticking out begging for attention.

He repeated that move at least a dozen
times before stopping and looking up at me. I think he was trying to gauge how
I was doing, so I smiled again. Then I let out a sharp gasp as his tongue made
contact with my clit. I was suddenly drunk on my own sexuality, and his.

“Oh God, Paul! Oh baby, that feels so
good.” He was flicking my clit back and forth with his tongue and sending jolts
of electricity surging throughout my body. I was glad I was so well-hydrated
from my stint in the hospital because my pussy was producing copious amounts of
fluid. He used his tongue to play me like a violin, expertly going from toying
with my clit and swirling around it to sliding it along between my lips. I was
out of my mind, it felt so fucking good.

“Oh baby, stop. I don’t want to come yet.
I want you inside of me!”

He pulled his face up and grinned at me.
My juices glinted off the sun that was streaming in through the window. He
moved back up to my face and I reveled in the way I tasted on his lips and
tongue as he kissed me deeply again.

I felt his body shift so that his hips
were poised over my pelvis. He lined himself up with my opening as we kissed
and then he broke the kiss to lift his head and look into my eyes as he entered
me. He slid his throbbing hard cock into my aching pussy, slowly while we
stared into each other’s eyes. He took his time, letting it slide in until it
was in as deep as he could bury it and then he slid it back out. I reached up
and put my hands on his hard ass and I pushed. He got the hint and he started
moving his hips as mine came up to meet them. I felt the orgasm starting on the
first stroke and it was only seconds later when it ripped through me like a
tidal wave causing every nerve ending in my body to stand on alert.

“Oh Paul! Oh fuck baby! Nothing feels like
this. Nothing has ever felt like this.” I don’t know if it was my words, the
sound of my voice or that he was just as horny as I was, but once my body
stopped shaking from the orgasm he began to pound into me with a driving force.
I was making unintelligible noises because my brain felt like it was no more
than a pile of heated mush. When I felt his cock stretch and the walls of my
pussy stretch around it I started shaking again with another orgasm. As I came
again, his whole body tensed and he grunted and then I felt him gently lay off
to the side of me, even in ecstasy thinking about not wanting to cause me pain.
I kissed the side of his face and I could feel him trembling. His skin was hot
and flushed and his breaths were rapid. He finally looked up at me and the most
beautiful smile I had ever seen covered his face. I was in love with this man,
God help me.

CHAPTER
FIVE

I went back to work a couple of weeks
after “the day with Mitch.” When I got there I thought it was strange because
there was no one around. I knew Paul was here somewhere because he’d left my
house that morning on his way. I instantly worried that something bad happened.
The after effects of everything that happened was that I walked around in a
heightened sense of anxiety. I stared to head for the locker rooms before I saw
Victoria stick her head out of the back room and I heard loud whispers of
“Shh!” and “She’s here!” I smiled to myself then. They were great friends, but
the worst at surprises. I stepped into the back and when they all yelled
“Surprise” I tried to pull off a shocked expression. They had a big “Welcome
Back” banner and the room was filled with balloons. There was a table full of
food, a pot-luck extraordinaire. There was also a big cake that said, “Welcome
Back Jessie!”

“Aw, thank you guys. This is so nice.”
Paul was there and when I looked at him I could feel tears in my eyes. “Thank
you all,” I said again. Everyone was there and for the first hour I was at work
I caught up on what everyone was doing and ate way too much. When we finally
all dragged ourselves away from the party and got to work Paul said, “I’m going
to work out in the ring with Sam today after we do some warm-ups. Do you have
time to watch and give me some pointers on my form?”