Dirty Player(5)

I punched him in the shoulder. “Shut up.” I turned to Beaux. “You mind?”

“Go kick back, Sis. You’ve earned it.”

I rolled to my toes and kissed his cheek while I waited for Kolby to slide out of the booth. He gripped my hand and led me down the stairs, pulling me behind him so we wouldn’t get separated in the crowd at the bottom. Halfway down the second flight, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

I paused, tugging my hand out of Kolby’s, and looked around. Seeing nothing, I shook off the strange sensation and hurried to catch up to my dance partner.

The music was louder on the dance floor, pulsing through my body and filling my veins with that instant need to move.

The song was fast and perfect, and as Kolby guided us to an area of the floor beneath the VIP area where we’d sat, he set his hands on my waist, pulling me to him until my hips were against his.

We would have had to shout to be heard, so we were silent while we moved, our bodies connected. It had been so long since I’d been out. Most days I felt too old for a bar scene—not that Patrick would have ever gone anyway. And if Patrick didn’t want to go somewhere, we rarely did.

I lost myself in my thoughts, my regrets, and the feel of warm and strong hands on my body as sweat began to bead at my neck.

The buzz of the alcohol beginning to dissipate as I lost myself in the music, it was just me and Kolby while he spun me in circles and we goofed around. We made funny faces and moved our bodies in time to the music.

We stayed there longer than the one song we’d agreed on, and it was at the end of the fourth when I finally needed a break. My toes hurt in my heels, and the strap of fabric across my back clung to my skin.

“I need a break!” I shouted, leaning into Kolby’s arms.

He wrapped them around me. “Wondering when the old woman was going to stop. Lasted longer than I thought you would.”

I shoved him playfully again and turned to walk off the dance floor, but when I went to take my first step, my feet froze in place.

Kolby bumped into me, pushing me forward, and before I could stumble, I was pulled into another set of strong arms.

“The next one’s mine.”





Chapter THREE





SHANNON



Electricity zinged up my arms and down my spine, straight to my toes where they curled inside my heels.

Powell was a force on the field. Running and catching, he could do it all with the grace of a panther. Amazing, considering his six-four frame. He looked like he’d be large and bulky, awkward, but he was fast. He was powerful.

With his body guiding me backward onto the dance floor I’d just tried to exit, he was also undeniable.

Magnetic.

Heat swirled between us as I flexed my arm and tried to pull away from him.

My mind screamed to run.

My body screamed louder to resist the urge to do so.

“What are you doing?”

His sandy blond brows pulled together, sharpening into points. For a moment I thought he couldn’t hear me.

Then he leaned down, pulling me to him until my hand hit his chest. My fingers curled into his muscled firmness of their own accord.

“I’m thinking someone like you should have a real man. Not the boys you’ve been hanging with tonight.”

He’d seen me. He’d been the one watching me. I knew it with the same certainty I knew my panties were becoming wet despite his absurd assumption.

“You don’t know me. You know nothing about me.”

“I know what you want.”

He didn’t know crap. Anything he could say or assume was wrong.

I should have pushed him away from me. I should have found the way he rolled his hips against mine repulsive.

Instead, I became malleable to every move he made, my body succumbing to his presence and the static igniting in the breaths of space between us.

His gaze dropped from my eyes to my breasts, his stare bold and unabashed before he looked back at me. “You want what they all want. The fame, the money, the right to say you’ve sucked our large cocks.”

Yes. Repulsive. Yet a wave of excitement rolled through my body, heating it at the mere thought of his cock.

He continued before I gathered my scattered thoughts. “But what you don’t know is that men new in the league are still boys, easily led by sexy pussy with tits and ass and legs for days, but they don’t know what to do with it once they have it.” He was talking about my brother. And my brother looking at my ass and tits. I didn’t want to throw up like I normally would.

I was stuck on the fact that he thought I was sexy. How fucked up was I?

Not fucked up enough, or drunk enough, or dumb enough to not know where this was going. A quick fuck against the wall in the hallway where he’d turn me away from him, lift my skirt and plunge deep inside me, all without having to kiss or touch me.

I was lonely and still reeling from a failed engagement. I wanted a few hours of oblivion and possibly a one-night stand, but I wasn’t a pushover and I wasn’t an idiot. I deserved more than the sexy look he was giving me offered.

“Oliver?” I asked, my tone breathless and raw from the dancing and from the way his fingertips were running along my exposed skin.

“What, baby?”

I fought the cringe at the worthless endearment. My fingers slid from his chest to his shoulders and I pulled myself closer.

Flames shot through me as I brushed against the sizable bulge in his pants. “You don’t know shit. And if you don’t get your hands off me this very fucking second, my brother will kick your ass on and off the field.”

He dropped his hands like I’d burned him and shot me a quizzical look.

That furrowed brow was no less sexy.

I grinned and forced myself to step back. The space was necessary. Without it I might have said fuck my morals and jumped up on him, climbed him like a monkey in a tree and let him give me the ride I knew he’d be so good at.

“Your brother? Who?” A hand scrubbed down his face.

I didn’t take the time to explain. A rush of bodies pressed against us, giving me my opening.

I turned on my heels and trembling legs and got the hell off the floor, back to the VIP area and into the ladies’ restroom without looking back.

My back hit the wall of the bathroom and my hands went to my face before the door closed behind me. My fingers still shook from adrenaline and lust and desire when I pressed them to my temples.

I needed to get out of there.

I needed to leave.

How could I have ever been attracted to an asshole like Patrick, just in a prettier and sexier package?

All men were the same.

They thought with their dicks and thought women should bend to their will just because they flashed a wad of cash and the promise of an orgasm.

And fuck that, my fingers hadn’t let me down yet.

“Get yourself together,” I murmured to myself before I used the restroom.

When I was done, I splashed cool water on my wrists and my throat. My body was still heated. The memory of Powell’s body against mine. The sway of his hips. The size of his erection.

“Shit.”

Squeezing my eyes closed, I tried to vanquish the memories that were so brief they should have already disappeared, but they hadn’t. They were there, vivid and clear as day and equally powerful as the vision of Patrick pounding into a woman in a bathroom much like the one I was in at the moment.

The memory was a bitter slap to the face, better than any splash of cold water on my still-flushed skin.

I walked into the hallway with my head held high, my heels stable, and my resolve strengthened. Never again would I let a man use me and toss me to the side like Patrick had.

I would move on from him, but it would be with a man who knew how to treat a woman with respect, and had the ability to cherish them.

“Beaux’s your brother.”

The strained voice stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t turn to him.

“Yes.”

I waited for an apology I assumed would never come, and was surprised when it did.

“I’m sorry. I might have fucked that up down there.”

Might have? He’d essentially called me a whore. I spun on my heels until I faced him directly. With Oliver several feet away, his back braced to the wall, his hands on his hips, I barely had to tilt my head up to see him clearly.

“He was right about you, though. You’re a prick.”

A lip curled in response. “I said I was sorry.”

“Forgiven.” I turned around and walked back to Beaux. He had three teammates around him, women draped on their laps, but none on his.

His eyes were on me, his face holding that look of concern I was getting so, so tired of seeing on him.

“You okay?”

“Good. Ready to head home, though.”

He shot a look behind my shoulder and stood immediately. “What’d he say to you? I saw him follow you back to the bathroom.”

“Nothing, Beaux. It’s fine, I swear.”

His gaze searched me for honesty. I was lying, and we both knew it, but I still reached around him to the table and picked up my small clutch.

“Let’s just go. I’m wiped after the trip out here.”

He wrapped his arm over my shoulders and pulled me to him.

As he turned me, my head twisted and my gaze locked on Powell’s. He was sitting at the bar now, a glass of honey-colored alcohol in his hand. His stern expression was firmly in place and I turned back around while I still could.

With the heat in his gaze, the look of want still in his eyes, and the fact that he’d actually not only apologized but seemed genuine, I had no idea what to do about Oliver Powell.