He slumped forward, his weight heavy on her.
She kept her thighs clutched around his hips, not letting him go even as she felt him begin to withdraw. Just a little longer. Not yet.
The power of her will was no match for his strength. He pulled away and sat up on the edge of the bed. Bracing his elbows on his knees, he stayed there, staring into space and breathing deeply. The bow that had been fastened around her neck had come untied, and, as she moved, it slipped onto the pillow.
Bars of moonlight slashed across his back, and she thought she had never seen anyone who looked so lonely. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she couldn’t intrude on his privacy. The wrongness of what she had done struck her like a blow. She was a liar and a thief.
He rose and headed for the bathroom. “I want you gone when I come out.”
As Cal stood under the locker-room shower, he found himself thinking about Rosebud instead of the grueling practice he had just completed or the fact that his shoulder ached, his ankle throbbed, and nothing on him seemed to be recovering as quickly as it used to. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about Rosebud since his birthday night two weeks ago, but he couldn’t explain why she kept popping into his mind or why he’d been so immediately attracted to her. He only knew that the instant she had walked into his living room with that fat pink bow around her neck, he’d wanted her.
Her appeal confounded him because she wasn’t his type. Although she was attractive with her blond hair and those light green eyes, she wasn’t in the same league with the beautiful girls he’d been dating. Her skin was outstanding, he’d give her that, sort of like French vanilla ice cream, but she was too tall, too flat-chested, and too damned old.
He ducked his head and let the shower water splash over him. Maybe he’d been drawn in by all her contradictions: the intelligence in those green eyes that fought the cockamamie story she’d told him, a funny aloofness in her manner that kept running headlong into her clumsy attempts to seduce him.
He’d quickly figured out that she was an upper-crust groupie looking for a cheap thrill by pretending to be a hooker, and he hadn’t liked the idea that he was attracted to a woman like that, so he’d told her to leave. But he hadn’t put any real energy behind it. Instead of being irritated by her lies, he’d mainly been amused by her desperate earnestness as she’d spun out one story after another.
But it was what had happened in his bedroom that he couldn’t forget. Something had been very wrong. Why had she refused to take off her clothes? Even when they were going at it, she wouldn’t let him undress her. It had been strange, and so damned erotic he couldn’t quit thinking about it.
He frowned, remembering that she hadn’t let him make her come. That bothered him. He could read people pretty well, and although he’d known she was a liar, he’d figured she was essentially harmless. Now he wasn’t so sure. It was almost as if she had some hidden agenda, but he couldn’t imagine what it was beyond putting a check mark in front of his name before she moved on to her next celebrity jock.
Just as Cal was rinsing the shampoo out of his hair, Junior yelled into the shower room. “Hey, Bomber, Bobby Tom’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.”
Cal slapped a towel around his hips and hurried to the telephone. If it had been anybody else in the football world from the NFL commissioner to John Madden, he’d have told Junior he’d call back. But not Bobby Tom Denton. They hadn’t played together until the last few years of B.T.’s career, but that made no difference. If B.T. wanted his right arm, Cal figured he’d probably give it to him. That’s how much respect he had for the former Stars’ player who, in his opinion, had been the best wide receiver in NFL history.
Cal smiled as that familiar Texas drawl came over the phone lines. “Hey, Cal, you comin’ down to Telarosa for my charity golf tournament in May? Consider this your personal engraved invitation. Got a big barbeque in the works and more beautiful women than even you’re gonna know what to do with. ’Course, with Gracie lookin’ on, I’ll have to leave it up to you to entertain them. That wife of mine keeps me on a real tight leash.”
Since injuries had prevented Cal from playing in B.T.’s last few tournaments, he hadn’t met Gracie Denton, but he knew Bobby Tom well enough to realize there was no woman in the world who could keep him on a leash.
“I promise to do my part, B.T.”
“That’ll make Gracie real happy. Did you know she got herself elected mayor of Telarosa right before Wendy was born?”