Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Thorne
After the game, the arena chefs lay out a buffet for us. I grab an empty table, making a concerted effort not to look for Mollie. It’s hard because I hear her laugh as I stare at my sweet potato, stabbing it viciously with a fork.
Beck takes the seat beside mine, giving me a look. “What’d that sweet potato ever do to you?”
“Nothing. I’m just still wound up from the game.” Technically not a lie.
Jett and Hunter take seats at the table. Hunter scowls down at his plate as he attacks a chicken breast. Not a big talker, that guy. Jett raises his chin at Beck. “That second goal was tricky. Good on you for distracting Johnson.”
He’s talking about the Vipers’ goalie. Beck smirks and takes a bite of his salmon. “Someone had to do something. This idiot had other things on his mind.” He nods at me.
“I was distracted,” I admit with a shrug. “Cross had to know that putting me and Kuznetsov on the ice together without designating our positions was going to be rough.”
As if conjured by my saying his name, Konstantin appears. He nods to an empty seat. “You mind?”
“Go ahead.” Beck pushes out the seat for him. “We were just talking about you.”
“I bet.” Konstantin sits down, glancing at me. “We played like shit.”
“No kidding.” I look down at my plate for a beat, then remember that he needs to be able to see my mouth to lip read. “A good captain would try to look at the bright side. We both got better throughout the game. Maybe in the next game where we’re both on the first line, we can work together more.”
Konstantin dips his head in agreement. “That will be the plan, then.”
His accent catches my attention. There’s a vague flatness to his vowel sounds. That and plan are contorted coming off his tongue. I wonder if that’s from being hearing impaired, or if that’s a leftover from being born in Russia.
“Probably figure it out before then,” Jett says. “We have practice five days a week. You should ask Coach for strategies.”
“No doubt Cross has some ideas,” Konstantin says.
I size him up. If Konstantin is actively angling for my job, he doesn’t show it. Then again, he doesn’t show much of anything.
“I’m bushed,” I say. “I’m going to head up to my room.” Rising, I grab my plate, a couple of protein shakes, and several electrolyte drinks.
The rest of the guys keep eating as I take the stairs up to the third floor, where my room is. Immediately, I spot my girlfriend outside a room at the end of the hall, fumbling with a keycard. “Damn it,” she mutters.
She drops the piece of plastic and bends down, giving me a fantastic shot of her panties. White with little pink hearts dotting the fabric. Just like that, I’m hard as steel.
I wait until I’m right behind her to murmur, “Can I help you?”
Mollie whirls, her eyes wide, the keycard pressed to her heart. When she recognizes me, her relief is evident. “God, Alex. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“I can’t help that you’re trying to break into my room,” I tease. Reaching around her, I swipe my own keycard, then push her inside.
“I was just… uh…” Her cheeks turn bright pink as I drop my hockey bag and back her against the closed door.
“You were just what?” I bury my nose in her red hair, inhaling deeply. Citrus and vanilla and clean skin. “Just sneaking into your secret boyfriend’s room while you’re on a work trip?”
“Alex.” God, I love how my name sounds when she says it.
She’s wearing a cute pink sweater with daisies on it, and her short green skirt.
I tug the fuzzy collar to the side, revealing the pale, creamy skin where her neck meets her shoulder.
Her breath hitches. Placing a burning kiss there, followed by a stinging nip of my teeth against her sensitive skin, I groan.
My control, which has been holding by a thread all evening, snaps cleanly in half. Her hands find my chest and she tips her face up. The look she gives me is the one she's been giving me for weeks. Patient and certain and a little smug, like she knew this was coming before I did.
Her hands twine in my hair, her hips press into mine, and I walk her backward toward the bed and then stop.
She pulls back. "What?"
"Not here." She blinks at me. "Mollie, I've been thinking about this for three years. A hotel room isn't exactly how I planned it. You deserve so much better."
She deserves the world, not me, a world-weary hockey player with nothing but the dregs left to give her.
"Alex." She says it the way she does when she thinks I'm being an idiot; both fond and exasperated. "We have a room. We have a bed. We have approximately eight hours before the early flight home. And I’ve been fantasizing about this moment since July." She reaches for my belt. "I'm done waiting."
I catch her hands. She looks up at me, lips curving upward, giving me one more chance to talk myself out of whatever argument I think I'm making. I can’t come up with anything because her amber eyes are shining with unspoken emotions I can’t quite decipher. Caught in her gaze, I’m hypnotized.
Then she drops to her knees.
The sound I make is a grunt, and a groan, and a protest all at once. She looks up at me from the floor with her hands at my waistband and her red curls falling in her face.
God, I love how she looks at me. No one has ever really seen me the way that she does. It’s too much.
"Get up," I say roughly.
She raises an eyebrow. "Why?"
"Because if you do what you're about to do, this is going to be over in thirty seconds and that’s not how tonight is going.
" I pull her back to her feet. She makes an indignant noise that I cut off with my mouth.
I kiss her hard, possessive, feeling as though I could own a part of her if I just dominated her with my lips, my teeth, the groan that slips past my lips.
She melts into my kiss immediately, her hands sliding up my chest. Crossing the final steps to the bed, I lay her down, taking a second just to look at her.
Her skin is pale in the low light, freckles scattered across her shoulders, her red hair against the pillow. She's watching me with dark eyes and pink cheeks.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says.
"Funny, I was about to say the same thing," I tell her. I pull my dark gray hoodie up over my head and toe off my sneakers. Then I pull my T-shirt off, loving the way her pupils dilate as she takes me in.
“Damn.” She shivers. “You’re so fucking hot, Alex.”
I collapse on top of her, caging her in. She doesn’t have to say those words. She doesn’t need to say anything at all to make me want her. But every time she opens her mouth, something new and unexpected pops out.
And it drives me wild.
She shivers when my mouth finds her pulse point, her hands coming up into my hair.
I work my way down her collarbone, her sternum, the soft skin of her stomach, taking my time at every place that makes her breath hitch.
By the time I get to her waist, she's squirming and her fingers are tight in my hair.
“Alex,” she gasps. I’m going to wreck this girl, ruin her so that she needs me as badly as I need her. So that I’m the only one she thinks about when she’s in bed alone at night. It’s only fair.
First, I undress her, taking the time to kiss her pebbled nipples until she moans before I push her skirt down her hips.
She’s so perfect and innocent and mine, lying there in nothing but cotton panties. Spreading her legs, I brush a finger down the damp spot where the thin fabric clings to her pussy.
Mollie has no idea how much I’ve fantasized about this moment. “So beautiful…”
Using two fingers, I pull her underwear down and press my face to her inner thigh. God, she smells good. Vanilla, citrus, and the faint promise of sex. I breathe her in and she makes a needy sound. "Alex," she says, writhing. "Please."
"I've got you," I tell her. Dragging my tongue up her seam, I steady her hips when she tries to come up off the bed. “You’re so wet, Freckles. So hot for me.”
“Yes, Alex.” She digs her hands into my hair with a moan. “Fuck, baby.”
The pet name on her lips sounds better than any I’ve ever heard.
I part her puffy pink lips with a finger, and slurp at her pussy, making her shudder. Circling my tongue around her clit in lazy laps, I’m rewarded by a garbled groan. Her hips roll as I set a rhythm, chasing that for a minute, then disturb it by teasing her channel with my finger.
“Oh. Oh. Omigod,” she whispers.
Smiling and slurping and sucking, I run that finger down, tracing the moisture that slips from her pussy toward her asshole.
“Alex!!” Her hands tighten in my hair, tugging me away.
I don’t stop, circling her tight bud. “Have I ever done anything that you didn’t like, Freckles?”
Mollie swallows, jerking her head tightly side to side. “N-no…”
“Then let me work. I know your little pussy is throbbing and excited, but this will open you up, get you nice and sloppy for me. I don’t know if you noticed, but I have a huge cock.”
“Fuck,” she moans. “I keep thinking about you being the first man who I ever come with when your big cock is deep in my pussy, stretching me out…”
Her words are unexpectedly filthy. I groan and slip the tip of my finger in the pucker of her ass. She tightens up, making me murmur, “Relax into my touch.”
Sucking on her clit does get her ass to relax so I can work a big finger in and out of her body, finally loosening it enough that I can fuck her properly. She lets out a string of inaudible moans and gasps as I flick my tongue over her clit. I sink my finger deep and she grunts.
“Oh god. Alex—"
She tastes exactly the way I knew she would and I lose myself in it completely, learning every response, cataloguing every sound. I set a punishing rhythm and she rolls her hips, desperate, horny, her hands in my hair trying to bring me closer.
Her thighs tighten around my head and I grab her, holding them open because I'm not finished. She doesn't get to rush this, not tonight, not after three years.