Grand Slam Playboy (Off Base #2)

Chapter 1

Audrey

The sheet beneath me has gone damp.

He has me pinned into the mattress, his thigh working between mine, the weight of him pressing down but still not enough. When he exhales, it's on the sensitive spot behind my ear, and I feel it shoot from my neck down to my core, a warmth that pools and spreads into the hollow of my hips.

Late afternoon light stretches across the room. It reaches through the curtains, amber and thick, the kind that clings and makes everything look like it’s dipped in honey.

His mouth lands on the side of my throat. Warm, open, wet. His tongue traces a slow line from the base of my neck to just below my jaw, and my pulse jumps against his lips.

The sound that comes out of me is mine and it isn't, a low, broken thing that catches in the back of my throat and spills out before I can stop it. My fingers twist tighter into whatever they're holding—fabric, hair, both—and my hips shift under him, seeking without meaning to.

He smiles against my skin like he's been waiting for it. I feel the curve of his mouth, the way it changes the pressure of his lips from soft to something with intent behind it.

Then he moves lower, stubble dragging across my collarbone, across the upper curve of my chest, and each point of contact leaves a trail of heat that doesn't fade. My eyes flutter shut as he continues down, down until the anticipation is almost worse than the contact itself.

My hands don't know what to hold. His hair, the sheet, both at once and neither well. I grab a fistful of something soft then pull, and his breath hitches against my stomach, the sound he makes vibrating through me.

He whispers my name, dark and half-laughing, and the way he says it, like an obscene promise, does something to the inside of my thighs. I try to answer, but his lips reach the underside of my breast and words just stop.

His mouth is so close to where I want it that the distance between almost and yes becomes a physical ache. He breathes against me, and I feel the wet heat of his exhale on skin that's already tight, already waiting.

His hand finds the inside of my thigh.

Rests there.

The weight of it holds the entire world.

Please.

I don't know if I say it out loud. The word hangs in the air either way, and he hears it, lifting his head as my legs fall open wider. I can't help it. My body is making decisions without me now.

His hand starts to move, slow and deliberate circles, the friction maddening—not hard enough, not direct enough—just the suggestion of what his fingers could do if he wanted to, if I asked again.

If I begged. The pad of his middle finger finds the spot that makes my breath stutter, and he stays there, pressing, rotating, the rhythm steady and patient and devastating.

My back arches off the mattress without permission.

The sheet stays fisted in my hand, knuckles white, and my breath comes in short, hot bursts as the heat escalates from climbing to coiling.

The pulling winds tighter, somewhere low, somewhere I'd forgotten could wind, and my thighs tremble around his hand.

I press my heels into the bed.

He doesn't stop. His mouth returns to my throat, teeth grazing, tongue soothing, and his hand speeds up, fingers curling in, and oh god, the tightness reaches the place right before, the place just before, the place right before it—

My eyes snap open on the bedroom ceiling, the dream evaporating the way a candle goes when someone pinches the wick—immediately snuffed. Gray morning light leaks through the curtains, and my breath sounds loud in the quiet of the room, my hand cramping in the rumpled sheet beside me.

I turn my head.

The pillow beside mine sits flat, the duvet smooth on that side, a film of dust on the lamp on the nightstand. The book Thomas was reading still waits in the drawer. I put it there the week after the funeral, unable to look at it on the shelf. Unable to make myself throw it away either.

It'll be a year in a few more months.

The thought makes everything inside me go cold again.

I lie very still and let my body finish its accounting. The pulling unwinds, the dampness of my skin cools in the morning air, and the sound I almost made stays in my throat and doesn't come out.

Nothing to say to an empty room. No one to say it to anyway.

I close my eyes.

The day awaits on the other side of getting out of this bed, and I think through the shape of it, of what I need to do.

Get up. Get dressed. Make sure the kids are fed and the bag is packed, then make the fifty-minute drive to Harlow if traffic cooperates. After that it's a backyard full of strangers, all of them friends of a man my sister is "not dating" but obviously wants to.

I'll smile at them. Ask the follow-up questions my mother taught me to ask. I'll nod when they tell me things, keeping my hand on my glass and my face arranged, and for four hours nobody will see anything I don't want them to see.

That's a lot.

I think about it, and the pressure starts forming behind my left eye. It's small at first, a bright pinprick at the bone above my brow, and then it turns into a slow pulse that finds the rhythm of my heart the way it always does.

I press the heel of my hand to my temple, willing it to go away. The pulse doesn't slow.

No.

Please.

Not today.

I can already see how the pain will play out—the medications still not working—and the functioning part of my brain finds the excuse immediately.

I could tell her.

Tell Nora.

I could pick up the phone and say I woke up with a migraine, and she'd say of course, Auds, it's fine, I'll go alone. And she'd mean it. She would go alone and chew the inside of her cheek the whole time she was there.

My sister has slept in my guest bedroom for six months. She's done my laundry for weeks when I couldn't get out of bed. She’s carried the bottom corner of my life since the funeral, and she’s asked me—once, quietly—if I'll come with her today.

I put my feet on the floor, the room tilting as I stand.

I’m going.

End of discussion.

"The prettiest woman at this whole party is sitting alone at the bar."

A slow shake of a head I can feel rather than see.

"Somebody should've done something about that already."

I don't look up.

The lemonade in my glass has gone down to mostly ice. I've worked on it for twenty minutes, pressing the chill against my temple between sips, watching the kids from the shade of the pergola.

Eli has streaked through the deck like a small wet missile since we arrived.

Sophie holds court on the steps of the shallow end, pretending she's not having a good time, and the pretending runs so committed it counts as its own kind of enjoyment.

Nora stands somewhere behind me with Nate.

I haven't checked on her in ten minutes, which beats the longest she's gone without glancing at me.

A man drops onto the stool to my left.

He didn't ask. He just swung a leg over and settled the way some people settle into a couch in their own house, like the bar stool was always his throne to claim.

He's close, closer than a stranger has any business being.

The sun comes off his skin, and his forearm rests on the bar between us, sun-darkened to the wrist, a watch on it that flashes in my peripheral vision.

I take a sip of my drink. "That's a strong opener," I say, pressing the cup back to my temple.

"I thought so."

"Does it usually work?"

"I'll let you know."

His voice drops lower than it ran at the side gate, warm and pitched to carry without rising, the kind of voice that knows the size of the room it's in. A smile threads through it that isn't a smile for the whole yard. Narrower than that. Pointed somewhere.

"What's your name, doll face?"

Doll face.

The phrase lands in a place I haven't kept guarded, because I haven't needed to. Heat climbs the side of my neck, and I press the glass harder against my head, but the cold doesn't reach it.

For eight months, every word aimed at me has come padded around the edges.

Audrey in a careful voice, honey in the casserole voice, Mom behind the bedroom door.

The word doll in a stranger's mouth, easy and warm, like he's been saying it all his life and decided I qualify without asking, goes straight through the part of me I keep behind the polite smile.

The smile doesn't move. I make sure of it.

I turn my head, and my breath snags somewhere it shouldn't.

The first thing I notice about him is impossible to miss.

He's beautiful.

No opting out of seeing it.

Dark golden hair, slightly long, damp at the tips.

A jaw drawn by someone with too much confidence.

A mouth that has clearly caused trouble before and will cause it again.

White cotton stretches across his shoulders, swim trunks low on his hips, and his expression runs mostly amusement with something hotter laced underneath, something that threads through my chest like a wire.

I lower the glass.

He grins. Slow. Like a man unwrapping something he's been told he can't have.

"Audrey," I say.

"Audrey." He tries it in his mouth then tilts his head. "Just Audrey?"

"Audrey's enough."

"Audrey is plenty."

I drop my eyes back to my glass before my face does something I can't take back. My fingers have tightened around it, and I loosen them one at a time, the way you'd loosen a fist you didn't know you'd made.

I find Eli in the deep end. I find Sophie on the steps. I try to put my pulse back where it's lived for eight months—in the slow, careful register of a woman who isn't asking anything of anyone.

It doesn't go.

"So." He props his elbow on the bar and angles toward me. He hasn't opened the beer in his other hand, the bottle hanging loose between his fingers, forgotten. "Tell me how you fit into this lineup."

I blink. "Nora is my sister."

Something flickers across his face and disappears before I can name it.

"Nora's sister." His voice softens a half-shade. Then he nods. "That tracks."

"Does it?"

"You have the same nose."

A flush reaches the back of my neck, and my fingers tighten around the glass without me telling them to.

"You do that every time you get nervous?"

"Do what?"

"Strangle your drink."

I turn back to him, because if I keep looking away he's going to notice, and I'd rather get caught with no answer than caught flinching.

He hasn't moved. The grin has gone smaller, the amusement still there, but the thing underneath it is easier to see now.

He looks at me the way a man looks at something he's decided about.

I don't know what he's decided. But I want him to keep deciding it.

The thought arrives so clearly and so unauthorized that for a second I can't breathe through it. The ice gives me away first, clanging against the side of the glass. I hope he doesn't notice.

"You here with anyone?" His voice drops another half-step, no smile in it.

My pulse jumps into my throat, and I force myself not to look away from his gaze.

"My kids are in the pool."

His expression doesn’t waver.

"That isn't what I asked."

He's right. It isn't.

I know how to do this. I've done it half a dozen times in the past year—at the pharmacy, in the waiting room of the doctor's office. I'm a widow. My husband passed away last year. I should tell him, cleanly, so he can retreat in good order the way they all do.

I open my mouth. I take a sip of my drink instead, and the ice clicks against my teeth.

"I'm here alone," I say. It comes out quieter than I mean it to.

He receives it without moving. Just looks at me, and the grin shifts slowly into something I don't have a name for. He leans an inch closer along the bar, propped on his elbow, the beer still unopened.

"Audrey." He says it again, like he's spelling it for himself. "Can I tell you something?"

"Please don't."

He laughs, short and surprised, the laugh of a man who didn't expect to get told no and is delighted to have been. The sound of it travels through me like a vibration, settling somewhere low, somewhere it has no business going.

Before I can catch it, my mouth moves, a small smile pulling at the corner that I didn't authorize and can't, right now, remember how to suppress.

He sees it, and his face does something then.

"There she is," he says, softly, mostly to himself.

Heat flashes through me, quick and bright. My thighs press together on the stool, and I look away before it can settle.

I can't remember the last time my face did something I didn't plan. I can't remember the last time someone noticed when I let the planning slip. Or the last time a man—this man, any man—sat one stool away from me and looked at my mouth like he was trying to memorize it.

The pressure behind my left eye keeps its rhythm. But underneath it, somewhere lower, a second beat has started, one that wasn't there ten minutes ago.

A shape moves at the edge of my vision.

Nate, coming around the end of the grill with tongs in one hand and a dish towel over his shoulder, walking with the deliberate ease of a man who's choosing not to look like he's hurrying.

"Asher."

The man on the stool beside me doesn't turn his head. "Holt."

"Come here a minute."

"I'm in the middle of a conversation."

"I can see that." Nate's hand lands on his shoulder, easy, friendly to anyone watching, not entirely friendly underneath. "Come here a minute. I need to talk with you about something."

His eyes don't leave my face. "Audrey." He says it like he's marking the page. "Hold that thought."

He slides off the stool the way he sat down on it, no negotiation, no effort. Two fingers tap the bar between us—once, light—like a man leaving a tip. He turns and follows Nate across the deck.

He doesn't look back.

I watch him anyway.

The line of his shoulders under the white cotton, the beer bottle swinging neck-hooked from two fingers, his free hand coming up to push the damp hair back from his face—careless, automatic—the gesture of a man completely at home in his own skin.

Asher.

My hand stays where it is on the glass, the other resting flat on the bar. I hold them both very still, because if I move them I'm going to give myself away, and I'm not ready for the yard to see it.

The ice in my glass clicks.

The barbecue goes on around me. The pool, the kids, the grill smoke, somebody laughing somewhere behind me, the lake glittering through the trees beyond the fence.

The sun makes a shape of light on the water that flares against the bone above my eye every time I look too long, and I look at it anyway, because I need somewhere to put my eyes that isn't where he went.

The second beat keeps going. Low, slow, unmistakable.

I sit very still on the stool.

The thought arrives the same way the dream did. Without permission. Whole.

I set the glass down on the bar.

I want him.

It's the cleanest thought I've had in eight months.