Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (35 page)

No one seemed to notice the hostility underlying every dumbass story he told. No one but May.

Her mother came down the stairs with two bags of chips and a casserole dish and shouted, “Football dip!”

Allie and Matt dug in. Other than the macaroni salad contest—from which Nancy had emerged victorious when Matt showed up to break the tie—there hadn’t been any lunch. All that food had been for the game, and Nancy was bringing it downstairs one dish at a time, laying it out on a table beside green paper plates and gold napkins.

Everybody seemed far more interested in the food and the company than in the pregame analysis on TV.

“You guys do actually
watch
the game, right?” he asked May under his breath.

“Sure.” But her eyes flicked to the TV, which was on mute, and then to her mother.

“What?”

“Well, sometimes I have to go watch it upstairs.”

“Because …”

May leaned closer and lowered her voice. “My mom doesn’t like it if anybody gets too … intense about the football.”

Her hair looked shiny under the basement’s can lights. He hadn’t been alone with her all day. There were way too many people around.

“And
you
get intense?”

“I’ve been known to take it a little more seriously than I probably should.”

He resisted the urge to tuck a strand of her hair more securely behind her ear. Not something a friend would do.

He didn’t want to be her friend. Not if it meant acting like this. Feeling like this.

“Remember that Seahawks game with the replacement refs? I had to leave the room. Allie thought I was going to have a heart attack.”

“I got kicked out of Pulvermacher’s,” he admitted.

“What’d you do?”

“You probably don’t want to know.”

“Did you hit somebody?” Her breath was coming faster now, and she was leaning into him, her hand on his thigh.

“You look like you hope I did.”

“I was so mad about that game. I couldn’t sleep that night. I just lay awake, being furious.
Maybe if I’d hit somebody, I could have slept.”

“I didn’t hit anybody. I got into an argument with some hippie who told me, ‘Chill out, man. It’s a game.’ ”

“I’m surprised you let him live.”

“Connor put himself between us, but the shit I yelled over his head got us both thrown out of the bar.”

“Mom sent me upstairs in the first half. By the third or fourth time Dan got sacked, she said I wasn’t fit for company.”

“That doesn’t sound like sweet, polite little May.”

She ducked her head and smiled sideways at the couch. “It’s possible that I’m a little irrational when it comes to football.”

He let himself smooth his hand over the slippery jersey fabric on her shoulders and the broad, stiff numbers flanking her spine. Just once. “Bloodthirsty wench.”

Hiding behind the curtain of her hair, she bit him on the collarbone, inflicting a sharp, secret wound that made him suck in a breath.

“You’ll pay for that,” he promised.

“After the game?”

“There’s always halftime.”

* * *

They barely lasted a quarter. Somebody stood and blocked the TV about ten minutes in, and he started to grumble. May politely asked the woman to move, but the die was cast.

After that, every time someone laughed too loud over at the bar, Ben stiffened, and May turned up the volume on the TV. Allie wasn’t even pretending to watch, her mother had spent the past hour talking about the wedding with three of her friends, and her father was oblivious at the bar, deep into swapping hunting stories with all her uncles, who were in town for the wedding.

When the Packers called a time-out, two different neighbors swooped in to ask Ben questions about his imaginary job. Nobody asked May what it was like to watch her ex-boyfriend play his ex-team while she sat on a couch next to the guy she was falling for.

Which was good, because she wasn’t sure she could have told them what it was like. She
didn’t have the words, and Ben had too many.

“You know, it’s the endorsements that take the most time,” Ben said. He packed the statement with such contempt, she expected her neighbors to recoil. To lift their hands and say,
Whoa. Forget I asked
. But it was as though no one could hear it but her. No one else was really
listening
to him.

“People always talk like endorsements are quick cash, but let me tell you,
somebody
is spending hundreds of hours working on those deals,” he said. “It’s just not the players. By the time you add up the lawyers hammering out the terms and the riders on those contracts and the PAs like me, who have to schedule all these phone conferences between four different people only to be told at the last minute that your talent has some unspoken objection to the whole idea of endorsing deodorant—”

The game came back on, and Ben’s eyes went straight to the screen. He stopped listening to himself. “It’s a pathetic time-wasting circle-jerk.”

“Excuse me,” May said. “I need to borrow him for a minute.” She grabbed his hand and pulled.

Ben followed her upstairs, past the TV in the living room. “Where are you taking me?”

“You’ll see.” They padded up the carpeted stairs to the bonus room on the top floor.

Ben found the remote before she’d even finished flipping on the lights. “You’re a goddess,” he said, his eyes already on the blue glow of the TV’s warm-up screen. “Help me find the channel.”

She did, and they sat side by side on the couch, their thighs pressing together but their attention entirely on the screen.

Almost entirely. Ben leaned forward most of the time, legs spread wide, elbows on his knees when things were going well, the palms of his hands braced against his kneecaps when the team required his full attention. At one point, he reached over and absently rubbed his hand up and down her thigh. “You lock the door?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Then there was a call he didn’t like, and he threw both arms in the air and flung his torso back against the couch cushions, his whole body a protest.

A few seconds later, he sat forward again, resuming his vigil.

May paid attention to every play, but beneath—between them both—arousal built. A player fumbled, Ben called him a fucking idiot, and desire contracted between her thighs, low and hot. He groused at the refs now and then, but the Packers were ahead, so there was a pleasant halfheartedness to it.

“Einarsson’s not playing his best,” he said.

“Don’t make me feel bad.”

Ben put his hand back on her knee. “It’s not your fault.”

When the Packers’ new quarterback threw away the ball, then sprinted after the opposing lineman to pull an open-field tackle from his ass at the forty-five-yard line, May said, “I’m going to marry that man.”

She meant it as a joke, but Ben didn’t seem to think it was funny. “Not fucking likely,” he said, and heat zipped through her, waking every part of her that had been anesthetized when she walked over the threshold into her parents’ house and back into her old life.

Her clit. Her heart.

Her defiant, unsatisfied self.

“Stranger things have happened,” she said. The Packers were ahead with twenty-three seconds left in the first half. Ben’s dark mood turned her on. His body, solid and real beside her. His presence. “I bet he likes tall women.”

Three seconds later, Ben had her underneath him. “Wait until I’m gone before you start running around with quarterbacks again, huh?”

“If you insist.” She found the hem of his shirt and pulled it out of the way so she could settle her hands over the divots at the base of his spine.

“I insist.”

He kissed her deeply, and she wanted to cheer, it was so exactly what she’d been hoping for. His tongue tasting of salt and beer, his arm braced against the couch behind her head. His anger transformed into movement, desire. No lies between them.

Ben’s free hand found her breast and rubbed her nipple through her jersey, but she pushed his hand aside and reached for her zipper. She didn’t need foreplay. Her pulse was beating between her legs, loud and desperate, and Ben was already hard. “You have a condom?”

“In my pocket.”

“Get it on.”

She unzipped her jeans as he tussled with his, raised her hips a few inches and shoved denim as far down his legs as she could. She spread her knees and said, “Hurry.”

“Will anyone come up here during the half?”

“Hurry,” she repeated, and he settled over her, testing her readiness with a fingertip.

“You’re not wet enough. Let me—”

She licked three fingers and dropped her hand between her legs, more to get him to stop talking than because she really needed it. There was moisture inside her, and the condom was lubricated. Ben would take care of the rest.

He watched her hand, eyes glittering. “That’s fucking hot.”

“My new quarterback boyfriend tells me that all the time.”

“Smart-ass.” Wrapping his hand around the base of his cock, he found the right angle and sank inside her.

“Ohh.” She arched up off the couch, seeking to get closer to him. To pull his heat deeper.

Their breathing became its own language, long exhales and short, gasping inhales voiced as quietly as they could manage. He felt so good, his thick length claiming her the way she’d been waiting for all day.

You’ve been waiting all day for him to claim you
.

Guh, she had. She was. One more stupid hope, balanced on the cliff edge and waiting to be tipped over and dashed. Surely if he’d planned to claim her, he’d have done it already, rather than spend the day going along with the ridiculous lie Allie had invented.

Surely if she deserved his regard, she’d have said something. Done something by now. Something much more brave and definitive than sneaking him off for a quickie in the bonus room.

But what was he doing here, inside her house, inside her body, if not claiming her? Why make friends with her family, share a beer with her father, tease her mother in the other room if not because he wanted
this
, and he wanted everyone to know it?

Stupid questions. Stupid girl, to be getting her hopes up.

Still. Still. He’d made her this way. She couldn’t pretend, with Ben inside her body, that this half-assed, undefinable relationship of theirs was entirely in her head.

She squeezed him tight, digging her nails into his ass so he’d take her faster and rougher.

She couldn’t pretend not to care. He was leaving, and she cared.

She wanted him to stay with her, and she would tell him so.

She would clear things up with Dan. She would stand up to her mother. Tomorrow.

Now this was all they needed. His fingers tangled in her hair, wrapping it into a fist to create a tug against her scalp. Stinging pleasure to match the sharp intrusion between her thighs, the cutting pressure of his hips moving in rough, synchronized thrusts against her own.

Their joined bodies moistened until they began to glide, pleasure singing over her skin, tripping her lungs, curling her toes.

His mouth on her throat, open and hot. The scrape of his teeth.

Ben bit her neck. Hard.

“Ouch!”

“I owed you that.”

He nipped her lip, then kissed her. Purposeful at first, but soon the kiss lost focus. When he pulled away, his eyes were only half-open, his cheeks and throat flushed. “I’m close.”

“Touch me.”

He shook his head. Grabbed her wrist. Pushed her hand between them. “You.”

Ben had lifted his chest off her, bracing himself on both hands and staring down at the place where their bodies joined, and she had to admit, it turned her on. So primitive, watching his glistening flesh disappear at the same time that she lifted to meet him.

She touched him first, lightly circling his base with her thumb and fingers.

“May,” he groaned. “For Christ’s sake, we’re trying to get
you
off. That’s just—”

She tightened her grip, and he inhaled sharply through his nose.

“That’s just what?”

But it was too late to tease him—he was gone. His hips picked up, hammering relentlessly for a few beats until his whole body stiffened and he groaned. May’s skin prickled at the sound. Her fingers found her clit as he dropped his head against her shoulder. She stroked herself, smelling the sweat on Ben’s neck and lifting her hips as he bumped lightly against her, tweaking at her nipple, and all the pleasure in her body focused down, sharpened.

She heard the dull thud of footfalls on the basement stairs. Voices in the living room. Her hand worked faster between them. Her hips bucked, her back arching hard enough to bring Ben’s head up.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “That’s my girl.”

His words filled her with a frantic desperation that she was way too far gone to analyze. Pinned down by Ben’s gaze, she was alone in this—his eyes, his words, his lazy twisting of her nipple and the fullness of his cock inside her such passive forms of participation in comparison to the crazed energy with which she chased her own orgasm.

No lover had ever watched her the way Ben did. There was no hiding from him, and she didn’t even want to. She wanted him to
see
her—to witness the ugliness of her need.

She wanted him to know everything.

She wanted him to know she loved him.

Oh, bad idea, May
.

But it got her off. When the orgasm came, it pulled her tight as a clenched fist, tight as her own fury at herself, and then granted her reprieve, flinging her out of her own head. She gasped, openmouthed. She gave herself over to it—a seemingly endless contraction of pleasure and painful joy.

Ben balanced above her, blocking the overhead light. Watching the whole thing.

She closed her eyes when it ebbed away. Pressed her lips into his skin. Touched her nose to his shoulder.

She opened her eyes and drank in the sight of his hard, beautiful face. With trembling fingers, she outlined the shape of his jaw.

Loved him.

Fuck.

“Your mom thinks I’m going to help talk you into getting back together with Dan,” he said quietly.

“I know. I heard.”