SIX
With more pep to his step than the destination deserved or his night could attest to, Vadim walked into the trainers’ room an hour earlier than usual for his remedial lessons with Isobel. The Rebels’ captain, Bren St. James, lay on the table, getting his shoulder examined by one of the team doctors and Kelly.
Vadim had not slept well. He would say he had slept terribly, and not even Alexei’s warm milk concoction was enough to send him back to sleep. (Alexei believed warm milk and brandy solved everything.) All night, Vadim had replayed that one night with Isobel, but eight years had morphed it beyond recognition.
The sex was amazing.
The sex was adequate.
She had screamed his name over and over.
Because she was in pain.
In her eyes, he had seen desire and trust and honesty.
The mind could play the cruelest tricks.
Again he sent that mind back to the day he had finally slipped inside Isobel’s body after weeks of burning for her: a late afternoon in July, the air thick and sultry, the trees lining the driveway to Clifford Chase’s house green and bright.
I curl in on myself, hunching my shoulders lower while waiting to be admitted. Another furtive glance over my shoulder tells the same story as the first five furtive glances: no one is watching me.
The big oak door opens. My chest opens right up with it.
Bella.
Her dark chestnut hair is down and curled over her shoulders, and she wears makeup—smoky gray lines around her green eyes and slashes of pink on her cheeks and lips. I’ve never seen her in makeup before. It makes her look older than her eighteen years, and I suppose I should be grateful, because as mature as she is on the ice, she appears young off it.
“Vad!” She grabs my hand and drags me inside; then her arms circle my waist as she presses her body to mine. Her supple breasts push up inside her low-cut top, which is pink and has sparkles on it. Her hips are covered in tight black pants that stop halfway down her calves. Her feet are bare. It’s weird to see her in anything but hockey gear or sweats.
I smell it immediately. “Have you been drinking, Bella?”
A small giggle escapes her. “Just one.” More likely two or three. “To steady my nerves.”
I smile. “Why would you be nervous, Bella? I am just a friend visiting another friend.” But I push my erection into her fabric-covered heat all the same.
“You’re more than a friend, Vadim.”
Yes, there’s nothing very friendly about my feelings toward her.
“I shouldn’t be here if you are drunk,” I say, thinking it through and not enjoying the conclusion.
“I’m not drunk,” she insists, and her words aren’t slurred—or not slurred enough—so I allow my desire to muffle any negative thoughts. I’ve waited too long to let a couple of drinks stand in the way. After a month of flirting and touching—and let’s face it, her skating rings around me, an incredible turn-on—I will finally have her.
But I don’t want to rush her because this girl is special. Every time I see her, my heart skips beats and my dick throbs painfully to make up for it. Either way, it produces problems for my circulation, making my brain a blood-free zone.
I’m a dizzy fool when it comes to Isobel Chase.
“Want a drink first?” she asks. “I have vodka.”
“I don’t like vodka.”
“But you’re Russian!”
“The only thing I want to drink, Bella, is you.”
A very pretty blush blooms underneath her makeup. “Oh wow, you sure know how to fire up a girl.”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” And then I take her mouth boldly, only gentling at her gasp. Take it slow, Vad. We’ve kissed once before in the locker room at the rink, but it was quick, our worry about being caught by her father keeping our passion at a simmer.
“We’re alone?” I whisper against her mouth, though I know she wouldn’t ask me here unless we are.
She nods, eyes glazed over with both lust and trust, then she takes my hand and leads me toward the stairs.
Again I hesitate. I want to get it right. Treat her right. “Perhaps we should watch TV?”
She steps in close, her hand cupping my raging erection. “Does this want to watch TV?”
No, it does not. It wants out and in, where the “in” will be the sweetest oblivion. With her soft hand stroking my dick, I know I would be an idiot to turn down this opportunity. This beautiful, bright-eyed blitzkrieg of a girl wants me, has made it clear from the moment we met in every heated look and flirty comment.
The Girl with the Blazing Skates has this boy on the ropes.
His mind whiplashed back to the present. One of the trainers—Ted—was calling him over to the table.
What did the past matter? Once there was a boy, infatuated with a girl, desperate to have her. Too desperate, it would seem, for he hadn’t taken care of her in the way a woman, especially a virgin, should be cared for. In the years since, there was no doubt as to his prowess. Women spoke to newspapers about it, for God’s sake.
No lover left his bed wanting. All of them received the Vadim Petrov deluxe orgasm treatment (perhaps he should slip that to the newspapers). If he were to make the mistake of favoring Isobel Chase once more, she would be left in no doubt as to what had occurred. The best orgasm of her life!
“How’re you feeling today, Vadim?” Ted asked.
Furious. “A little stiff. It is often this way in the morning.”
Ted nodded as Vadim assumed the position: track bottoms pulled down to shorts, and on his back on the table. This gave Vadim a chance to assess Kelly, who was still working on St. James’s shoulder.
Vadim aimed for cool objectivity as he glanced sidelong at the man. Open and easygoing, Kelly possessed an all-American guilelessness that immediately aroused Vadim’s suspicion, not because he doubted Kelly’s motives for asking out Isobel, but because Vadim understood them all too well.
He was what one would call “a good guy.”
This disgusted Vadim. Isobel would be bored to tears with this man in her bed. He probably would ask for permission to kiss her, to touch her, to go down on her. Theirs would be a relationship filled with “you first; no, you; no, you.” So much respect for each other that there would be no allowances made for the demands of true lust.
This was the man she wished to allow access to her body? He would not know what to do with her.
Just as you did not know all those years ago.
The door opened and a dark ponytailed head curved around it. Isobel’s green eyes alighted on Vadim and dismissed him before moving on to Kelly and staying put.
Vadim’s blood raged at the notion that Kelly Townsend was more deserving of Isobel’s attention.
“I’ll come back,” she said to Kelly, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation.
Kelly stepped away from the trainer’s table just as Bren St. James sat up, the rubdown finished. “We’re done here. What can I do you for?”
Isobel smiled with a lot more warmth than this worm deserved. “It’s not important. It’s just . . .” She hesitated and swung her gaze to Vadim, who made no secret of the fact that he was listening. He held that green-eyed gaze with challenge.
Her brows formed a V in plain annoyance. “Later.”
Kelly nodded, apparently pleased with that. Later. When they would discuss important things. Like dates. Or orgasms.
Ted asked Vadim about the adductor muscle that had been bothering him, and the distraction meant that Vadim missed Isobel’s exit. Had she shared a longing look with Kelly before she left? Were they now communicating without words?
Vadim was not enjoying this. Not at all.
But maybe Isobel had nothing to do with the cloud hanging over him. He preferred to attribute his mood to the phone call he had received an hour ago from Mia. She wanted to meet up with him at the next away game in New York, which meant the pressure was on once again. Would his body be ready for play? Would his mind be ready for Victoria Wallace?
Yes, that was the reason for his irritation. Not Isobel Chase.
Mr. Siberia was a total joy this morning.
Of course, that conclusion would assume that degrees of joy were possible with the Cat’s Meow from Moscow. (Violet’s latest nickname, even though Vadim wasn’t from Moscow and the rhyme sucked.) Isobel put Vadim’s chilly demeanor this morning at a 9.5 on a scale of one to ten—“seriously pissed off, speech impossible”—but the scale didn’t even go below an eight, which was “annoyed with a chance of Russian swearing.”
Ever since he’d unloaded that glare when she popped her head into the trainers’ room, he’d been acting as if someone had cut out the crotches in his designer suits. Now they were running sprint drills from the center line to the blue zone. At first he seemed to be working through it, but with each rep, he’d up the growl quotient at her as he skated by.
Kind of sexy, but that was neither here nor there.
Isobel didn’t have time for sexy, growly, bad-tempered Russians playing havoc with her hormones, not when she might be headed out on a dinner date with a mere mortal who was just her speed. She hadn’t had a chance to touch base with Kelly, but she’d gone home last night after their chat feeling more hopeful than she had in a while.
Kelly Townsend might be the one.
Nice and harmless, a guy she could talk to. What better basis on which to build a relationship? Lust as the foundation might work for other people, but not for her. The proof was muttering to himself on every skate-by.
“Want to talk about it, Russian?”
He stopped, spat a curse at the ice, and then continued with the drills.
Fair enough. She wasn’t here to be his sounding board. Lord knew she understood what he was going through, but everyone had to deal with injuries in their own way and on their own timetable. Isobel would focus on Vadim’s skating and leave whatever was happening between the ears to the team’s shrink.
After ten more minutes of semidecent skating and Olympic-quality cantankerousness, she called a halt and took a seat on the bench rinkside. As she entered notes into her iPad, she became aware that he had skated over, cleared the rink barrier, and now stood before her. In skates, he loomed close to six feet seven, everything about him supersized.
She peered up. Damn, he was pretty, even when grumpy. “How does the knee feel?”
“Good. Best it’s felt in a while.”
Surprised at his even tone, she studied him more closely now, looking beyond the superficial perfection. She’d assumed his temper tantrum was related to his uncooperative body.
“That’s great. But if you’re pretending it’s better to get me to sign off on you quicker . . .”
He sat on the bench beside her, pressing his muscular thigh against hers, its heat a bulwark against the chilly rink. There was plenty of room on the bench. He didn’t need to sit so close or flaunt such a balls-out pose. She could have pulled away, but manspreading was just one of the many crosses women had to bear, and she refused to let him think this bothered her. Because it didn’t. It was just a thigh. A pillar-thick, incredibly massive, heat-conducting thigh.
“Believe it or not, Isobel, I’m a team player. If I wasn’t ready, I would say so.”
Sure you would. “You looked good out there today. You didn’t tire like the first time we did this.”
He stared at her, into her. There’d been a lot of that intimidating staring back in the day, and she was quite immune thankyouverymuch—oh, who was she kidding? Vadim Petrov in thermonuclear glare mode was enough to make her melt.
Lust. Not a good foundation.
His lips were moving, but she missed what came out of them, or rather her muddled brain couldn’t quite compute what came out. She rewound the last two seconds. She could have sworn—“What did you say?”
“Are you dating Kelly?”
He must have spotted her in the Empty Net and jumped to the right conclusion. “And this is your business because?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You don’t think—you don’t think—” Sputtering, she knew she sounded like a loon, but how was she supposed to respond?
Turned out she didn’t have to, because Mr. Nosy Parkov was still spouting unsolicited opinions. “Your position is precarious.”
“What position is that?”
“As a team owner who is female and trying to obtain a job on the coaching staff.”
Right, that position. “What have you heard?” Was someone else gossiping about what they’d seen in the bar? Kelly shouldn’t have kissed her cheek. Damn.
“The fact you might be using him to gain favor with the coaching staff was remarked upon.” He shrugged as if this was nonsense, but he felt it his solemn duty to keep her informed.
Now she was the one growling. She thought back to who else was sitting with Vadim last night. Callaghan, Burnett, Jorgenson, and . . . Shay.
“Did Shay remark upon it?”
“He did, and while no one agreed with him explicitly, the seed was sown.”
Her cheeks burned. To have her motives categorized so malevolently was both embarrassing and disheartening.
“So how’s the seed, Vadim? Has it sprouted yet? Has it grown into a tree in here?” She poked at his chest, angry with herself, with him, and with the high school gossips who wanted to rip down something before it had even started.
He grasped her hand and placed it flat against his chest. Oh my. His heart pounded, violent, vehement kicks under her fingertips. Those drills must have taken more out of him than he’d let on.
“I make up my own mind. If you think that a relationship with Kelly is more important than this gossip, then ignore it. They are only words. But . . .” He trailed off.
She felt her body angle closer. “But?”
He was still holding her hand, burning his heat and know-it-all assholery into every receptive little cell. “Will he satisfy you, Isobel?” His darkening gaze wavered between her lips and her eyes. “Will he understand what makes your pulse race, your blood surge, your body crave more?”
Pulse. Blood. Body. Crave. More.
His lips hovered an inch from her mouth, and beneath her hand still wrapped in his warm, sandpaper-rough one, she felt all that Russian passion. Th-thunk. Th-thunk. She felt it downloading into her blood, rewiring her neurons, rebooting her dormant libido. Her body didn’t just crave—it demanded. Gratification. Satisfaction. To be filled and used. Her breasts swelled. Hot, slippery dampness pooled between her thighs. She squeezed her core to get some much-needed relief.
It only made the craving worse.
Or maybe it made the craving better.
His eyes were dark discs of night, the blue impossible to discern, and she knew two things.
He’s going to kiss me
and
I’m going to let him.
Wait, he was not kissing. He was speaking. She thought she might have said “What?” but it came out as “Whuu-aaa?”
“So, is it more important?”
“Is—is what more important?”
He hoisted an eyebrow. “A relationship with Kelly. Is it more important than gossip?”
Screech. Kelly. That’s who they were talking about while she imagined this big, broody Russian fulfilling the fantasies her vibrator couldn’t. She drew back, blinking away the lust fog she’d become lost in.
Did she want people thinking she’d earned a coaching spot because she was dating the head trainer? Begging him over pillow talk to put a good word in for her? It wasn’t as if Kelly had any true power here; the decision would be down to Coach Calhoun and GM Moretti. The test was how she worked with Petrov. There were no shortcuts.
She peered at Vadim, who waited patiently. Or she would have thought that if he hadn’t squeezed her hand a smidge. Was that her imagination?
“I don’t know.”
“There is your answer.” He released her and picked up the stick he had leaned against the bench. Then he stood and headed toward the exit to the tunnel, leaving her a growly, confused, horny mess.