Chapter Eight
Val was nervous. She was never nervous in the corporate box at Henley stadium. If anything, apart from the bakery, it was where she felt most at home, watching her beloved Smoke play the game that had been bred into her DNA.
But she’d never screwed one of the players before, either. Sure, last time she was here a couple of weeks ago, she’d already transgressed with Kyle, but nobody had known. No one except the two of them. In fact, not even Kyle had known. Not really. Not who he’d slept with or the extent of the crap he’d stepped in.
Since then, everyone knew. Kyle, the entire team, and all the support staff. And the WAGs. A handful of them had been in touch in the days following that very public kiss and its fallout to check on her.
Having carnal knowledge of Kyle Leighton was one thing. Everyone knowing about it was something else entirely.
Frankly, it was freaking her out.
Like tonight, standing all alone at the window of the glass box, with women she was usually so at ease with treating her differently. With kid gloves. Like she might shatter at any second.
Val wasn’t used to being the subject of sympathetic smiles or random hugs. Sure, they were all well aware of her strained relationship with her father, but Val’s stiff upper lip where he was concerned had made it a nonissue, and the WAGs always took their cues from her. Suddenly, though, it was like they didn’t know what to say to her, and she knew none of them wanted to do or say anything that might make it worse.
It was a relief to see the men run out onto the field and feel the women join her, standing shoulder to shoulder with her. Their silent presence was the kind of calm solidarity she needed right now. They might not know what to say, but Val got the message.
We’re here for you.
It took Val about ten seconds to spot Kyle, bouncing on his feet a little, shaking his hands out, obviously limbering up, and, for a moment, all her anxiety and tension drained away. The man was a pure pleasure to look at in blue and silver, the uniform fitting him like a glove, tight against shoulders and abs and thighs, exposing his strong forearms and powerful legs. And that face. Sexy despite his crooked nose messing with the symmetry.
But it was more than that. It was his self-possession. He was carelessly, effortlessly confident. He wasn’t strutting, but every taut, honed line of him reflected his unshakeable faith in himself and his body and what it could do on a rugby field.
It was a testament to his training and focus and, yes, god-given talent, that he’d been elevated so quickly through the ranks. And he knew it. The fact he could walk on the field surrounded by the titans of the game and yet still hold his own was monumental.
And it was utterly arousing.
Val’s skin flushed, her nipples tightened, and muscles low and deep shifted as her body flooded with something hot and totally new to her. She’d been attracted to men before, aroused by their touch and their kisses. But not as potently as this. Not just from looking at them.
Christ, the man was an entire football field and a couple dozen rows of stadium seating away, and her body was on fire.
This was more than mere arousal. This was lust.
Pure, undiluted, primal.
She glanced at Eleanor to her left. She was Ryder Davis’s sister and the latest addition to the WAGs, having recently succumbed to the charms of Bodie Webb. Eleanor was staring at her man with rapt attention, her lips parted, and Val wondered for the first time how many of these women who stood beside her every home game were as revved up as she was.
What kind of black magic was it about these guys—small figures down on the field—that could reach all the way up here and strike a bunch of strong, independent women dumb? Was it the pure physicality of them, was it some kind of primal, gladiatorial sense of the event, or some deadly mushroom cloud of testosterone that caused mass arousal in women?
It had to be something. How else could Kyle Leighton make her slick and needy from so bloody far away?
Of course, she had been in a state of high sexual alert for two weeks now, so maybe that was it. Since their quick and dirty kitchen sex, she’d become so attuned to the clock turning five forty-five every morning, she practically came when she heard Kyle walk into the shop.
And she knew it was him even before he said a word. She knew. Her body knew. It was in the hitch of her breath and the skip of her heart and the bloom of heat in her pelvis when he greeted Sandy, all warm and cheerful. It was in the way the sweet smell of vanilla seemed to intensify in her nostrils and the sudden rush of saliva to her mouth.
And, as he pranced around on the field, doing his thing, it was happening again, the blooming and the hitching and the salivating. It was bloody hard to ignore. He was bloody hard to ignore, and she suddenly wondered about the wisdom of going to Tanner and Matilda’s after the game tonight.
It had been almost two weeks since their wild bakery tango, and, as agreed upon, they weren’t going to be alone. They’d have the whole team around them. But Val wasn’t sure that was enough anymore. Frankly, with her clothes threatening to fall off just looking at him, she was seriously wondering if their pledge to stay away from each other was really possible.
Maybe she’d known something earlier, when she’d detoured to the kitchen in her apartment and dabbed some vanilla behind her ears and on her wrists.
Kyle bent at the waist to stretch out his hamstrings. His shorts rode up and pulled taut against his ass and the backs of his thighs. Val swallowed. If she started to drool, there’d be no hiding this thing from the WAGs.
She was thankful she’d decided to team her Smoke jersey with a flowy vintage velvet skirt that had a fringed hem instead of her regulation jeans tonight. A seam up her crotch might be a little too much stimulation at the moment.
“Well,” Juliet—Ryder’s fiancée—said out the corner of her mouth, keeping her voice low. “If you’re going to pash a guy in front of your father and the entire Smoke staff, you picked a good ’un.”
Val blinked and checked herself. Was she drooling? Or was Juliet checking out Kyle, too? Juliet was the only WAG not wearing a Smoke jersey. Instead, she was in her now-infamous Ruck Me, Maul Me, Make Me Scrum T-shirt, which the WAGs had unanimously voted an essential part of every home game get-together.
WAGs. Wives and Girlfriends. It suddenly occurred to Val that she could be a WAG. That instead of being here in this room as the coach’s daughter and Sydney Smoke’s number one fan, she could legitimately join the WAG ranks.
Kyle had certainly seemed up for it.
What if I told you I could handle my career and your father just fine without dancing around and pretending I’m not totally hot for his daughter?
God…it was tempting. But no matter which way she looked at it, she wasn’t up for making things difficult for Kyle. What kind of a couple could they be with that kind of pressure on them? Relationships were hard enough without twenty-two years’ worth of friction bearing down on them.
How long would they last?
She wasn’t keen on getting her heart broken in the kind of way she suspected would happen if she got tangled up in Kyle. Her body was just going to have to get used to denial.
“We’re just friends.”
Val didn’t have to look to know all the WAGs were listening and that all of their bullshit detectors just twitched.
“It sounded a lot more than friendly, the way Linc described it,” Em said.
Matilda nodded. “And Tanner.”
“I heard he grabbed your ass,” Juliet added.
No one was talking out the side of their mouths now. Clearly, the seal of silence had been broken and her friends were going to talk the crap out of the incident.
“And Dex said Griff’s been pretty pissed off about it for the last two weeks.”
Val almost snorted at Harper’s statement. How did they even tell the difference? Her father had been pissed off for twenty-two years.
But suddenly she wished they’d all still been awkwardly quiet. She didn’t want to be responsible for her father’s bad mood and any blowback on the team. She tipped her chin at the glass. “They’re kicking off.”
The collective attention snapped back to what was happening on the field, and Val relaxed. As much as she could, anyway, given the churn in her gut. And the one between her thighs.
It didn’t last for long. The game was a real nail-biter. The possession of the ball changed so frequently, Val’s head swam. It was a brilliant game of truly excellent rugby, thanks in no small part to Kyle, who was right in the thick of things.
Val was practically light-headed from lack of oxygen due to the amount of times she was holding her breath. She even clutched Matilda’s hand at one stage as Kyle made a mad dash up the field, streaking away. The opposition came at him wave after wave, which he sidestepped or powered through, refusing to cede the ball to them or pass it to one of his own.
Val was so tense she was banging on the glass yelling, “Pass it. Pass it.”
He had men either side of him, clear and free, who could take it, but he seemed hell-bent on getting it across the line himself. She almost had a heart attack when the opposition winger got a hand to his leg and almost brought him to the ground.
“Pass it,” the WAGs yelled in unison. The guys on the field were all obviously yelling it, her father sure as hell was.
But Kyle wasn’t letting go. His eyes were fixed on the try line and he was grimly determined to get the ball over himself, breaking free more from luck than management, crossing the try line. It was an act of breathtakingly supreme confidence that could have blown up in his face.
It hadn’t, but it had been a very close call, and as magnificent as it was to witness something so incredible, her rugby-loving genes knew he’d taken a really big risk going it alone. He’d almost been pulled down three times and could have lost the team the try altogether.
But Kyle wasn’t looking back, he was basking in the moment, jubilantly raising his hands to the crowd, who were chanting his name and going nuts. His teammates didn’t look as impressed, and the commentators on the TV behind her certainly weren’t, as they muttered about risky moves and foolishness. Even the WAGs, who went crazy whenever the Smoke scored a try, were subdued in their celebrations.
She didn’t need to look at her father to know he’d probably be having some kind of apoplexy on the sidelines.
But, despite it all, despite knowing that Kyle had been reckless, that the team was annoyed, that the WAGs were disappointed, Val was seriously frickin turned on.
He was breathtakingly confident for a guy who could have just blown a play. But there wasn’t one thing in his body language that suggested anything other than his utter faith in his ability to run that ball over the line.
And that was sexy as hell.
“Well…” Matilda shook her head slightly, her lips pursed, her gaze trained at the glass. “He’s cocky…you got to give him that.”
A quick stab of annoyance wrinkled Val’s brow, and a rebuke rose to her tongue. She bit it back, surprised at its speed and intensity. This wasn’t any of her business. He wasn’t her guy. And Matilda was merely expressing the same thing she knew they all were thinking. The same thing she’d be thinking if she was listening to her head and not her clitoris.
Kyle had always played a self-sufficient style of rugby. That’s what made him so formidable. It might not have made him popular, but it won games. His technique was between him and the team. Him and her father. Who would no doubt have plenty to say about Kyle’s performance and his style.
It wasn’t her place to answer for him or rise to his defence. “Yes,” she murmured, trying to clear the lasciviousness from her voice. “Isn’t he just?”
…
Kyle let the laughter in the minivan wash over him as it headed toward Tanner’s apartment. Between the players and the WAGs, the mood was up. They’d won the game by two points, and he’d scored three times. The chatter had turned to beer and pizzas and everyone was talking over everyone else. No one seemed to be addressing him in particular, which was fine, because he only had eyes for Valerie.
She was sitting opposite him in a Smoke jersey, the tips of her loose red hair falling to nipple level, and a skirt with a fringe that flirted with her ankles. Matilda was on one side, Dono on the other, and all he wanted to do was to haul her over the space between them into his lap, grab a handful of her ass, and kiss her.
He’d played his butt off tonight, and the fact she’d been up in that glass box watching him had added an extra urgency to his game. The same urgency buzzing through him now like a bloody jungle drum.
Whether it was excess testosterone, two weeks of denial, the thrill of the chase, or the aroma of vanilla filling his senses, he wanted her.
And her father be damned.
He tried not to look at how Dono’s thigh was pressed all the way down the length of hers, and how she was teasing him about the flash of bare butt they’d been afforded up in the box when one of the opposition had tried to bring him down, yanking on his shorts.
He didn’t want her teasing Dono. Or looking at him. Looking at any other man. He wanted her looking at him. Teasing him. He clenched his hands into fists by his side to stop from tearing his shirt off, Incredible Hulk style.
How had this thing gone so quickly from bar hookup to raging green-eyed monster?
“Dude,” Linc assured Dono, “ain’t nobody want to look at your butt.”
Everyone laughed, but Dono was his unflappable self. “Better than your lily-white excuse of an ass.”
“Are you kidding?” Linc boasted with his usual degree of cockiness. “The only ass people want to see on that field is mine.”
“Oh I don’t know, Linc,” Valerie said, sliding a quick gaze in his direction before returning her attention to Donovan. “Variety is the spice of life.”
But Kyle was in no doubt she wasn’t talking about Donovan’s butt, and it was like a hot jolt of lightning to his cock.
There was more laughter. They were so tight-knit, this group—much tighter than he’d witnessed at the Centaurs. He still felt like an outsider. The WAGs were welcoming but wary, and it felt like they were treating him with kid gloves. Like they hadn’t accepted him onto their team yet.
But right now he didn’t give one fuck about that. Right now, he only had eyes for Val.
She was doing her best not to look at him, but there was a weird undertone between them. In fact, the whole dynamic in the van was weird. It was like the conversations were happening in layers. One the surface, everyone was celebrating a much-deserved win. Scratch deeper and there seemed to be an underlying tension he didn’t understand.
He had a feeling it had to do with him. And Val.
And their history.
He didn’t think any of the guys were comfortable seeing him and Valerie in the van together. It was as if their loyalty was being called to account, and the guys were unfailingly loyal to Griff. The women were more relaxed. They clearly got on well with Val, and she was obviously a member of their gal-pal group. But they were also protective of her.
They didn’t have the kind of loyalty to Griff as the guys did. If anything, their body language told him their loyalties lay with Valerie.
But everyone in the van knew the history between Val and himself by now—or thought they did, anyway—and it was like both men and women had some kind of tacit agreement to keep him and Val apart. Like when he’d gone to sit next to Valerie in the van earlier, he’d been manoeuvred out the way by a determined Tanner and Matilda working in tandem.
Given how Tanner had already had words with him tonight about not hogging the ball, he hadn’t made a fuss at the blatant cock block. But if they thought they could continue to do so, they were wrong. At some stage tonight, he had every intention of kissing the holy hell out of her.
His body ached with the driving need to hold her in his arms. Where they went from there he didn’t know. All he knew was he had to taste her, or he was going to die.
It took him two hours. Two hours with the need for her growing every second, coursing through him like a ticking clock as everyone manoeuvred around them to keep them apart. Running interference so they were never alone together. The WAGs sticking to Val like glue. The guys trying to distract him with one more drink, one more game of pool, one more war story.
It was like some pantomime. A comedic farce playing out around them. Except it wasn’t funny.
Every glimpse he caught of her, every tantalising whiff of vanilla, every husky vibrato or tinkle of laughter notched the need a little higher. And the swish of that fringe playing peek-a-boo with her ankles was driving him crazy. He wanted them around his neck in the worst way possible.
Who knew ankles were a thing?
But finally, the planets aligned, and he caught a glance of Val heading up the stairs. She looked over her shoulder, their eyes meeting briefly, before she disappeared from sight, but a lot could be conveyed in a second, and there was absolutely no mistaking what he saw in her eyes.
The message. The intent. The desperation that burned as brightly as his.
And by some miracle, the guys all seemed distracted, their number divided, their attention elsewhere, and Kyle didn’t waste a moment, he didn’t stop to think or analyse. He moved, slipping after her with all the determination it had taken to run that try over the line earlier tonight.
He took the stairs two at a time, no idea which direction she’d taken, just following the vague, sweet scent of vanilla and his gut, which tugged at him hard as he turned right, the door to the guest bathroom open and beckoning.
But he didn’t make it that far, an arm shooting out of a darkened bedroom to his left as he passed, yanking him inside, unbalancing him a little, as the press of a warm body and the sweet, milky scent of vanilla surrounded him.
His “Val—” was cut off by the hot slam of her mouth, the husky desperation of her breathing. Her body contact was like a physical punch to his gut after two weeks of denial, and he held her tight, kissing her back, hot and hard and hungry, groping for the door and clicking it shut.
He had no idea what room he was in and he didn’t care. Nor did he care that they had probably five minutes before about a dozen people downstairs would realise he was missing. And so was Val.
But he’d take whatever time he could get.
The darkened room heightened his senses, and Val filled every one of them. She filled his head with her taste and her smell and the brush of her hair and her crazy low moans, which reverberated around his head and wrapped around his cock. A cock which she had her hands on in the next few seconds.
“This is why we’re not supposed to be alone,” she muttered as she ripped his fly down, the noise joining the sounds of two ragged sets of breathing.
“I know.” And he groaned as her fingers wrapped around his girth.
She panted. “Sit. Chair. Behind you.”
His calves hit the chair, soft and cushiony, and he sat automatically, no question of not doing exactly as she requested, bringing her down with him, and he thanked God for that skirt, which hitched up and settled around them as her naked flesh landed intimately against his bared, aching cock.
“Christ…” He grunted at the wet heat of her sliding against him. “You’re not wearing any panties.”
If he’d known she was commando, he’d have dragged her upstairs in front of everyone and to hell with what they all thought.
“They’re in my pocket,” she muttered as she produced a condom and fumbled between them in the dark, rolling it on as his hands slid under her jersey. They hit bare naked breasts, and his nuts contracted. This was taking commando to the next level.
She gasped as he cupped them, kneaded them, the nipples pebbling as he brushed them with his thumbs, remembering how she’d touched herself for him last time. He pushed her shirt up, needing to feel the hard buds against his tongue. Needing it so badly, his hands shook like some junkie about to get his next fix.
“I don’t know how to stop wanting you,” he rasped, his lips pressed to the slope of one breast, his breath hot.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered, rising a little to centre herself over the top of him. And he thrust inside her.