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 withlittle 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 herbreath 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.
