Page 18 of Last Line of Defense

My fingers slide easily inside her as I fuck her deep and without mercy. Alicia thrusts her hips backward like a woman possessed, desperately seeking more friction against my hand. My other hand goes straight to her clit and rubs it in fast, vigorous, precise circles.

“I’m going to come… Clara, God, don’t stop, don’t stop…!”

“I wasn’t planning on stopping even if they paid me to,” I growl, giving her one last bite on the neck.

The orgasm courses through her body with brutal intensity. Alicia screams my name with all her might, clenching with incredible force around my fingers buried inside her, coming so hard that her knees buckle and threaten to send her to the floor. I hold her firmly, pressing her against my body and continuing to move my fingers throughout her orgasm, prolonging her pleasure until she melts in my arms beneath the water.

We stay exactly like that for a few long seconds, wrapped around each other, breathing heavily and noisily beneath the stream of water that’s starting to cool. But fifteen minutes aren’t enough for us. Not by a long shot. Although, unfortunately, they’re all we have right now if we don’t want to get ourselves into a massive mess with the club’s board.

I turn her toward me abruptly and kiss her on the mouth with an almost desperate fury, and right after that, I pull away from her with superhuman effort.

“I want more, Clara… please…” she pleads, her gaze unfocused, brushing her swollen lips against mine.

“It was supposed to be fifteen minutes… and…” I keep my eyes fixed on my analog wristwatch, which I left on the shelf. “We’ve gone over by exactly two minutes. Finish your shower, get dressed, and try to cover up those lovely marks I just left on your neck somehow if you don’t want the coach asking you for an explanation.”

It takes a tremendous mental and physical effort to pull myself away from her body, to leave her there alone beneath the shower spray, and to silence once and for all my insane desire to slam her against the wall again.

I rush out of the shower, away from the suffocating heat of the steam and away from her before I lose my mind again. I pick up my uniform from the floor with my hands still trembling and get dressed as fast as I can, trying to quickly erase the physical traces Alicia Puertas has just left on my body and, above all, that perfect storm she has unleashed inside me and which, of course, hasn’t quite subsided yet.

7

An Unexpected Truce

Alicia

They say there are mistakes you make only once in a lifetime—the kind you learn your lesson from the hard way and then avoid at all costs. And then, in a league of her own, there’s Clara Valle. Not only does she not fall into the category of an avoidable mistake, but she also seems determined to become a daily addiction—complete with a medical license, a dark uniform, and a truly alarming ability to mess with my head just by looking at me.

It’s been barely a few days since those brutal, unforgettable fifteen minutes in the showers, and I still feel the intensity of her fingers inside me at the slightest opportunity, as if the icy water from every shower I’ve taken since then hadn’t quite managed to wash away her touch. And it’s not just the wild caresses that are seared into my body—though I’d be blatantly lying if I said I don’t think about them more often than any logic would dictate—it’s everything else: the hoarse tone of her voice right after sex, her gaze, and that forced separation we imposed on ourselves, leaving me with the distinct feeling that we’d crossed a line neither of us will quite know how to redraw.

Of course, my natural and mature reaction to such chaos can be nothing other than to stir things up even more. Because if Dr. Valle is going to keep acting as if absolutely nothing happened between us, I’m going to enjoy every damn second of pushing her headfirst to the edge of her sanity. It’s a bad idea. A terrible idea, in fact. But I’ve always had an incorrigible weakness for women like her.

This morning, the first-team locker room is much noisier than usual. We’ve just finished an intense and exhausting training session on the field—a session that, because of my damn joint, I wasn’t able to complete in full—and the atmosphere is buzzing with physical exhaustion, the lingering euphoria of preseason, and some of the most absurd comments that inevitably pop up when a group of twenty soccer players spends too many hours together. There are damp towels strewn across the wooden benches, empty sports drink bottles rolling across the floor, reggaeton blaring from a wireless speaker forgotten in some corner, and Alba, our beloved captain, recounting a sensational story about an internal argument among players on another team as if she were reporting live on World War III itself.

I’m sitting next to my locker, wiping the sweat from my neck with a white towel, secretly wishing they’d all get in the showers already so I can be left alone. But the rest of the universe has unanimously decided that its main mission for today is not to leave me alone for even a second.

“I’m telling you, seriously,” Alba insists, gesturing exaggeratedly with a workout T-shirt in her left hand, “if the Northbridge girls keep up that shitty atmosphere in the locker room, they’ll end up imploding before April even rolls around. You can see the cracks coming from across England.”

“Well, hey, that’s exactly what you said last year,” Sonia replies without looking up even a millimeter from the nail file she’s using to buff her nails, “and they finished second in the league standings. Your predictive talent is conspicuous by its absence, Captain. Good thing you’re much better at leading us on the field than you are at predicting the future, because otherwise…”

“What can you do? Some of us were born with the gift of commanding and leading, not predicting the future.”

I chuckle under my breath, shaking my head. It’s truly strange how quickly this locker room is starting to feel less like a foreign place to me. I wouldn’t call it family—because I don’t really believe in that idyllic concept when it comes to elite professional soccer—but it is a pretty livable space. A place where, for the first time in a long time, my teammates aren’t just watching me, waiting to see when I’m going to cause the next disaster. Although, well, there are people at this club who do.

And one of them is walking through the door right at this very moment.

Clara walks into the locker room with a plastic folder tucked under her arm, exuding that impeccable, cool composure that I find increasingly dangerous and thrilling. She doesn’t need to do anything extraordinary to draw attention; her mere presence is enough to suddenly change the atmosphere in the entire room. She’s wearing the club’s official black uniform, tailored to fit perfectly, her dark hair pulled back today into a low ponytail, and that strictly professional expression that—if I didn’t know her so well on a personal level—I might easily have mistaken for indifference. But I’ve already learned to read between the lines perfectly. I know exactly where to look: the slight tension in her jaw, the blatant way she avoids holding my gaze for more than two seconds in front of the others, or that split-second hesitation as she walks past me. It’s elegantly concealed sexual tension. And for me—a masochist by nature—it drives me wild.

“Alicia,” she says aloud, stopping right in front of me. “I need to take a close look at how this morning’s physical workload has affected your left knee. I’ll be waiting for you in the physical therapy room first thing this afternoon—don’t be late.”

“Well, Doctor… What an unromantic and unsubtle way to invite me to spend some time alone with you,” I reply instantly, raising an eyebrow and giving her my best crooked, mischievous smile.

Several of my teammates nearby burst out laughing as soon as they hear me. Clara stares at me. That’s all. She fixes me with that dark, steady gaze, laden with a silent threat that, instead of intimidating me in the slightest, has exactly the opposite effect on my body. It turns me on.

“Well, since you’re not saying anything, I’ll take that as a resounding yes,” I add, having a blast, winking at her without a shred of modesty.

Alba, who literally lives and breathes celebrity gossip on this team, immediately crosses her arms, flashing a suspiciously wide and mischievous smile.

“Hey, I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but I’m starting to suspect that Alicia is enjoying her mandatory rehab sessions a little too much.”