His eyes drop to my lips as I take a sip and I can feel, suddenly, something unmistakable on his lap beneath my bottom. As the cool liquid runs down my throat, it makes me realize the entire rest of my body is feverishly hot and getting hotter.
“Can I get some?” His voice is strangely husky as he signals to my drink.
When I nod, he grabs the bottle in one big hand and tilts it up to his mouth, and my hormones discharge all at once at the sight of his lips pressing against the rim.
Right over the spot mine have just been.
His throat works as he swallows, then he lowers the bottle, his lips now moist, and when he hands the Gatorade back to me, our fingers brush. Lightning shoots up my veins. And I’m entranced by the way his pupils have darkened, and the way he’s staring at my eyes without any laughter in his eyes. When I automatically try to cover my nervousness by taking another swallow, he watches me way too intently, his lips unsmiling. Beautifully pink. The cut on his lip’s still healing. The one I want to lick. A ribbon of longing unfurls deep inside me. And it hurts. I’m on his lap, and I realize one powerful arm is around my waist, and I’ve never been so close. Close enough to touch him, kiss him, wrap all my body around him. I’m suddenly dying and flying. I just can’t pretend this is no big deal anymore. I want him. I want him so badly I can’t think straight. It is a deal. A big deal.
I’ve never felt like this.
I know it’s crazy, and that it’s never going to happen, that it can never happen, but I just can’t help it. He’s like my Olympics, something that I’m never going to have, but which I crave with my entire being. And I absolutely loathe the thought that his arms have been around one, possibly two, women less than twenty-four hours ago, when I wanted it to be me.
Agitated all over again at the memory, I try standing, carefully, and he takes my Gatorade and sets it aside as he grabs two towels from a basket and wraps one around his neck, then drapes the other around mine, all the time holding me up by the waist. “I’ll help you up so you can ice that.”
He lowers me from the ring like I weigh no more than a cloud, and then I have to lean on him, my arm around his narrow waist as we walk out.
“It’s fine,” I keep saying.
“Stop arguing,” he says.
In the elevator, he keeps me close to his side and his head ducked to me, and I can feel his breath near my temple. I’m painfully aware of how big he is, compared to me, and of his five fingers splayed around my waist, and of the exact moment he shifts his nose and lowers it to the back of my ear. It tickles when he exhales, and he’s so close, his lips would brush the back of my ear if he speaks. I hear his deep inhale all of a sudden, and my s*x or**s throb so fiercely, I ache to turn around and bury my nose in his skin and suck all the air I can into my lungs. But of course I don’t do this.
He walks me to my room, and my body is in such a state, my brain can’t even come up with a topic of conversation to get rid of the tense silence that accompanies us.
“Hey, man, ready for the fight?” A uniformed hotel staff member, who seems to be a fan, asks from across the hall.
Remington gives a thumbs up with a dimpled smile before turning to me, pressing his jaw into the hair at the back of my ear. “Key,” he says in a guttural whisper that elicits goose bumps. He swipes it and brings me inside.
Diane isn’t here, and I know she’s probably making his super luxe dinner right now. He sets me down on the edge of the second queen bed, which I guess he figures is mine because Diane has a picture of her two kids facing the first bed, and he grabs the ice bucket. “I’ll get you ice.”
“That’s fine, Remy, I’ll do it later…”
The door closes before I can finish, and I exhale as I bend to palpate my ankle to assess the damage I caused.
He leaves the lock out so he doesn’t have to knock, and I stiffen when he returns and slams the door shut. He runs the water in the bathroom, and then he’s back, looking enormous and commanding inside my hotel room as he plops the bucket on the carpet.
He kneels at my feet, and at the sight of his powerful body and dark head bending down to tend to me, a rush of wanting ripples through me with such force, I stare down at the ice and want to dip my head in the bucket.
He yanks off my tennis shoe and then my sock, then he holds my leg gently by the calf as he eases my foot inside. “When we get this fixed I’m going to show you how to knock me down,” he whispers. When I can’t answer and am completely undone by his touch, he glances up, and his eyes are both tender and intimate. “Cold?”
Though the rest of me is anything but, my toes start freezing as the water envelops them. “Yeah.”
As he sinks my foot deeper, my entire body tenses from the frigidness, and he pauses midway down. “More water?”
I shake my head and ram it down the rest of the way, thinking, No pain no gain. My lungs seize up as my body absorbs the cold. “Oh, shit.”
He notices my grimace and yanks my foot out, then he shocks me, flattening my icy cold feet against his stomach to warm me. His abs clench under my toes, and his eyes hold mine in a grip so powerful, I’m drowning.
Voltage surges through me. His warm, big, callused hand is curved around my instep, holding my feet to his stomach so firmly it almost feels like he wants me there. I wish my hands were my feet, feeling those washboard abs under my fingers. Every dent perfectly presses against the arch of my foot and my toes, and the numbness has left me completely.
“I didn’t know you gave pedicures, Remy,” I say, and I can’t understand why I sound so breathless.