Page 29 of Puck Prince

“Sore?” she asks. While I can’t see her face, I hear the salt in her smile.

“Coach ran us hard today.”

“You stretch often?”

She’s dousing the fire with gasoline right now. “Of course I fucking stretch, I’m an ath—fuckme.” She digs deeper, and I realize I’m going to have to put a muzzle on it if I want to be able to walk out of here with my pride intact.

“By the way,” she says as she works her way up my calf, “you were the one blocking me in the locker room. I was just there to meet the team and get to work. You were standing in front of the door.”

I open my mouth to say something but decide against it. There really is a knot where she’s working, and I’m going to be like a cat on the ceiling if she goes any deeper.

“You really should get these legs of yours loosened up more often,” she advises after a beat. “They’re tighter than?—”

You?I want to finish for her. But I don’t. I can’t. I won’t. I shouldn’t.

…I want to.

“I guess I might have neglected it a little in the past. But in my defense, the last PT was an ancient old bastard with rough hands and a rattlesnake personality.”

“I can be rougher, if you want.”

“Let’s not.” I hold up a hand and somehow, I know she’s smiling. Goddammit, I’m smiling, too. I gotta cut that shit out. “The rattlesnake personality part is the same, though.”

She shrugs and digs in.

I earned it.

It was worth it.

“For real, though.” I get serious. “We need to be more careful. People are going to suspect.”

“Suspect what?” she asks innocently. Meanwhile her hands are working their way up to my thigh.

I prop myself up on my elbows, shooting her a look.

“What?” she asks, hands kneading higher and higher. “There’s nothing going on between us.”

“Obviously. But we did fuck around.”

“Yeah. We did. And I regret it. Especially since you—” She stops.

“Since I what?” I ask, grabbing her hand. It’s distracting.

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. “But you can’t peg all this on me. Yes, you helped me get back in my house. Yes, we got… sidetracked. But I don’t intend to get sidetracked again.”

“Is that why you were pressed up against me in the locker room, not once, but twice in the same day?”

“You put your hands on me, not the other way around!”

I laugh in her face. “You practically groped me!”

“I was trying to get away from you!”

“And nut checking me is the way to do that?”

“You think Iwantedto touch you?” she whisper-yells.

“I mean, I asked you to rub out my calves, and you’ve somehow taken a detour to my upper, inner thighs.”

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