Page 32 of Seduction on the Slopes

“You know they moved around a lot, and I . . .” His usually carefree face gets lined with uncertainty and discomfort.

I should tell him to stop, but I don’t want to. I’m going to be greedy, because that’s who I am. More, more, always wanting better, more.

“Sometimes I just wanted to stay. I’d make a friend, or I’d like my room when we actually got an apartment, or I’d find a decent place to ski. And just as we’d settle, we’d move again. I probably have outstanding library fines in half a dozen states.”

He smiles, but it’s weak. Not his usual exuberance. I smile back, because it’s kind of funny, imagining mini-Crash reading anything at all, never mind going out of his way to get a library card and being distraught when his parents packed them up suddenly and he couldn’t return his books. Actually, the idea gives me hives.

“I asked them to leave me sometimes—or tried to run away and hide so they’d have to pack up and go without me, and I could stay—but they wouldn’t, for the longest time. I just wanted, no matter how shitty it would’ve been, to have a place to call ours, you know? But that wasn’t something they could hack. It took me a long time, but I finally figured out one of the reasons we would leave someplace was that they owed someone money and couldn’t pay. We didn’t have a cell phone, no permanent address, no computer.”

What he’s describing is so very foreign to me it’s almost in another language. I wouldn’t have thought that would bother Crash so much, but maybe his seemingly laid-back nature is a defense mechanism instead of his natural inclinations. It was how he had to be to survive and not lose his mind while his parents traipsed all over the place and dragged him with them.

“So, you know the end of the story—when I was sixteen, we were in a ski town in Colorado, and I loved it. I put my foot down, told them I wanted to stay, that I wasn’t leaving with them. They tried to talk me out of it, said we’d go to another ski town if I wanted, but we had to leave. When I said no again, they didn’t argue. Just unloaded my stuff from the van, handed me fifty bucks, and told me they’d try to find me when they passed through town again.”

Christ almighty. He’d told me nearly as much before, but hearing it so baldly makes my stomach clench. Fifty dollars? They left him with a duffel bag and fifty goddamn dollars when he was sixteen years old, and didn’t know if they’d ever see him again? And now that he’s a SIG athlete, they’ve come sniffing around again? Fuck no. I will beat them back with my ski poles if I have to, but there is no way in hell they’re getting close to Crash again. Over my dead body.

It’s odd that seconds before I wanted to dig my claws in him, make him bleed for me, but now that someone else might hurt him I want to rip their heads off and throw them down a mountain, sending their decapitated bodies down the other side.Morbid much, Miles?

But maybe that’s what it is. He’s mine to hurt, mine to boss around, because at the end of the day, I want what’s best for him, too. I want him to succeed and I’m going to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Those people, though, couldn’t be bothered. Crash is worth bothering over.

“I’m lucky ski bums are pretty cool. I couch-surfed for a while, until I could pick up enough odd jobs to rent a room, and then I stayed there. Had my own little world and I could do whatever I wanted to. It wasn’t pretty, but it was mine. And, you know, turned out okay.”

He smiles again, and it kills me. Because he means this one. Like his family abandoning him when he was a pimply-faced kid was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Depressingly, maybe it was.

Who knows if he would’ve ever made it so far if he’d kept living out of a van and wandering the country? Who’s to say his parents wouldn’t have gotten sick of the mountains and moved to fucking Nebraska, or gotten sick of the cold and gone to Florida? The world would’ve missed out on its chance to see Crash Delaney ski, and that would be a crying shame, because this man on skis is a thing of beauty.

So I do the only thing I can think of and roll on top of him, pinning his hands to his sides and kissing him. I have too many feelings colliding in my head to make sense of them all, and at the moment, he feels too goddamn good between my thighs, our cocks rubbing against each other and getting hard. Screw feelings right now. Crash doesn’t want my sympathy anyhow, so I’ll tell him in the only way I’ve got that I think he’s the greatest.

I’ll love him with my body until he’s not thinking about that goddamn van, about being left on a street corner in some random-ass mountain town with his life on the ground in front of him and having to figure it all out when he probably hadn’t even gotten a driver’s license yet.

All he needs to figure out is what I want from him, and right now, I want his slim but strong limbs tangling with mine, his hot wet mouth opening for my kiss, and the small desperate noises he makes when I’ve hauled him up the mountain on my back, but haven’t yet pushed him down the slope.

Chapter Seventeen

Crash

It’s the morning of our first race, and no, there’s not any press first thing, not until we’ve made our way down the mountain—but honestly, we’ve been doing this for over a week, and it seems routine, but also like something both of us enjoy. Not that we’re, like, dating or something. But I’d like to think maybe we could?

Miles was the first one out of bed this morning, and is taking his sweet time in the bathroom. Hope he didn’t eat something that disagreed with him last night, but we ate the same thing and I’m fine. Yes, I have a basically iron stomach because it’s been honed by years of gas station chili fries and vending machine snacks, plus fast food when we could afford it. Maybe Miles’s more refined palate is troubled by the dining hall food, but I think it’s pretty good.

I’m about to give a shout when he emerges, looking robotic and twitchy. Is Miles actually nervous? Part of me finds deep satisfaction in this because holy shit, he’s actually human, but another part of me finds it terrifying. If Miles is freaking out, what should I be doing? Running around the village screaming with my hair on fire? He’s so much cooler than I am, and yet . . .

Thing is, I know a pretty good cure for nerves. So I get out of bed, cursing when my bare feet hit the cold floor, and sidle on up to him, laying my hands on his hips, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. Instead of melting, turning around and kissing me like I’m the air he needs to breathe, he stiffens, and not in the fun way.

“Not today.” His words are clipped, but the punch they deliver doesn’t feel pulled. In fact, I feel as though his fist has sunk into my stomach. What does he mean, “not today”? And because I’m a glutton for punishment, I can’t help but open my stupid mouth and ask.

“Why not?”

He shakes me off and turns around, hands resting below the waist of those goddamn pajama pants. I swear to god, every time I see plaid flannel from now on, I’m going to get hard. “I know we’ve been fooling around, but there isn’t a press event this morning. You don’t need it. You’ve said yourself, you do fine after races because you have something to talk about.”

Another punch. I’d thought we’d gotten to a place where he enjoyed this. I don’t want to get all mushy or serious or anything, but it had felt like we were getting kind of . . . close, in a way. Not like intimate in the way those TV Dr. Phil-types talk about it, but still. I’d thought there was something. Maybe I was wrong.

“Yeah, but I thought you might, I don’t know, want to.”

Miles gives me his back, that broad, beautifully muscled back, and heads to his dresser. “I don’t.”

Right. The hits keep on coming, and I am too fucking stupid to know when to quit.

“How come?”

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