Page 68 of The Shake Off

Holy shit, had they escalated.

You know that old saying – absence makes the heart grow fonder, or whatever? Well, it really fucking does. I hadn’t talked to her in a week. She never replied to my text message about Penn – not that I’d expected her to – but I had needed to see her again, if only to discuss making a new deal of some kind, and get to work on all the skills I’d been reading about.

Practice makes perfect, and all that.

I was determined that a week spent reading would not be a week wasted.

However, I was also aware of the delicate nature of the situation, given how she’d reacted to me the first time I’d asked her to help me, so all I’d planned was a little thank you; a cupcake peace offering if you will, where I would politely ask if we could renegotiate terms. I might not know that much about women, but I knew enough that they really didn’t like it when you ordered them to have sex with you – even if it’s what your boss had inadvertently told you to do.

I also knew Payton would likely punch me if I came outright and said it.

Therefore, my plans to see her had been completely innocent, and the five minutes she’d allotted me would have been more than sufficient.

I swear, your honor.

That all went to shit the second I laid eyes on her.

I’d spent a lot of time over the past week thinking about Payton and that noise she made. Mostly about how fucking hot it was. Which led me into thinking how hotshewas.

But I’d been way off base.

I’d knocked on her door, and my heart had come to a shuddering stop.

It had only been a week since I’d last seen her, but in that week, she’d turned from smoking hot to… I dunno, whatever was hotter. Volcanic? Inferno hot? Those goddamn chili peppers Tanner kept in the fridge that melted your skin if you so much as looked at them?

She was the type of hot that set off forest fires, that should come with a flashing warning to be kept away from incendiary devices.

She was a Saturday night New York ten, who rolled into a lazy Sunday morning ten too. She was the girl who walked through a bar and fights broke out in her wake over who buys her first drink.

The girl you’d hand your soul over to, just so you could watch her wrap it around her pinkie.

I stared and stared at her, then she’d looked up at me.

No one had ever looked at me the way she’d been looking at me as I walked into her office. Not in the two years I’d been playing in the major leagues, or the two years before then in the minors. Or in college as star pitcher.

Never.

She didn’t look away, not even to blink as I strode to her desk with all the purpose I could summon. I had to remember to blink myself.

It was thankful there was a chair, because she’d put me on my ass.

I hadn’t been able to remember a single second of my life before I sat down, and all I could focus on was her mouth and kissing it.

Kissingher.

I’d put the cupcake on her desk and gave a silent prayer she wouldn’t eat it in front of me. I didn’t want to see her lips covered in frosting as she bit into it, or her tongue licking the sugar away. I wanted to run.

But when her computer screen fired up and I found myself looking at everything that had been written about me over the past week and more, my dick took over. She’d been checking up on me, and her denial only made it hotter. I became deaf to everything except hearing that goddamn moan again.

So no, I had zero clue what the time was because my morning had revolved around Payton.

“Are you okay?”

I opened my eyes to find Lux standing over me with a frown, and I returned it with my biggest smile. Here’s the thing about Lux; he might look like he could snap you in half with one hand tied behind his back, but looks could be deceiving, though the bright pink hoodie and trackpants he’d just changed out of should be enough to give it away. It had taken us a few weeks to figure out, but of the four of us, Lux was the secret romantic. The sensitive one. The one who liked to read poetry, and take bubble baths.

Bubble baths, I tell you. By himself.

To each their own, but it all added up to someone who’d be far too invested in my new-found interest with Payton. Up until this morning, I would have sworn blind it was just about perfecting the sex and getting my game back, but now I wasn’t so sure, and until I figured it out for myself, it needed to stay my little secret.

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