Page 47 of Only Between Us

“Thank you for helping me.” His mouth tilts in a genuine half-grin, which does absolutely nothing to calm the fresh ache between my thighs. “Does this mean I can get some rest tonight? Fall asleep without worrying you’ll off me just to ride that bike again?”

“I wouldn’t get too comfortable.” I run my thumb deep into a groove in the muscles of his calf. Brooks releases a soft breath that makes my thighs clench together. “Feel good there?”

He nods with his eyes on me. “Yeah.”

I do it again, unable to help myself, and bite my lip when his jaw slacks.Don’t think about the bed. Pretend it’s not there.

“Fuck. Look at you blush.” Brooks’s eyes move over my face. “Is this rubdown for me or for you, Pippen?”

“Please. What could I possibly be getting out of this?”

“You’re right.” Brooks sits up straight. His shadow falls over my body. “Knee feels a bit better.”

I know this is my cue to let go. Know he’s said it for the sole purpose of proving his own point. But I can’t stop touching him. His soft sighs are addictive. The way he looms over me, too. “So you’ll twirl me around the dance floor, then?”

“If you play your cards right,” he says without breaking eye contact. “I need you to stop touching me now. Really.”

“Why?”

He tips his head in a way that saysare you really asking me that?

I let my gaze fall down his body to find his cock straining against his shorts. Fuck, it’s…

“Siena.” Brooks’s voice turns low, gravelly, that calm façade crumbling fast. “I need you to get up. Right fucking now.”

I stare up at him, at the very clear threat in his eyes, before doing what he says. I get to my feet on shaky legs and find my spot leaning against the dresser. Try and fail to think of something to say to break this unbearable tension, until Brooks’s phone starts ringing on the bed behind him.

“It’s my mom. Probably wants to know how it went today.” Brooks gets to his feet. He tests his knee, adjusting the front of his shorts before moving for the door to take the call. “I’ll, uh… I’ll sleep on the floor tonight.”

I don’t dare move until the door closes behind him.

Chapter16Brooks

Siena walks into the room just as I’m tossing a couple of pillows on the floor.

She’s bare-faced, wearing a faded, oversized T-shirt that skims the tops of her thighs. She looks comfortable. Disarmed, at least in appearance. It looks good on her.

“I thought we’d have separate rooms and didn’t pack bottoms,” she says in apology.

As though I weren’t snapping a multitude of mental pictures of those legs. One day, when I’m wrinkled and my body truly gives up on me after everything I’ve put it through, I’ll stay warm remembering those legs and the fact that I once got someone as stunning as Siena Pippen to pretend-date me.

“It’s not like I’m wearing much more.” I gesture down my front, at the boxer briefs I have on, and nothing else. Because, fuck it. If I’m taking the carpet tonight, I may as well be comfortable. “I’m sleeping on the floor, anyway.”

Siena pulls back the bed covers on one side of the bed. “Brooks, do you really take me for the kind of person who’d let an injured man sleep on the floor?”

No, but I really wish you were.

“All right.” I sigh. I’d never been more relieved to see my mom’s name across my phone than I’d been earlier. I don’t know whether Siena feels it, too, but this room is running on depleted levels of oxygen.

Feeling her up on that sideline had been an indulgence.

Letting her touch me, kneel at my feet, just minutes before sharing a bed?

It was a mistake.

I climb onto the mattress with the stack of floor pillows. Siena flips off the light and… it’s so much worse like this. I can’t make her out as my eyes adjust, but my every other sense feels amplified. I hear her soft breath from the other side of the bed, feel the heat from her body nearby. That sunshine scent is drenching me. My skin feels pulled taut by awareness.

I straighten out my bum leg as much as I can in the space between us, trying to loosen it up some more. Trying to keep my earlier panic at bay and replaying Siena’s soft encouragement when it comes close to gripping me by the throat.

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