Page 56 of Until You're Mine
I tilted my head.
One of his dark eyebrows quirked up. “Do you want me to keep my promises, or not?”
I groaned. “You’re making this really difficult.”
“So are you. I promise. With the aforementioned exception.”
I rolled my eyes. “Really? ‘Aforementioned?’” He nodded, a proud grin on his face, and I couldn’t help dragging my thumb over the scrumptious stubble lining his jaw. “Maybe right before you knock him out, tag me in and let me take a shot or two before you finish him off?”
“Sure thing,” he said, then he wrapped his arms around my waist and brought me flush against him. “I’ll make you another promise. While you and I are together, I won’t touch another girl.”
My heart tried to soar, but I’d clipped its wings a long time ago. “I’m not asking you to—”
“I’m telling you that I won’t. That you can trust me. You don’t have to ask.”
“I appreciate it, I do. But it’s thewhile we’re togetherpart that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? We can’t really be together—not out in the open—and we have an expiration date.” My worries and frayed emotions swirled together, bringing the crappy debris to the surface. “There are so many things against us. What are we doing?”
“The best part is that we don’t have to know. We can take it a day at a time.” He leaned temptingly close, one breath between our mouths. “Just ride the wave with me, Brooklyn.”
He parted my lips with his tongue and rolled it over mine, his hands working free the button of my jeans, and I went ahead and caught the wave. I rode it as we stripped off every last piece of our clothes, as he put his mouth on me, licking and sucking and driving me wild with desire. Rode it when he covered his body with mine and it became impossible to tell where I ended and he began. One moan blurred into the next, along with my cries and his groans and an overwhelming rush of pleasure.
Then we were coming together, and I went ahead and let the current pull me all the way under.
Chapter Thirty-One
Shane
In some ways, this week had been the hardest week I’d had in years. And in others… My gaze drifted to Brooklyn, and she gave me a smile, followed by a look that meant stop being so obvious.
In others, it’d been the best fucking week of my life.
Don’t get me wrong, today’s workout made me long for death, but like a quick one, where I came back at the end of the day to see my girl. Weekends didn’t mean a whole lot in my line of work—or more like they meant the gym would be full of weekend warriors—so I either crowded in with them or got creative. Looking at Brooklyn, I could think up a lot of creative ways to expend some energy, and I decided that tomorrow I’d skip the gym. But first I had to mention it to my coach real quick and see if he popped a blood vessel.
“I’m thinking about taking my recovery day tomorrow,” I told Blake, who’d done the majority of today’s training. I didn’t know if it was punishment for standing up to him, or if he believed in me and wanted to take a more active role, but between his, Liam’s, and Finn’s rigorous workouts this week, there wasn’t a single muscle in my body that didn’t ache. “Then I’ll do a beach jog and some lighter drills on Sunday to get me through the weekend.”
The guy stared, hard and flat, giving me no clue as to what he thought of my plan. He expelled a breath. “I suppose that’s in order. It does no good to injure you, because we sure as shit don’t have spare time for recovery.”
In other words, we still had a lot of work to do. No fighter ever wanted to think they weren’t up to par, and I’d driven myself harder than I ever had, but I got it. Conrad’s nickname “Croc” hadn’t only come from combining his first and last name, but because he was notoriously hard to keep down. He always managed to roll his opponent and take control, and grappling was my weakest area. I’d been working my ass off to tip those scales in my favor, though.
“See you on Monday, then, when the gym’s less crowded and I’ve spent the weekend recouping.” Not that I was going to tell him, but Brooklyn was part of that. Whenever I was with her, things felt less heavy. The world calmed. Anything seemed possible, which had me tasting that future victory, making me want it that much more.
“You better be ready on Monday, bright and early. Stay up late and party all weekend, and you’ll regret it.”
Either way, I’d be pushing my body to the brink and sucking air Monday morning, but I didn’t plan on partying. Besides the night I’d slipped and had the Jack Daniels, I’d already cut out alcohol two weeks ago. The plan was to take Brooklyn to a barbecue my closest friends were throwing. I wanted her to meet them, and for them to meet her, and in spite of being sure it’d go smoothly, I was oddly nervous.
Brooklyn grew up in this gym, around rough and tumble guys, but there was a difference between trained-fighter-hard and street-hard, and my boys and I grew up in one of the rougher neighborhoods. It sometimes made me worry that I’d never be able to make her happy, not if I didn’t get my career back and hold on to it, even as I told myself it was way too soon to think about that.
The thought of us not being together made my lungs deflate.I might be getting in over my head.
Don’t overthink it. Tonight’s about fun, not forever.I walked up to her desk, working on keeping a straight face instead of giving her a goofy grin and bouncing around her feet like a dog who couldn’t wait to go for a walk. “You about done here?”
She glanced around and kept her voice low, like there might be hidden spy cams. “I need another half hour, maybe even a whole one. I’m so close to the bottom of this bill pile, but I can’t get things to balance right.”
“Want me to stick around?”
“No. We’d just get ourselves in trouble.” Her eyes ran down me and she sank her teeth into her lower lip. Evidently she wanted me sporting a hard-on at the gym—it’s not like sweats did a good job of hiding a situation like that, either.
“The sexy lip bite isn’t helping,” I said. “Need me to take over? I’d love to get my teeth on—”
