Page 17 of Double Team

  maybe it’s her shampoo – clean and light and floral. Her chest rises, giving me a glimpse over her shoulder of her cleavage in her shirt.

  “Aiden…” she breathes. I can’t tell if she’s saying my name as a warning or if she’s saying it because she wants me to touch her.

  “This play starts with me yanking up this little skirt you’re wearing.” I slide my hands down the sides of her thighs, pulling the cotton fabric up as my fingertips brush her skin. When I lean in close to her, my lips near her ear, she lets out a whimper.

  A fucking whimper.

  My cock hardens immediately, like some kind of reflex. I’ve never gotten hard because of a sound before. I pull the skirt up over her perfect ass.

  Her perfect, nearly bare ass.

  She’s wearing a little black thong under the skirt. I want to tear it off her ass right now. Instead, I palm her perfectly round cheek before pulling my hand back and giving it a light slap.

  “You did not just spank me,” she whispers.

  I think about how exactly she’s going to look bent over like this while I fuck her from behind, and my cock throbs in response.

  “Tell me how much you want me to bend you over and slide my cock inside you right now,” I whisper. She moans softly as I speak the words, my lips so close to her ear. “Tell me how much you want to feel me slap your ass as I fuck you.”

  “Aiden…”

  “All I have to do is slide my fingers around your thigh,” I say softly. “If I reach between your legs, will I find that your pussy is ready for me?”

  She lets out a frustrated groan and squirms against me, but doesn’t move to step away.

  “Say yes.”

  She lets out a long sigh. “Aiden, I just… no. I can’t do this with you and No-“

  Damn it, fucking Noah. I hear the clomp-clomp of his footsteps on the floor before I see him. What a cock-blocker.

  “Hey Aiden,” he calls.

  Grace leaps away from me like a pole-vaulter, leaving me with what is going to be the most massive case of blue balls in recorded history.

  “Fuck.” I mean to say “what” but that’s what comes out instead. I clench my fists, trying to suppress my irritation with Noah because the last thing I want is for him to think he’s getting to me – or worse, that I’m having trouble scoring with Grace.

  Noah grins and holds up his phone. “A couple of cheerleaders texted me looking for you. Apparently they want to make an ‘Aiden sandwich’.” He uses air quotes. “Tell your hookups to stop texting me.”

  “I’m going to just… um… I’ll be right back,” Grace says, practically running out of the room.

  “Really? Fake threesome? That’s all you’ve got, Noah?”

  He shrugs. “Prescription cream for my sores?”

  “Now that was funny.”

  “Aw, you don’t think an Aiden sandwich is funny?” he asks as I storm out of the room.

  The three of us don’t end up eating dinner together. Grace goes out to do something with the campsite, leaving her salad half-completed on the counter. The campsite is obviously an excuse to avoid what happened between us – and Noah walking in on us – so I knock on her bedroom door later in the evening.

  When she pulls it open, she gives me a look. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m not trying to get in your pants.”

  Grace raises her eyebrows. “Or under my skirt?”

  “Is that why you’re wearing jeans now?”

  “Today – earlier – was…”

  “There’s no Aiden sandwich.” I interrupt her before she can say anything else. “The text message thing – Noah was getting me back for saying he had an STD.”

  “No cheerleaders?” She crosses her arms and makes a serious face, except I can tell by the way that her lips pull up at the corners that she’s about to smile.

  “Cross my heart. No cheerleaders, no sandwich. I came by to tell you that. That’s it. And to mention that you never made dinner.”

  “You came by to point out that I never made dinner for you? How gentlemanly.”

  “You can make me dinner anytime, you know. I’m just saying.”

  “Are you finished?”

  I grin. “Not really. Where are your two grumpy guardians?”

  “They’re keeping a lower profile. They’ve cleared the house, so it’s not like they need to be posted in front of my room.”

  “Ditch them.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Have you ever lost them before?”

  Her eyes go wide. “No.”

  “Not once?”

  “No. I’ve never done anything I’d need to ditch them for.”

  “You’ve never done anything bad?” I tease. “I thought you just had bed-shaking, toe-curling sex last week.”

  Grace rolls her eyes. “Obviously that wasn’t true.”

  “Obviously.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I’m just saying that if you’d had bed-shaking, toe-curling sex with me last week, you wouldn’t be running around here camping.”

  “Where would I be?”

  “In my bed, clearly. Because when I fuck you, you’re not going to make it out of my bed for a week.”

  “When you fuck me?” she asks, eyebrows raised.

  “Yeah, when. Just so we’re clear.”

  Grace lets out a loud exhale. “I can’t go any… further with either of you.”

  “Because you want both of us.”

  She bites her lower lip.

  “And both of us want in your pants.”

  “I think so,” she whispers.

  “You think so?” I ask. “No, that’s a fact. We definitely both want in your pants. So I think it’s pretty clear what has to happen.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I show you that I can rock your world harder than Noah can.”

  She laughs. “Is that why you want me to ditch my security? So you can rock my world?”

  “Nah. You’re not sure yet. I want you to want me so much that you beg me to fuck you.”

  She shakes her head and sighs. “No one talks to me the way you and Noah do.”

  “Sugar, if I said half the dirty things that came into my head when I look at you…”

  Grace puts up her hand. “I’m not going anywhere with you unless you promise no hanky-panky.”

  “I’ll be a perfect gentleman. Cross my heart.” When she narrows her eyes, I roll mine. “Come on, already.”

  She grins. “Okay. Let’s ditch the Secret Service.”

  “You’re being a very bad girl, Grace Sullivan.”

  We make our daring escape out of a side door near the gym, and Grace giggles as we run not-so-silently behind the stable and out into the meadow. “Where are we going?”

  “Shh, loudmouth, someone’s going to hear you.”

  Grace repeats the question in a whisper.

  “There’s a pond down here. You can’t see it from the house, but I noticed it yesterday when I took some of the kids up on their horses. Let’s go skip rocks.”

  “I’ve never skipped rocks.”

  “What kind of horrible, tragic upbringing did you have?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never really gone camping, either.”

  “Uh, aren’t you running this camping thing with the kids every summer?”

  “Well, I go with them and I do the day activities – it's usually ropes courses, trust-building things and stuff… but there’s always some of us who stay in a building and hang behind if they’re doing an overnight trek.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “What?” Grace squeals. “I don’t have to camp in a tent in order to help the kids. The ground is… hard.”

  I have to tell myself that if I don’t focus on what she’s saying and not on the fact that her ass looks so damn good, then I’m going to be the one who’s hard.

  “I knew it,” I tell her.

  “What

?”

  “You’re spoiled.”

  “I’m not spoiled!”

  “Sleeping on the ground is hard?”

  “It is. Are you going to argue otherwise?”

  “Next you’re going to tell me that you’ve never been fishing or mudding or drank moonshine.”

  “Okay, now you’re just being a jackass. You already know my answer is going to be no to all of those things.”

  I shake my head at her in mock disappointment.

  “I didn’t grow up in the country!” she protests. “I grew up in Denver.”

  “You live in Colorado.”

  “Wait,” she says. “I ski a lot. I definitely skied a lot during boarding school in Switzerland, too. That’s outdoorsy, right?”

  “Now you’re just making it worse,” I tell her.

  When we reach the pond, I try not to be distracted by the way her ass looks in those jeans when she bends over to pick a rock up off the ground.

  “How’s this?” she asks.

  “Wrong kind of rock. You need the skipping kind – thin and flat. Like this.” I hold up a perfect skipping rock and demonstrate, watching it ping across the surface of the water. “Five skips. I’m a master at this.”

  She laughs. “You’re a rock-skipping master?”

  “We all have our gifts.”

  “Is this what you did growing up in West Bend?”

  “I told you there was nothing to do in that town.” I hand her a rock. “Try it.”

  She tosses it into the water and it lands with a ker-plunk. “That’s embarrassing.”

  “Maybe rock-skipping isn’t your thing.”

  “Oh, shut up.” She’s silent for a few minutes as she looks for rocks. “You and Noah have been friends for a long time.”

  “We have.”

  She’s silent for a minute as she picks up another rock and throws it, watching it plop into the water. “I don’t want to come between that.”

  “Try this one.” I hand her a flat rock, moving around behind her and taking her wrist in my hand. Fuck, she smells good, and she feels so damn good against me. “You have to flick your wrist.”

  I let go and she tosses it. This time it skips twice. “How about that,” she breathes.

  “You’re not going to come between us.”

  Unless she wants to come between us.

  Where the hell did that thought come from?

  Grace turns around, still close to me. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve known Noah my whole life. We grew up next door to each other. Our moms were best friends. We’ve always been…”

  “Jackasses?” she teases.

  “I was going to say tight, but jackasses works too.”

  “Are your families still close?” She steps away now, bending over to pick up another rock.

  “My sister Annie and I are close with his parents, yeah. My dad was only in the picture until my mom got pregnant with Annie. Two kids were one too many for him, so he ran off. He tried to contact me three years ago when I signed my contract because suddenly I was his son, but you know the saying – too little, too late.”

  “So your mom raised you.”

  “Yep, single mom. She worked at a factory thirty miles out of town to put food on the table for us. That’s one thing that still gets me now – not having her here to see how her work paid off.”

  “She passed away?”

  “Car accident in high school. A tractor-trailer truck ran a stop sign and slammed into the side of her car. It was instant.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Life kicks you in the nuts sometimes.” I shake off the pang of sadness I always get when I think about it. “Anyway, Noah’s mom and my mom were best friends and our jerk-off father didn’t turn up, Annie and I went to live with Noah’s family after that.”

  “That’s why you guys are close.”

  I shrug. “We were tight before that. But that’s why you shouldn’t worry about getting between us. Both of us know the score.”

  21

  Noah

  Things have been getting more heated between Aiden and I over the past week, which is why the charity’s idea to have us head up a bunch of kids for a touch football game before the end of the camp was a disaster waiting to happen.

  “Total accident,” I call loudly after I trip Aiden on the field. Yeah, it’s a low blow, but since that fucker put a laxative in my food the other day right before we were about to head out for a trail ride, I’m not playing clean anymore.

  Aiden stands up, glancing around at the kids and smiling as he gestures at them to back away. “I’m totally fine, kids. It was just an accident. Noah gets clumsy sometimes and can’t seem to control his limbs.”

  Standing on the sidelines with her arms crossed, Grace looks less than pleased.

  Aiden gets in my face. “In front of the kids, Noah? Real mature,” he says, his voice low.

  “Says the guy who put laxatives in my food.”

  The kids are goofing off, quickly losing interest in the game. But Aiden smiles broadly and fakes a laugh for anyone watching us, like we’re standing here joking around. He yells, “We’re just… talking about plays. Take a timeout, kids!”

  Then he drops his voice low again, his smile turning into a snarl. “You put itching powder in my boxers.”

  I shrug. “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Maybe that threesome with the cheerleaders just got you more than you bargained for.”

  “The fake threesome you made up,” Aiden says, stepping forward and pushing my shoulder.

  “You’re going to really lay your hands on me?” I warn. “I’m bigger than you.”

  “Huh. That’s not what Grace seems to think.”