Page 37

CHARLIE

When I’m home, I’m used to near absolutely silence at night.

The house is set up high enough that the traffic noise from the Pacific Coast Highway doesn’t reach my bedroom, not even when I have the floor-to-ceiling windows open.

It’s so quiet that it took a few Brooklyn nights to get used to the near constant noise that would echo into the dawn when I was staying with Javy.

Here, though, the reverberation of the diving board followed by the splash of someone slicing into the pool, just steps from my bed, is enough to wake me from a dead sleep.

There’s a glow emanating up out of the water, blue tinted as it reflects off the pool’s liner and, as I slip out of bed and pad across the room, a blurry shape is still under the water, swimming a strong breaststroke toward the far wall.

Frankie.

Quietly, so I don’t wake Gregory or Javy, who are camped out in the living room just beyond my door, I ease open the sliding door and stand at the edge of the pool, breathing in the cool night air that’s coming in off the ocean in the distance.

It’s a clear night, barely a cloud in the sky, a nearly full moon and stars twinkling down at me, way more so than in New York. The city lights up the night there, instead of the stars. Though, truly, it doesn’t matter to me either way.

Frankie surfaces at the edge of the pool, gasping for breath while she holds on to the stone-edged coping, her chest heaving up out of the water.

“Night swimming?” I ask, keeping my voice down. I don’t want to startle her.

Her shoulders tense and she doesn’t turn to face me, not right away.

“Frankie?”

“Yeah,” she says, finally. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Worried about Nakamura? Don’t be. I think we’ve got it in the bag.”

“No, it’s not that,” she says, finally twisting around in the water, her hair slicked back, and I try to focus on that and not that she’s clearly swimming in her bra and panties. It doesn’t cover any less of her than a bathing suit would, but still, my dick doesn’t care: it knows the difference.

“Then what’s up?” I ask, settling down on the pavers, with only my boxer briefs on, letting my feet dangle into the pool, the water perfect as it laps against my shins.

“I got fired.”

The words at first don’t actually register for me. I got fired . They’re absolutely the last thing I ever expected her to say, but then when they hit me, the only thing I can feel is pure unadulterated rage.

“Dan Wilson. I’m going to beat the shit out of that motherfucker.”

“No, not Dan Wilson,” she says, lifting herself up out of the pool, and I’m so enraged that I don’t even fully appreciate the long line of her body glinting in the moonlit. “Me. It was my fault. Nobody’s fault but mine.” She wraps a towel around herself.

“You’re telling me he didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“He definitely did. I’m sure, while we were watching the game with Nakamura and handing him watered-down minor-league beer and shopping-center tacos, he was on the phone with every single member of the Eagles board, who then called Hannah Vinch to let her know I blew the deal and that’s that.

I’m done and it’s no one’s fault except mine. ”

That has me on my feet in an instant. “Bullshit. He’s just a dick who’s afraid his star player is going to take less money to sign with the team he wants, instead of the team Dan tells him he wants. The one that would earn Dan a bigger cut.”

“Yeah, but that’s the job, isn’t it? Dealing with assholes like Dan Wilson, making sure you don’t alienate them, making sure you woo them and their clients. That’s what I was supposed do, that’s what Stew entrusted me with, and I didn’t do that, so I lose, game over.”

“No, no, I don’t accept that.”

“You don’t have to. It’s already done.”

“Fuck, well then I’m gone too.”

“No!” she practically shouts, but then shakes her head and continues, her voice lower, “Don’t do that. Don’t make it like that. I want you to stay with the team. Those boys, they need you and you need them. I know you’re gonna do great things with the Eagles and you deserve your ring.”

“You deserve it too. More. You’re the one who started this, building the team since last season. It’s your team, Francesca.”

“It was supposed to be.” Her voice hitches and, as I take a step closer and then another, it’s clear the droplets of water now running over her cheeks are tears. “But it’s not anymore. It’s yours.”

“C’mere,” I say, reaching out for her, a hand at her shoulder gently guiding her forward into my chest. She takes a small step and then just collapses into me, her body heaving in quiet sobs as she cries, her tears hot against my skin.

“You have to promise me,” she mumbles against my shoulder, as her arms come around me, holding tight ,and I press a hand to her back to keep her close, her towel rough against my fingertips. “You have to promise me you’ll win the whole damn thing.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, as I feel her breathing start to even, warm exhales over my chest that make the hair there stand on end while goosebumps rise over my skin. “I promise.”

“Good, and wherever I land I’ll be doing my best to make sure that doesn’t happen,” she says, leaning back in my arms and looking up into my eyes, her gaze satisfied, but still not shining with that brightness I love.

Love.

Shit.

I love her.

I don’t even know when it happened.

There’s no moment I can pinpoint, no bolt of lightning to my heart or tidal wave of feelings.

It’s been there for so long, I didn’t even notice, until right now when she was crying in my arms, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to fix it.

The last of her tears fall and I reach up to wipe one away with the pad of my thumb

“Francesca, I . . .”

But she cuts me off, pushing up on her toes, a hand already buried in my hair as she pulls my mouth down to meet hers and I half expect it to match the last time this happened, hard and rough, mostly pleasure, but just the right amount of pain.

But it’s not.

As soon as her lips find mine, the kiss turns hesitant, gentle even. And if that’s what she wants, that’s what I’ll give her, but first . . .

I pull away with every ounce of restraint in my body and pull in a gasping breath. “Before we do this, I need to know something.”

“Anything,” she whispers, her lips ghosting against mine as she says it, close enough to send a firestorm of sensation over my skin.

“Do you really want this or is it because . . . because of what happened tonight.”

“I thought . . . I thought you knew . . .” she says, blinking up at me.

“It was always there for me, the whole time, hovering in the background. Every time you fought with me over some stupid point in my analysis, every time you did something exactly the opposite of what I’d told you and, especially when you followed my game plan, when you listened. ”

“You liked when I listened to you and when I didn’t listen . . .” I say with a laugh, and a quick peck to her nose, “. . . so always?”

“Always,” she says, and laughs too, a light, airy sound that makes something in my chest loosen. I hate what happened to her, but she’s going to be okay.

“So, this isn’t just because you’re upset that you got fired and you need a distraction . . .”

“Charlie?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up,” she says, and kisses me again, bracing herself against my shoulders and then leaping up into my arms, knowing, instinctively somehow, that I’d take her cue and catch her.

My hands wrap around her thighs, my thumbs landing in that clever little crease between them and her hipbones. I could spend a lifetime exploring the soft skin there, running my fingers over it, tracing it with my tongue, sucking a bruising kiss into it, in a place that only she’ll see.

And suddenly I don’t care why she wants this now. She wants me and that’s enough.

I ignore the creaking protest of my knee as I turn back toward the house.

We’re too exposed out here. I make it through the slider, managing to close it behind me when the internal creak turns into a scream and I have to toss her away from me onto the bed as I collapse beside her onto the mattress with a huffing laugh.

“Are you okay?” she asks, leaning up on her hands to hover over me, the damp strands of her hair tickling my shoulders and chest.

“I’m good,” I assure her, cupping the back of her head and drawing her down for a long, lingering kiss, just like I’ve always wanted to.

I nudge her bottom lip with the tip of my tongue and then she groans into my mouth while letting me deepen the kiss, the sound echoing down into me, setting my body alight and my hips softly thrusting up off the mattress into hers.

The bed shifts around me as she tosses a leg over mine and settles down against me, her legs on either side of my thighs, her ass sitting round and full and soft against where my dick is growing hard and hot encased in the cotton of my boxer briefs.

The towel falls away as she starts to set a rhythm, long and slow figure eights that have my hands gripping her hips, along for the ride with her.

She pulls away from the kiss and sits up, her head thrown back as she keeps up the pace, giving me a view that even the long stretch of the Pacific Ocean can’t match, the dips and curves and peaks of her body completely intoxicating

The light pink lace of her bra and the matching panties are still wet and dark against her pale skin and I run a hand up from her hip to slide my fingertips along the underside of it, before cupping the weight of her in my palm, while my other hand traces up her spine to the clasp.

Her eyes open as she looks back down at me and nods, pressing her chest deeper into my grip and running her hands up and down my chest before bracing herself there to get a better angle. My hips are rising to meet hers of their own volition when, with a twist of my fingers, the hooks are undone.

She laughs lightly, leaning down to nip gently at my lips. “It should probably annoy me that you can do that one handed.”