His crooked smile became more pronounced.
The photographer whistled, I guess approving of whatever feedback he was getting on his end of the camera. “Every woman in America wants to be you right now, sweetheart.”
Archer grunted, his knuckles digging a little deeper into my ass. “More like every guy in America wants to be me right now.”
I did my best to stay still and, you know, keep from hyperventilating. The heat from the lights, combined with the heat spilling from his body, was stifling. With his cleats on and me being barefoot, Archer seemed that much taller. With my petite body pressed up against his, his frame seemed that much more imposing. With his arms snug around me, I could feel the strength he possessed. It was the kind that was meant for power. The kind that told me he could do anything he wanted to me and I’d be helpless to stop it. It was thrilling at the same time it was terrifying.
A few minutes later, my heart still thudding so hard I prayed he couldn’t hear it, the skin between Archer’s brows creased. “When will the magazines go up for auction?”
“In two months. Don’t worry, we’ll send you one.” The photographer continued to snap photo after photo.
“Yeah, I’m going to need more than that.”
“How many more?”
The crease deepened. I was trying to keep my head turned away from him, but my eyes weren’t so capable of the task.
“Eh, thirty? Maybe forty? Just enough for every wall in my apartment. Don’t worry, I’ll pay whatever the auction price winds up being.”
My forehead creased. “Every wall in your apartment?”
“I like my name on your back.”
The way he said it, like it should have been obvious and required no explanation, made me smile. “Such a caveman.”
“If I were a caveman, I’d tell you where I’d rather have my name on you.” Archer’s fist pressed into my backside enough to smash me closer to him. “Tattooed on you so you couldn’t just take it off or wash it off.”
“Wow, okay, so I retract my former accusation in favor of labeling you some barbarian-Neanderthal-caveman hybrid.”
“Before you form any more unfavorable opinions of me, let me just remind you that I’m a baseball player.” When I arched a brow at him, he continued, “I’m good with my hands, know what to do with a big stick, and am used to getting dirty.”
I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling. I didn’t want him to think I found any of what he’d said endearing, even though I kind of did.
With my hand tucked behind his back, I pinched at his side. “Only in baseball is someone highly skilled if they hit one third of the balls thrown in their direction.”
His plastered on smolder fell when he shot me a wounded expression. “Sure Coach doesn’t have you around to keep our egos in check?”
“A pro baseball player’s ego? No amount of insults could keep that in check.” I felt my straight face falter as he threw me another injured look.
“Triple ouch.”
“Oh, please. You like it.”
“Yeah”—he tipped his hips into me just enough—“I do.”
I nearly leapt through the ceiling when I felt him hard against me, but I recovered. Eventually.
“Everything okay?” the photographer asked, not sounding like he really cared.
Archer waited for me to answer.
“Everything’s great,” I muttered.
“Thanks. I get that a lot.” Archer’s eyes were spilling amusement.
Grumbling under my breath, I did my best to stay cool and collected through the remainder of the shoot. I felt the opposite though. In fact, I felt my own arousal wetting my underwear. Shit. My body was responding to his. Of its own accord. Without my permission. Feeling him hard and ready against me should have made me want to turn and run. Instead, my body was doing the opposite—welcoming him and inviting him closer.
After a minute, Archer must have noticed the frustrated look on my face. “Sorry,” he whispered.
Even hearing the softness his voice could attain, feeling the heat of his breath on my cheek, made my body weaken.
“Sorry for what?” I asked. “That I’m wearing nothing but your jersey? That I somehow wound up in this photo shoot when I had no idea I’d be posing for Sports Anonymous with Luke Archer? Or are you sorry for your erection you clearly can’t control when I’m stuck sandwiched between you and a baseball bat?”
Archer lowered his head so his mouth was beside my ear. “I’m sorry if my ‘erection’ makes you uncomfortable.”
“But not sorry because you have one, right?”
His head shook slowly. “No, not sorry for that.”
“Of course not.”
When he shrugged, the band of muscle beneath his chest moved against my hand. “At least now you know.”
“At least now I know what?”
“How I feel.”
I blew out a breath. “Yeah, I have a really good idea how you feel. Thanks for clearing it up.”
The harder Archer fought his smile, the more pronounced his dimple became. The auction price for these issues just spiked a grand or two. The children’s hospital could thank me later.
“You know how this game works. I know how.” He paused, letting that settle in the space between us. “You just have to decide if you want to play.”
“Because you have decided?”
His bat pressed deeper into my back, drawing me impossibly closer to his body. His arousal settled hard into the side of my stomach. “Doc, I’m already playing.”
DID I WANT to play the game?
That was the question that had been playing on repeat through my head the past two weeks. I still hadn’t arrived at any answers though.
For as strong as Archer had come on, he’d backed off to the point of simple formalities. I wasn’t sure if that was his way of letting me work things out without any pressure from him or if he’d lost interest or if, hell, I’d imagined everything during that twenty-four-hour period.
Either way, I was still considering my answer. Do I want to play the game?
Typically that question would have been followed up with an immediate and inviolate no. But this wasn’t the typical guy asking. It was Luke Archer. It wasn’t the name or prestige that came with the name that had caught and kept my attention; it was the man behind the name. He was a good one—a decent one.
Now that I was watching Archer through a different lens than the athletic trainer one I’d observed him with before, I was noticing new things. Like the way he always made it a point to take time before and after a game to sign autographs on kids’ baseball gloves or balls or napkins or whatever they waved at him from the fence.
Or the way he embodied the role of a team player—never showboating after nailing a ball over the fences, never failing to pat a teammate on the back when they trudged back to the dugout after striking out.
Or the way he was the first one on the field to warm-up and stayed after to help pack up. As star athletes went, he was the only one I’d come across who didn’t behave like a star.
In terms of men to get involved with, he seemed like the best kind a woman could hope for. I just couldn’t decide if this woman was ready to get involved with anyone, especially someone on the same team. Especially the star player who had no lack of scrutinizing eyes and rolling cameras aimed his way at any given time.
No matter how discreet we tried to be, someone would always be watching. Someone would find out. It was inevitable. And I couldn’t risk getting caught sleeping with a player when I’d already had to fight tooth and nail to get noticed on my own merit.
I couldn’t afford to be that athletic trainer who’d clawed her way into the pros by clawing her nails down Luke Archer’s back. Was a few weeks or months of wild abandon with Archer worth the risk of losing all my credibility?
My frustrated groan rolled down the hotel hall as I stormed down it some time after two in the morning. I’d never been much of a sleeper, and ever since Luk
e Archer’s roundabout proposition, sleep had been that much harder to attain.
The exercise room was open twenty-four hours a day, thank god, because I needed to work out some serious pent-up energy. We had a big game tomorrow against the Orlando Rays, and everyone was on edge. On edge translated to being ripe for injury, which translated into the athletic training team being extra busy tomorrow. The Shock and the Rays were rivals, but that rivalry ran deeper than most rival relationships did. The players couldn’t stand each other, and the last time Reynolds’s nose had been broken was during a game against the Rays. I didn’t know where the rivalry came from, but I was dreading tomorrow’s game.
Waving my cardkey beside the exercise room keypad, I could just make out the whir of a treadmill behind the door. I’d been hoping I’d have the room to myself, but it sounded like someone else was an insomniac.
I threw open the door, moved inside, and stopped short. If the room hadn’t been lined with mirrors, I might have quietly backed out and found another way to vent my excess energy, but it was too late. Archer had already seen my reflection in the mirror in front of the treadmill he was running on.
A slow smile shifted into place as he lifted his hand in a wave.
The door clicked closed behind me, sealing me in that small room, alone with him. The scent of sweat and man was overwhelming, rolling over me in heavy waves. I wasn’t sure if this was what scientists meant when they talked about pheromones and their effect on the opposite sex, but shit, my body was practically writhing from the scent of Luke Archer filling the room.
The view of him didn’t help either.
“Couldn’t sleep.” Archer pulled the ear buds from his ears, glancing at me over his shoulder.
“Yeah, me either.”
“I don’t sleep for shit most nights, but it’s been impossible lately.”
I could feel his eyes on me as I moved across the room, grabbed one of the folded towels, and brought it over to him. He was drenched with sweat, beads of it rolling from his hair down his forehead. The rest of his body was just as soaked.
That tended to happen when a person was maintaining a . . . I leaned over the treadmill just enough to read the screens.
“Archer!” I chided, going into athletic trainer mode instantly. My finger punched the speed down until he wasn’t sprinting at speed Super Human.
He grumbled as he wiped his face with the towel. “Sorry, Doc. I didn’t think you’d be around to catch me in the act.”
“The act of running ten miles per hour for the past . . .” My eyes darted to the time screen, widening instantly. “Hour?! You’ve got a big game tomorrow. What were you thinking running—no, wait, sprinting—almost ten miles less than twelve hours before it starts?”
Archer sighed when I kept punching the speed down, but he didn’t fight me on it. “I was thinking I couldn’t sleep and had about ten miles of wind-sprint energy to work off before I could even try.”
“There are other ways to work off energy that don’t involve you going into cardiac arrest or passing out from the effort.”
“Those are my favorite ways to work off energy actually.” He ran the towel through his wet hair, sending beads of sweat raining down onto my arm.
The room was warm and I was hot, but I still got goose bumps from feeling Archer’s sweat spray on my skin. It made me think of other ways it could happen. It made me fantasize about those ways.
Clearing my throat, I reached for his water bottle—which was empty—and backed up for the water cooler. “No more ten-mile dashes the night before a game. You’re going to hurt yourself or wear yourself out. You need a way to burn off some extra energy, I’ll work up a plan that doesn’t involve you setting speed records on a treadmill, okay?”
“Would this plan have anything to do with you and me horizontal in my bed?”
Two weeks of silence on the issue, and now he was jumping in with both feet. I guessed I could rule out his interest passing or it all being some figment of my imagination.
“Archer,” I said in warning while I filled his water bottle.
“Fine, fine.” His feet continued their steady pace, pounding the treadmill. “You and me vertical up against my hotel shower wall?”
Another round of chills spiraled down my spine. He knew just what to say to make my body respond. He knew just how to say it to test my willpower.
“I take your silence to mean you haven’t arrived at any conclusions regarding you and me?”
My head shook as I filled his water bottle.
“Have you given any thought to you and me?”
He watched me as I screwed the bottle’s lid back on and wandered toward him. “Lots of thought.”
“And?” He took the water bottle from me, waiting.
Looking at him from this close was hard. Seeing him shirtless again made me remember the way his body had felt against mine during that impromptu photo shoot. The way his hard planes accepted my soft curves. The way his arms felt around me, tucking me close to him like nothing could get past him. God. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not with him. Not with a player on the very team I was working for.
“And it will require lots more thought,” I said, picking up his bottle and holding it out for him with a raised eyebrow. Gauging how long he’d been running and how much he was sweating, he needed to down a couple of liters to restore his fluid levels. I needed to make sure he got some electrolytes in him too.
“Anything I can do to help sway your decision?” Archer looked down at me while he sucked on his water bottle. He gave me a happy now? look when he handed it back, almost empty.
“Yeah. Explain why you ignored me for months, then when you decided to notice me, you pretty much came on so strong it was like I was the last woman on the planet and the fate of it rested on our ability to procreate.” I headed back to the water cooler, thankful for the added space between us.
He’d been guarding his looks around me when others were around, but now that we alone, he was staring at me like he knew me as intimately as two people could know one another. He didn’t blink once, his long strides strumming along the treadmill. His muscled shoulders lifted. “I go after what I want. I don’t leave you guessing. Or wondering. With me, you get what you see. You know what I want. Who I am.”
When I handed him the fresh water bottle, he drank a few more sips before squirting a stream onto his head. I backed up into the wall behind me. Distance seemed like a good thing when Luke Archer was looking at me the way he was, saying the things he was, sweating and breathing hard the way he was.
“And you want . . . me?” I said, needing the words spelled out.
He didn’t pause. His stride didn’t lose a beat. “I do.”
My heart felt like it was climbing into my throat. “Why?”
His gaze pinned me to the wall. “Because you know the demands of this lifestyle. You’re as committed to your job as I am to mine. You’re as interested in keeping this quiet as I am.” He motioned at me like I was living proof of his confession. “I respect you as a trainer and a human being. And, most importantly of all, I am attracted to you in a way that makes it hard to breathe when you’re close.” That was when he paused to take a breath. “I want you in a way that makes rolling into bed every night without fantasizing about crawling over your body impossible. That’s why.” He let that settle in the air, never looking away. “I can’t promise you forever. I can’t promise any length of time actually, but I can promise honesty and commitment. The rest, I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“And sex.” My eyebrow lifted. “You can promise me that too, right?”
A tipped smile slid into place. “I can absolutely promise you that.”
“Glad that’s all cleared up,” I muttered, wondering if anything was or if everything was just more confusing now. Was he suggesting a sex-only relationship? A no-strings-attached one? Was he hinting at maybe more?
Did I care?
My answer to that question w
as unsettling. So I shuffled it to the back of my mind.
“This schedule—this life . . . it would be nice to have someone to climb into bed with at night.” His shoulders lifted as he kept clipping along. “To share private moments with. The same person. A person I trust.”
I knew all too well what he meant. Ours was a lonely life. One filled with endless tasks, long hours, and hundreds of people . . . yet still impossibly lonely. It would be wonderful to have one person I could trust to share intimacy with. A person I could wrap my body around at the end of a long day and pretend that life was more than schedules and commitments.
“This is a strange arrangement,” I said after a minute.
He was cooling down and needed to get some more fluids, electrolytes, and rest before tomorrow’s game. The thing was, I didn’t trust myself to go back to his room and follow up on those items. We hadn’t even crossed a line yet and already I was letting my feelings for him get in the way of my job.
I couldn’t do that. No matter where Luke Archer and I wound up, I couldn’t let my feelings for him get in the way of my job.
“This is a strange life that we live,” he replied, punching the treadmill to a stop. “When you make your decision, you know where to find me. You know where I stand. Let me know when you figure out where you do.”
“No pressure, right?”
He stopped wiping off his face, his eyes darkening as he stepped off the treadmill and moved toward me. “Depending on your answer, there’ll be plenty of pressure. In all the right places. Whenever you need it. Whenever you want it.”
My legs squeezed together. “You really don’t leave anything open to interpretation, do you?”
“No.” His head shook. “Don’t let the fear of striking out hold you back.”
My tongue went into the side of my cheek. “I think Mr. Ruth was referring to baseball, not dating.”
His dimple sunk into his cheek. “Maybe he was, but that’s the principle Mr. Archer applies to all facets of his life.” Backing away from me, he snagged his shirt off a barbell and took another sip from his water bottle. He was keeping true to his word—letting me figure this out without him pressuring me . . . yet.