and his two players clearly had a longtime ease with each other, but just as clearly there was a hierarchy, with Mark at the top—and he hadn’t taken his carefully observant eyes off Rainey.
Crap.
She turned away, but he snagged her hand and pulled her very wet self back around. She thought about tugging free.
Or kicking him.
As if he could read her mind, his lips twitched. “Easy,” he murmured, and pulled off her sunglasses.
She narrowed her eyes against the sun and a wealth of unwelcome emotions as the very hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his sexy mouth.
“It’s a little hard to tell with the raccoon eyes,” he said. “But the bad ‘tude’s a dead giveaway. Rainey Saunders. Look at you.”
The others were all still talking with a false sense of intimacy. Mark tapped the bill of Rainey’s Ducks hat, giving a slow shake of his head, like he couldn’t believe she’d be wearing anything other than the Mammoths’ colors.
And suddenly she felt like that silly, love-struck teenager all over again. Having four years on her, he’d been clueless about the crush. He might never have known at all if she hadn’t made a fool of herself and sneaked into his apartment to strip for him. It’d all gone straight to hell since he’d been on the receiving end of a blow job at the time. She’d compounded the error with several more that evening, which she didn’t want to think about. Ever. It’d all ended with her pride and confidence completely squashed.
Worse, the night had negated the years of friendship she and Mark had shared until then, all erased in one beat of stupidity.
Okay, several beats of stupidity.
She lifted her chin, which turned out to be a mistake because water had pooled on the bill and now dripped down her face. She blinked it away and tried to look cool—not easy under the best of circumstances, and this wasn’t anywhere close to best.
Mark pointed to her nose. “You have a smudge of dirt.”
Oh, good. Because she’d been under the illusion she was looking perfect. “Thought you liked dirty girls.” The minute she said it, she could have cut out her tongue. He’d been on GQ last month, artfully stretched out on some L.A. beach, draped in sand.
And four naked, gorgeous, equally sandy women.
She’d bought the damn issue, which really chapped her ass. Mark clearly knew it, and his smile broke free. She rubbed at her nose but apparently this only made things worse because his smile widened.
“Here,” he said, and ran a finger over the bridge of her nose himself.
Up this close and personal, it was hard to miss just how gorgeous he was.
Or how good he smelled.
Or how expensive he looked.
All of which was hugely irritating.
“Got it,” he said. “Not much I can do about the soap all over you. Let’s fix this too.” Then, before she could stop him, he tugged off her drenched hat, flashed an amused glance at what was surely some scary-ass hair, then replaced her hat with the one from his own head. The Mammoths, of course. He ran a hand over his own silky, dark hair, leaving it slightly tousled and perfectly sexy.
She snatched back her hat. “I like the Ducks. They’re my favorite team.”
At this, both of his players turned from Todd and stared at her. Rainey didn’t know if it was because of what she’d just said, or because no one dared sass their fearless leader. “No offense,” she said to them.
“None taken,” Casey said on a grin and held out his hand, introducing himself. James did the same.
Rainey instantly liked them both, and not just because they were famous, or cute as hell—which they were—but because they were quite harmless, as compared with their head coach. He wasn’t the least bit harmless. Rainey squirmed a little, probably due to the soapy water running down her body.
Or the way Mark was studying her with the same quiet intensity he used on the ice—which she knew because she watched his games. All of them.
“So how do you know Coach?” James asked her.
Rainey looked into Mark’s eyes. Well, not quite his eyes, since they were still behind the reflective Oakleys that probably cost more than her grocery bill for the month. “We go way back.”
Mark’s almost-smile made an appearance again. “Rainey went to school with my brother Rick.” He paused, clearly waiting for her to add something to the story.
No thank you, since the only thing she could add would be “and one time I threw myself at him and he turned me down flat.”
They’d seen each other since, of course, on the few occasions when he’d come back to town to visit his dad and brother. Once when she’d been twenty-one, at a local police ball that Mark had helped chair. He’d slow danced with her and the air had crackled between them. Chemistry had abounded, and she could read in his dark eyes that he’d felt it too, and she’d melted at his interest. But she hadn’t been able to swallow her mortification about the fiasco on her sixteenth birthday, so she’d made an excuse and bailed on him. She’d seen him again, several times, and each accidental run-in had been the same.
The laws of physics didn’t change. The sun would come up. The sun would go down. And she would always be insanely attracted to Mark Diego.
The last chance encounter had been only two years ago. They’d had yet another near miss at a town Christmas ball when they’d again slow danced. He expressed interest in every hard line of his body, some harder than others, but she’d let self-preservation rule once more.
“So are you friends?” James asked her and Mark now. “Or …?” He waggled a finger back and forth between them with a matching waggle of his brow.
Mark gave him a single look, nothing more, and James zipped his lips.
Impressive. “Neither,” she told James resolutely, trying to wring out the hem of her shirt while ignoring how close Mark was standing to her, invading her personal space bubble.
“It’s been a long time,” he said. “You look …”
“All wet?” she asked.
His eyes heated, and something deep inside her quivered. Damn, he still had the power. He smiled, and she narrowed her eyes, daring him to go there, but his momma hadn’t raised a fool.
“Different,” he finally said. “You look different.”
Yes, she imagined she looked quite different than the gorgeous women she’d seen hanging off his arm in magazines and blogs.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
She wanted to believe that was true, but realized with some horror that she’d actually leaned into him, drawn in by that stupid magnetic charisma. But she was nothing if not a pro at hiding embarrassment. Spreading her arms, she gave him a hug, as if that’d been her intention all along. Squeezing his big, warm, hard body close, she made sure to spread as much of the suds and water from her shirt to his as she could. “It’s good to see you as well,” she said, her mouth against his ear, her lips brushing the lobe.
He went still at the contact, then instead of trying to pull free, merely folded her into his arms, trapping her against him. And damn if her body didn’t burst to life, as if all this time it’d been just waiting for him to come back.
“Yeah, you’re different,” he murmured, doing as she had, pressing his mouth to her ear, giving her a shiver. “The little kitten grew up and got claws.”
When she choked out a laugh, he closed his teeth over her earlobe.
She gasped, but then he soothed the ache with a quick touch of his tongue, yanking another shocked response from her.