Gloves Off: a marriage of convenience hockey romance (Vancouver Storm Book 4)

My eyes go wide, face pressed into the duvet. “I wasn’t—oh.”

His fingers sink into me. Intense pleasure radiates from where he rubs my G-spot.

I shudder, toes curling as desire courses through me. In the back of my mind, I find it annoying, how quickly and easily he found it. It’s probably just the angle of him kneeling behind me on the bed. Urgent heat gathers between my legs, and I clutch the duvet. He delivers a sharp slap to my ass. Another wave of heat rolls through me.

“You love this, don’t you?” His voice is low in my ear as I shudder and clench on him. “You love being filled and fucked by my fingers.”

I close my eyes, trying not to disintegrate yet. That would be way, way too good for his ego.

“Answer me.”

“Yes,” I rush out, before I curse myself for letting him win that round.

His hand smooths over my backside. “Good girl.”

Another shiver of delight moves through me. “Shut up,” I huff.

“What else would you be, with those pretty bows on your ankles?”

My shoes earlier. He always notices.

“Are you going to come tonight, good girl?” he asks in a low, smug voice.

I clench around his fingers, the tight spasm as pleasure rolls through me. Something about Alexei calling me that makes my brain melt.

“I doubt it.” My strained voice betrays me.

Another sharp slap on my ass, and the coil of need between my legs winds, tightening.

“You know what I think, Hellfire?”

My teeth sink into my bottom lip so I don’t cry out as he strokes his fingers in and out of me a little faster, a little rougher. God, that’s so good.

“I think you’re so in your head all the time, so in control, that it’s nice to let me take charge.”

With his free hand, he gathers my wrists and holds them against my lower back. I choke back a whimper as lust tightens between my legs.

I guess I like this.

“You’re doing so good for me, sweetheart,” he murmurs, trailing his lips over the back of my shoulder, and deep inside me, something shifts.

Everything heightens. The coil of need winds another notch, and sparks start going off at the center of my spine.

Oh god. He’s rubbing exactly the right spot. I can’t think. I can barely breathe. My arms flex, tugging against his hold, but he holds tight.

Shit. No. I think I’m going to—I can’t actually be—pleasure tightens through my body, spiraling, spinning, whirling, expanding. My mouth falls open.

I’m going to come.

Pleasure washes over me, and as I tip over the edge, I bury my face in the pillow. I’d rather suffocate than give him the satisfaction of knowing I’m coming, but it only makes it worse. I only come harder on his fingers. His scent, the urgent feel of his fingers inside me, the way I know he’s looking at me, so focused and hungry and intense, like I’m the focus of his full attention, they all fold together and the sensations within me double, triple, quadruple. I’m shaking on his fingers, clamping my teeth together, making fists with my bound wrists, and staying silent with every shred of control I have left.

“Did you just come?”

“No,” I croak. I’m panting. My pulse races. Floaty, languid feelings drift through my bloodstream. Delicious serotonin has melted my brain.

“Liar.”

I can’t look at him. I don’t think my vision works anymore.

His hand returns between my legs and my eyes go wide.

“What are you doing?” I gasp, tensing up with sensitivity as his fingers slick over my clit. I’m soaked.

“You said you didn’t come.” His breathing sounds ragged but he gives my wrists a teasing squeeze. “So we’re not going to stop until you do.”

My lips part. This wasn’t part of the plan. I don’t know what to do now. He swirls the pads of his fingers across my oversensitive nerves and my eyes close. Every nerve ending in my body melts with his slow touch. I think I sigh with pleasure.

“Throwing in the towel so soon, Doctor?”

“Fuck you.” My voice is a thin rasp as another wave of heat ripples through me. My god. His fingers speed up. My muscles tighten again, pleasure cresting higher, insides going molten.

No. Nonono. Again? How?

I let out a desperate groan into the pillow, shuddering as the pressure between my legs peaks, firing through me, heating my blood and making my mind go blank. It’s the best form of torture, this. I don’t know how long this one goes on for—it could be seconds or hours, I’m not sure, but when I descend back to earth, I’m breathing hard, heart racing and limbs so heavy I couldn’t stand if I wanted to.

A pleased noise rumbles out of his chest. “Again, huh?’

“No,” I protest. I hate losing like this. I hate that he can make me come so easily. “You didn’t. I didn’t.”

“Mhm.” I refuse to look at him, but I can hear it in his voice—he loves this. He loves winning. “You’re beautiful. I’ve always thought that.”

“Shut up,” I gasp. He’s lying. “You hate me.”

“I always thought you were beautiful, though.” His eyes tease me. “It made me mad.”

He guides his fingers back inside me. Moments later, I shatter again into a thousand pieces.noveldrama

With a word, I could end this. There isn’t a single part of me that believes he’d push this further than I want. He’d stop the second I say stop.

I don’t say stop, though. For some reason, I hang on.

And I’m not quite sure I hate him anymore, not after tonight. Not after he apologized the other week. Not after he coached soccer for me, and they liked him.

“Done yet?” he asks.

“Done what?” I manage, panting. “I’m bored.”

Alexei makes me come so many times, I lose count. One turns into three, which turns into five. I think we’re around seven or eight by now, but they’re starting to string into one another, so does that count as separate or just one? Who cares. I’m a disintegrating mess, coming on my husband’s hand while he looks, doling out pleasure.

“There,” he says with satisfaction when a moan finally slips past my clenched teeth as I come again. “There we go.”

“I hate you,” I gasp.

“Uh-huh. I know. I hate you, too.”

It doesn’t sound like he does, though. It sounds like he’s enjoying this more than I am. Deep down, his smug satisfaction thrills me. I’m disgusting. I hate myself for that. Where’s my fantasy of the faceless hot guy who doesn’t talk and follows orders?

That guy could never make me come like this.

I sob another involuntary moan into the pillow.

“You could end this, you know, if you just admit it.”

Never. Not while I’m still conscious. I’d pass out before I admitted defeat. He’d be so smug. He’d lord it over me for the rest of our deal. Every time he looked at me, every time he spoke to me, we’d both be thinking about this.

I don’t even want to think about what this means, that he can make me come so easily.

“Fine!” I shout. “Fuck. Fine. Okay. You made me come. Once.”

“Once?” His hand presses at my entrance like a threat.

“I lost count.” I don’t care if he knows. I don’t care about anything.

I steel my spine and haul in a deep breath. My pride is about to get the bruising of a lifetime.

A kiss on my lower back. Soft, sweet, barely more pressure than a butterfly. His breath fans over my skin. “Good girl.”

I shiver.

“Such a good wife for me,” he says in a low voice, and threads of warmth trickle through me at his praise. A kiss on my left wrist.

“Stop that.” He’s just messing with me. He just loves winning.

“You did so well,” he adds, pressing his lips to my right wrist, and I like that, too.

“What the actual fuck is happening here?” I whisper at the wall as he trails a soft line of kisses across my back. His hand is on my ass, smoothing over my skin. He chuckles.

That fucker actually chuckles.

He delivers a sharp slap to my ass, and my pussy tightens around nothing, the traitor. He lifts off the bed, and I feel the cold loss of his hands on my body.

That’s my cue. I rise to my elbows, dragging my lifeless corpse up. I weigh approximately twelve million pounds.

In an instant, he’s back, hand pressing to my lower back, pushing me down. “Stay there.”

Opening my mouth to argue is an instinct.

“Don’t argue,” he says, but softly. Almost sweetly.

I don’t know who this is. He body-swapped with someone else while my face was buried in the pillow.

Still, I sink into the duvet, catching my breath while I listen to him in the en suite. The tap runs. A rustle of fabric. His heavy footsteps return, and my lips part in surprise as a warm, damp cloth presses between my legs.

“What are you—” I start.

“Shut. Up.” Again, that soft, soothing voice.

“You’re not actually taking care of me right now?” I ask in my own soft, dazed voice as he swipes gently against my center. I want to wrench around and look at his expression to get a goddamned handle on what we’re doing here, but I don’t want him to see my baffled look of concern and confusion. Keeping my eyes open is proving difficult, anyway.

“This is what people do after sex, Hellfire.”

No, they don’t. We didn’t, not last time. This wasn’t anything like last time, though.

The cloth disappears. I hear it land in the bathroom before the bed dips. I crack one eye open. He’s sitting on the edge.

“Are you going to sleepwalk tonight?”

“No,” I lie, replaying the sickening stomach lurch as I watched the footage of his head shot, of him being carried off the ice.

“You remember what I said?” His voice teases me, low but gentle, and the stubborn part of me digs her heels in. “About you sleepwalking?”

If I sleepwalk again, he’s getting rid of my bed. He wouldn’t.

I think about him buying me that car, and I’m not so sure.

“If I wake up with you in my bed,” he warns, and I squint at him, half-awake.

“You won’t,” I promise, too sleepy and orgasmed-out to deal with tomorrow’s consequences. Around Alexei, I can’t seem to stop running my mouth. It’s a problem. It gets me into trouble, again and again.

The fun kind of trouble, though. The kind that made me come over and over.

He sweeps my hair aside and his breath skitters over the back of my neck. “Close your eyes,” he murmurs.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

I close my eyes because I want to, not because he told me to, but within seconds, I’m fast asleep.

The next morning, I wake with my leg trapped under Alexei’s, tucked into his chest.

His erection presses against my hip and my eyelids fly open. His skin is impossibly warm and his heart beats steadily under my palm. Slow, steady breathing lifts his expansive chest.

Fuck, I mouth, cursing myself and my stupid problem.

When the footage of his career started last night, I should have made an excuse and hid in the bathroom, checking my makeup, so I didn’t have to watch.

He needs you here, Ward had said, and an ache forms in my throat at the memory.

I sneak out of bed without waking him, tiptoe into the shower, and wash every trace of what we did last night off of myself.

I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to feel like this, like I’m starting to care.

This crush I have on my husband isn’t going away, but I’m going to ignore it until it does.