Shuddering uncontrollably, I feel him stiffen in surprise of my startlingly powerful convulsions. His hands quickly spread on my back and flatten me to him as he lifts his leg higher between my thighs and grinds his muscle into my clit, his ravenous mouth taking all my moans inside him.

When I’m done, he brushes my hair back and looks positively intimate. His voice. Intimate. Mild with tenderness. “Did that feel even half as good as it looked?” His fingers trail along my cheek in a whisper touch, and there is still not enough air in my lungs to scream at him.

I Hate. Him.

I feel like I just gave him everything, and got nothing back, even though I was the one who was pleasured. Angrily securing the towel around myself, I glance around the room, at anything but his odious beautiful sexy face.

“I assure you that’s not happening again,” I whisper in my complete and total embarrassment.

He kisses my ear, his voice husky. “I’m going to make sure that it does.”

“Don’t count on it. If I wanted to have an orgasm all alone I could have taken care of myself without giving anyone a show.” With the towel clutched to my chest, I sit up and ask, “Can I borrow a damn shirt?”

Slowly, his lips curl into a dimpled, kind of cocky smile that makes me suspect he likes the idea of me wearing his man stuff, and he heads into his closet while I wait for him to come back, feeling all kinds of slutty and wanton.

His beautiful torso is still a little damp, and I can’t stop admiring the way the towel hugs his narrow hips. His body is perfection. His butt defies gravity, it is so perfectly tight, round and muscular. Every time I see it in any kind of clothes, I drool about a small ocean.

I want to see him naked and touch him, and once again tonight, I loathe that I won’t be able to sleep from the torment of wanting to feel him inside me. Can I even stay here to sleep? Wanting what he’s not ready to give me?

No, I’m not going to sleep with him tonight, only to kiss like teenagers, making out in first base and second and third, without going for it all…

No.

Hell no.

I want him to make love to me. I. Need. Him to. Damn him. I hate that he can control himself and hold back while I am completely undone for him.

He hands me a black t-shirt I’d seen him wearing before, in our very first flight to Atlanta. “This okay?” he asks, blue eyes all-knowing and deep.

I slip it on, feeling the fabric slide along my skin and feeling it awaken tingles all over my body. He remains standing at the foot of the bed, and his eyes probe into me. They’re intimate eyes, eyes that have seen me naked and make my pussy ache so deep I feel like squirming. “Come eat something with me,” he says, and I follow him out into the suite, not one whit relaxed even after the amazing orgasm he gave me.

“Let’s see what Diane left you,” I tell him as we study the contents in the hot drawer of the presidential suite kitchen. He uncovers the plate and I shoot him a smile. “Eggs. They must’ve been on sale tonight.”

Those dimples again, boyish and sexy as he glances at my mouth and stays there. I don’t even think he realizes he’s staring so hotly at me. In silence, he extracts two forks from a drawer and comes over. “Come share.”

“Oh no. No more eggs for me tonight. You enjoy.”

He sets the forks down and follows me to the door, grabbing my wrist to halt me. “Stay.”

The abrupt request shoots a ripple of heat through me, but it’s the intensity in his blue eyes that nearly rent me open.

“I’ll stay,” I say, my voice smooth but firm, “when you make love to me.”

We stare, then he sighs and holds the door open for me, putting his body in such a way that I have to brush past him to leave. The contact burns me. His eyes watch me all the way to my room. They burn me.

At night, I lay awake, in another master bedroom of another presidential suite, with Diane resting in the other bedroom, and I’m still in flames. I’m in bed with the door open, my ears alert for any noise, in case Remy has an extra key to this suite, and he might come get me.

His t-shirt large and wonderful on my much smaller frame, and it smells of him. It feels soft against my skin, and here I am, shivering with need, wishing he’d break down and come get me and tell me he’s ready for me. I am so ready for him. Just come make love to me, I think helplessly.

At 2 a.m. he still hasn’t, and I’m still awake.

I can’t see how a man who really wants a woman can hold back like this. Remy is disciplined and the strongest man I’ve known, but I watch the door and remember his touch, the way I came for him, and don’t think it’s even possible that he could hold back if he wanted me the way I do. My sex aches like never before. It is so swollen remembering the powerful strokes of his tongue and the way his thigh grazed me. My hunger has not only not been appeased, it has done the impossible and tripled until I feel rabid. He just opened up an unquenchable thirst and I don’t feel satisfied, but feel empty and anxious. My entire existence tonight is focused in watching that door.

Does he feel anything for me even remotely as strong as I do?

There’s this mean little part of me, the girl who broke her ACL and who failed to accomplish her dream, the girl who doesn’t believe I can really have anything wonderful, makes me wonder if he really wants me at all.

Or he just wants to play with me.

Then I wonder if this is the sort of feeling that got my sister Nora in trouble in the first place.

Austin

In Austin we’re staying in a six-bedroom home with a barn included, and that fabulously crafted old-fashioned red barn is where Remington trains. He’s been pushing tractor tires all day. Running up the outside stairs with cement bags atop both his shoulders. He’s climbed ropes slung up from the barn rafters, swung from the rafters and then ran with me around the property. He’s training like a beast, and moody as a mad gorilla, as well. Although he seems to be especially moody with the other members of his team and I seem to be the only one who calms him, so Riley and Coach keep begging me to go stretch him when he starts getting upset about something like the fit of his “damned-for-shit gloves nobody can fight with.”

It’s been torture for me, these frequent stretches. Sliding my hands along his sweaty chest. Austin is hot in July, and he takes off his shirt and the skin-to-skin contact unsettles every little and big part of me, flashing me back to every sensation of being naked in bed with him.

Every night since the egg incident a week ago, I’ve lain in bed staring at my door. I know I should touch myself just to find some relief, but what I want from him is so far beyond sex now, I don’t even want to put a name to it. Though I know perfectly well what it is.

On our flight here, we exchanged music, and I find I’m always breathless waiting to see the song he will play for me. I tried to keep my selection unromantic for him, and actually got a private thrill when he scowled at all the girl power songs I handed over.

He, on the other hand, played me the most romantic song I’d ever heard in my growing-up years, which was featured in a chick flick in the end, where a guy plays the song to the love of his life on his boom box. The movie is called Say Anything, but the song is called “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel.

I wanted, seriously, to melt into the leather of the plane bench when it started playing for me, with his somber blue eyes intently watching me as I soaked up the lyrics about finding the light in her eyes…

Damn.

Him.

He hasn’t touched me since the night we showered together. But the things he said … the way he kissed me … I want him so bad, sometimes I just want to hit him in the head and haul him into my woman’s cave, where nobody’s opinion matters but mine. And I say we go at it all night long and that’s that.

Today I’m inside the house, retrieving some elastic bands from my suitcase which I might use to stretch him in the end of the afternoon session. This is just a tactic so I don’t have to touch him skin to skin anymore, and spare myself another sleepless night of arousal. I pass through the front door with the band dangling from between my fingers, and I spot Pete there, holding it partly closed as he speaks to someone on the other side.

As I pass through, I see a silver-haired man and a woman through the corner of my eye, and suddenly they call me.

“Young girl! Please, won’t you let us talk to him?”

The feminine voice stops me in my tracks, since I’m the only young girl in the house, unless someone started cross-dressing here, and I don’t think Coach is into that.

When I step forward, the tall, slender, frail-looking woman rushes to tell me, her face pale and her sullen eyes a dark chocolate, “We didn’t know what to do. He felt abandoned but he was too strong and nobody could control him, least of all me.”

My brain processes her words in silence, and while it does, I stare at them and remain standing behind Pete.

“Again, I’m really sorry,” Pete formally replies. “But even if he weren’t busy, there’s no way I can get him to see you. But please rest assured I will make contact if that ever changes.”

He slams the door shut a little harder than called for, and releases a long, pent-up sigh.

And finally my mind speaks to me. “Are those Remy’s parents?” I ask, bewildered and shocked.

Suddenly I realize his father’s blue eyes are unmistakable in color, and although white-haired, the man had incredibly large and healthy bone structure.

Pete nods and rubs his forehead, appearing extremely agitated. “Yeah. They’re the folks, all right.”

“Why won’t Remy see them?”

“Because the bastards locked him up in a psych ward at thirteen and left him there until he was old enough to sign himself out.”

An awful sensation settles in my gut, and for a moment, the only thing I do is gape. “A psych ward? For what? Remy’s not crazy,” I say, instantly outraged on his behalf as I follow Pete across the living room.

“Don’t even look at me. It’s one of the most frustrating injustices I’ve ever had to witness in my life.”

Chest wound tight, I ask, “Pete, were you with him when he was kicked out of boxing?”

He shakes his head in a negative, his stride not breaking. “Remy has a short fuse. You light it, he blows up. His competition wanted him out. Picked on him out of the ring. He bit the bait. Was kicked out. End of story.”

“Well, is he still angry about it?”

He opens the terrace doors that lead across the garden and to the barn, and I follow, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun with my hand.

“He’s angry, all right, but not specifically about that,” Pete says. “Fighting is all he knows. It’s all he’s had that he can control in his life. Growing up, it was pure rejection for Rem. It’s damn near impossible to get him to open up. Even with those who’ve been with him so long.”

“How do you think his parents knew where we were? I thought this house was to keep the press away since the egg incident?”

“Because this is Rem’s house,” Pete says as I spot the charming red barn looming ahead across the lawns. “After he got out, he made money fighting, then he got this house, trying to prove to the old folks that he could be someone … The folks still didn’t want anything to do with him. He got stuck with the house and now only uses it when we’re in the city to keep the press from hounding him at the hotels. He has a lot of fans in Austin.”