Playing Hardball Page 2

  “Then there was the Campus Miss Christmas party, which you totally blew off.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” he snarled, giving her tit a rough, punishing lick while sinking his fingers more deeply into the seam of her sex. With his index finger, he carefully tested the tender rim of her opening. “You’re not very wet,” he muttered.

  “Yeah, well I haven’t exactly been thinking about sex.”

  He lifted his face from her breast and challenged her with a look. “You haven’t been thinking about me?”

  “Only how mad I am at you.”

  “And that stops you from thinking about sex?” he demanded, his brow arching upward.

  “What do you think, Einstein?”

  He sent her an evil grin. “I just know it doesn’t stop me. I think of you and I think of sex. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.”

  “Well, I guess I’m just not built like you,” she snipped.

  “No,” he breathed, raking his eyes down over her breasts again. “You’re not. And every morning I wake up and thank the blessed Lord.”

  “Well, you may have to ask His help if you expect me to—”

  “I don’t need his help,” he snorted. “I’ll have you creaming in no time. Lord or no Lord.”

  “Colt,” she whimpered apprehensively. “Wh-What are you going to do?”

  “Just this,” he grunted as he hooked her heel through the fence and buckled her in. With her foot trapped just beneath her butt, he dropped to his knees, got her skirt up over her hips and pushed her lace-clad leg wide. He snagged the cotton panel on her panties and tugged it to the left, exposing all the delicious pink details she kept hidden between her thighs. When he touched his mouth to her luscious, hot flesh, a jolt stiffened her frame and he couldn’t help his smile of satisfaction, which he very tactfully hid against the pout of her pussy lips.

  “Colt,” she squealed. “We need to talk.”

  “Well, see now, that might be a problem, honey. Because I’ll be using my tongue in a minute. But I won’t be using it to talk.”

  After that he just had to ignore her complaints and comments so that he could devote his full attention to the work that faced him, to her delectable pussy. With one hand pressing her leg open and the fingers of his other hand tugging the cotton panel out of his way, he threaded his tongue through the parting in her plump labia. She tasted of sex and heat and sweet innocent arousal. As he laved the fragile flesh and got a deeper taste, his cock stiffened to the point of rigid agony. Jesus, she made him hot and horny! Well, if he had to suffer, he was damn sure gonna make certain he didn’t suffer alone.

  After ten months of marriage, he knew exactly what Renny liked and where she liked it. He used his entire bag of tricks—first licking a hot line through her slit then sucking at her clitoris with gentle precision. When he had her clit nice and plump, he gave it the firm lashing it deserved. Gradually, Renny’s arguments dissolved into an incoherent garbled mess of helpless sobs and whimpering cries. He pulled her wider and angled his head back so he could put his mouth against her opening, which spilled a warm, delicious rush of liquid down his throat. He growled as he sent his tongue deep and pulled more of her flavor into his mouth. When he figured she was approaching the peak of arousal, he pulled back, sending nothing but the teasing touch of his heated breath across her sex.

  She shuddered beneath his hands then used the brief respite to renew her attack. “You’re just doing this to avoid arguing.”

  “Actually,” he countered with a dark chuckle, “I’m doing this to make you ready for my cock.”

  “So you’re not even going to try to explain yourself?”

  He straightened before her and wiped his mouth on his shoulder. “I don’t want to be around other women,” he muttered, the words sounding tight as they made their way through his clenched teeth.

  “What?”

  “You know how I feel about women—women other than you.” He was lying but he figured she’d believe the story, considering his history. After what had happened with his first wife, everyone had known he didn’t want anything to do with women. Since falling in love with his beautiful Renny, that was no longer the case. But it was better for her to think he still hated all women, than to know the truth.

  “So your hate for women is so great that it keeps you from spending time with me? Half the population is made up of women, Colt! Are you going to refuse to spend any time with me unless we’re alone?”

  “That’s about it,” he insisted stubbornly.

  Renny’s elegant eyebrows pulled together as she considered him speculatively. “Do you not want me to have friends, Colt?”

  “No!” he barked as his entire frame jerked in horror. He knew she’d grown up pretty lonely. He wanted desperately for her to make new friends. He’d had plenty of friends in his time, not to mention two brothers and a sister who were always there for him. More than anything, he wanted his Renny to know that joy of camaraderie.

  “Because it seems like, whenever my personal assistant is around, that’s when you disappear.”

  He shrugged, trying for some nonchalant body language. “I don’t have anything against Layla per se, Renny. I’m glad you’ve made friends at Campus Miss. I just…don’t want to be around women if I don’t have to.”

  “Even if it means not being around me?”

  Grimly, he nodded.

  “Even if those women are important business associates as well as my best friends?”

  “I thought I was your best friend,” he growled.

  “You know what I mean,” she snapped, clearly exasperated.

  He was feeling pretty exasperated himself. He really did not want to discuss a situation about which he could do absolutely nothing, other than exactly what he was doing. He really just wanted to fuck the woman he loved.

  He covered her mouth again, sharing her pussy flavor with her as he pressed his lips against hers and reached with his tongue for the back of her throat. She responded with a melting whimper that sharpened the ache in his groin. God help him. Of all the women he’d had in his lifetime, nobody could melt like Renny. And once she started melting, her inner nympho wasn’t far away. And that provocative, naughty, impish nymphomaniac drove him right out of his ever-lovin’ mind!

  He pried the cotton panel from her pussy again and fingered her folds, his hand shaking as he reached deep for her opening and collected her slippery heat. His fingers coated with her silky moisture, he dragged his hand back through her slit and smeared the creamy hot stuff over her clit while she arched and gasped. His fingers slipped over her delicate sex as he searched out all the lush details inside her soft pussy lips and Renny sobbed at the wet friction he forced between her legs. Oh yeah, she was excited all right, her clit thick and full, her pulse threading through the tag of flesh in sharp surges. He knew he had only to flatten his thumb over that tiny bit of feminine flesh and she’d come right in his hand.

  “Oh!” she sobbed, her body shivering against his. “I’m going to come. Colt! I’m going to come right now!”

  “No, you’re not,” he snarled. “Not until I get inside you.”

  She gulped at the air, clearly willing her body to wait for him and his full, hard, hot penetration. “Colt,” she whimpered, the need in her voice almost destroying the hold he had on his control.

  With his thumb holding aside the cotton panel and the fingers of his other hand buried in the crease of her ass, he set his cock head at her tender opening and felt her cunt flutter at the edge of climax. “Not until I’m inside you,” he commanded warningly, feeding her the first thick inch of his erection.

  Again, she shuddered around him as though the walls of her channel were trying to pull him deep inside. A careful thrust took him another few inches inside that delicious heat. It wrapped around the top of his shaft and teased his glans so disturbingly that he began to wonder who would break first, him or her. Sweat dampened his brow as he grasped her bottom and tilted her pelvis into his groin. W
ith a taut grunt, he shoved into her another tight, hot inch. “Fuck,” he muttered, dangling at the edge of his own barely held release. “Can you take the rest of me, sweetheart? All at once?”

  “Not without coming,” she cried, her teeth buried in her bottom lip as she gazed up at him, her slight frame trembling beneath the hard press of his body.

  “Then let go, baby. Because here I come.” With those words, he straightened his legs and jerked upward, the edge of her panties scraping painfully along his entire length as he entered her, his cock drilling right up against the velvet cushion of her cervix. As he watched her face, her eyes lost in pleasure, a small broken sound came from his chest—the sound he always made when he watched her come. The one he always hoped she never heard. Because, if she ever did, she’d know how completely she’d enslaved him.

  Her cunt knotted around his length and he experienced that perfect moment of black pleasure in which nothing else exists. Wrapped up inside her precious, squeezing heat, his orgasm crushed down around him while her silken sheath wrung the release from his balls. Like a line of fire, it surged through his shaft, the pleasure immense and amazing and lasting forever before finally leaving him spent and drained and so much in love that it hurt. Feeling utterly destroyed in the aftermath of his passion, he buried his mouth against Renny’s neck and kissed her with the careful press of his teeth.

  It was hard for Renny to stay focused and angry with her husband when he had her pressed against a fence, his big hand gripping her ass and angling her pussy to take the full, hammering impact of that wickedly wide shaft, drilling the pleasure so deep inside that she could feel his heavy weight banging at the door to her heart.

  But Renny had a legitimate gripe with her intensely handsome husband and she wasn’t going to be derailed by a little dirty sex, no matter how hot it happened to be.

  Lately it seemed as though Colt refused to go anywhere with her, especially to company functions where she’d made new friends and wanted to show him off. It was mortifying, really. Layla and Nina and the rest of the women who worked at Campus Miss probably thought theirs was a marriage of convenience. It was getting so bad that Renny was beginning to doubt Colt’s love for her. If it weren’t for the fact that he grabbed her so hungrily when they were finally alone, she’d have thought he didn’t want her at all anymore.

  “Still doubt that I love you?” he asked, the words gritty and rasping against her ear.

  As he nibbled distractingly on her earlobe, she pushed out her bottom lip. “I know men can have sex without involving their hearts,” she answered sulkily.

  A grim snort heated her neck. His voice was bitter as he said, “If that was the case, sweetheart, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  Immediately Renny flared to anger. “Is that supposed to remind me that you can have any woman you want, Colt? Because if it is, you can just shove it, Mr. Har—”

  A fierce sound ripped from his throat as he grasped her head in both hands. “You’re the only woman I want,” he snarled.

  As he nailed her with his glowering green gaze, it was hard for Renny not to believe him. Of course, she wanted to believe him. But if he truly loved her then why hadn’t he gotten his butt down to the airport to give her and Layla a ride into town? Why had he refused to go with her to the California photo shoot? Why had he blown off the Christmas party? And why did he ignore her new personal assistant to the point of rudeness?

  She knew that after his first wife had cheated on him with his two best friends, Colt had decided that he hated all women. But since Renny had married him, she thought he’d put all of that hostility toward the opposite sex behind him. Now it seemed as though that dark, unhappy side of him was resurfacing and it troubled Renny on so many different levels.

  Did it mean that he was jealous of the new friends she’d made? Or had he decided that he just really didn’t like women? If that were the case, how long would it be before he didn’t want to be around Renny anymore? She was, after all, a woman—a small, skinny one who looked more like a boy from the rear view, maybe. But she was still a woman.

  As Renny worried her bottom lip with her teeth, Colt pulled away from her, a frustrated growl vibrating in his chest. He tucked his thick cock back into the pocket of his jock strap and fastened the buttons on his pinstripe pants. As he turned away from her and his cum soaked through her panties, she watched with a growing feeling of helplessness. Trapped against the fence with one of her ankles fixed beneath her butt, she couldn’t press her thighs together to halt the thick, heavy flow that seeped down between her legs.

  But she wasn’t alone. Without a word, Colt pulled a dark towel from his sport bag, turned and knelt in front of her and slowly, gently, cleaned the inside of her legs while pressing soft, warm kisses into her thighs. She should have felt like a mess. Instead she felt like the most treasured female on the planet.

  “I love you like this,” he murmured in his deep, rough voice. “I love it when you smell and taste of me.” Giving in to an apparent tug of emotion, he wrapped his arms around her and kissed the silky black fabric that stretched across her mound. “I love you, Renny. Never doubt it.”

  Renny wished she could just accept those words at face value. But she couldn’t help challenging him one more time. “How much, Colt? How much do you love me? Will you come to New York with me next month for the Central Park photo shoot?”

  His head moved the slightest bit…in the wrong direction. “No,” he answered, his tone so melancholy that it was hard to believe he didn’t want to be in New York with her.

  Chapter Two

  When Colt herded his pretty little wife through the front door of Dalton and April’s home, Bolt took one look at Renny’s face and plunked Royal into her arms. Knowing Bolt, he probably figured it was impossible to look unhappy when holding a two-month-old baby. Whatever his motive, his strategy seemed to work. Renny’s mouth softened into a beautiful smile as she gazed down at the little newborn wrapped in a fluffy blue blanket.

  With Renny effectively distracted, Bolt grabbed Colt’s elbow and steered him into the dining room where several of Dalton’s colorful pastels brightened the walls. “What’s up?” Bolt demanded the minute he had Colt alone. “Didn’t you tell Renny about her so-called friend at Campus Miss?”

  “How can I tell her?” he groaned, lifting his hands out to his sides. “She needs these women, Bolt. She needs to be successful at making friends. She’s never really had any before! Did you know that when my little Renny was fifteen years old, her two best friends stopped coming around the minute her brother left for college?”

  “Why on earth would they do that?” Bolt asked, a bewildered look falling across the blunt angles of his face.

  “I don’t know,” he growled, shaking his head. “I mean, I guess she was always a bit shy and nerdy but…”

  “But she’s wonderful,” Bolt insisted, though he must have known he was singing to the choir. “She’s just…fucking wonderful.”

  Colt leaned back against the heavy dining room table and crossed an arm over his chest. Grabbing his own biceps, he buried his fingers in the heavy muscle and kneaded it angrily. “I know that and you know that. What I don’t know is why fate has always been so damn cruel to her.”

  Bolt swept his hand toward the open archway that led to the other rooms. “Tavia. April. Cord and Cindy. They all feel the same way about her. Dalton too.”

  Colt smiled gratefully. “I know,” he said softly.

  “I’m tellin’ you, man. You need to come clean with Renny.”

  “Come clean?” Renny asked, the sound of her voice jerking Colt’s attention to the wide archway behind him. Her expression was both determined and fearful as she stepped into the dining room and fixed her baby blues on Bolt. “What do you mean?”

  Moving to Colt’s side, Bolt frowned at Renny, who was supposed to be holding Royal in the living room.

  “Tavia had to change the baby,” Renny explained briefly while twisting her
fingers together in an anxious knot. “What does Colt need to come clean about?”

  Colt flicked his gaze at Bolt and threatened him with a look that was meant to shut him up. Unfortunately, Bolt was a hard man to intimidate. In fact, trying to get Bolt to do what you wanted him to do was kind of like trying to steer an avalanche. Colt smothered a curse as Bolt said, “He needs to tell you why he’s been reluctant to attend certain functions with you.”

  “Certain functions?” she echoed uncertainly.

  “Bolt,” Colt snarled warningly, balling his fists at his sides as he transferred his weight to his toes and got ready to launch himself at his brother. Not that it would do him much good. He’d never won a fight with his oldest brother before and he didn’t reckon that was going to change any time soon. But he was willing to risk a nosebleed—or worse—if it would shut Bolt up for a little while longer.

  As Colt took the first menacing step toward his brother, Bolt swiftly sidestepped and got around him. About half a second later, Bolt was standing behind Colt and had him trapped in a great big bear hug. As Colt strained in his grip, Bolt tightened his hold and told Renny, “Your friend Layla has been hitting on my little brother.”

  “What?” she whispered, looking stunned at first, then horrified, then inevitably hurt, which was exactly what Colt had been trying to avoid.

  As Colt watched those wide blue eyes fill up with pain, he could have killed his big-mouthed, meddling brother. At the same time, he could have kicked himself for sharing his secret with a man not generally known for his diplomacy. But most of all, he wanted to wrap his arms around Renny and shelter her in his embrace and protect her from a world that was far too ugly for a sensitive soul like hers.

  “Hitting on him hard,” Bolt added, blundering ahead, his deep voice grim but determined. “She’s been groping him every chance she gets, the minute your back is turned.”

  “I told her that I love you,” Colt insisted, the agony crackling in his voice as he struggled to free himself. “I told her to keep the hell away from me.”