Knockout: A Bad Boy Billionaire MMA Romance (Athletic Affairs) Page 3
“Jesus, Jacob,” She gasped, raking her nails across my scalp and sending sparks of shivers down my spine. I moved my fingers in and out of her in a corkscrew motion, enjoying the way her pussy seemed to slowly open to accept more digits. I moved my tongue back up to her clit, pinching her nipple between my fingers with one hand hard enough to draw a little cry of pleasure and pain from her.
I loved the noises she made and was already committing every single one to memory as she squirmed above me - but I already needed more. My cock was aching beneath my boxers, and all I wanted in the world was to fuck her. My brain seemed to narrow down to only that thought, pulsing with the words -fuck her, fuck her, fuck her.
When she came, her entire body shuddered and she let out a cry so loud I was sure that the pilot could hear us from the cockpit. I licked faster, sinking my fingers into her skin and ignoring the way my cock was pressed achingly against my shorts.
Her pussy was so damn good, and I knew I had to be inside her, now. I pulled my face away from her cunt, leaving her gasping beneath me, and kissed her, hard, as I fumbled with my pants. She pushed her tongue into my mouth, her brazenness making me smile - she liked the taste of herself on me. Well, that made two of us.
She reached down to wrap her hand around my cock, massaging me lightly before she got a firm grip and began to jerk me off gently. I groaned into her mouth. Her touch was electric, my body responding to her in ways that I didn’t even think were possible before. I reached into my pocket for a condom, and was about to sheath myself when-
“Oh!”
We jumped apart, and I raised my head to see the stewardess I had forgotten was on board standing in the entranceway to the cabin. She held her hand up and excused herself, and seconds later we were alone again – but the moment was gone. The shock of the disturbance had put paid to any plans I might have had about fucking her senseless, and instead we looked down at each other and exchanged a small, awkward laugh.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” she remarked, and I noticed a blush creeping up her neck, Was the filthiness of the situation really just sinking in now? After everything we’d done? I raised my eyebrows but slipped off of her obligingly, pulling up my pants and flopping back down into my seat.
“You weren’t saying that a second ago,” I pointed out teasingly. Only a minute or two ago, she had been coming, her clit pulsing with pleasure under my tongue – and now this? Yeah, it didn’t make any sense to me. I adjusted my cock slightly, hoping that I could put aside the raging rush of arousal that coursed through me when I thought about eating her out. The moment had gone. And besides, it wasn’t like I couldn’t relive it in all its glory when I got to my hotel room later.
I watched as she adjusted herself, enjoying the show as she bent down to pull her underwear back on and push her skirt down. She glanced over her shoulder and caught me looking, and a wry smile broke over her face.
“You pervert,” she teased, and I held my hands up, the arousal-fog finally receding from inside my brain.
“If I am, then you totally are,” I shot back playfully, I found myself fighting the urge to pull her on to my lap, to wrap my arms around her and keep her close to me. Huh. That was a new one. Usually, after I came, I couldn’t wait to be by myself again. I had been known to sneak out of hotel rooms in the middle of the night before, even if I wasn’t proud of it. But the smell of her skin on mine wasn’t enough. I wanted her closer.
“I guess,” she glanced away, her eyes falling on the recorder. “Good thing I switched that off.”
“Might have made for some decent material,” I flashed her a grin, and she returned it – though there was something in her expression that told me she was holding herself back a little. I furrowed my brow, and she smoothed out the rest of her clothes.
“What’s wrong?” She asked, and I shook my head. It must have been the altitude.
“Nothing,” I brushed her question off before they could get too far inside my head. “You want another drink?”
“Uh, sure,” she raised her eyebrows. “I’d love one.”
We spent the rest of the two-hour journey kicking back and drinking, the two of us exchanging stories about where we’d travelled over the years. I found myself drawing close to her physically, and had to fight the urge a couple of times to drape my arm around her shoulders or interlock her fingers with mine. Jesus, I was fuck-drunk; it was a rare feeling but I recognized it at once.
The two of us had had some good sex and now I was letting myself get all hung up on her. Yeah, I wanted to hit that again, but we needed some space first. Though I found my eyes drifting down to her lips as I considered the fact that if she came on to me at that moment, I would totally have gone along with it and dived in for a round two.
When we landed, I went to help Natalie with her bags, but she gently but firmly wrestled them from my hand and slung them over her shoulder again.
“I’m okay, really,” she assured me sweetly. “I just want to get back down to the hotel and catch some sleep.”
“I’ll see you later?” I raised my eyebrows. “We can actually get started on the interview this time.”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” she agreed, and she hesitated for a moment, lingering near the door as we waited for it to open. She leaned towards me briefly, and I caught a whiff of her perfume; sweet and vanilla-y, it seemed to encircle me like a pair of arms. But then, she drew back, putting space between us again, and my heart dropped disappointedly. It seemed for a second as though we were on the same level, the two of us acknowledging that there was something going on here beyond just sex, but it was gone in an instant.
“I’ll call you, we can grab dinner,” I suggested, as the door opened.
“Catch you later,” she agreed, and hurried down the steps and in to the taxi that she had waiting on the tarmac below. I watched her go, and wondered what the hell I had just gotten myself into.
Chapter Three
Natalie
As soon as I got to the hotel, I jumped into a shower and started scolding myself as harshly as I could manage. How stupid did I have to be to hook up with the guy that I was meant to be writing a story about?
I had assumed that our burgeoning sexual tension was what I would use to keep him interested and coming back for more, not a card I would play within minutes of being alone with him. I couldn’t believe how dumb I’d been, but yet here we were; my pussy was sore from him inside me, and my body was already craving him again. I’d had to fight the urge to throw myself at him before we left the plane, and it had taken everything I had in me to back off and put some space between us. I had to keep focused on the story. I had to.
I unpacked my stuff, and looked around the hotel room. I would barely be here long enough to justify arranging my toiletries on the counter in the bathroom. I had never travelled as much as I was going to in the next month, and it was a lot to get my head around. Not having a place to call my own felt distinctly weird.
Maybe that’s why I’d done it; maybe I was searching for something I knew would be a regular feature in my life while I was away, and he was the only thing I could rely on. I shook my head at myself in the mirror. Enough with the amateur psychology already. You fucked him because you wanted him and he wanted you. And now, you were staring at yourself in a hotel bathroom mirror trying to convince yourself that there was something more to it. There wasn’t, and all you had to do was get it out of your head and focus on acting like a fucking professional.
He had seemed keen to get in touch with me again, so maybe I hadn’t totally blown my chances. But what if he expected it every time? Maybe that’s why he invited me along, as his own personal fuck-doll on tour. Well, if that was his game, I had some bad news for him. I might have been easily seduced, but I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. Even if I could still feel the way his hands roamed all over my body and instantly craved more all over again. If he had walked in my hotel room door and told me he wanted me in that second, I would have been h
elpless to resist him, and the knowledge of that was enough to make me want to scream.
For the next week, every time I went out to meet with him again, I looked at myself in the mirror and gave myself a pep talk before I did so. I had to remind myself not to do anything that I would regret. Remind myself that he was just a boy, and boys like him came along all the time. That if I fucked this up, I would have to go back to Tanya and tell them why, and live with their judgement of what I’d done.
It didn’t make it any easier knowing that he very clearly wanted me, badly. When we went out for dinner that first night, it was just the two of us, and he picked a place with low lighting and expensive wine that he insisted on treating me to, to celebrate our venture together. He let our knees knock together under the table, and our fingers bump into each other a few times, and I knew he was just waiting for me to snap and invite him back to my hotel room.
And God, did I want to. Maybe it was the tantalizing knowledge that we shouldn’t do any of this that was making me so damn inclined to, but either way, it was taking every single bit of restraint I had in me to fight the urge to jump his gorgeous bones. I hadn’t even gotten my hands on him, not really, and it felt as though I’d been cheated out of a life-changing experience.
His first fight went well; I brought along my recorder and kept it close to me the entire night, using it as a way to keep myself accountable for what I did that evening. I mostly just took spoken notes about the atmosphere of the fight, and managed to catch a couple of people for interviews here and there.
It wasn’t much, but it was something, a foundation to build my article around. In all my years covering sports, I had done very limited reporting on MMA and it was good to have a chance to catch the temperature of the crowd and get a feel for what I could expect over the next few weeks.
The cheap beer flowed but the crowd never got rowdy; in fact, it seemed like a pretty good-natured place to hang out on a weekend evening. No one gave me any hassle, which was impressive, as even as a reporter when I turned out to sporting events as a single woman, I tended to end up having to beat back over-enthusiastic fans keen to give me their inside scoop on proceedings.
He won the first fight, and I went to find him as soon as it was over. But when I finally came across him chilling backstage with Angelo, I was surprised to see that he was surrounded by a bevy of gorgeous women.
I mean, I wasn’t sure what I expected. This was part of his game, after all. He had a reputation and I had known that when I signed up to cover this story. Hell, that was part of the reason I had picked it up. But for some reason, seeing him with a handful of women hanging on his every word, each of them dressed to the nines and tossing their hair and clearly having come out here with the intention of getting Jacob into bed, I felt a stab of jealousy.
He took a minute to notice me standing in the corner of the room, my recorder hanging limply from my hand, and for a second he didn’t react. It was as though he was showing me what I was missing, reminding me that it could have been me hanging off his arm after a fight. We stared at each other for a moment, and the gregarious smile dropped from his face for a split-second. Everyone around him seemed to dull down momentarily, waiting for Jacob to join in on the fun again, and it didn’t take long for him to click back into the charming form he’d been in when I arrived. I made my way over, swallowing heavily to dull the deep thud of jealousy that was pulsing through my chest.
“Hey,” I greeted him, speaking loudly so that I could be heard over the chatter of everyone around him. “Congratulations.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he nodded, but he seemed distracted. Or maybe he was just playing that way? I couldn’t believe the high-school levels of over-analyzing I was already going through. I was a grown-ass adult, for Christ’s sake, and I wasn’t going to spend this whole trip trying to figure out what games Jacob was trying to play with me. We had hooked up, he had tried for another round, and I had shot him down. Now he was moving on. What was I so jealous about?
He was doing what I had asked of him.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Good,” he nodded, distracted by one of the women who was whispering in his ear. He grinned at whatever it was that she was saying to him. I tapped my foot, pissed, and caught the eye of Angelo. He was watching me with something that resembled amusement, as though he wanted to turn to me and say Look, this is what you signed up for, I told you, I told you.And he had been right. No wonder he had seemed so against me coming along on this tour.
Maybe he had known that this would happen, that Jacob would push me away as soon as he realized that I was no longer a sexual conquest.
“Do you have a minute?” I asked, trying not to sound too impatient and failing. He met my gaze steadily, and suddenly I felt a shiver dart along my spine. I was reminded why I had done it in the first place, why we had hooked up on his plane and why I had to fight the urge to invite him back to my hotel room and lock the doors and make sure that he never left.
He was just…I couldn’t describe it. I had written for a living for years, and yet I couldn’t put into words the way that he made me feel. My stomach flipped and the soles of my feet tingled and it was all I could do just to stay standing.
“Not right now,” he waved his hand, dismissing me. I flushed with anger. “Maybe I’ll catch you later?”
“Sure,” I backed off, stalking off, out of the press area and back towards the bar that I had spotted on my way in. I needed a drink, and soon. I caught the eye of a good-looking older guy leaning on the edge of the bar opposite me, and I offered him up a half-hearted smile, but I knew that I didn’t really want to distract myself with anyone else. I ordered a beer in one of those cheap, sweaty plastic cups, and drank it quickly.
It didn’t make me feel much better. I made my way back to the hotel, which was a mercifully short walk from the arena, and managed to put in a few last-minute notes on my recorder. I knew that listening to them back I would probably cringe at how obviously miserable I sounded, but these were for me and no one else. I sighed before I switched it off, a little crackle of static floating out of the Dictaphone, and made my way back up to my hotel room.
As soon as I got in, I kicked off my shoes and flopped face-first on to my bed. I fell asleep right there, and woke up the next morning with make-up smeared across most of my face. I transcribed my notes over breakfast, and did my best to ignore the fact that I sounded beyond pissed off by the end of the evening.
His next fight was a state over and a day later, giving me time to start writing up an outline for the article and pack up my stuff before we took off once more. He didn’t give me a ride in his jet this time, and I was kind of glad not to have to worry about turning down the offer.
I had so many feelings about everything that had happened, I wasn’t certain that I wouldn’t just blurt it all out as soon as I got him by himself again. I just…I felt like I was a teenager again, trying to decode signals from a guy who probably didn’t even know he was throwing any in my direction.
His next fight was an even quicker win than his first. I had to admit, I was impressed. On the train on the way over, I had watched a few of the best MMA fights online, giving myself a frame of reference for what I was looking at. Even though I knew I was an asshole for even thinking it, I’d kind of sourly assumed that it was his father’s money that had gotten him where he was today.
But I was clearly jumping to conclusions, because he could hold his own in the ring and it was clear that the other guy wasn’t holding back. I hadn’t managed to get him by himself since our dinner together and there was only so much background research I could do before I needed to get something meaty from him again, so I chased him down as soon as the fight was over and ducked into his dressing room.
“Oh, hey,” he flashed me an excited smile, clearly still pumped with adrenalin from his victory. “What are you doing here?”
“Trying to get an interview with you,” I replied good-naturedly. See? We coul
d be platonic. I would just have to ignore the fact that he had peeled his shirt off and that he looked just ridiculously hot. I took a deep breath, pulling myself out of my attraction, and smiled.
“Uh, I actually have an after-party to go to,” he shrugged. “You’re welcome to come, if you want?”
He didn’t make eye contact with me, but the careful way he spoke told me that he really wanted me to come along. I hesitated. I really needed to get him on his own, but there seemed no way to do that outside of just going along with what he wanted. He was in control here, and I didn’t like that. I had to remind myself that I was the one telling the story, and that I was the one who got to dictate how he came across to a huge bunch of people. Our readers trusted me, our editors did too, and I just had to find it in me to do the same.
“I’d love to,” I managed with a smile. His face lit up briefly, but he quickly dulled his excitement and went to grab a smart shirt from the wardrobe next to him.
“Cool,” he replied, his tone casual and disinterested. But I could tell that he was pleased to have me there. And honestly, I was just glad to have him on his own for a second. Seeing him with all those women had sent a jealous animal rearing up inside of me, one that I didn’t recognize. I knew he’d probably hooked up with at least one of them, and I couldn’t compete with how available those women were to him. They had no reason to hold back, but I did, and I hated it so much.