He took it from her. “Thanks.”

She shrugged. “It’s yours.”

Alexis sidestepped him to return to the other side of the bed, a safer distance. She looked at the floor as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head.

“I’m decent,” he said, trying and failing to make a joke out of the sexual tension that made the air sizzle and crack like a fire.

She glanced up through hooded lashes. “Are you . . . Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry about Beefcake. He’s just—”

“I’m fine, Lexa.” The corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile that sent her heart into a rapid flutter. “But I don’t think he likes the harness.”

She laughed all nervous-like and then cringed at how unnatural it sounded. “Right. No, I think maybe I won’t be using it.”

She met his eyes and then quickly looked away, but her gaze instead fell to the bed, but that suddenly seemed way too intimate, so she looked back at him, and then, oh shit, her cheeks blazed as hot as if she’d just pulled fresh muffins from the oven.

This was ridiculous. She was acting like a teenager with her first crush. “Are you staying?” she blurted.

His expression went blank. “I— Do you want me to?”

“I—I was just asking. I mean, it’s late, so I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to go home, but you can stay if you want. I just—”

Her words became a jumbled run-on sentence as he walked toward her. He stopped inches away, and her breath lodged in her chest.

“Alexis.” His voice was strained again.

She gulped. “What?”

“Do you want me to stay again tonight?”

She noticed everything at once—the low register of his voice, the clean, manly scent of him, his muscled forearms, the overpowering size of him. And heat. It radiated off him in waves as if he generated his own solar power.

Yes. I want you to stay. The words were there, but she couldn’t get them out. Something was wrong with her. She was itchy in her own skin, jumbled in her own thoughts, unsure of her own emotions.

She put a foot of distance between them. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “You can go.”

* * *

* * *

The drive from her house to his had never been so long, and Noah was pretty sure he’d left more than a chunk of his skin behind. He’d obviously left his common sense. Because it was a test of willpower in the entire twenty-minute drive to not turn around, return to her bedroom, drag her into his arms, and beg her to touch him again.

That was pathetic enough. But even worse was that the only thing stopping him was a sliver of uncertainty that he’d imagined the whole thing.

Noah pulled into his driveway and squinted as motion lights flooded the lawn and garage with a yellow glow. Noah turned off his car, dragged his hands down his face, and groaned out loud as he dropped his head against the seat.

No, he hadn’t imagined it. He’d been naked in front of enough women—not a lot, but enough—that he recognized the look on Alexis’s face. Desire. And he had no idea what to do about that, which is why part of him was grateful she’d told him to go home. The other part of him? Noah shook his head. The other part of him needed a cold shower.

He unlocked his front door, punched in the alarm code on the keypad inside, and dropped his keys on the entryway table his mother had insisted he buy. Marsh, of course, had scoffed and said a man should decorate his own damn house.

Noah bypassed the stairs because there was no point even trying to go to bed. So he grabbed a beer from the fridge and wandered to the living room to collapse on his couch. He surfed the channels on his TV for ten minutes before giving up and turning the whole thing off. He could text her, of course. They often did to say good night, but after writing and deleting ten different messages, he gave up and tossed his phone onto the coffee table. It landed next to a plastic bag.

The book.

Great. He should’ve thrown the damn thing away.

Noah flipped it off. He wasn’t going to read that stupid thing. What the hell was it going to teach him that he didn’t already know? Marsh’s voice was a mocking whisper in the back of his mind. What kind of man reads a romance novel to figure out how the fuck to tell his woman that he’s in love with her?

Noah downed the last warm swallow of beer, still glaring at the bag.

Fine. He couldn’t sleep anyway. He grabbed the book, cracked it open, and started to read.

     AJ Sutherland’s first mistake was going two miles over the speed limit in a dinky town like Bay Springs, Michigan, where the cops had nothing better to do than hide in dark alcoves with radar guns.

 His second mistake was thinking anything had changed in the eighteen years since he’d been back to the northern resort town where he spent his summers as a teenager.

 He banged his hand against the metal bars of the jail cell. “You know you can’t hold me indefinitely, right?”

 The officer who pulled him over and arrested him regarded him with a mixture of boredom and outright hostility. “You have a right to remain silent. You might want to use it.”

 AJ uttered an “argh” and ran his hands through his hair. “Look, Mr. Alvarez—”

 “Mister?”

 “Chief Alvarez. I get that you don’t like me and never have, but you can’t just throw me in jail for it.”

 “Son, I didn’t arrest you because I don’t like you. I arrested you because you have an outstanding warrant.”

 “Bullshit. For what?”

 “Watch your language. You might be a big, bad NFL player to the rest of the world, but around here you’re just a cocky punk who walked away from his responsibilities.”

 “What the hell are you talking about?”

 “Daddy, stop.” The female voice that interrupted their conversation was straight out of AJ’s memory bank, and he’d be lying if he wasn’t terrified to hear it. Because there was only one person on Earth who hated him more than Chief Sandoval Alvarez, and that was the chief’s daughter, Missy.

 She walked down the hallway and stood next to her father in a long, dark trench coat and with a briefcase in her hand.

 “Missy?” AJ croaked.

 She sighed. “No one has called me that in a long time.”

 “Sorry. Melissa, then?”

 A single eyebrow arched. “What brings you back after all these years?”

 “I have some decisions to make. This seemed like a good place to make them.”

 Her expression remained unchanged and unimpressed. “I heard about that. You’re thinking of retiring.”

 “Thirty-six is old for a quarterback.”

 She looked at her father. “Let him go.”

 “Can’t do that, sweetie. He’s under arrest.”

 “On what charge?” AJ barked.

 “Eighteen years of unpaid child support.”

 AJ tipped his head back to laugh but it died on his lips at the look on Missy’s face. He blinked rapidly as his vision blurred. “Wh-What is he talking about?”

 Missy looked at the floor and pinched her nose.

 “Missy, what the hell is he talking about?”

 She looked up. “You have a daughter.”

CHAPTER NINE

By the time he pulled into the parking lot behind Mack’s building the next morning, Noah was more than twenty minutes late and looking for a fight. Because he’d slept like shit, and that book? What the fuck was that? What kind of romance novel was about a guy who abandoned his child? He should have listened to his first instinct and thrown the thing away.

He stormed in the back door just in time to hear a loud clap and a man’s commanding voice. “Work those glutes, kids. Squeeze those cheeks.”

Oh no. No way. He absolutely did not have the energy for this today. Noah spun on his heel and was just about to nope the fuck out of there when he heard Mack’s voice.

“Where the hell have you been? We had to start without you.”

A frustrated growl emerged from Noah’s throat as he turned back around. Mack stood at the end of the long hallway that led to the bar area. He wore long track pants, a T-shirt bearing the logo for his bar, and a whiskered scowl.

“Damn,” Mack said, reeling back. “You could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon. What happened to you?”

“Fuck you. I’m here, aren’t I? And why the hell did you make us do this so early on a Saturday?”

“Because the Russian has a game tonight.” Mack turned around and nodded for Noah to follow. “Come on. We’re just warming up, so you didn’t really miss anything.”

Great.

The pulsating beat of a techno song greeted him as he walked into the main part of the bar. Sonia and the guys turned and looked in unison as Noah and Mack walked in. They formed two sloppy lines along the wooden dance floor where, come ten o’clock tonight, drunken douchebags would attempt to out-line-dance one another before stumbling into the street to throw up.

Standing in front was a man in a baggy pair of sweatpants and a black tank top that read Music City Dance Factory. Tattoos covered both of his arms all the way to the wrist.

“That’s Clive, our choreographer,” Mack explained. “He owns a dance academy in Midtown.”

Noah shook the man’s hand, apologized for being late, and then purposely walked to the far back of the dance floor.

Clive clapped his hands. “Are we ready, then? Let’s get back to working those shoulders. We don’t want to pull any muscles.”

Noah did. He desperately wanted a pulled muscle. He’d break his own goddamned arm to get out of this.

Clive moved into some kind of hip gyration, and Noah knew without even trying that his body was not going to move like that. Not with any amount of practice. Dear God. This was going to be beyond humiliating. This was going to be cruel and unusual punishment. There was no way in hell he was going to do this in front of Alexis.