After two days with Matt, remembering what had soured her against ballplayers in the first place, she’d steadily begun to realize there were no guys like Alex. Just because he had the same job as Matt didn’t mean he was the same person.
Matt had bought Olivia off with a tablet. Alex had given her a day at the ballpark. Being a baseball player wasn’t what made Matt an asshole, that was just his natural state of being. Alex would still be Alex if he was a car salesman or a professor. For ten years Alice had told herself anyone who played baseball for a living was, by default, a schmuck.
Now she knew she’d been the stupid one for her prejudice.
And knowing she almost threw everything away with A
lex because of her stupid notions? She was all the more surprised to find him standing in front of her now.
“I’m glad you’re here.” Instead of crying, she tried something she hadn’t done in a while. She gazed up at him and smiled.
His brown eyes, previously wary and full of concern, now shone with warmth and a twinkle of that mischievousness Alice had come to understand was a part of him at all times.
He pulled her close, and the bulk of his arms and chest surprised her. He was built like a linebacker, a solid wall of muscle wrapped around her in a crushing hug. Beneath his wet T-shirt his back was corded with the same muscle, and she wondered what had happened to the nearly chubby man she’d been introduced to a year earlier.
How much focus and energy had been required to transform him into this? Or had this man been lurking in there the entire time and she hadn’t known it because of his stature? He didn’t look muscular at a glance. He still retained the same stocky frame as before. But there was nothing fat about him.
She wouldn’t have cared if there was. Maybe it was a cliché to think it would just be more of him to love, but she thought it anyway. Every inch of Alex, especially the inches surrounding her now, was something to be grateful for. She didn’t know where this man had come from, or how he’d stumbled so gracelessly into her messy life, but she was elated to have him.
Stupidly, she wanted to tell him again how glad she was he had come, but when she lifted her head to say the words, her lips were covered. His mouth claimed hers, stealing away the syllables of appreciation and replacing them with a surprised oh, which she breathed over his lips.
Her surprise was short-lived because the kiss was relentless. His mouth and hands pleaded with her, his fingers digging into her waist as his tongue sought a union with her own. She groaned against the heat of it, letting him back her up to the wall so she could feel the rain-soaked weight of him against her. His body was like a blanket she might snuggle into on a cold winter night, but the comfort she wanted from Alex now was something wholly different than basic warmth.
He kissed her the way she imagined long-lost lovers might. Men and women torn asunder by war or great misfortune, reunited after torturous decades of loneliness.
It had been less than two months since he’d been in her bed—or at least naked under her in her car—yet he clawed at her as though she was the last good thing he would see before he died.
A rational part of her mind—the part she was coming to think of as the buzzkill center—told her this was a terrible idea. Olivia was sleeping in the other room. What kind of mother brought random men into her house to fornicate?
Fornicate?
Clearly the buzzkill center of her brain didn’t know how to put together a convincing argument. Liv was still on painkillers and would no doubt sleep through the night. Though Alice had no plan in place for what the morning would hold—if Alex stayed through to the morning—she couldn’t think of a single reason to stop what they were doing.
All the arguments she’d had before about distance and the realities of their lives didn’t seem to hold water when his tongue was in her mouth and his hands had found the hem of her shirt. In fact, even her dull, boring, logical brain was starting to be swayed.
It’s not a good idea, but it feels so good.
She couldn’t blame it on booze, since one glass of wine was hardly enough to render her stupid. Truthfully she didn’t want to blame anything at all. She wanted to dive into him with eyes wide open and relish what he was offering her. Whether it was comfort, carnal need or some combination of the two, she wanted it. Every minute of it.
She seized him by the belt, biting his bottom lip to stave him off for a moment. “Bedroom,” she whispered, which was quite different from what she’d been trying to say when he came through the door.
He allowed her to guide him by his belt buckle through the narrow halls. The whole time he never stopped touching her. She felt the graze of his fingers on her arms, her neck, her back. He’d just managed to cup her ass, both his large hands sliding into her back pockets, when she brought them through her bedroom door. Alex closed it behind them without being asked, nudging it shut quietly with his foot.
He was still wearing his shoes, which were wet from the rain, and the impressions of his footprints had followed them into the room. Looking down, he was momentarily abashed to see he’d left a trail behind.
“Oops.” The sheepish smile he offered was as close to an apology as she was expecting to get given the heated circumstances. Alice didn’t care about the floor. It gave her something new to add to the to-do list in her mind.
But all that was Tomorrow Alice’s problem.
She stood in front of him, struck shy. He was in her bedroom. Up until that moment the only sexual conquests occurring in her bed had been by her own hand, and usually with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in a starring role.
With a real man in the room—one nearly as stubbly, but far less lethal—she wasn’t sure what to do with him. She glanced from Alex to the bed, her hands still on his belt, and smiled weakly.
“Here we are.” She gave a little shrug.
He’d removed his hands from her pockets when she turned around, and now that they were loose, he was touching her everywhere. He stopped moving only when he found her breasts through her shirt and held them in his palms. Alice’s instinct was to cover up. Sure, he’d seen them before, but they weren’t suitable for being ogled in the light. She’d had a baby for crying out loud, and they weren’t exactly small and perky to begin with.
Yet he didn’t seem to be assessing them in any negative way. Instead, when his thumbs brushed over her nipples—tight and hard through her bra—he let out a small moan of appreciation, closing his eyes as if he wanted to focus on the feel of them.