Delly's Last Night (Go Get 'Em Women) Read online

  He frowned, the sleepy look vanishing. “You think so badly of me, Delly?”

  She slid her hands around his neck, stroking the flesh under his ears. She could feel the big artery there, pulsing through the skin. “You were the one that raised the question in the first place,” she pointed out, and pressed her thumbs inwards.

  “That was before—” He tried to jerk away from her hands, suddenly aware of what her thumbs were doing. With a curse, he ripped at her arms, using a strength he shouldn’t have been capable of by then. Her hands were ripped from his neck and pinned to the carpet on either side of her.

  Fury etched itself on his face as he lay over her, his body holding her down. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Delly tried to keep her expression innocent and wide-eyed, and her voice puzzled. She had lost another chance to escape because he’d been too quick to react and she fought against despair. She could not afford to keep blowing her chances like this. There would not be that many, not with Neal Cadogan. Especially not now.

  “You think I don’t know what it is you were trying to pull just then?” His anger seemed to pulse from him. “You were trying to knock me unconscious by restricting my carotid arteries.”

  She abandoned her bluff. “So?” She managed a shrug.

  “So...?” His tone was one of stunned amazement. “Just what is it you think I intend to do to you, Delly? Where did this...fury for me come from?”

  She dodged the direct question. To answer it would reveal her deep shame, her stupidity. Instead, she hit back with her own anger, using it as a deflection. “You cuff me to the bed, threaten to call the police and wonder why I try to escape? Did your IQ shrink the last ten years or something, Neal? Because you weren’t that stupid in Colorado.”

  He stared at her. Perhaps her anger had surprised him. “Explain it to me, then,” he said, more gently.

  “What’s to explain? You’re standing between me and freedom. I intend to be out of this house long before six a.m. hits.”

  “Why, what happens at six? The world falls apart?”

  Caution flooded her. She’d said too much. “You could say that,” she agreed carefully. It was sort-of the truth. Not long after six a.m. it would be Delly’s world that came to an end. She looked him directly in the eye, making sure he understood how serious she was about this. “I have an appointment tomorrow morning. One I won’t miss even if I have to shoot you to make it. Don’t get in my way, Neal. Not this time.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Not this time? What was the first occasion? I must have been asleep at the time.”

  Too much. She’d said too much. She looked away. “Don’t worry about it. The last time didn’t involve you,” she lied.

  She thought the silence that stretched was because he didn’t believe her.

  “Delly,” he said softly.

  She looked back at him.

  “I will let you go. But for now, I need to have my fill of you. You walked out of my life once before and it...it almost killed me, Delly.” This time it was Neal who looked away abruptly. He cleared his throat, then forced himself to continue. “This time, at least, I have advance notice. I intend to take my fill before you disappear and consider myself lucky.”

  “You’ll let me go?” she breathed, her heart suspended.

  “I’ll let you go.” To demonstrate, he let her arms go, and sat up. “But not before dawn.”

  Delly slowly sat up. Despite the painful past telling her Neal Cadogan could not be taken at his word, she believed him. And the belief freed her of the need to escape. In its place the ravening physical hunger returned, curling its way through her with tingling fingers. She rested her hand on his thigh, slid it over the firm muscle, searching for his cock. She pressed herself up against him from behind.

  She heard his quick catch of breath. It was an erotic sound. “Your hands on me...” he sighed.

  “All over,” she agreed.

  Chapter Three

  Golden, Colorado. Olympic Trials. Ten years ago.

  There were athletes all over the city, most of them so focused on adjusting to the altitude and getting in their training in preparation for the trials in two week’s time, that they had turned into obsessive compulsive automatons. Neal couldn’t wait to get paid so he could blow the town for good.

  The call to pick up his payday sent him deep into the heart of Olympic territory, the main arena where the trials would be held. He grimaced and walked from his hotel to the complex, barely ten minutes away. He arrived early and after passing through security, wandered around the halls, watching for a few minutes here and there. He realized he was deep in the heart of gymnastic territory.

  There was a blonde woman working on a floor routine with a ball. Neal wasn’t a gymnastic fan and even less thrilled with the ribbons and hoops and stuff that the women’s gymnastics had introduced lately. But he caught from the corner of his eye a small part of the blonde woman’s routine with the ball, and it...flowed. He wasn’t aware of coming to an absorbed halt, but he found himself standing inside the half-closed door, watching, as she perfected the movement, which involved letting the ball run from her hand held high in the air, down across the back of her neck, to the hand spread waiting on the floor. Her whole body was elongated, graceful...

  The coach finally seemed happy, and the blonde smiled. Her smile lit up her face. It was one of those whole body, warm-you-all-over expressions that some women seemed to have, that endowed upon a man, could weaken his knees.

  The blonde stood in the very corner of the mat, the ball held in one hand over the top of her head. The coach started some music, and it wasn’t poppy, quick jazzy stuff. It was elegant, liquid and fitted the blonde perfectly.

  The blonde rolled into her routine.

  Who is she? Neal wondered. He watched the routine for the full three minutes. And it was just as elegant, as intelligent, as the music. He was entranced.

  The coach seemed annoyed and stalked onto the mat, her boot heels digging stars into the matting, and stood talking to the blonde, her voice low. But even from where he stood, Neal could hear the strident, demanding tone.

  The blonde nodded, over and over.

  There was a man sitting with a laptop a few rows down from where Neal stood. Neal climbed down to his row. “Can you tell me who she is?” he asked.

  “That one? That’s...um, Alexander. Delly, I think.” He opened a file on his laptop. “Yep. Delly Alexander.”

  “She looks a lot older than some of the others trying out.”

  “She’s a dark horse, that one. Twenty-three and her First Olympic trial, but they’re already saying she’s a contender.” The guy shook his head. “I dunno. I don’t think they should be letting them into the Olympics at such an advanced age. They’re career is almost over before it has started.”

  Neal struggled to find an answer that wasn’t insulting. He clearly didn’t understand sports or the Olympics well enough to have an informed opinion. But he found the idea of contemplating someone’s career as almost over at twenty-three pessimistic in the extreme, and utterly bizarre.

  He realized that the blonde had thrown jeans and boots on over her leotard, and a light coat, and was climbing the stairs to leave the arena. She would pass directly by him.

  Neal climbed back to his spot by the door and turned to watch her ascent. She wasn’t watching where she put her feet. Instead, she was turning her head, taking in the couple of dozen people sitting in the stands—other athletes waiting for their training slot to open up, their coaches, family and friends, and some media people, too. Plus some interested observers, like the guy with the laptop, who seemed to have no discernable role that Neal could figure out, and Neal himself.

  The blonde—Delly—reached up and pulled clips from her hair, and shook her hair out, even as she climbed. The blonde hair spilled around her shoulders and she shook it out of her face and pushed it back with one hand, the fingers sliding through the locks.

>   Then she started working on the straps around her wrist. She still wasn’t bothering to check her footing as she climbed. She was that sure of her balance and her sense of distance and timing.

  She frowned, and tugged on the strap, then lifted it to her mouth and started gnawing at it with her teeth.

  “Need help with that?” Neal asked, lifting his voice a little, for she was still a couple of steps from the top.

  She looked up at him and paused, a slender tie from the strap caught between her teeth, her arm up by her jaw.

  Then she smiled, lowering her arm. “I guess I should have brought the Velcro straps with me, huh?” She climbed the two steps and stopped in front of him. “This is embarrassing, but would you mind?” She held out her wrist. “It tightened up during training, and now I can’t budge the damned thing.”

  Neal teased and tugged the knot undone, while he tried to deal with the impact she was having on him. This close, even in the near darkness of the auditorium, he could see her eyes were green, and there wasn’t a hint of brown in the green at all. They were a pure, unadulterated sea green. She was wearing makeup. Just enough to enhance her eyes. Lipstick.

  And scent. Something light and lethal that was curling around his head and making his cock stir and his balls to tighten.

  “I was watching your routine,” he told her, trying to cover up his powerful reaction.

  “Oh?” She smiled, but her eyes grew wary. “You’re a fan of gymnastics?”

  “Never,” he confessed. “I don’t even watch the Olympics.” He gave her back her wrist, the knot untied. “But you made me understand why people go crazy over it.”

  She unravelled the strap and shoved it into the pocket of her suede coat. She pushed her hands in the pockets, too. “Well. Thanks.”

  “Can I buy you a coffee?” he asked, and could feel his own jaw unhinge in shock. Where had that come from? Well, he knew exactly where it had come from, but clearly, his mouth had slipped the leash of better sense. He wasn’t in Colorado for this. He was leaving town this afternoon.

  Her lips had opened in surprise, too. Then she tilted her head. “You’re not one of those guys who goes around sleeping with every Olympic medallist they can fuck, are you?”

  “They do that?” he asked, astonished. Then he shook his head. “No, I’m not one of those guys. You’re definitely my first Olympic medallist.”

  She smiled. “I’m not a medallist. I’m not even a contender.”

  “You will be.”

  She had been about to say something, but her words halted at the edge of her lips. She let them out, unspoken, on an exhalation as she studied him. “And you aren’t a gym nut?” she repeated.

  “Not in the slightest. Does that mean coffee is out?”

  “I don’t do coffee.” She raised a brow. “But I could murder a chicken burger, especially if it had bacon on it. I’m starving.”

  “Burgers it is. I just have to make a quick phone call. We can stop at the payphone in the foyer.” He held out his hand. “I’m Neal.”

  She shook it, and he could feel power in her grip to spare. “Delly.”

  Delly finished her burger when Neal was still three bites into his. She burped softly and sat back. “Is it just me, or are they making them smaller these days?”

  Neal laughed. “Here, take my fries.”

  She shook her head. “Too fatty.”

  He considered her. “Would you like another burger?”

  She threaded her fingers together and rested her chin on them. “Would you think me too much of a pig if I said yes?”

  “I’d think you were training too hard,” he said, getting up. “I’ll be right back.”

  She was sitting cross-legged on the tiny chair when he got back from the serving counter, her feet tucked under her, displaying an unconscious flexibility and balance that made him smile. He put the burger in front of her. “Eat,” he told her. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  She looked up at him with one of the knock-out smiles he had seen in the arena. “My hero.”

  Neal sat and tried to return to eating, but his appetite wasn’t for food, anymore.

  “So, if you’re not into Olympic sports, what are you doing in Golden right now? Do you live here?” she asked.

  “I’m a freelance graphics designer. I flew in to deliver some work and get paid.”

  “Flew in from where?”

  “Seattle.”

  “It’s still quite a way to come just to deliver and get paid.”

  “It was a big job,” Neal assured her.

  “So you’re not going to be here for long, then,” she said.

  “I have a seat on the United Airlines flight to Seattle at four.”

  Delly put down what was left of her burger. Not much of it remained. “That’s a pity,” she said softly.

  Something in her tone or her eyes made his gut clench and his breath catch. Neal fought to stay still and not give away how much she was affecting him just by the way her hair streamed down her face and shaded one eye, so that she peered out from behind the shield to look at him with that frank stare.

  Or that her lithe, strong body was calling to him like a siren song.

  He picked up a packet of table salt and turned it in his fingers. “Why is it a pity?”

  “You’re the first man I’ve met who has absolutely nothing to do with sports or the Olympics, and has zero interest in them...but you still have empathy enough to understand where I’m coming from. Hell, you’ve even fed me.” She gave a small smile. “Do you know how much of a relief it is not to talk about training, about the Olympics, about the gym, about any of it? To be able to switch off and just be...normal, for a while?”

  Neal shook his head. “I don’t. But there was a man at the arena. He said something about your age, that at twenty-three, a gymnast’s career was almost half-over. I imagine you’re feeling enormous pressure right now to prove yourself and justify the years of training.”

  She nodded. It was a small movement of her head. “See, you get it. And I didn’t have to talk myself to death to explain it to you. Sometimes, I feel like I’m going mad with the impossible schedules and expectations. And then I see other woman my age, who just have a simple job, and head out to clubs in the evening. Who have a life...” She grimaced. “I sound incredibly ungrateful, don’t I?”

  He reached over and picked up her hand, and his pulse shot upwards when she didn’t pull her hand out of his grip. He held it. “You sound incredibly stressed, Delly. That’s all.”

  She reached with her other hand and slid her fingers along his jaw. “Kiss me.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  He realized his grip on her hand was tightening and laid her hand on the table between them. “I want to, Delly. I want more than the kiss. I want...” He let out a frustrated breath, and leaned forward, so that he could drop his voice and lower the chances of being overheard. “I want you so badly, Delly, I’ve barely been able to think of anything else since you stopped in front of me at the top of the stairs in the arena. I want to drag you out of this restaurant right now, throw you up against the side of the building and take you right there. I want to hear you scream as you come around me, because I know you have that sensuality in you. I saw it in the arena. It trumpets from every choreographed step in the routine and the way you perform it.”

  Her lips parted and her eyes widened. And the tip of her tongue emerged to moisten her lips. She was breathing quickly. “Neal,” she whispered. “Do it.”

  He didn’t think it was possible for his pulse to leap any higher than it already had, but her soft command shot it skyward. His whole body thrummed.

  He shook his head. “No. I can’t, Delly. I’m not built like that. I won’t start this when I know I’m leaving.”

  She sat up and uncrossed her legs. Sadness touched her eyes. “Then I’d better leave,” she said. “Because I can’t sit this close to you and not
want it. You’ve opened the box now.” She stood and threw her coat on, shrugging into it. The movement extenuated her body, making the leotard stretched taut over her torso. Neal tried hard not to look, but his gaze was snagged by her breasts pressing against the Lycra.

  He stood and grabbed her hand and pulled her through the restaurant toward the glass swing doors. He wasn’t aware of making the decision to move. But Delly didn’t protest, or pull away from him.

  Out on the sidewalk, he turned and pulled her along. Delly had no trouble keeping up with him. Her legs were that long.

  The service alley turned in right next to the building here. He took five steps into the alley, and pushed Delly up against the wall.

  Her breath escaped in a rush. But still she didn’t say anything. She reached for him, instead.

  Neal kissed her, and it was heady, like drinking fine wine. Her scent wreathed him, intoxicated him, and made him want more. His whole body was inflamed now. He swept his tongue into her mouth and met hers.

  And she moaned.

  The sound was another accelerant to his already taxed body. He battled not to grind his hips into her, but her pelvis shifted and thrust, pressing her against his aching, rigid cock.

  He found his hands were inside her coat, sliding over the glossy Lycra, down to the sway of her hips and her ass.

  Delly gasped as he pressed her even harder against him, her lips brushing his mouth.

  The sound was an erotic preview of what his body was aching for.

  But it was a reminder of the real world, too.

  Neal pushed Delly away from him, letting her lean back against the wall once more. He rested his hand against the wall, just by her head, letting himself recover. He was shaking.

  “That would be ‘no’, then,” Delly said. Her voice was hoarse.

  Neal forced himself to look her in the eye. The sight of tears brimming there speared his chest with a hot poker. “Delly, you really want to fuck a near stranger, and have him walk out of your life thirty seconds later? I’ve done it before. No matter how great the sex is, you feel wretched after they’re gone. I won’t do that to you. Not now when your life wound up so tight a loud noise could set it off.”