Page 24 of Slapshot Bride

And I’m standing here acting like I just scored a game-winning goal because she laughed at one of my dumb jokes.

Shaking my head, I gather the paper plates and takeout containers and head for the kitchen before my brain can get any more carried away.

I should clean up too. Been one hell of a day, but one I don’t regret.

My legs carry me up the stairs, two at a time. I stop at the top, staring past my door to hers. I continue to mine and step into the room, shutting the door behind me.

The bedroom is quiet.

So is the bathroom, but I hear it anyway. The faint sound of water rushing through the pipes.

Fuck. My mistake.

I should never have come up here. Not now.

But it’s already too late.

Because the images hit immediately, uninvited and way too fucking vivid.

I close the door behind me, brace both hands on the counter, and stare at my reflection.

The man looking back at me isn't someone I’m especially fond of right now.

She trusts you. I tell him and he knows it.

She trusts you because you have not done one single thing to make her not trust you, and you are about to walk into that shower and undo it, in your head, where it counts.

He knows that too.

I get the water going. Hot, because the cold shower I took last night did absolutely nothing for me except make me angry and wet, and I'm not interested in repeating the result.

I step in.

The water hits my shoulders, and I close my eyes, and immediately the part of my brain I've been negotiating with all day shows me what it has been holding hostage.

The mirror. The fitting room. The line of her back in that green dress. The way her breath caught when my knuckles dragged up the inside of her spine. The way her eyes met mine in the glass and held there, and the way I almost forgot, for one second, that she’s off-limits.

I brace one hand against the tile.

Don’t.

She's under your roof.

But then I think about her in the dressing room again. The bare line of her shoulder. The slip of skin between the dress and her hairline. The way she said my name into the curtain, soft, embarrassed, I need help with a zipper.

The image rearranges itself, and now she's not asking for help with the zipper, now she's turning around in the green dress with the front of it loose and unfastened and asking me to help her with that instead, and my hand has moved before I can think.

I'm not the man my reputation says I am.

I'm not Preston fucking Sinclair, who decided what she was allowed to feel.

I'm also, apparently, exactly the man who is going to do this in his own shower at eight thirty on a Tuesday night with the woman he's trying not to think about, just down the hall, having a shower.

And Lord, if that thought doesn’t make it worse.

My clothes are long gone, and standing under the warm water, my palm wraps around my aching member. And just like that, I lose all sanity.

The first stroke is involuntary, but the second, it’s measured, with just the right intensity and pressure. Pleasure skittles down my spine, a shudder working its way through.