No strings attached by Alison Kent Page B

paused, struck anew by the thought that she’d certainly gone for what she wanted in his kitchen. “Besides, you spike a hell of a volleyball. And that can’t be said of a marshmallow.”
    “That spike was pure luck and you know it.” Her mouth twisted into a cute but still only halfhearted grin.
    He wanted to see her smile. The way she’d smiled yesterday on the volleyball court, full of more life than he thought he’d ever seen…even more than he’d seen when she’d been in his kitchen.
    A particular truth he could’ve done without. So much for making a big first impression. “Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I do know is that you don’t hate sports quite as much as you’ve been trying to convince me you do.”
    “Don’t be so sure.” She swiveled her chair back and forth, back and forth. “But don’t think the way I feel means I don’t know how to play.”
    “I know you know how to play. I was there, remember?” And Eric still wanted to take a bat to whoever it was who had burned this girl so badly. “So, do you want to join my team?”
    “Permanently?”
    “Why not? We’re a sort of self-contained league. Sports bars. Restaurants. Friendly competition that has nothing to do with business. We bowl, play volleyball, softball. All in the name of fun, and the losers buy the beer.”
    “Ouch. A double whammy.”
    Eric shrugged. He was still having trouble reconciling Chloe with “permanently.” “Whaddaya say?”
    “I’ll keep it in mind,” she said, and then she frowned and asked, “Don’t the members of your team have to have a connection to Haydon’s? How did you manage to sneak me past the officials yesterday?”
    “I told them we were lovers.”
    Chloe’s chair came to a total stop. “You told them what?”
    Eric moved into the office, closing the door most of the way with one hand, but with a gentle shove so Chloe wouldn’t feel physically trapped. Like it or not, it was time for that conversation she’d run out on yesterday. “Actually, I said you and I were seeing each other, which is the truth. Especially now with the way things have changed…”
    Reaching her desk, he let the thought trail off and waited for her ball-busting denial that their relationship had changed. What he got instead was a thoughtful silence and a lazy consideration from eyes boldly enhanced by eye shadow in shades of dark blue and pink.
    Her irises were deep violet and her pupils flashed with what instinct told him was the memory of holding him inside her mouth. Eric stirred at the thought. He’d stirred every time he’d thought of her the past twenty-four hours.
    But even before she’d wrapped her lips around his dick and made him come, he’d reacted much the same way. Yesterday’s blow job had just put a new twist on an already tightly wound tension between them.
    She rolled her chair beneath her desk, walked around the far end and propped a hip on the corner.Arms crossed, she swung that one dangling foot, her skirt hiked halfway up her thigh…which wasn’t doing much to keep Eric’s mind on the here and now. He lifted his chin, kept his gaze locked on hers.
    “In what sort of way have things changed?” She asked the question with all sincerity, or with such well-veiled sarcasm she had him fooled dead to rights.
    Either way, she was toying with him rather than giving him a straight answer. She wanted to play? Fine. He’d play her until she begged him to stop.
    He took a step forward, trailing his index finger along the edge of her desk. “Do you really want me to answer that?”
    “That depends, sugar.” Her voice was low, both in tone and in volume, a husky, seductive whisper complementing the low sweep of her lashes. “Do you think you have an answer?”
    Oscar-caliber performance aside, her shy act was still an act. And he was not about to let her get away with ignoring what they’d done. “An answer other than the obvious? I mean, it’s not like every woman who comes into my kitchen