tone was suddenly sultry.
“No.”
The warmth traveling up my neck couldn’t be contained. My father had accepted a summer job coaching a youth football camp down in North Carolina and had left this morning. For some reason, though, I’d been a little hesitant to tell Vaughn that I’d be without parental supervision for the next four weeks. Sure, I was eighteen, but to my father, I would always be his little girl. At least now that we’d graduated, Vaughn was no longer one of his players. My father would have never condoned our relationship, as complicated as it were, otherwise. I’d had a hard enough time convincing him to let his quarterback take me to prom. Vaughn had told my father that he simply wanted to repay me for all the “tutoring sessions.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Make it ten, or I won’t bother answering the door,” I challenged before hanging up. I didn’t want to make it too easy for him, after all. I rushed downstairs and turned off the dinner-for-one I’d been preparing before heading back up and straight for the bathroom. I knew exactly what was running through Vaughn’s mind.
Goose bumps appeared on my skin as I filled our garden tub with hot water, Epsom salts, and my favorite lavender bubble bath. The tub was only half full when the doorbell rang minutes later. Checking my phone, I smirked when I saw that it had only taken him eight to reach me.
When I opened the front door, Vaughn swept me up in his big arms, pressed me against his naked chest, and kissed the hell out of me. Anyone else and I might have been grossed out by the sweat now soaking the front of my T-shirt, but with Vaughn, I couldn’t get enough of the testosterone seeping from his pores.
He was just so damn male.
“Miss me, pip-squeak?”
Even though it had only been two days, I’d been anxious to see him again, and even though summer had only just begun, it was already starting to feel like the end. “What I don’t miss is your new pet name. Can we please discuss you going back to Ty-ty?”
Grinning, he gripped my ass before wrapping my legs around his waist, and it was then that I remembered I only wore panties. He’d seen me in much less, but I couldn’t help the blush that warmed my cheeks as he kicked the door closed and carried me up the stairs.
He went straight for the bathroom without having to be told.
Like all the other times, he quietly removed his clothes after setting me on my feet. All he wore were navy-blue basketball shorts and matching trainers, so he was naked in no time, and I was in danger of swallowing my tongue. Everything about Vaughn Rees set my body on fucking fire. Even, ridiculously, the hair on his legs. I loved feeling the roughness of them against my own whenever we became tangled underneath the sheets.
“Are you sore?” I asked when he grimaced while lowering himself into the hot water and lavender-scented suds.
Eyes closed and head tilted back, Vaughn replied as casually as if we were discussing the weather. “Not as sore as you’re going to be when I fuck you.”
My legs were suddenly too weak to hold me up, so I sank onto the wide ledge surrounding the bathtub, brought my knees to my chest, and hugged them for dear life. I believed him. “When will that be?”
It was a dangerous question, indeed, but the silence had become too thick with tension. I needed to break it somehow. It wasn’t as if I was saving myself for marriage, but it turns out, I wasn’t as open or eager for casual sex as I thought. I wanted—no, I needed more, and ironically, it was Vaughn who made me see that.
In the beginning, he’d set out to make me just another notch on his belt and nothing more. But in a twist of fate that neither of us could see coming, during the weeks he spent chasing me, his dick had grown a conscience. And then Vaughn gave me what he hadn’t given the others. Honesty.
He admitted to me that even by some snowball’s chance in hell he’d want more, he couldn’t and wouldn’t give it to me. I never learned why. I’d been too afraid of driving him away to ask.
The most obvious reason was that he wanted to keep his options open for when he inevitably went pro. We were young.