Stroking her clit, she imagined it was Victor’s rough hands touching her.
Closing her eyes, she heard his gravelly whispers in her ear, calling her Sunshine, all while telling her just how hard he was going to take her.
She tilted her head, pretending she could feel his mouth tracing down her skin.
Pressing the vibrator inside, she was shocked to discover how wet she was, though she didn’t know why she was so surprised.
Her body had shifted into overdrive during that kiss on the patio, and nothing short of an orgasm was going to calm it down again.
She turned the vibrator on high, not bothering to tease herself with the lower speeds. This wasn’t going to take long.
Thrusting it in and out, she fucked herself with the toy with a roughness she’d never attempted before. As expected, her inner muscles quivered and clenched within minutes. She startedrubbing her clit faster, her body undulating in time with the rhythm she created.
And when her climax struck in a flash of blindingly bright white light, she arched her back, threw her head back, and gasped out his name.
“Victor.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Victor staredat the wall and sighed. He’d been sitting at the island in his kitchen for a full fifteen minutes without moving, listening to the distant voices of Pip and Belle drifting down from upstairs. He couldn’t make out that they were saying, but every now and then, he could hear Pip’s giggle or Belle singing something.
He’d been in this same listless state for the past five days, ever since that second ill-advised kiss with Belle. There were too many things playing on repeat in his mind, distractions he couldn’t shut down. It had become so noticeable to his teammates that he’d stopped going to workouts at the training facility, sequestering himself in his own gym for hours on end. If he’d just been a grumpy asshole, none of his buddies would have questioned what was wrong, but his typical annoyance for the world at large wasn’t what was coming through.
Instead, he’d just gone quiet, too numb inside to summonanyemotions—good, bad, or otherwise.
Dean had tried to talk to him a few days ago, but Victor had blown him off, claiming he was fighting off some bug and he’d be back to normal soon. Dean, the smart-ass, asked if he couldcome back a littlelesslike his normal self. Victor hadn’t had it in him to laugh or grin or smirk or even toss the guy the middle finger.
Which was when his coach realized it wasn’t a bug, and he became concerned. Victor had dodged a couple of phone calls and ignored four texts from Dean since then. The man had already offered him good advice, but Victor hadn’t taken it before laying two major kisses on Belle, pushing her away after both.
He’d fucked up royally. He’d seen the hurt in her eyes the other night, when he’d told her why they couldn’t be together. Victor wasn’t sure there was any coming back from that, even if he wanted to.
Especially not in lieu of everything that had happened since.
That night, after Belle left him alone on the patio, he chugged down the rest of his beer, trying to pull himself together and will his painful erection away. The woman was hell on his libido. All she had to do was walk into a room and he was flying at half-mast. The moment he caught a whiff of her perfume or heard her adorable laugh, he hit three-quarters. And the second he cut the distance between them, touching her, kissing her, his cock grew hard enough to drill holes into concrete.
Once he’d been able to walk upstairs that night, he headed toward his room—only to pull up short just outside Belle’s room. Because he’d heard the telltale sound of buzzing and her soft, panting breaths.
Jesus.
He should have fucking kept on walking, but the masochist in him didn’t do that. Instead, he’d remained by the door, listening. It had taken everything he had not to walk into her bedroom and finish the job for her, because he hated the idea of her finding pleasure with anyone, or anything, that wasn’t him.
He’d told himself all summer—fuck that, for nearly three years—that Belle wasn’t his, that he had no claim on her, but he knew now, he’d been lying to himself.
Whether she was his or not didn’t matter because in his mind, she belonged to him. And not in some lukewarm, “she’s attractive” way. But in a caveman, chest-beating, drag-her-to-his-lair, keep-her-there-forever kind of way.
By the time her breathing had grown shallower, his cock had been rock-hard again, and he cupped it with his hand through his shorts. If it had only been the two of them in the house, he might have pulled it out and stroked it, but there was no fucking way he could do that with Pip right across the hall. So he’d squeezed himself through his cargo shorts, the touch nowhere near enough to calm him down.
Especially when Belle had gasped and—fuck him—called out his name.
Victor knew in that moment he had to get the hell away from that door, because he was two seconds away from slamming into her room and unsaying all the mature, adult, “correct” things he’d just said to her by the pool.
Walking to his room, he’d bypassed the bed, heading straight for the en suite bathroom, stripping off his clothes as he went. Once he was in the shower, it hadn’t taken him more than a dozen strokes before he was there, coming hard as he cried outBelle’sname. Not that it helped. The shower was torture, and the water had gone cold before he’d left it because he had to jerk off twice more before his stupid dick would go the fuck down.
Victor wasn’t sure what he’d expected to happen after he brushed her off for a second time…but God knew he hadn’t anticipated suddenly living in this too-professional, all-business nightmare of the last five days.
Belle had taken his words to heart, becoming exactly what he called her when he grumbled about her arrival in his house at the beginning of the summer.
She was the world’s most efficient Mary fucking Poppins. The perfect nanny—and nothing more.
