Page 44 of Her Player

That was rock music.

The second I slipped out of my office, however, I was met with something that should have been illegal in an enclosed space. That specific strain of rock music my daughter used to blast through the house as a teenager, the kind with screaming where the melody was supposed to be. She still played it in her car sometimes and I swear for the life of me, I didn’t understand it.

The drumming alone gave me headaches sometimes.

I followed the sound, the clicking of my heels swallowed up by someone screaming incessantly onto a track. It dragged me all the way to the weight room, where the smell of heated sweat greeted my nostrils. My nose curled as I peered around the corner. Whoever the hell was still in here needed to go home and get some damn rest.

But when I saw Rhett deadlifting weights, I paused.

He wore nothing but a pair of basketball shorts with black leggings beneath them. Sweat dripped down his chiseled chest, driving liquid trails toward his happy trail that disappeared beneath the band of his pants. Despite the fact that he didn’t have quite the chiseled abs of some of the men on the team, he still had that outlined V that disappeared from view beneath the leggings.

I felt my mouth watering as I recalled how that thin layer of softness around his muscles felt against my cheek last night.

I lost myself in the cords of his forearms. In the way veins bulged from his rock-hard thighs. He had legs like goddamn tree trunks, and I swear, he never looked more powerful.

All sweaty. Muscles pulsing. Breathing heavily as if…

“Heeeey, Miss C,” Rhett said.

My eyes dropped to my tablet, even though my cheeks burned as I looked up into his face. Holy fuck, he was close.

When the hell had I walked into the gym?

Rhett’s grin sent a shiver down my spine. “Wanna watch?”

“Have you been here all day?”

He grinned as he held out his arm, ushering me toward a bench along the wall that faced him. My heels clicked across the tiled floor, maneuvering around the foam and rubber pads that dotted the flooring. I took a seat on the bench, watching as Rhett got back into position with the weight bar, and then his large, callused hands gripped it.

He took great care in his form as he hoisted the bar up to his hips before easing it back down onto the ground.

I watched him repeat the motion ten times before he set the weights down and released them altogether.

“No,” he said breathlessly as he pulled a white rag out of the back pocket of his basketball shorts. He wiped off his face. “Did some weights with Jett after practice, then I went and sat with Brynn at the bar until Coach came by to sit with her.”

My heart warmed. “Thank you for doing that for her. She felt… not so good about going into work today.”

He nodded before he readied himself for another set of deadlifts. “I can’t blame her.”

“Neither can I.”

My eyes watched his motions. I devoured the way his muscles flexed with every movement of the weights. He moved from deadlifts to something that looked like circuit training, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I should’ve been hungry. All I did was snack on nuts and fruit and chips while I worked. But as I watched sweat drip down Rhett’s back as he did pushups, I found myself licking my lips.

My body was hungry.

But not for food.

“Like what you see?” Rhett asked coyly as he hopped up and grabbed a bar before starting in on some pull ups.

I just tilted my head, leaning back against the wall, and crossed my leg over my knee.

It made Rhett chuckle. “Stare all you like, Miss C.”

“Don’t worry,” I said as I crossed my arms over my chest, “I will.”

And I did. I let my eyes feast on him. The way he moved from machine to machine. Exercise to exercise. He was like a mountain, moving only when the earth called to him. His body was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. His eyes twinkled whenever he looked over at me and found me still staring.

I didn’t even care what I looked like any longer.