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I press the words into her skin. "I've got you."

I start sucking on her breast. I can feel her pulse beating faster. I slide one hand down her belly.

She murmurs out my name and I feel her body come alive under me. Her hands land in my hair.

As my hand reaches lower, her thighs fall open for me.

I groan and dip my fingers between her folds. She's warm and slick already, swollen from last night, and I go gentle, because I know she must be sore.

Her hips chase my hand. Trying to follow the slow circles I'm drawing around her clit.

"Hi there." I get the words out as I lick her nipple. My finger start moving in an easy rhythm, easing one just barely into her and back out, shallow and careful. "Morning."

"Jax." My name comes out of her. She’s panting now. "Deeper.”

But I won’t do it. Not yet. I curl my finger on the next slow pass and her whole body jolts. "That's the lesson for today. I like to start my mornings making you come. Consider it a requirement."

She's soaked for me fast, her body still lit from last night, and I keep it slow, my thumb rolling her clit.

One finger sliding just deep enough to give her something to clench around without pushing her. She grabs my wrist, not to stop me. But for me to go deeper. And I do.

"That's it. You’re my sexy little kitten. Such a good girl, soaking my fingers. I feel your pussy clenching, I like how much you want me to fuck you.”

I watch her in the gray morning light and it beats any highlight reel, any goal I have ever scored in my life.

Her hand is on mine, guiding me, and my finger is thrusting in deep and fast. The way she wants it. “Hear how wet you are for me."

She moans, her head tilts back, and she comes for me.

She breaks on my hand with my name in her mouth and her spine bowing off the mattress, and I kiss her through all of it.

I kiss her breasts, her throat, the hinge of her jaw, murmuring how sexy she is, how fucking her is better than winning a game, until she goes boneless and shaking under me.

She comes down slow, blinking up like she isn't sure I'm real, and I brush the damp hair off her forehead and hate how badly I want to keep her.

I'm painfully hard, have been since she said my name in her sleep.

She feels my cock against her. Still catching her breath, she reaches down between us and wraps her hand around me, and the touch nearly takes me apart.

"What about you?" Her voice is soft. "Don't you want to..."

"God, yes." I catch her wrist before she can move her hand, and it costs me actual years off my life. "But not this morning. This one was yours." I press my mouth to her knuckles and move her hand off me before I lose the argument with myself.

"You're sore. I'm not going anywhere near you again until you've healed up. And if you keep touching me like that, sweetheart, I’ll stop being a gentleman about it."

I don't say it out loud. Because the reason is simpler and way worse. If I take her again right now, with her looking at me like I'm real, I’ll stop being able to pretend any of this is casual. I'm barely holding that line as it is.

I know the truth, and I’ll take it to the grave. My reputation wasn’t an accident. It was on purpose. After she rejected me four years ago and looked at me with hatred. I did the only thing I could think to do. I tried to drown her out.

Model after model, headline after headline, a parade of women who were beautiful and smart and completely wrong, because not one of them was her.

I let the tabloids write me as the guy who can't be tied down, and the whole time I was just a man trying to get over a girl.

It didn’t work. Years of trying, and she gets a job at my team. What are the odds? But here she is, and I'm a teenager again.

She thinks that kiss was a drunken mistake, but I wasn’t drunk. I just needed the one drink to give me courage to show her how I feel.

And now I finally know how our story ends. I get to make her good at fucking, and then I get to stand at the finish line and hand her to the man she really wants.