I held my breath. Everything changed now. We were alone. There were no friend dramatics, no other guys or teammates around us, and his coach had left us alone. It was only me and him. Jesse dropped his hands from the door and walked to me, quietly. A shiver went up my back as I watched him come. He moved with a gracefulness that was sensual and dangerous at the same time. His eyes had darkened. The same desire leapt inside of me. It burst into flame and I gasped when I felt his fingertips against my skin. They trailed around my neck and he turned my mouth to his. My heart was pounding. It wanted to burst out of me, but then everything went away. Jesse lifted me in his arms. My lips gasped against his; they were cemented to each other. I felt the bed sheets underneath me. All I wanted was him. All I needed was him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jesse was gone when I woke the next morning for the second time. He had slipped out of the bed earlier, but pressed a kiss to my forehead before he left. So when I woke again, it was to the annoying sound of the phone. Angie sounded bright and perky on the other end. Apparently my cell phone wasn’t doing the job, so she had asked around and found where the Golden Boy’s room was. I was supposed to be thankful she hadn’t come in person. I growled back. I wasn’t ready for her that morning. I wanted to curl back up in bed and never move. It smelled like Jesse. Everything did – the pillows, the bed sheets, even the towel he had left on the other bed.

But Angie was insistent, so an hour later I met her in the lobby for breakfast. She looked refreshed in a blue dress with her hair in braids on top of her head. Ugh. She looked gorgeous. I touched the ends of my hair and knew my messy ponytail would never look sexy on me, not when I stood next to her.

“Hey, my only best friend now. What are you hankering for?”

“Jesse,” I grunted.

She froze for a second. The bright smile slipped a bit, but she rolled her eyes. “Okay. I got that, you stupid girl-who’s-going-to-be-destroyed-later-by-him, but I was talking about food.”

I opened my mouth.

“And not in the way of what you want to taste right now, but actual food that we can sit down, order, digest, and take home in a doggy bag. That kind, you wanton woman, not anything that has to do with sex.”

I closed my mouth. I had another smartass comment on the tip of my tongue, but I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m still pissed from last night, I think.”

“You think?” She arched an eyebrow high as the hostess led us to a table in the hotel’s restaurant. As we slid into our seats with the pool as our backdrop, Angie frowned when she opened her menu. “I’ve moved onto being angry.”

I opened mine as well. “But why are we so angry? She didn’t do anything to us last night.”

“Uh,” she choked out, shocked. “Are you kidding me? You don’t even know what she said to me last night.”

“What’d she say?”

“Well, she called me a bitch when she realized I had been the one on Cord’s phone. Then I called her a backstabbing bitch, both to her boyfriends and to her friends. I called her a bunch of other names too, not appropriate for here.”

When the waitress approached, we both ordered coffee. As she left, I glowered over my menu. They all looked the same: skinny, gorgeous, blonde hair, with very full lips. I growled as I remembered Sabrina from the night before, and the club’s hostess as well. Both could trip on a box of doughnuts and get fat, for all I cared.

“Okay.” Angie snapped my menu out of my hands and snapped her fingers in front of me. “Where’d you go? I was here ranting about our lost friend, but you went somewhere else. I know you, Alex, and I know you don’t have it in you to be that angry at Marissa.”

Oh, right. Marissa.

I shrugged. I was beyond caring now. “I don’t know. I was pretty upset with her last night too. She doesn’t treat Eric right at all.”

“Hmmm mmm.”

“What?”

She gave me a knowing grin. “And that has nothing to do with you and Jesse, right? You’re not equating him and Marissa together? She cheats on Eric. He’ll cheat on you. You see where I’m going?”

“No.” We weren’t in an exclusive relationship. He could do whatever he wanted. So could I.

“Oh. Okay, well, you’re mad that she’ll cheat on Eric?”

“If she hasn’t already.” I leaned forward. “Her and Cord were giving each other the bedroom look last night.”

“Really?”

“You didn’t catch it?”

“No.” She was surprised, but the waitress returned with our drinks. After the coffee was set down, we both ordered toast and fruit. The waitress seemed disappointed when she left. “I’m surprised that I didn’t catch that.”

“You were distracted by wanting to scratch her eyeballs out.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” Angie grinned as she took her coffee black. I poured a creamer in mine as she asked, “So the game is tonight, at six. You’re still going with us?”

I shook my head.

“What? Why?”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to open a conversation about how my parents would be there and there’d be a memorial dedicated to Ethan. I couldn’t handle that conversation right then and there. “You think Marissa is still going?”

She rolled her eyes. “I suppose. She’s the one with the tickets. Crap. I didn’t think about that until now.”

I laughed. “Wouldn’t that suck? You confront her about ditching us and she gets you back by giving your tickets away to someone else?”

She slumped back in her chair. “Man, that sucks, but I’d respect her a bit more if she did that. It’s something I would do.”

I laughed harder.

Angie grinned at me. “What the hell am I going to do? You can’t ask Jesse for tickets?”

I shook my head. No way was I going to risk that the seats he’d give us would be next to my parents. He’d do that without thinking, although his comment last night had surprised me. It’d been the first real one he had made that told me he was aware of what my parents were doing, or that I might be hurting because of them.

I swallowed that painful thought away.

She’d been watching me as I pondered all of that. Her eyes were too knowing as she sat back. “Oookay. We’re not going down that road, apparently.” Then she smirked. “Maybe we could call that captain on their team? He seemed like a nice guy, what’s his name, Ryan or—”