“I’m so glad I can be helpful.”

He smiles against my shoulder. “Tools are helpful, Charlene. You in my bed this morning is a treat.”

My heart flutters at his words and the warmth of his lips on my skin. That fluttery feeling echoes through my body as his palm glides down my stomach.

“And I plan to enjoy you as I would the most decadent dessert,” he whispers in my ear before he bites the lobe.

By the time we’re done I’ve had two more orgasms, which Darren happily adds to his running tally. He quite literally keeps track of my orgasms, like they’re part of our sex stats.

I curl up against his side, blissed out enough that my brain and my mouth are on a disconnect, so I ask a question I’m not so sure I want the answer to. “Did you find anything out about the expansion draft?”

“Just that Alex and Randy are safe. The rest is up in the air until they announce the other players they want to hold on to.”

“Do you think you’ll be one of them?”

He runs his fingers through my tangled hair. “It’s hard to say. At thirty-four I’m closer to the end of my career than I am to the beginning, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“Because the Vegas team owner has a hard-on over you?”

Darren sighs. “Yeah. Here’s hoping he doesn’t throw away one of his picks on me, but if he does, I guess I spend a year in Vegas playing like shit so they don’t renew my contract.”

I don’t know whether he’s intentionally left me out of the equation or not.

He checks the clock on the nightstand. “Fuck. I didn’t realize it was so late. I need to go. I have practice in half an hour.”

I regret bringing up the expansion draft when we don’t have time to really talk about it. He rushes to get dressed and gives me a quick peck on the lips as he shoves his wallet and phone in his back pocket.

“Your face smells like my pussy!” I shout as he rushes out of the bedroom.

“It’s my favorite cologne,” he calls back.

I expect to hear the door slam shut, but instead he pounds his way back up the stairs. He appears in the doorway, expression unreadable as he tosses my phone on the bed and then climbs up after it. “You have a thousand messages from Violet. She’d like to know if you’re being kept in my lair and if so, do you have a cage, or are you allowed to sleep in my bed.” He straddles me, eyes dark as he leans down, fingers sliding into my hair at the nape of my neck. His lips ghost over mine. “Feel free to answer that however you like.”

I wait to see what he’s going to do. Apart from a few brushings of lips and teasing of tongues, there wasn’t much kissing last night. Our mouths were too busy on other things.

He sucks my bottom lip between his and then his tongue flicks out, stroking along the roof of my mouth, causing me to jerk and flail. He pulls back, eyes searching my face as one side of his mouth twists in a malevolent smile. “Change the setting on your phone so there’s no preview of the messages, Charlene. Unless you want me and the rest of the world to know the content of your conversations with Violet.”

With that he releases me. I flop back down on the mattress as he gracefully rolls off the bed. He pauses at the door. “Next time I’ll kiss you for hours before I let you come.”

And with that, he disappears down the hall. I cover my mouth with my palm and smile behind it. I don’t care if our relationship is weird; I wouldn’t trade it for all the normals in the world.

I pick up my phone and key in my password. Darren wasn’t lying. I have a million and one messages from Violet. Half of them are gifs of the Fifty Shades movies. Most of them feature Christian Grey half naked, so I get distracted by the pretty as I scroll back through them. They stopped from midnight until eight this morning, and then started up again. The most recent ones are requests for proof of life.

I’m about to take a selfie, but then I realize I look like I could be a kidnapping victim with how messed up my hair is, so instead I search the internet for pictures of sex dungeons and send that to her instead.

I love Violet, and she knows more about me than anyone else in this world—except maybe my mother, and in some ways, Darren. But after my mom and I left The Ranch when I was a teenager, it was drilled into me to gloss over personal details. The less I share, the easier it is to keep myself and the people around me protected from my past. It’s part of the reason Darren and I work so well. We’re both private people when it comes to our pasts, and that makes him safe in a way a lot of other people are not.