FORCE: A Bad Boy Sports Romance by Vivian Lux Read Free Book Online Page A

help me out with my hard-ons, whether with hands, or mouths or spread open legs. A parade of faceless, nameless pleasure spread over seven frenetic months.
    As I gripped myself in my hand, I gritted my teeth. I shouldn't be doing this. This was the saddest fucking thing in the world; me jerking it in my double-parked car, while inside the building next to me, the reason for my boner was slipping between her sheets.
    Did she wear pajamas? Or sleep nude. I wondered idly.
    And then, with a start, I realized I knew that answer to that question. My grip on myself eased as I stared straight ahead in shock.
    Candace would wear pajamas...because she hates the cold.
    She hates winter.
    Her favorite season was summer.
    I knew these things because she told me... and I listened.
    Listening was...not my strong suit to say the least. In one ear and out the other my exasperated mother would sigh when another truancy report came home from school.
    And of course I'd blow her off and go back to doing whatever the hell I wanted. Whether it was smoking, drinking or going over to the warehouse district with Brad to break windows and bust streetlights, I did whatever the fuck I felt like, because who was going to stop me? My father had bailed when I was five and my mother was caught in a single-mother guilt-spiral; too exhausted by her job and the crappy grind of our existence to have the energy to discipline her son.
    I was on the fast train to juvie when Coach Randall came into my life.
    I had been playing at the local rink, a real shithole that could only afford to run the Zamboni twice a month. It was on this pitted, scarred patch of ice that I learned how to skate faster than my demons. And when Coach Randall came to give a talk as part of the outreach program, my mother showed up in her scrubs to make sure I was there.
    That's when he changed both of our lives in one fell swoop.
    To me, he gave the training guidance I needed to channel my inner talent into real discipline.
    To my mother, he gave love...then a ring...then a nice house in the suburbs where she no longer had to duck drug dealers and catcallers to get home to her son. We moved in with him when I was fifteen, and when I was eighteen he gave me the chance to try out for the Blackhawks. For the first time in my life, I had a man worth listening to...but by then I was too far gone. Stubborn and scarred from my days as a teenaged delinquent, I still struggled daily with listening to his advice. He was the angel on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, while on the other shoulder, a devil in the shape of my own ego shouted over him.
    I always struggled to be able to listen to the angels.
    But I had listened to Candace.
    And that fucking surprised the hell out of me.
    Zipping myself back up again, I threw my Escalade into drive, allowing myself one more glance in my rearview. There was a light still streaming from Candace's building.
    I wondered if it was from her apartment. I wondered if she was still up and thinking about me.
    I would be thinking about her - my angel - all night long.

Chapter Seven
    Candace
     
    When my alarm went off at 4:15 AM, I threw it across the room, convinced that it was malfunctioning.
    Then I remembered last night, and sat up in the dark, wide awake, fingers brushing the place on my lips where Ian’s had met mine.
    “Holy shit,” I murmured in my darkened bedroom. “Holy fucking shit.”
    There was really no other way to express the magic of last night. Everything I thought I knew, everything I had been taught at my job, had been turned on its ear. We had nothing in common, no shared interests, no mutual hobbies. But the chemistry…the chemistry…
    It was undeniable.
    I'm not that kind of girl.
    Except...what if I am?
    “Holy shit,” I repeated, my whole body shuddering as I remembered the feel of his hands on my skin, rough and calloused, brushing down my arms to twine his fingers in mine as he lifted my hands over my head to pin me back against the