Staying On Top (Whitman University) (7 page)

“Yes, I’m sure, but thanks for coming up with new reasons for me to stay. The others were getting stale.” No reaction. “Besides, we’ll be on the move and you can be my new hitting partner. You up for it?”

This time she rolled her eyes, shouldering her pack in a way that drew my eyes to her breasts under her tight black tank top. “I’m going to assume you mean tennis, not some
other
kind of hitting. And I don’t play.”

“I’m still coming. And by that I mean coming along, not some
other
kind of coming, although we are going to be spending a lot of time together so I hope you’re prepared to control yourself in that department.”

“I think I’ll manage,” she said with a snort. “Are you ready?”

“Yep. We’re all checked out, and I have enough cash and euros on me to pay an international ransom. Are you going to tell me where we’re headed first now?”

“You mean you’re not going to follow me blindly, no questions asked? I knew that it would never have worked between us.”

I stepped closer, inhaling her perfume and purposefully invading her personal space, not missing the hitch in her breath when we drew close enough to touch. Blair had been flirtier since she came to my room this morning, still trying to change my mind but also ready to accept my company on her trek. Her cocoa eyes gazed up into mine, a confusion of thoughts parading through them. I couldn’t catch a single one, but most of them I didn’t like.

I bent down until our faces were inches apart, loving that she leaned in to me instead of backing away. Blair likely didn’t shy away from much. “Trust me, Blair, if we were involved, I would lead or follow, whichever you wanted at the time. I do it all.”

She tipped her chin up, but not before a delicate shudder told me she wasn’t immune to the crackling tension between us. “Maybe so, but given your confidence and reputation, I’d need to see multiple blood test results to go anywhere near your bare skin.”

Protests or not, she leaned closer when I took another step forward, swaying as though fighting the desire to touch me. “Is that what bothers you? That you wouldn’t be the only one?” I slapped her ass a little harder than necessary, and when she bit her lip I got a hard-on I would have to hide.

Her recovery didn’t take long, and the dirty look she shot me could wither a rose in the middle of summer. “Rule number one—don’t ever touch my ass again. Rule number two, I’ve never been a one-and-only kind of girl, but this entire partnership is fragile enough without adding sex to the mix. I think we’d be best off keeping it simple.”

“Agreed. Nothing fancy, then. And I agree to your rules, with one exception—I won’t touch you again until you
ask
me to.”

“Fair enough. Let’s go.”

I could tell by the look on her face that she thought resisting me would be possible, but the lust neither one of us could quite hide made me wonder if we wouldn’t end up in bed together sooner or later. Even though it was hard to feel badly about that, the whole thing tickled my newfound suspicious bone. Blair had been so dead set against even a harmless fling with me, she’d turned down at least five requests for a date and refused to come to my tennis tournament. What had changed?

It could be that nothing had changed, because no matter her protests, the attraction between us couldn’t be one-sided. She felt it, and I felt it. Maybe she had gotten tired of fighting it.

Maybe. But she showed up out of nowhere, claimed to be the daughter of my accountant and that she wanted to help me. My unwillingness to let her go without me had been met with . . . flirtation. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t trust it.

Instead of overthinking it, I followed her swaying hips down the hotel stairs—all twenty flights of them—and into a cab. A
cab
. I couldn’t remember the last time a car hadn’t been waiting for me, but according to Blair’s assessment of her father’s reach, the flying-under-the-radar plan was necessary. If we used our connections, he would know.

And this was only the beginning. We were flying
coach
all the way to fucking Austria.

It had been a long time since no one had waited on me hand and foot, but that wasn’t even my biggest concern—it was the germs. It wasn’t my manliest quality, and I didn’t share my issue with many people because it was a bigger problem than I liked to admit, but they freaked me out. And I was pretty sure I was the only guy on the tennis tour with a full-fledged plan for the zombie apocalypse. 

Because it
was
going to happen. It was only a matter of time before germs adapted further and turned on us, the microscopic little hellbeasts, and we were all brain-rotted zombies. I didn’t want to think about how many of them lived on commercial airlines or were currently trying to find a way through my pants in the cab.

“Why are you making that face?” Blair asked, watching me with a mixture of amusement and concern from her side of the taxi.

I stared at her legs, half turned on and half horrified that her bare skin was touching the cracked black leather that had been touched by countless other bare legs. It wasn’t an incapacitating obsessive-compulsive fear of germs, but I went out of my way to avoid certain things. And, fine, the incapacitating level of my problem might not be far off.

Blair didn’t need to know my secrets, or weaknesses. It made me uncomfortable enough that she’d read my face with such ease. “Nothing. Just thinking.”

“You know, if taking a taxi bothers you this much, this is going to be one long trek.”

“Maybe we’ll find him in Austria.”

“You have no idea how badly I’m hoping that’s the case.” She wrinkled her nose. “You’re sitting in the middle on the flight, by the way.”

We lapsed back into silence when I didn’t argue with her. Arguing could turn into a full-time job with the two of us, and I had no interest in a nine-to-five. I had a bag full of sleeping aids in the shape of pills. She’ll be sorry she didn’t give me the window when I pass out on her lap and leave a drool puddle between her legs.

No. Do not think about anything between her legs.

“The taxi doesn’t bother me.”

She gave me a look that said she didn’t buy my protest but was already tired of arguing with me, too. I had no idea how she read me like that—we hadn’t spent hardly any time together and I had no idea what she was thinking. Ever.

My phone buzzed with a text message from my cousin Melody, asking if she could come spend Christmas with me. I replied with an excited yes; it would be nice to not be alone on the holiday for the first time in years. Then a message came in from Leo, wanting to know where in the hell I’d gotten off to, and I had to break the news that I was leaving the country for an undetermined amount of time.

There was no way Blair could miss the angry buzzing of my phone created by his flurry of pissed-off protests, and I caught her eyebrow raised in between my hurried responses. “You’re not the only one who’s less than thrilled about my decision to blow off a few days of training.”

“You know—”

“Save your breath.”

Once we checked our bags and went through security, we settled at a table in the airport Starbucks without discussing it. Blair ordered a black coffee and stirred in cinnamon, vanilla, and Splenda. I ordered a decaffeinated tea.

“Okay, so now that I’ve proven my willingness to follow blindly and we can’t possibly be overheard by anyone who cares, Miss Paranoid, how about you share a little bit about where we might be going on this little impromptu adventure.”

I still wasn’t convinced this would end up doing me any good. Even if we did find Neil, why would he give me my money back? What if he was more of a badass con man than a weaselly one and tried to, like, get rid of me or something? 

Part of me wanted to forget the thirty mil and nurse my wounds in Australia, make sure my body was ready for the season in six weeks, and focus on replacing what had been stolen.

The beautiful, irritating, mysterious girl across from me shouldn’t have anything to do with my decision, yet she did. She’d been on my mind, in my fantasies, for months, and this gave me the opportunity to spend time with her, get to know her. It made me entertain the ridiculous notion that maybe this entire thing happened so that the universe could force her to get to know me. 

It couldn’t stop the insistent burble underneath all of that, the quiet, certain whisper that I couldn’t trust her. 

“Sure, we can talk about it.” Blair bent down, her silky chocolate hair spilling over her arm as she reached into her bag. Her fingers smoothed the wrinkles out of a piece of notebook paper. I tried not to imagine how they would feel on my skin, how her hair would tickle my cheeks.

“So, there are five places that have always been my dad’s favorites. Every time he’s asked to see me in the past five or six years, it’s been in one of these places . . . but he’s always had me flown in to a private airport and driven to his house, so it’s hard for me to guess exact locations.”

“And one is in Austria. It’s a big country.”

“I know, but I know what airport I flew in to and how long the ride was to his house.”

“General direction?”

“You know, you really don’t fit the dumb jock image.”

“You say that like you’re disappointed.” I smiled, trying to soften my response. “Do I have a dumb jock image?”

She shrugged, and the pink tinge to her cheeks surprised me. “I don’t really keep up, honestly. I’m not . . . comfortable with the whole idea of notoriety.”

“Is that why things didn’t work out with you and Flynn?”

Blair’s head snapped up, her fingers curling around the edge of the paper. “How do you know about me and Flynn?”

“Is it a secret?” The twisted expression on her face didn’t lessen. “Quinn.”

 “Oh. Right.” Her shoulders relaxed. “Anyway, yes, that was one of the reasons things didn’t work out with Flynn. Although I’m not sure what ‘work out means,’ since we’re, like, nineteen years old. We had fun for a while. I didn’t like the idea of the cellulite on my ass being circled in national magazines.”

“I’ve spent a good amount of time staring at your ass, and it looks damn good.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t seen it naked.”

“I think we could remedy that. I mean, if you’re concerned. I could even photograph it if you want.”

“
Anyway,
the car in Austria headed south from the airport in Villach, crossed the Slovenian border, and took me to a town in the mountains. It wasn’t too small.” She turned her phone around so I could see the map of the area she’d pulled up. “I’m guessing Jesenice.”

“Wait, so we’re going to Slovenia? Why not fly there, then?”

“Because we can’t take the chance of flying into a smaller airport. It’s easier to get lost in Vienna, and we can drive from there.” As though on cue, a tinny voice announced our flight. Blair pulled her hair up into a bun and grabbed her backpack. “You know, you can still stay here.”

“Nice try, gorgeous.” She flinched at the very honest compliment, which made me smile. I had no idea why it made me smile to cause her discomfort, but it seemed I had more than a few miles to figure it out.

Chapter 6

Blair

Sam’s hot breath blew across my neck, rustling strands of hair that tickled my skin. It felt a little wet, but I couldn’t see well enough to figure out if he was drooling on me and, really, there wasn’t much point in knowing the answer.

I could not believe that he was slumped against me on the last leg of an impossibly long coach flight from Melbourne instead of in Australia where he belonged. This was not part of the plan, even though in the back of my mind it had been a possibility. I figured my surface honesty would have him groveling at my feet, ready to give me any and all required information so that I could fake finding my dad and bringing him to justice.

It made me respect him more that he wouldn’t bite, but the distrust he’d earned by being taken by my father had made him suspicious. It made me unexpectedly sad. Even though dating Sam hadn’t appealed to me for many reasons, his carefree, embracing attitude toward the world had warmed me in St. Moritz. It was rare to find someone who had made it all the way into his twenties—and been successful along the way—who hadn’t acquired a certain amount of cynicism and bitchiness. Myself included. 

Sam hadn’t been putting it on, though. He simply lived each moment as though it was its own tiny story, then closed the book and moved on. 

It was how my father lived, but with an entirely different agenda. It was how
I
lived, because of the life I’d been born into, but it didn’t come naturally to me. I wanted to keep something. Watching Sam had made me sad then—for myself. For what I’d never had.

Watching him now made me sad for him. Or humanity in general, I didn’t know.

I suspected it had a little to do with why I hadn’t shoved his head off my collarbone two hours ago. And I would be lying if I denied the heat between us, or the fact that touching him was like a drug I had no desire to quit cold turkey. It had taken every last ounce of self-restraint not to lean up and kiss him in the hotel room.

It had been over thirty hours since we left Australia, and I had never missed my father’s arsenal of private jets more in my life. We’d stopped in China and Holland, which didn’t seem like it could possibly be the fastest route to Austria. If I didn’t get my feet on solid ground for more than a couple of hours I was going to flip out—it would have been easier to take the sleeping pills Sam had offered, but one of us had to be sober to make sure we made our connecting flights. He’d popped them every few hours and slept more than he’d been awake.

Lucky bastard.

Hopefully whatever had freaked him out about being awake on the plane wouldn’t be an issue in a car, because the drive from Vienna to Jesenice would be at least three hours and I had exhausted my supply of caffeine pills. Sleep was becoming an inevitability.

The pilot announced that we would be touching down in about twenty minutes. I elbowed Sam, not gently, disproportionately pleased at his pained grunt.