Tackle (6 page)

"Really," I said firmly. On impulse, I leaned forward, resting my hands on his angular hips, and pecked him on the cheek. "Thanks," I said softly, "for letting me apologize." I didn't want to let go – he smelled clean and fresh, and the aftershave that was dabbed delicately on his neck imparted the faintest hint of spice.

His arms suddenly swept forward and encircled me, gathering me up in a tight embrace. His body was tight – I could practically feel the ridges of his abdominal muscles pressing against my stomach through the thin material of his white tee, and the arms that held me tight against him were thick and muscular.

For a second, I felt as though I'd been transported to another world, and I gave serious consideration to leaning upwards and planting another kiss on him – a proper one, this time.

"Any time," he said huskily. I had no idea whether Alex was hitting on me, or whether this was entirely innocent and I was the one
taking things the wrong way
.
"I've already forgotten about it."

My breasts were squashed up against his chest, ensconced in the tiny crater beneath his broad, defined pecs, and my nipples were suddenly on fire. I felt like any moment now, my legs would simply give way and I'd collapse against Alex's hard, athletic body. Seconds that felt like minutes ticked away, and suddenly he released me.

"Sure I can't give you a lift?" he asked.

I was weak at the knees, my breath was ragged and there was a definite, undeniable wetness between my thighs. "No," I panted, "I'm fine."

His eyes raked my body up and down. "If you sure…" he said, eyes lingering on my chest. I had the uncomfortable thought that perhaps he could see my suddenly hard nipples, but the bra wire digging awkwardly into my back reassured me that at least they were hidden, even if my flushed cheeks were definitely on show.

I nodded quickly. If he asked again, I didn't know whether I be able to refuse. "I am."

"In that case," he smiled, "I'll see you around." He opened the front door of his Audi sports car, jumped in and gunned the engine – and just like that, he was gone.

I had to sit down, just to still my trembling legs.

Was I imagining things, or was there a bulge in his pants?

P
eople
in any other walk of life thought that professional athletes had it easy. And hell, I'd be the first to admit that I'd way rather play soccer on an immaculately maintained grass field for ninety minutes than spend fifty hours a week down a coal shaft.

Routine, though, was a killer.

Wake up at eight, have breakfast: two slices of toast, half an avocado, two eggs.

Yoga at nine – needed to stay flexible, didn't want to get injured.

Drive to the training ground, be there by half ten.

Fitness training until half eleven. Mid-morning snack – always eating, had to get those nutrients in somehow.

Team training until lunch, working on technique, strategy.

Stretching.

Eat a snack.

Tactics meeting until three.

Go home, eat another meal.

Take a nap so the muscles can recover.

Go for a swim. Eat dinner.

Don't go out, because alcohol inhibits recovery.

Sleep.

Then wake up and do it all again.

Okay, I wasn’t saying I was a saint – but if I got through most of that, I should be able to treat myself every now and again, shouldn't I?

And ever since Diana had apologized to me yesterday, the only thing I'd been able to think about was the sensation of having her tits pressed against my chest. I felt like I was going crazy – and I knew there were only two things that would cure my current obsession with her perfect, taut body: drinking and fucking.

I intended to do both.

"Rodrigo, it's Alex,
como estas
?" I asked down the phone.

"Alex, I'm good – how you doing man?" he replied. His tone was upbeat, but I knew better – deep down, he was bored as fuck.

"Not bad, not bad," I agreed, "just playing FIFA."

"The soccer game?" He laughed. "They got you in it yet?"

I looked at the little character who represented me on screen. He wasn't anywhere near as handsome as me, but he wasn't bad for a pixelated computer game. "Oh yeah." I grinned.

"Feels good, doesn't it," Rodrigo asked, "to know that millions of people around the world are playing as you every day?"

I hadn't thought about it like that, but Rodrigo was right – it did. It felt damn good. Still, I didn't want to spend my Thursday evening in at home playing on my PlayStation, nice as my new villa was. I leaned back on the grey suede, L-shaped couch and tossed the controller to one side.

"You're right, man, it does. But I get to do it for real – that's what really feels good."

"Too true," he agreed. "Why you calling?"

"Fancy going out for a drink?" I asked. "I'm losing my mind in here. I need to find a woman."

Rodrigo laughed. "Have you got laid since you got to Barcelona?" he asked. "What's it been, two weeks now? I'd be going crazy, too."

I cast my mind back to a perfect, tanned brunette that I'd picked up after leaving Adria's bar a few nights before. She'd been a good lay, but I felt nothing for her. Certainly not enough to call her up and have her back over, though I knew that was exactly what she'd expected when she'd punched her number into my cell phone before putting her bra back on.

"Of course I have," I laughed, "but you can never get enough, you know?"

"I feel you, Alex," he replied. "I heard about a party at the W Hotel down by the beach – want to check it out?"

"Sounds good. See you at ten?"

"Alex," he laughed, "remember this is Spain – not America. I'll see you in the bar at midnight."

"Midnight," I repeated, "got it."

Six hours to kill
, I thought, stretching languidly and casting my eye around my new villa. I'd gone straight from foster care to college, and the sum total of my possessions when I'd signed for Barcelona had added up to about three cardboard boxes – moving in had been pretty easy.

The previous owner had died, or gone bankrupt – something like that, and my lawyers had negotiated a package deal for the villa and the furniture in one. As my eye danced from possession to possession, though, I wasn't particularly impressed by what I saw. Green leather, bronze-studded lounge chairs bracketed the tall, dark mahogany bookshelves, and the only possession I'd added so far – the grey suede couch I was lying on – looked conspicuously out of place.

Still, not bad for a twenty-one-year-old orphan.

And I hadn't bought the white-walled villa for its interior design, because I had every intention of ripping that out and replacing it with something entirely modern. No, I'd bought it because it was set in acres of green space only a short drive down the Mediterranean coastline from Barcelona – just off the promenade at Sitges. I'd had enough of inner-city living as a kid, and though Barcelona was about as far away from Compton with its soaring fifteenth century architecture and thousand-year-old cathedrals, I still yearned for open space, and freedom.

Having my own pool was pretty nice, too.

I
drained
my gin and tonic, noticing the faintest scent of lemon tickling my nostrils as I raised the glass to my lips. The ice cubes tinkled as I set it down on the long oak wood dining table. I didn't bother clearing it away – I was pretty sure the villa came with a cleaner, and if it didn't, it would soon…

After all, I had better things to do. Right now, for example, I wanted to get laid. I caught my reflection in a window and adjusted my brand-new suit jacket. I felt like James Bond, not Alex Rodriguez – but the more I caught glimpses of myself around the villa, the less I could tell the difference. The suit looked incredible – midnight blue, open collar and tailored to fit the ridges and lines of every one of my trained, thick muscles. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say the suit looked good, but
I looked
incredible in it.

I'd always been tall, tanned and tantalizingly attractive – but on top of that, I was now wealthy enough to wear a three-hundred-dollar shirt under a two-thousand-dollar suit. And unlike the rest of the crew I'd run with as a kid, I'd made it without slinging drugs.

As I walked over to the car, I couldn't stop thinking about how my life had changed the day I started kicking a soccer ball. We'd all played, all of us foster kids, and yet I was the only one who'd made it out – the only one who'd dedicated myself to something other than a life of crime. Why?

The gunmetal grey Audi blended into the darkness in the gravel driveway, and it looked like a stealth fighter revealing itself when the lights flashed after I keyed the remote control. I still couldn't believe that I was driving a car like this. I'd found myself involved in a few joyrides growing up, but we'd usually jacked cars from the broke side of town, so I'd never climbed into anything like this until the day I signed with Barcelona.

The car's powerful engine ripped apart the night's gentle solitude the moment I turned the key, but luckily I only had a couple of neighbors, and what few I had mostly owned similarly powerful cars. The twenty-five-mile drive to the W Hotel, an enormous thirty-story building built in the shape of an elegant sail, would normally have taken forty minutes, but the pacey sports car ate up the miles without complaining, and before long, I was slowly easing the car towards the valet station.

"How much?" I asked the maroon-jacketed attendant.

He looked surprised. "Oh, no sir – it's free."

I shot a grin and tossed him a hundred-euro note, leaving the Audi's keys in the car. "Then take it as a tip," I offered generously.

I saw his eyes shoot surreptitiously down to the note, then widen as he noticed the size of the denomination. He was clearly well-trained, because he barely reacted otherwise, just inclined his head and nodded graciously. "Thank you, sir. When will you be back?"

I chuckled. "I'll keep it here overnight. I probably won't be in any fit state to drive later on."

"Very good, sir," the valet agreed, now looking mildly surprised. I knew drunk driving was slightly more common in Europe, but I thought his reaction was slightly overblown.

I strode into the modern, glass-fronted lobby and headed straight for the bank of elevators. A couple of stunning, tanned local girls in cocktail dresses noticed me, and I watched them, hiding my grin, in the many mirrors strewn across the lobby as they followed me, giggling to each other.

The elevator bank pinged just a couple of seconds after I stabbed the button, and the doors opened on an empty lift. I stepped inside, touched the button for the Sun Deck and turned to face the front, graciously holding the open-doors button down to allow the strikingly attractive girls inside. They blushed in thanks and stood directly in front of me.

"Which floor?" I asked.

I watched as they both, in tandem, looked down at the illuminated button I'd pushed.

"Oh, don't worry," one of the girls, with sandy sun-bleached hair and a form-fitting red dress that barely stretched past her hips, giggled, "it looks like we're going to the same place."

"What are the chances of that…" I replied dryly.

The doors closed and the elevator whisked us upwards at a rate of knots, which made my stomach do back flips. The red dress girl's friend, an equally attractive, petite girl in a slightly more demure black cocktail dress took the opportunity to drop – or pretend to drop – her purse, sending the contents skittering across the elevator's marble floor. I started to bend down in order to help out, but the girl quickly interrupted me.

"Oh, it's fine," she laughed, "I do it all the time." She bent down, deliberately hinging at her hip so that her tight dress both rode up and tautened over her pert, firm ass. It was barely an inch away from my cock, and I wanted nothing more than to reach out and grab it. It took a monumental force of effort not to…

Luckily, I was saved by the bell as the elevator came quietly to a halt and the doors opened up. The party was in full swing on the Sun Deck, and I was dying for another drink. The single gin and tonic I'd allowed myself in order to stay under the limit before leaving the villa had only been enough to pique my appetite, not salve it.

"Are you coming to dance?" the girl in the black dress asked, artfully turning her body just enough that her perfectly tight body was accentuated and the side of her breasts peeked out of her dress.

I grinned rapaciously, my eyes greedily drinking in her body. "You bet," I agreed, "but I'll see you there, okay?"

She pouted, disappointed. "I guess…" she said, then flounced off.

I shrugged at her departing back and shoved my foot in between the elevator doors before they closed. I could have her any time I wanted, and we both knew it. Anyway, judging by the jealous looks her friend was giving her, it would probably be best for their relationship that nothing happened between us.

Unless, I thought, I could somehow engineer a threesome…

"Alex," Rodrigo shouted from the other side of the sparkling blue infinity pool, "you made it!"

"Fashionably late." I smiled, accepting a sparkling glass of champagne from one of the white-jacketed waiters. I had absolutely no idea who was paying for this party, and I didn't care, because I was A-list now – at least in this city. I strode over to my teammate with a broad smile on my face. "What are we celebrating?"

"Fuck knows!" He laughed, a slight slur giving away the fact that he wasn't exactly sober. "
Salut!
" he cried, clinking his champagne flute so firmly against mine that I feared that they might both break.

"
Salut!
" I agreed. "Find yourself a girl yet?" I asked, smiling. This wasn't like a college party – there was an abundance of women, and every single one of them was a nine or ten out of ten.

"Not yet, my friend," he replied, gesturing around, "but look, we're in luck tonight…"

I had to agree.

Around the edges of the infinity pool, which soared over the palm trees that were just about visible on the other side, women in tiny bikinis sat sipping drinks and dangling their bare legs in the water. One girl, inexplicably, was doing laps. I had no idea why – of all the times to get exercise, this wasn't high on my list.

My cock felt like a volcano – ready to blow. Being around these girls was like a form of torture, except at least I was in charge.

"What time's training tomorrow?" I asked, putting my hand over Rodrigo's ear and speaking loudly over the pumping soundtrack.

He looked at me and laughed, clapping his hand onto my shoulder. "Usual time, buddy. It's an open session, did you know?"

"What the hell's that?" I asked, dreading turning up at the ground the next morning. It was already one – I'd probably only get a couple of hours sleep. I shrugged. Whatever I did now, I was going to feel terrible, so I decided I may as well enjoy it.

"They hold two every season in the youth team stadium. The press and public turn up and watch us train, that's all."

I groaned. "Just my luck, the whole world's going to see me puking my guts out on the touchline." I drained my glass, aghast at the thought. Within seconds, the empty was replaced with a fresh flute of sparkling wine.

"Yup." Rodrigo grinned.

"How big's the youth stadium?" I asked, expecting my teammate to pick a number in the hundreds.

"Ten thousand." He grinned. "Not bad, eh?"

I groaned again. "And you said press as well?" I asked, Diana's tantalizing face suddenly appearing in my mind's eye. The last thing I wanted was for that beautiful temptress to turn up and see me playing through a hangover like an amateur. I scrunched up my eyes, angrily banishing her image. I was here to find a girl to take my mind off her – not to pine over her some more.

"Yup."

I drank my second glass of champagne, feeling the alcohol's heat rearing its head in my stomach. "Fuck it," I grunted. "I'm here now." I clapped Rodrigo on the back and pointed at a couple of bikini-clad girls who were eyeing him up. "Looks like you've got some admirers."

"I want the redhead," Rodrigo agreed thoughtfully. "I've never slept with a redhead."

"Enjoy, my friend." I laughed. "I'm going to find some pussy."

"Good luck," Rodrigo wished.