Page 81 of Endurance
I reach out and brush my thumb down her cheek. Her dark eyes swim with emotion. Her freckles like a canvas I could have painted myself. “Belle, my soul has grown with you. So much so, I wonder if it would have shrunk into nothing if I’d never met you.”
Her jaw drops as she huffs out a self-deprecating sort of laugh. Shaking her head, she replies, “I could have never seen you coming, Tanner.”
“I hope that’s a good thing,” I reply with a small smile.
She slow blinks and her face softens into my beautiful, warm Belle. Then she giggles, a look of disbelief twinkling in her eyes. “I can’t believe you’re the same man who told me women called you the thigh tickler!”
This makes me laugh. Hard. She joins in, too, and the sound of it mixed with mine soothes my troubled soul. Aching to feel her again, I lean down and crush her body to mine, encasing her with one arm behind her neck and the other around her ribcage. I use my lips to turn her smile into a kiss as I tip her back and breathe in the wildfire that is so quintessentially Belle.
Belle Ryan is unpredictable and the exact opposite of easy. But her spirit calls to me on some deep level that I cannot stay away from.
I straighten her back up and press my forehead to hers. “You inspire poetry, woman.”
She hugs me, rubbing her hands down my back. “I’m sorry for freaking out back there. I’ll apologise to your sister tomorrow.”
“Don’t even worry about it,” I reply, looking down at her. “Vi is in her own little bubble right now. I’ve never seen a happier family.”
Her brows lift. “You Harrises seem to have happiness figured out rather well.”
I frown. “We aren’t perfect. Far from it. You’ve got your family issues, I’ve got mine. If you share yours with me, I’ll share mine with you. Maybe then we can figure out the meaning of life.” I waggle my brows at her playfully.
“The meaning of life, you say?” She bites her lip around a sexy half-smile that makes my dick jolt. Her eyes narrow conspiratorially. “Let’s go ponder that over some chocolate.”
My brows climb. “As long as the chocolate is drizzled on your body, this thigh tickler is definitely in.”
Tanner and I visit Vi and Hayden at the hospital the next day. I was warned by Tanner that the baby was beautiful, but nothing could have prepared me for her hair. Adrienne, or Rocky, as all the Harris Brothers have apparently taken to calling her, is simply magic. I couldn’t stop touching her feathery hair as I held her for nearly an hour in their hospital suite.
When Tanner held her, however, it was less dreamlike. I could hardly stop laughing as he awkwardly tried to find a position to rest his arm. I kept picking at him to adjust her so her head wasn’t sagging back, and he just snapped back at me like he knew how to figure it out because he wasn’t a moron. So I asked him if he was sure about that because I seem to remember him naked on a street corner only a month ago. That escalated into a quarrel of epic proportions.
Since he had Rocky in his arms, we weren’t flat out screaming at each other like we wanted to. We were talking in slow, saccharinely sweet voices and smiling bright white teeth as we calmly called each other a knobhead spunk bubble and a nagging know-it-all cow.
Vi and Hayden didn’t know what to say, except for, “Thank God Adrienne can’t understand words yet.”
Afterwards, in the hospital parking lot, Tanner leaned across the console of my car, grabbed my face in his hands, and kissed me with an aggression that revved more than my car engine. When he pulled away and said, “You looked absolutely beautiful holding my niece,” I think I died a thousand deaths.
Indie had warned me about on-season footballers and off-season footballers being so different, but what I witnessed the next week with Tanner is not at all what I expected.
Originally, I thought he might pull away once he started attending practices again, requiring some space to help get back into his routine and focus. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
After his first practice back, he showed up at my door, smelly kit and all, and asked me if I wanted a shower, a forking, and then a spooning. We ended up spending every night together after that.
But things aren’t exactly like they were before. Tanner is still goofy and he’s stillTanner, crude jokes and all, but he’s more…intense. More focused. Even in the bedroom.
We no longer just have sex. We create movement. We connect on a different level that’s so much more…soulful. The way he looks at me and the things he says while inside of me have given me the most powerful orgasms of my entire life.
So I have to say, I’m amassivefan of On-Season Tanner.
A few days into practice, after a particularly incredible session of love-making, Tanner spoons me and begins opening up as if the words have been aching to come out.
“Did you know Camden and I had our own secret language growing up?” he asks, his voice husky as he adjusts me so his left arm is tucked under me like a pillow. His right arm snakes around the dip of my waist and he pulls the back of my naked body flush against the front of his.
“Like cryptophasia?” I ask.
“Crypto what?” he asks, his breath puffing against the hair on my head.
“Cryptophasia is a language developed by twins that only they can understand,” I answer.
“Well, yeah then, I guess that’s what we had. Didn’t know there was a medical fucking term for it.”
