Page 57 of Going for Gold (Sweet Cravings 3)

Bryce only had one beer. Instead of celebrating hard like everyone else seemed to be doing here, he was snuggled up next to me in our booth. I rested my head on his shoulder. I had never felt this comfortable around anyone before.

"Are you sure you don't want to dance before we go?" Tim asked. "I'd love to show you my moves."

Kristen laughed. "Not tonight. But speaking of dancing, Alina and I volunteered to be dancers in the tiebreaker. Not that it's ever going to come to that."

"Oh my God. That's fabulous," Tim said.

"And we need backup dancers..."

"Say no more," Tim said. "I can take over from here. I'll be your choreographer. We can have auditions for proper backup dancers tomorrow after your game. I'll be a dancer too, obviously. But Bryce and Alex will have to be understudies. They don't have the proper balance and grace required for this type of dance. Which one of you is the leading lady?"

"Kristen," I said. "I'm just the understudy." I looked up at Bryce. "It would be awesome if you'd be my fellow understudy."

"If it means hanging out with you, then absolutely. But like Tim said, I don't have the proper balance and grace required for that type of dance. So hopefully it doesn't come to that." He winked at me.

"Alex!" Tim yelled when Alex got back to the table. "We get to dance in front of the entire world!"

"Umm...what?"

Tim filled in Alex as we all walked back to their dorm and began talking strategy with Kristen. I tuned them out. I didn't care what their strategy was. There was no way I was ever going to be a part of that dance.

"Didn't Gabriela Santos volunteer for Brazil?" Bryce asked.

"Yeah."

"So you want to completely annihilate her in your volleyball game and in the tiebreaker?" He smiled at me.

"That doesn't sound so bad. But I'm just going to beat her in volleyball. I'm not actually going to dance in the tiebreaker. Besides, there isn't going to be a tiebreaker."

"Well, it was brave to volunteer."

I never considered myself brave. "Kristen kind of tricked me into it."

"Still."

The way he was looking at me made my face flush. I had worn the dress to dinner that I thought was too sexy for our first date. The sparkly one that Kristen had deemed appropriate and I had deemed inappropriate. But tonight I wanted to look sexy. If Bryce made a pass at me, I wasn't going to deny him. Hell. Having sex tonight would probably help me focus better in the game on Saturday. Because recently sex was on my mind a lot more than volleyball. All I could think about since Bryce won gold was how his lips felt on mine and how his hands felt on my ass.

We walked up the stairs to their room.

"I'm sorry it's such a mess," Tim said immediately after he flicked the light on in their room. He ran over to his perfectly made bed and plumped the pillows. And then he removed his athletic shorts from the ironing board and put them in a drawer.

Who irons athletic shorts? In fact, the label on them probably specified "do no iron." Or maybe it didn't, because no one in their right mind would do it anyway.

Alex turned the TV on and flopped down on the only couch.

Bryce adjusted the pillows on his bed to lean against the headboard so that we could sit up. "Is this okay?"

I was already kicking my shoes off. "It's great." I slid onto his bed and pulled the sheets up to my waist.

His Adam's apple rose and fell as he watched me climb into his bed. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned toward the TV.

For a moment he seemed engrossed in the news report about some table tennis player losing.

"He was walking around like he had something up his ass," Tim said.

Bryce shook his head. He was probably wondering why Tim knew what that looked like.

"What movie should we watch?" Alex asked. He was scrolling through the list of titles available on demand.

---