Beautiful Player (Beautiful Bastard 3)

She pulled back a little and looked at me, wearing an amused smile. “That doesn’t make you receptive and deep, Will. No one says a player has to be an a**hole.”

I rubbed my face. “I just think the word ‘player’ has a connotation that doesn’t fit me. I feel like I try harder than that to be good to the women I’m with, to talk about what we’re doing together.”

“Well,” she said. “you haven’t talked to me about what you want.”

I hesitated, my heart exploding in a wild gallop. I hadn’t, and it was because it felt so different with her from every other time I’d been with a woman. Being with Hanna wasn’t just about intense physical pleasure; it also made me feel calm, and thrilled, and known. I hadn’t wanted to discuss this because I hadn’t wanted either of us to have the chance to limit it.

Taking a deep breath, I murmured, “That’s because with you, I’m not really sure if what I want is sex.”

She pulled away, sat up slowly. The sheets slid off her body and she reached for a shirt at the end of the bed.

“Okay. This is . . . awkward.”

Oh, shit. That hadn’t come out right. “No, no,” I said, sitting up behind her and kissing her shoulder. I pulled her shirt from her hands, dropping it on the floor. I licked down her spine, slipping my hand around her waist and sliding up, resting my palm over her heart.

“I’m trying to find a way to say I want it to be more than sex. I have feelings for you that go way past sexual.”

She stilled, growing completely frozen. “You don’t.”

“I don’t?” I stared at her rigid back, my pulse picking up from anger rather than anxiety. “What do you mean I don’t?”

She stood, wrapping the sheet around her body. Ice slid into my veins, cooling every part of me. I sat up, watching her. “Are you—what are you doing?”

“I’m sorry. I just—I have some stuff to do.” She walked over to the dresser, began pulling things from a drawer. “I need to get to work.”

“Now?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So I tell you I have feelings and you’re kicking me out?”

She spun around to face me. “I need to go right now, okay?”

“I can see that,” I said, and she limped into the bathroom.

I was humiliated and furious. And I was terrified this was it. Who would have thought I’d f**k it up with a girl by falling for her? I wanted to get the hell out of there, and I wanted to climb out of the bed, pull her back. Maybe we both needed to think about a few things.

Chapter Thirteen

I closed the door behind me and took a few deep breaths. I needed some space. I needed a minute to wrap my head around what the hell was going on. This morning I thought I’d been discarded like one of Will’s many conquests, and now he was saying he wanted more?

What the fuck?

Why was he complicating this? One of things I loved about Will was that people always knew where they stood with him. Good or bad, you always knew the score. Nothing about him had ever been complicated: sex, no complications. End of story. It was easier when I didn’t have the option to consider more.

He’d been the bad boy, the hot guy my sister fooled around with in a shed in the backyard. He’d been the object of my earliest fantasies. And it wasn’t that I’d spent my youth pining over him—the opposite, in fact—because knowing I could lust for him, but never actually stood a chance, made it easier somehow.

But now? Being able to touch him and have him touch me, hearing him say that he wanted more when there was no way he could actually mean it . . . complicated things.

Will Sumner didn’t know the meaning of more. Hadn’t he admitted to never having even a single long-term monogamous relationship? Having never found anyone who kept him interested long enough? Didn’t he get a text from one of his nongirlfriends the morning after we first had sex? No thanks.

Because as much as I loved spending time with him, and as fun as it was to pretend I could learn from him, I knew that I would never be a player. If I let him into more than my pants—if I let him into my heart and fell for him—I would submerge.

Deciding I actually did need to get to work, I started the shower, watching as steam filled the bathroom. I moaned as I stepped under the spray, letting my chin drop to my chest and the sound of water drown out the chaos in my thoughts. I opened my eyes and looked down at my body, at the smeared black ink on my skin.

All that is rare for the rare.

The words he’d drawn so carefully across my hip were now bleeding into each other. There were marks where the ink had rubbed off onto his hands, and touches that alternated between pressing bruises and feather-light caresses had left a necklace of smudged fingerprints between my br**sts, over my ribs, lower.

For a moment I let myself admire the gentle curve of his handwriting, remembering the determined expression on his face while he’d worked. His brows had knitted together, his hair fell forward to cover one eye. I was surprised when he didn’t reach up to push it back—a habit I’d come to find increasingly endearing—but he was so focused, so intent on what he’d been doing he’d ignored it and continued meticulously inking the words across my skin. And then he’d ruined it by losing his mind. And I’d freaked out.

I reached for the loofah and covered it in way too much body wash. I began scrubbing at the marks, half of them gone already from the heat and pressure of the spray, the rest dissolving into a sudsy mess that slipped down my body and into the drain.

With the last traces of Will and his ink washed from my skin and the water growing cold, I stepped out, dressing quickly and shivering in the cool air.

I opened the door to find him pacing the length of the room, running clothes back in place and a beanie on his head. He looked like he’d been debating leaving.

He whipped off his hat and spun to face me. “Fucking finally,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?” I said, temper flaring again.

“You’re not the one who gets to be mad here,” he said.

My jaw dropped. “I . . . you . . . what?”

“You left,” he spit out.

“To the next room,” I clarified.

“It was still f**ked-up, Hanna.”

“I needed space, Will,” I said, and, as if to further illustrate my point, walked out of the bedroom and down the hall. He followed.

“You’re doing it again,” he said. “Important rule: don’t freak out and walk away from someone in your own house. Do you know how hard that was for me?”

I stopped in the kitchen. “You? Do you have any idea what kind of a bomb that was to drop? I needed to think!”

“You couldn’t think there?”

“You were nak*d.”

He shook his head. “What?”

“I can’t think when you’re nak*d!” I shouted. “There was too much.” I motioned to his body but quickly decided that was a bad idea. “It was just . . . I freaked, okay?”

“And how do you think I felt?” He glared at me, the muscles of his jaw flexing. When I didn’t answer, he shook his head and looked down, shoving his hands into his pockets. That was a bad idea. The waist of his track pants slipped lower, the hem of his shirt moved up. And oh. That little slice of toned stomach and hipbone was most definitely not helping.

I forced myself back into the conversation. “You just told me you don’t know what you want. And then you said you had feelings that went past sexual. I have to be honest, it doesn’t seem like you have a very good grasp on anything that’s going on here. The first time we had sex you basically brushed me off, only to now tell me you want more?”

“Hello!” he yelled. “I didn’t brush you off. I told you, it was jarring to have you be so cavalier—”

“Will,” I said, voice firm. “For twelve years I’ve lived with the stories of you and my brother. I saw the aftermath of you hooking up with Liv—she was hung up on you for months and I bet you had no idea. I’ve seen you sneak off with bridesmaids or disappear at family gatherings and nothing’s changed. You’ve spent the majority of your adult life acting like a nineteen-year-old guy, and now you think you want more? You don’t even know what that means!”

“And you do? Suddenly you know everything? Why would you assume that I knew this thing with Liv was so monumental? Not everyone discusses their feelings and sexuality and whatever comes to mind as openly as you do. I’ve never known a woman like you before.”

“Well, statistically speaking, that’s really saying something.”

I didn’t even know where all this was coming from, and the minute the words left my mouth I knew I’d gone too far.

All at once the fight seemed to leave him and I watched his shoulders fall, the air leave his lungs. He stared at me for a long beat, eyes losing their heat until they were just . . . flat.

And then, he left.I paced the old rug in the dining room so many times I wondered if I was wearing a track in it. My head was a mess, my heart wouldn’t stop pounding. I had no idea what had just happened, but all along my skin and into my muscles I felt tight and tense, afraid that I had just chased off my best friend, and the best sex of my entire life.

I needed something familiar. I needed my family.

The phone rang four times before Liv picked up.

“Ziggy!” my sister said. “How’s the lab rat?”

I closed my eyes, leaning into the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. “Good, good. How’s the baby maker?” I asked, quickly adding, “And I was most definitely not talking about your vag**a.”

Her laugh burst through the line. “So the verbal filter hasn’t grown in yet. You’re going to confuse the hell out of some man one day, you know that?”

She didn’t know the half of it. “How’re you feeling?” I asked, steering the conversation to safer waters. Liv was married now and very pregnant with the first, oft-heralded Bergstrom grandchild. I was surprised my mother ever left her alone for more than ten minutes at a time.

Liv sighed, and I could imagine her sitting at the dining room table in her yellow kitchen, her giant black Labrador moving to lie down at her feet. “I’m good,” she said. “Tired as hell, but good.”

“Kiddo treating you okay?”

“Always,” she answered, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “This baby’s going to be perfect. Just wait.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “I mean, look at its aunt.”

She laughed. “My thoughts exactly.”

“You guys picked a name yet?” Liv was thoroughly set on not knowing the sex of their incoming package until it was born. It made spoiling my new niece or nephew a lot more difficult.

“We may have narrowed it down.”

“And?” I asked, intrigued. The list of gender-neutral names my sister and her husband had come up with was bordering on comical.

“Nope, not telling you.”

“What? Why?” I whined.

“Because you always find something wrong with them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I gasped. Though . . . she was right. So far her name choices were terrible. Somehow she and her husband Rob had decided that tree names and types of birds were gender-neutral and fair game.

“Now what’s new with you?” she asked. “How has your life improved since your epic showdown with the boss man last month?”

I laughed, knowing of course she meant Jensen, and not Dad, or even Liemacki.

“I’ve been running, and getting out more. I mean, we came to sort of a . . . compromise?”

Liv didn’t miss a beat. “A compromise. With Jensen?”

I’d spoken to Liv a few times in the past weeks, but had steered clear of my growing friendship, relationship, whatevership with Will. For obvious reasons. But now I needed my sister’s thoughts on all of it, and my stomach clenched into a giant ball of dread.

“Well, you know Jens suggested I go out more.” I paused, running my finger around a swirling pattern carved into the antique hutch in the dining room. I closed my eyes, wincing as I said, “He suggested I call Will.”

“Will?” she asked, and a beat of silence passed in which I wondered if she was remembering the same tall, gorgeous college-aged lad that I was. “Wait—Will Sumner?”

“That’s the one,” I said. Even talking about him made my stomach twist.

“Wow. Was not expecting that.”

“Neither was I,” I mumbled.

“So did you?”

“Did I what?” I asked, instantly regretting the way it came out.

“Call him,” she said, laughing.

“Yeah. Which is sort of why I’m calling you today.”

“That sounds deliciously ominous,” she said.

I had no idea how to do this, so I started with the simplest, most innocuous detail there was. “Well, he lives here in New York.”

“I thought I remembered that. And? I haven’t seen him in ages, sort of dying to know what he’s been doing. How’s he look?”

“Oh, he looks . . . good,” I said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. “We’ve been hanging out.”

There was a pause on the line, a moment where I could almost see the way Liv’s forehead would furrow, her eyes narrowing as she tried to find the hidden meaning in what I’d said.

“?‘Hanging out’?” she repeated.

I groaned, rubbing my face.

“Oh my God, Ziggy! Are you banging Will?”

I groaned, and laughter filled the line. Pulling back, I looked at the phone in my hand. “This isn’t funny, Liv.”

I heard her exhale. “Yes, it totally is.”

“He was your . . . boyfriend.”