“Your leg.” Panic took my voice an octave higher. “Put me down. You shouldn’t even be standing on your own right now.”
“I’m not planning on staying vertical for much longer. Don’t worry, Do . . .” He caught himself, clearing his throat as he stepped out of the tub with me still in his arms. “Allie.”
“Put me down now, Archer.”
“No.”
“Dammit.”
His jaw set as he held me tightly, my struggle to get free useless. “I will put you down when I’m damn good and ready to put you down.”
“I’m supposed to be helping your leg get better. Not make it worse.” I wiggled against him, but his grip was unbreakable. He had almost a solid foot of length and fifty pounds of weight on me. Not to mention a solid ton of resolve and determination. “Put me down right this second, or so help me god, I will change my position on the whole needing you in me stance.”
“You can change your stance on the position all you want. I like them all.” His hand smacked my ass when I continued to struggle against him. So help me god, if he injured himself even worse, I was not letting him out of an ice bath for the next forty-eight hours. “So long as I get to have my dick buried deep inside you, the position’s of little concern to me.”
His dirty words had my legs tightening around him even though I was still trying to pull away. “Let me go, Archer.” My words came out slowly, as much an order as they were a threat.
“Fine,” he fired back right before his arms freed me, sending me spilling onto the mattress behind me. The mattress whined as my body bounced onto it. “Now let’s get these panties you’ve got in a serious bunch off of you.”
Even though the material was pasted to my skin from the bath, Archer had no problem peeling my pants down my body in one quick pull. He threw them over his shoulder, sending them smacking into the wall behind him.
Staring at me spread below him on his bed, a crooked smile christened Archer’s face. Something flashed in his eyes when they roamed my bare chest. When they roamed lower, his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Your panties. Take them off.”
My heart was about to burst out of my chest. What resided between my legs was pulsing with need. The rest of my body was bursting into flames, need fueling the fire.
Even through all of that, I was still pissed at him for not listening to me and risking injuring himself even worse.
“You don’t listen to me. I think I’m going to repay the favor.” My fingers curled around one of the pillows stacked on his bed, and I sailed it at his face.
Archer merely slid a little to the side and the pillow whizzed past him. “Fine. Keep them on. I can work around a little fabric. No problem.”
When his hand dropped to stroke himself a couple of times as he stared at the area between my legs, my fingers found their way beneath the sides of my panties, pulling them down my hips.
“Shit, that’s hot.”
Finishing pulling my panties off my feet, I flung them at his face too. This time he didn’t step out of the way.
“What’s hot? This . . .” My gaze moved down to the freshly exposed part of my body.
Archer wet his lips when his eyes followed mine. “It’s hot that I can tell you to do something and you do it. That’s hot.”
His hands dropped to my bent knees, slowly opening them until he could step between them. His gaze never left the area between my legs.
“This . . .”—the way he said it, the way he was looking at it, made every muscle in my body tighten—“is the damn finest sight I’ve ever laid my eyes on.” When my eyebrow lifted as I leaned up onto my elbows, he added, “Even better than the sight of that scoreboard at the end of tonight’s game, or the scoreboard at the end of any game I’ve ever played and won.” He didn’t stop opening my legs until they could go no farther.
“Not sure how I feel about you comparing that part of my anatomy to a scoreboard, but I think you meant that as a compliment. So thanks?”
“Damn straight I meant that as a compliment.” Archer yanked open the nightstand drawer and reached inside . . . only to find a hotel bible. “So not what I was looking for.” He groaned.
“Conditioned response?” I said, touching myself as he rushed over to one of his suitcases by the door.
“More like some combination of wishful thinking and my dick using up the blood supply that normally carries oxygen to my head.” When I raised an eyebrow at him now throwing things out of his suitcase as he searched, he tapped his temple. “This head.”
“Ah, got it. So you keep condoms in your nightstand at home and your suitcase when you’re on the road?”
“Hopefully,” he said as shoes and shirts continued to tumble out of his bag.
“Hopefully?”