Hoops (22 page)

“He needs you,” Carolyn said deliberately. “You’re good for him.”

A film of tears appeared in Helene’s eyes, and she seemed robbed of her usual chatter.

Taking Helene’s arm to guide her over a particularly large patch of half-melted ice, Carolyn added more lightly, “Besides, what would you do with all your wonderful wool clothes?”

Helene patted Carolyn’s gloved hand on her arm in thanks. “You wait and see, Carolyn Trent. I’ll disappear to Bermuda one winter just like the robins. Not all of us have something tall and charming to ward off the chill of these Wisconsin winters.”

She hardly heard Helene’s discussion of C.J.’s visit with Stewart to view some old campus movies. Color—unrelated to the raw air—flooded her cheeks. In the past three weeks Carolyn had heard several vague comments about her relationship with C.J. She and C.J. had agreed to be discreet. But more and more she wondered if it was a matter of public knowledge that he spent more nights at her place than his.

“You know I can’t get cable at my place like you do here,” he’d said offhandedly one night while flipping from basketball game to basketball game. “You get a lot more games. I wish I could tape some of these.”

“You could set your VCR up here.”

The offer had been carefully casual. She’d adamantly shut off any efforts of her mind to analyze or label her feelings for C.J. Draper. But when his blue eyes had turned toward her, she’d felt her heart hammering. What was she getting herself into? Did he read this as a preliminary step to giving permanency to their relationship? Did she?

Either he didn’t see her trepidation or he ignored it, because he simply said thanks.

The next day he brought the machine over.

It was just a VCR and some videotapes, she’d told herself. A simple practicality so he could tape more games. But when she curled up in his arms to read while he watched the tapes, practicality seemed a very distant concept. And it was even harder to remember that other people observed her and C.J. and did their own analyzing and labeling.

“That doesn’t change anything,” she said, more in answer to her own thoughts than to Helene.

“Of course not.” Helene’s look of surprise took on a shade of appraisal. “There’s no reason for it to change anything you don’t want changed. What are you worried about it changing?”

What was she worried about? That other people knew she was involved with C.J.? She’d never particularly cared for her private life being known, but surely that was one aspect of campus life she’d long accepted.

“I’m not worried about anything,” she assured Helene.

And only a tiny voice whispered cautiously to her: except perhaps tempting the fates by feeling so happy.

“Helene! Carolyn! Hold up there.” Dolph Reems came chugging up to them, already pulling open his satchel-like case. “Boy, am I glad I saw you, Carolyn. I’ve got to get over to my daughter’s for my grandson’s first birthday, or my life won’t be worth living. I’m already ten minutes late, and if I swing by your place, too, it’d take another fifteen. But I promised C.J. I’d get him these tapes from last season’s conference tournament today. He wanted to watch them before tomorrow’s practice.” He pulled out four videotapes and tumbled them into her unresisting hands.

“You know, I really think we have a shot at winning that tournament.” He continued on his way, still talking to them over his shoulder. “I really appreciate it, Carolyn. Tell C.J. I’m sorry ’bout not getting them to him earlier. I had to pick up the cake. Bye. Bye, Helene.” He climbed into his car, backed up and waved goodbye to them.

“My God, if Dolph Reems knows, everybody knows,” Carolyn sputtered at last.

“The secret is definitely out,” Helene said with barely controlled laughter. “Do you mind so terribly?”

Carolyn looked down at the tapes in her hands and said with a trace of wonder, “No.” She was just surprised. “It’s just Dolph . . . I mean, I’ve known him since I was a little girl, and he’s always seemed so straitlaced, but he . . .” She searched for a phrase to explain Dolph’s attitude and fell back on understatement. “He didn’t seem to mind.”

“Mind? He positively beamed. The man looked like Christmas and the Fourth of July had arrived together! You’d think he expected a commission as matchmaker!”

And now laughter overtook Helene. “When everybody knows Stewart and I are splitting it down the middle!”

* * * *

C.J. noticed the tapes on the table, but not right away. First, when he deposited the cartons of Chinese food he’d brought for dinner, he wrapped his arms around her from behind and kissed her neck. With the lettuce she was washing for a salad dripping in her hands, Carolyn could do no more than lean back against him and sigh.

That was enough.

He spread the fingers of one hand and let them graze the bottom curve of her breast. “Mmm. Salad’ll be good.”

“There’s not going to be any if you keep doing that.”

He loved the way her cool voice grew husky under his touch. His hand covered her breast, sensing it tighten through the slippery silk.

“If that’s the choice, I’ll take this,” he murmured against her neck. “I like this blouse.” His fingers began adeptly unbuttoning the white mother-of-pearl buttons down the front of the peach silk.

“Then why are you taking it off?”

“I like what’s underneath better.” His fingertips slipped inside the opened blouse and delved under the lacy edge of slip and bra to the ivory-smooth skin. One touch brought the rosy tip to tight attention.

“Oh, C.J.” She dropped the lettuce into the sink and twisted in his arms to face him, trying, still, to keep her wet hands away from him.

He bent to trail his lips along her jaw, then down her throat and lower. Slipping the straps from her shoulder helped him clear the way for his mouth to follow where his fingers had prepared. Wet hands were forgotten in the need to hold his head closer.

The phone jolted her back to the present. The sound of water running and the smell of Chinese food slipped back into her consciousness.

“Let it ring,” C.J. growled.

“We did that last night, remember? And never got any dinner. Tonight we eat, first,” she said as he helped her restore her clothing. Then she picked up the phone. “Hello? Oh, hello, Stewart.” She listened just a moment, then handed the phone to C.J. without looking at him. “It’s for you. Stewart.”

Even as he talked to Stewart about arrangements for the team’s tournament trip, he watched her. Searching, she knew, for some reaction to Stewart’s easy assumption that C.J. could be reached at her apartment. She wasn’t sure herself if her lack of reaction resulted from the numbness of shock or disinterest in something basically trivial.

Quickly she finished the salad and set the table. By the time she’d brought the food, C.J. was hanging up. He sat down with his usual easy motion, but she sensed an added tension in him. Perhaps Stewart’s assumption bothered him. He wasn’t a man accustomed to being considered part of a twosome.

“What are these?” He patted the stack of videotapes as she served the salads.

“Dolph gave them to me.” Her casualness was impressive. “I ran into him this afternoon and he asked me to bring them . . . here to you.” She’d almost said “home to you,” but had faltered at the last second.

He tightened momentarily. More a stillness of his face than an obvious tension in his muscles. Then he relaxed.

Carolyn felt her breath come again as they dug into the cartons of Chinese food. Some milestone had been passed.

She didn’t have to identify it to be glad it was behind them.

“Must be the tapes of last year’s conference tournament. I wanted to look at them again. With only a week left we’ve got a lot of practicing to do.”

C.J. talked on about basketball while they ate chicken cashew and shrimp and vegetables, but all the while one level of his mind tried to weigh Carolyn’s reaction. For his part he didn’t give a damn who knew. She was the one who wanted discretion. He would shout it from the chapel’s bell tower if they’d let him. But she didn’t want it that way.

Her marble mask had been held in place by a lot of ideas of what a proper professor should and should not do. He’d wondered—and tried hard not to—how she’d feel when the pairing of Professor Trent of the English Department and Coach Draper of the basketball team became public knowledge. He hadn’t acknowledged the possibility that she’d recoil, but it had been there.

Having the tacit declaration of that public knowledge delivered virtually back to back by the two men who were the closest things to father figures in her life should have really thrown her for a loop. But she’d hardly batted an eye.

It didn’t reassure him.

C.J. didn’t consider himself an insecure man. This was something different.

He told her the team had a real shot at some upsets in the conference tournament, maybe even winning the title and the automatic berth to the national tournament that went with it. Even without the title, the team could get invited to the national tournament as a wild card.

And he thought about how much he wanted her. All the time. Any time. Never had a woman excited him so easily, so unwittingly. Watching her in the kitchen, finding excuses to brush against her as they cleaned the dishes. Hearing her voice. Just knowing she was in the living room reading.

He’d lie in her bed holding her, stroking her soft hair. Totally satisfied, yet never having enough of her. His desire for her was a constant pool of gasoline that needed only the tiniest flick of flame from her for a conflagration.

“Okay, we’ve eaten first,” he declared, grasping her hand and tugging her toward the bedroom. “Now it’s time for seconds.”

* * * *

She wasn’t a jealous woman, but Carolyn could be jealous of basketball. A game for heaven’s sake. A boy’s game played by overgrown boys in shorts, squabbling and fighting over a silly orange ball. Good Lord, she even sounded like a jealous woman spitting venom at a rival.

In the afterglow of their lovemaking, lying naked with C.J.’s warm chest against her back and his arm thrown across her, how could she doubt his feeling for her? She didn’t. But when he talked about the conference tournament and what the team could do, she remembered his ambitions. Ambitions that all led away from Ashton and her.

What would happen after this season he was making such a success of? Would other schools want him sooner than even his dreams had foretold?

“Frank got a B plus on that history paper,” she told him, only partially aware of the impulse to remind him that his accomplishments with the team went beyond the court. “I don’t know why the old skinflint couldn’t have given him the A,” she grumbled. Where he nuzzled the back of her neck, she felt C.J.’s mouth lifting up into his uneven grin.

“Why do I feel like Ward Cleaver learning the Beave just got a good grade? Think I should take him out for an ice-cream sundae?”

Carolyn reached back to slap at his derriere, but found instead the hard muscle of his upper thigh. “Seriously, you should be proud of these guys. They’re really working hard—in the classroom, too, I mean.”

“Uh-huh,” he mumbled, feasting more deeply on the taste of the skin at her shoulder. “That’s the guys—Classroom All-Americas.”

“Well, there is an academic All-America team,” she objected. The unevenness of her voice betrayed the effect of the charges set off in her body by the feel of his muscles and the sensation of his mouth and tongue branding the back of her shoulder.

“Uh-huh.” The words sounded automatic. His mouth crested the ridge of her shoulder to the front, starting a slow, sensual descent toward another peak, already pebbled. “But no coach. Doesn’t help the coach any to have academic All-Americas.”

“Some coaches have clauses in their contracts for bonuses based on graduation rates. More and more schools are doing that, so the coaches who keep their players in school are rewarded.” She sensed his heightened interest in her words and felt unaccountably shy.

“How do you know about that?”

“Oh, I read it somewhere.” She pressed the flat of her palm against his buttock to draw him closer. His body hardened in delighted response. But the attempt at evasion and diversion seemed to intrigue him more.

He leaned over her to see her face. “Where’d you read it?”

“Some magazine,” she muttered.

He used the simple expedient of pressing her shoulder down into the mattress so that she lay on her back. That way, with his body half over hers, he could see into her eyes. “What magazine?” His grin popped in and out like sunshine behind fitful clouds.

There was no reason for embarrassment. Still, she felt a little silly. But he wouldn’t let it go. She knew him too well.
“Sports Illustrated.”

He looked into her mildly defiant face and laughed. Amusement, and something deeper, swelled his heart. He dropped back but pulled her with him so that they lay facing each other, side by side. “Professor Trent buying
SI
in a plain brown wrapper. I can see it now,” he teased, but without malice.

“I thought I should know more about the players’ interests,” she said defensively. “Their world.”
And yours
.

He saw those final, unspoken words in her eyes and experienced a glow, swift and warm, of a deeper emotion calling for a name he wasn’t quite ready to use. He trailed his hand lightly down to her breast, circling the nipple with infinite care. Then he slid one knee between hers and pulled her top leg up across him until it hooked over his hip.

When his hips moved and she felt the smooth, hard heat of him touch her, her system went haywire. She gasped and arched toward him, instinctively seeking deeper contact. She had just enough rationality left to know he was equally affected. She hardly recognized his voice—only the emotion—when he spoke.

“You’re quite a woman, Professor Trent.”

He slid inside her.

Chapter Eleven

C.J.’s predictions about the conference tournament nearly came true. The team won its first game easily, pulled an upset in the semifinals and just missed another one against the favorite in the championship game.