Noah slid the napkin slowly to the side like it might strike out and bite him at any moment. “Let’s let this one sit a minute.” Then he picked up the last one and read, “I, Noah Hunt, am committed to abstaining from—” He read the rest in his head: sex for the duration of therapy. “Oh, hell no.” He crumpled it into a ball and tossed it over his shoulder. “That ain’t happening, chica. Let’s go back to this one…”
He reached for the dating napkin, but Julia was off her stool, retrieving the no-sex napkin.
“Throw that in the trash, beautiful. It hurts my eyes to look at it. Hurts my dick to think about it. Now, what’s this about no dating? Are you, perhaps, jealous?”
She set the offensive no-sex napkin back on the bar in front of him and met his eyes. “As I said, you need focus to achieve what you’re shooting for. Dating and sex will not get you back on that mountain. Commit to this for six weeks, and you can go back to your womanizing ways as soon as you own Snowmass.”
“Oh Christ.” He sat back, stunned. “You’re serious.”
“As a limb amputation.”
His mood soured. “Not funny.”
“Not trying to be.” She patted the napkin. “Sign them, Noah. Commit to your future for a change.”
“My future?” he said, growing serious and frustrated. “That’s all I’ve ever been committed to. A change would be committing to enjoying the moment.” He reached out and closed his hand over hers. “Enjoying you. The way we enjoyed last night. You can’t tell me you can just write that off as nothing.”
“Last night is the past. I told you, I don’t—”
“Sleep with your clients. I heard you.”
“Then we’re clear.” She straightened and met his look with a flaming beam of challenge.
She didn’t want him. And this was an easy way of getting around shrugging him off while still getting her cash. He should have known. It always came down to the almighty buck.
Great.
Fucking perfect.
“Fine.” He picked up the pen and signed both napkins, shoving them back at her.
He felt like a stupid two-year-old when he crossed his arms and proceeded to pout, but he couldn’t seem to control it.
She picked up the napkins, pulled them into one neat pile, and met his gaze. “Go change for your assessment and first workout. Then we’ll hit the grocery store for a crash course in nutrition and shopping, then end the day with a cooking lesson.”
“Scintillating.” He pushed back from the bar, looking forward to getting away from her for the first time since he’d set eyes on her thirty hours ago. “Can’t wait.”
Julia had forgotten how draining it could be to work with a difficult athlete. They required intense mental and emotional manipulation to get them to give their all to every workout. Other trainers might call it providing motivation. Julia had never been one to sugarcoat.
She stepped out of the shower in her suite and pulled a towel from the heated rack. Oh, the little luxuries wealth brought. She’d grown up with them all—the designer clothes, jewelry, nannies, tutors, trainers, chauffeurs. But as she dried with a towel heated to her body temperature, she was reminded that nothing money could buy replaced what a soul truly needed.
For her, it had been the unconditional love of her parents. She wondered what loss lurked in Noah’s psyche. She’d worked with too many professional athletes to believe he’d escaped the development of some black hole in his past. She’d gone through the harrowing training herself and knew exactly what a person had to give up to reach Noah’s level of expertise.
“Doesn’t matter,” she reminded herself. She was in a professional relationship with Noah, not a personal one. Professional therapists didn’t worry about damaged psyches unless it hindered performance, and that didn’t seem to be the case for Noah. “Just drop it.”
She wrapped the towel around her back, and her shoulders and biceps ached with the movement. Today, Julia had leveraged Noah’s obvious male vanity to light a fire under his ass during the workout by joining in. As she’d expected, he’d added weight, corrected lazy form, and pushed himself to beat her in some way—more reps, more weight, quicker finish. She sure as hell hoped she didn’t have to do that with every workout. Yes, she was committed to health, but she was no longer training for a two-hundred-meter butterfly against China’s gold medalist and would rather not feel like she was.
Julia fastened the towel between her breasts and reached for her moisturizer sitting on the vanity. She pumped the lotion over her fingers and spread it over her face, then her neck. A tingle of pain brought her gaze to the skin beneath her fingers as she touched her collarbone.
The small, red, diamond-shaped welt there shot her mind back twelve hours. To her cheek crushed against the mattress. To Noah’s weight forcing the front of her body into the softness on every long, deep stroke of his cock from behind. To her hands trapped against the bed at eye level, their fingers threaded, his flexing and clenching with each thrust. To his teeth sinking into the skin above her collarbone as she’d climaxed and bowed with pleasure so intense, she felt absolutely no pain.
Lust spiraled through her body, pooling between her legs. Her sex clenched against a surge of need, wet for him at the mere split-second memory.
Damn, last night had been good. Awesome. Spectacular. Noah had been a perfect balance of demanding dominant, and sensual explorer.
No, no, no. She forced her brain into the here and now. Last night was last night. Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. Their fleeting time together was in the past. And yes, that gave her a little ache at the center of her chest. But life wasn’t about sex. And they both had futures riding on their professional relationship.
Three sharp knocks sounded somewhere in the other room, making Julia jump. Then Noah’s muffled voice called, “Quinn, are we doing this sometime today? Looks like more snow is coming in.”