She stared at me, and I could see the war going on inside her head. The desire to pull away and run. The desire to stay. The desire to just flip me off and tell me to go to hell.
Finally, her stubbornness won out. She pushed my hands away, grabbed the bar, and waited for me to touch her again. I talked her through the placement of her stomach, back, and shoulders, and then watched as she did ten with barely a tremor.
“Just when I thought Dani Whittaker couldn’t astound me any more, you drop ten pull-ups like they’re nothing,” I told her. The honesty of my admiration hung in the air.
She pulled away. “Please. Like ten is anything big. How many can you do?”
“As many as needed.”
It wasn’t a brag. It was a fact.
“Oooohhkay. How many is that?” she asked.
“’Til I’m told to stop or everyone else has dropped.” She didn’t roll her eyes again, but I was pretty sure she wanted to. I followed her question up with one of my own. “How many push-ups can you do?”
Her lips quirked. “As many as needed.”
That made my lips twitch in response. “Challenge accepted.”
She laughed sarcastically. “Please. I’m not insane enough to think I can surpass a SEAL in the push-up count.”
“You’ve already shocked me. Are you afraid you’ll sully the image with some lame-ass girl push-ups?”I goaded her, knowing she couldn’t resist. I wanted to see her in action more.
“Sure, challenge me after I’ve already done the pull-ups,” she said dryly, but she went to a mat in the corner of the room, and I followed her.
We got down, facing each other, some kind of twisted mirror of each other. Two people who didn’t give in or give up easily.
She smirked at me and said, “I feel the need to set some rules of engagement.”
“This isn’t an operation, Athena,” I said with a full smile hitting my face. “But what did you have in mind?”
“You have to do two for every one of mine,” she said.
“Only two?”
“Don’t get all cocky on me now, Pretty Boy,” she said, and I couldn’t help my eyebrows going up at her word choice that brought us back to the last challenge we’d engaged in.
She did a push-up, and I did two. They were nothing to me. I’d been doing push-ups since starting military school; they were second nature, like taking a step or lifting my arm.
We continued to count off, and her breath got rocky fairly quickly whereas mine felt like I’d barely woken up. She made it to seventy-five before she stopped, rolling over on her back to catch her breath.
But that put her face even closer to mine. Her lips a millimeter away as I continued to do push-ups. If she turned her head, our mouths would merge. It was a beautiful torture as I continued to press. Up and down. Lips close, closer, backing away. So tempting. Taunting me.
I’d stopped counting, mesmerized by her look, and I about broke apart when she put her finger in her mouth as I lowered once more. She pulled it out, moving it slowly toward me while I stared, before suddenly sticking it in my ear.
I collapsed onto the mat with a grunt of surprise and a chuckle in my chest. “Holy shit, did you just give me a Wet Willy?”
She was up off the mat, laughing, allowing the tension which scoured us to drift away momentarily. A break in the campaign of animosity and desire. But there was no way I was letting her get away without retaliating.
I was up and after her before she could get anywhere near the door. I crushed her perfectly defined body up against the wall, gazing into her face as her eyes went wide. I stuck my finger in my mouth and then dragged it along her jaw. She squirmed, but she was laughing at the same time.
She tried, reflexively, to get her hand up to defend herself, but I grabbed both her wrists in one hand while rewetting my finger and outlining her ear and dragging it down to her neck. It was childish. An immature prank. And yet, with her, it felt nothing like a joke. It felt like foreplay I’d never be able to finish. I pressed my thigh against her pelvic bone and was rewarded with a little moan.
The fitness room door slammed shut, causing me to pull away, the noise startling us back to reality as Marco came around the corner. Out of the entire detail, he and Trevor were the two I’d found any grudging respect for. Surprise registered in his reflection in the mirror. He hadn’t seen anything damaging. He hadn’t seen anything that couldn’t be played off, but his wheels were still turning.
“Thank God,” Dani said. “Finally, someone who can give him some real opposition. I don’t think I’d survive if he challenged me to a sit-up competition.”
She grabbed her water bottle and her towel, heading for the door.
