Delay of Game

A Her Captain, Her Penalty Bonus Chapter
by Aurora North

This scene is too hot for Amazon. Elena and Sloane’s first off-season vacation — a Cape Cod beach house, no ice, no rules, and the captain’s very specific ideas about sunscreen application.

Elena

The beach house was Sloane’s idea.

“Off-season,” she said, sprawled across my couch in June with her legs in my lap and a rental listing open on her phone. “No ice. No drills. No hockey. Just us, a beach, and an aggressive amount of doing nothing.”

I said yes because I’ve learned that saying yes to Sloane Mercer is almost always the right decision, and because three days into the off-season I was already climbing the walls without a practice schedule and she knew it.

Now I’m standing on the deck of a rented cottage on Cape Cod, watching my girlfriend lose a fight with a bottle of sunscreen, and I’m thinking about discipline.

Not the hockey kind. The other kind.

“Elena.” Sloane holds up the bottle with both hands, like an offering. “I physically cannot reach my own back. This is a design flaw in the human body and I need you to fix it.”

She’s wearing a black bikini that I’ve never seen before and that I suspect she bought specifically for this trip because it’s doing things to her body that should require a permit. The top is a simple triangle that barely contains her breasts. The bottoms sit low on her hips, exposing the cut of her obliques and the compass tattoo on her wrist and the freckles scattered across her shoulders that I have personally kissed every single one of.

I take the sunscreen. “Turn around.”

She turns. Pulls her hair over one shoulder. The back of her neck is already starting to pink.

I squeeze sunscreen into my palm and press both hands flat against her shoulder blades. She hisses.

“Cold,” she says.

“You’ll survive.”

I work the sunscreen in. Slow, thorough. Her shoulders. The dip of her spine. The small of her back, where my thumbs press into the muscles on either side of her vertebrae and she makes a sound that’s half groan, half something else.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” she says.

“Turning sunscreen application into foreplay.”

“I’m protecting you from UV damage.”

“You’re rubbing my back with oiled hands while I’m wearing a bikini. That’s not dermatology. That’s a category on a website I’m not going to name.”

I press my thumbs harder into the knots at the base of her spine. She arches into the pressure and the sound she makes echoes across the empty beach.

“We haven’t been here four hours,” I say, “and you’re already trying to start something.”

She looks over her shoulder at me. Hazel eyes, bright in the sunlight.

“I haven’t started anything, Captain. I’m standing here being responsible about skincare.”

“You bought a bikini that’s three square inches of fabric.”

“I bought a bikini that fits.”

“It barely fits.”

“I know.” She grins. “You’re welcome.”

She tilts her chin up — the gesture, the angle, the defiant invitation that started everything.

“No rules.” She hooks one finger into the waistband of my shorts. Tugs. “Then I can do whatever I want.”

She tugs again. Harder. I step forward, into her space, and her back presses against the railing and my hands find her hips — bare skin, warm from the sun, slick with sunscreen.

She rises on her toes. Kisses me. Salt and lip balm and the particular sweetness of Sloane Mercer when she’s happy. I kiss her back, my hands tightening on her hips, and the June sun beats down on us and the ocean roars behind the dunes.

She breaks the kiss. Takes my hand. Pulls me inside.

Sloane

The beach house has one bedroom. White sheets, driftwood headboard, a ceiling fan turning lazy circles. The curtains are sheer. The light is golden. Everything smells like salt and wood and sunscreen.

Elena stands in the doorway watching me strip off the bikini top I wore specifically to make her lose her mind, and from the look on her face, the investment paid off.

“Come here,” I say.

“I’m enjoying the view.”

“Taking it off.” She crosses the room in three steps, and her hands are on me — sliding the bikini top straps off my shoulders, cupping my breasts, her thumbs brushing my nipples. “I’ve been thinking about this since the car ride down. Three hours of you in a sundress with no bra, and I had to maintain highway speed limits.”

She bends and takes my nipple in her mouth, and I gasp and grab her shoulders. Her tongue circles slowly, and her hand slides down my stomach and hooks into the bikini bottoms and pulls them down.

I step out of them. She’s still dressed — tank top, shorts, the captain’s watch on her wrist — and the asymmetry is its own kind of power exchange.

“On the bed,” she says. That voice. Eight months and it hasn’t lost a single volt of its charge.

She strips. When the watch comes off last, I know she means business. The watch is always last.

“Don’t hold back,” she says. “I want every sound you’ve ever held back. Every moan. Every scream. Give me too much.”

She works down my body with the patience of a woman who has nowhere to be for five full days. She kisses the hollow of my throat. Each rib, counted with her tongue. My hip bones, where she bites — hard enough to mark, gentle enough to make me want harder.

“God — Elena, please—”

“Please what?” She looks up from between my thighs. “Tell me what you want. Out loud. Full volume.”

“Your mouth. I want your mouth on me. Please, I need—”

She gives me her mouth.

The first stroke of her tongue tears a cry from me that bounces off the driftwood walls. She moans against me — the vibration sending shockwaves through my clit — and her hands grip my thighs and hold them open and she eats me like the ocean is right outside and she’d rather drown in this.

I’m loud. I’m so loud. Every sound I’ve stifled in eight months comes pouring out — moans and gasps and her name and profanity and the raw, unfiltered music of a woman being taken apart by someone who knows every note.

She pushes two fingers inside me while her tongue works my clit, and I scream — the sound ripping out through the open window toward the Atlantic Ocean.

She curls her fingers and sucks my clit and I come so hard my back arches completely off the bed and the orgasm tears through me in waves that feel tidal, oceanic, the kind that remake shorelines.

She crawls up my body. Kisses me. I taste myself on her mouth.

“Your turn,” I say. I push her onto her back, and the surprise on her face — the captain yielding the high ground — makes me want to devour her.

I go down on her with everything I have. She’s loud too, now. She groans and gasps and says my name in a voice that’s wrecked and wild and when she comes, her thighs clamping around my head, the sound she makes is the most uncontrolled thing I’ve ever heard from Elena Voss.

We lie tangled in the white sheets, damp with sweat, breathing ocean air through the open window.

“Best vacation I’ve ever been on.”

“It’s been four hours.”

“And I’ve already had the best orgasm of my life. Imagine what five days will do.”

She laughs. The full one. My favorite sound in any room, in any building, in any state.

“I have plans for every room in this house,” she says. “The kitchen counter. The shower. That reading chair by the window. The deck, if you behave.”

“I never behave.”

“I know.” Her hand tightens in my hair. Just enough. “That’s what makes it fun.”

I grin against her neck. “Yes, Captain.”

Her whole body responds. Eight months and that word still lands like lightning.

“Say it again,” she whispers.

“Captain.”

She rolls me onto my back. Pins my wrists. Looks down at me with dark eyes and messy hair and a smile that’s equal parts love and menace.

“We’re going to need more sunscreen,” she says.

I laugh. She kisses the laugh out of my mouth.

The ocean keeps crashing. The fan keeps turning. The afternoon stretches into evening, and we make good on her promise — every room, every surface, every sound we’ve ever held back — and when the sun goes down we sit on the deck with wine and watch the stars come out and the world is quiet and vast and ours.

“Hey, Captain?”

“Hmm.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Mercer. Now put on sunscreen. You’re burning.”

“Make me.”

She does.

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