Liam
I manage to get my head back where it’s supposed to be before the puck drops. It’s a physical game. I end up in the box once but balance it out with an assist, and we eke out the win. But it was too close. Something Coach makes sure we know, and the press wants to talk about.
My attitude— or, more specifically, lack of one —means they don’t want to talk to me for long, and I’m out quick. Nichols is waiting for me outside the locker room.
“How bad does it look?” I ask when he falls into step with me. “The picture.”
“What do you think?” he asks, not giving anything away.
Shit, how bad could it look?
Once I got my mouth on her again, there was just her and me and this need rising faster than I could get control of it.
I stop just before the door to the players’ parking lot, turn back, and stare down the concrete corridor.
There’s no one coming, so I take a deep breath, hoping like hell whatever it is, it won’t cause problems for Stormy. “Lemme see.”
Nichols hands me his phone.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” For a second, I think about sending him into the concrete pylon with my fist. “You can barely make out our faces.”
We’re mostly in the shadows in the background. Yeah, my hand is in her hair, and the way her head is tipped back and her body is molded to mine say this kiss probably should have happened behind closed doors, especially with that sliver of ice blue showing beneath my shirt… thanks to my hand bunched in the back of it. But no one’s going to be looking at us.
No one is going to care who we are.
Nichols drops a hand on my shoulder and gets in front of my face to meet my eyes. “Diesel, man. This picture… It’s Boomer dipping a chick with his tongue down her throat and her knee hitched high enough to show some flash and his hand on the bare skin of her ass. This picture is going to get eyes.”
Oh shit, how’d I miss that?
Because all I saw was Stormy.
“This picture is already making the rounds on the boards. And while you can’t see exactly who you are, anyone who was there is going to know. Bunnies talk, and there’s a good chance someone might take note of the notoriously closed-off defenseman in a lip-lock with a pretty girl new to the scene.”
What does that mean for us? For Stormy?
I’m the boring guy. Kind of a dick, erring on the side of unfriendly. The press won’t care who the girl is in my arms.
I don’t sleep with bunnies. I don’t make headlines.
No one is going to want more information about her.
No one but me.
“I should probably stop out to the apartment and let her know about it. Make sure she’s not—”
“Misty already told her. She was fine.”
I suck my teeth. “Still, I should call.”
Nichols’s raised brow says what he thinks about that.
“Yeah, man. Sure, call.” He starts backing up, nodding over his shoulder. “Misty’s waiting for me out front, so I’m gonna head out.”
He takes off, and I let myself into my car where I sit and stare at my phone.
I want to call.
Maybe I want to call more than I should.
My thumb drums against the side of the phone, her smiling face staring back at me from her contact screen.
Fuck it.
I hit call and two rings later she answers, “My sister seems to think I’m about to become famous, but I’m not convinced it’s time to buy the oversized sunglasses just yet. How about you?”
She sounds relaxed. Amused, even. And I settle back in my seat, enjoying her voice.
“Have you seen the picture?” I ask, putting the car in gear and backing out.
“I have. And even I had a hard time focusing on us past Boomer and his… friend?”
“Comparatively speaking, we’re pretty tame. And it was New Year’s.”
She hums her agreement. “I could have been some girl walking past that you happened to reel in for a kiss when the clock struck twelve.”
Unlikely, but for this conversation? “Sure.”
Her laughter bubbles through the speakers, making me grin.
“You don’t think they’d buy it as a random act of kissy celebration?”
“Not really my style.”
“No. You’re more the marrying kind.”
And this time I’m laughing back.
“So that’s how it’s going to be….”
I’m reconsidering my stance on the friends thing. Not so much by choice— New Year’s we definitely crossed some lines that can’t be uncrossed —but because there seems to be something of an inevitability to a relationship between us.
I mean, I had to call her when I found out about the picture. And then from the road just to make sure nothing more had come up with it. And again, two days later, to see if the cable guy had fixed their signal. And one more time the day after… because we won, and I fucking wanted to.
So yeah. Inevitable. No sense fighting it.
Which is why, when we touched down this morning, instead of driving into the city, I drove to Hendricks & Hale Toy Company.
If I’d had any doubts about it being a family company, five minutes in the lobby listening to Amber and her sister Bea, who’s on break from “Receiving,” argue over whose turn it is to pick where they order lunch from is enough to rectify that.
The girls look like they’re in their early twenties, sound like they’re in their teens, and behave like they grew up playing in these halls. And something about their eyes and chin maybe, suggests a blood relation to my wife.
“Liam?”
I turn around and find Stormy crossing from the elevators, her eyes lighting up when they land on the coffees I brought.
“You are my very favorite human right now,” she says, taking one of the cups and bringing it up to her nose.
She’s wearing a winter blue skirt that ends neatly at her knees and a creamy silk blouse. Her heels are high, and I can’t help admiring the curve of her pretty legs.
Christ, it feels good to be close to her. “Bet you say that to all the guys who bring you flat whites with sweet cream.”
“She does,” Amber chimes in, standing to lean over the lobby desk as we pass.
Then Bea: “But bring one for me— a mocha —and I’ll only say it to you.”
I laugh and look back. “Next time. A mocha.”
“Two!”
We take the elevator up to three, and I follow as Stormy cuts past a handful of people whose heads all turn in unison as we pass on the way to her office.
“This is me,” she says, waving me through to a space that’s perfect for her.
There are light walls with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a snow-covered hill behind the building. At one end of the room, her desk, cabinets, and bookshelves are a dark chocolate finish with cream accents, clean lines, and stack upon stack of files, classic toys, and presentation materials atop them, and at the other, a couch and two chairs to match surround a low table with a small bonsai tree in the center.
It’s a little cluttered but no grunt’s office. This is the workspace of a hard-working woman poised to one day take over. Or at least that had been the plan before her ex turned her life upside down and she decided she’d rather move across the country than work with him.
Damn.
She closes the door behind us and walks over to where I lean against the window. We’re alone, and for a beat, I get the sense I’m not the only one resisting the urge to reach out and catch her hand so her fingers tangle with mine and I can feel that low hum over my skin in all the places we touch.
But in the end, I manage to keep my hands to myself.
“So, what did you want to talk about?” She takes a sip and moans a little, going back for another.
“It’s not a big deal. Checked in with the lawyers, and they’ve started with the paperwork.”
She raises a brow, waiting for me to add something like a critical need for more documentation, a signature, at the least. But standing across from her, my own coffee warm in my hand… I got nothing.
That was it.
I bring the coffee to my mouth, take a swallow. Watch her other brow rise to meet the first, pulling the corners of her lips along.
“Ahh.”
“Yep.” And suddenly I don’t care about looking like a tool or unnecessary visits. Because that smile is as much of a win as the game from last night.
And she doesn’t seem to mind, either. In fact, if anything, it seems like she may have swayed just that much closer. “Well, thank you. For letting me know.” She takes another sip and peers up at me through the fringe of her lashes in a way that’s downright flirty. “I wouldn’t have trusted the lawyers to pass on that kind of information.”
A laugh huffs out of me, and I look away, shaking my head. But then it hits me. There’s a kernel of truth there.
The lawyers could handle it.
Only, those fuckers are ruthless, and while I trust them with all other aspects of my life and career, I don’t trust them with her.
And hell, a part of me keeps thinking about that stricken look in her eyes when I told her I thought we should get a divorce. Like I was taking something from her when all I wanted was to give her something back.
She’s not fighting me on this, but a divorce wasn’t what she wanted. Even if it should have been. So yeah, maybe I want to make sure she’s okay as we move through the steps.
“Glad we’re on the same page. But actually, there’s something else we should probably talk about sooner rather than later.”
“What, suing me for alimony?” she teases, and I pull at my collar.
“Close, but not exactly.”
I tell her what I’m thinking, noting her easy posture go stiff, her arms cross, and the only sway I’ve got by the end is her body leaned away from mine.
“No.”
“It’s barely fair.” She could ask for a hell of a lot more.
“Fair? You mean because of all the time, love, and energy I put into supporting you and your career, because of the investment I made in our marriage?”
I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be easy.
“How about because of the way I locked you down for the last year.”
We’re back to the single brow-lift accompanied by some toe-tapping, that has me working double-time not to get distracted by her legs.
“So maybe I should pay you, then. Because I’m pretty sure the whole wedding thing was my idea.”
“You were trashed. And I mean both emotionally and in terms of what a breathalyzer would have shown.”
“You were drunk too.”
“Fine. We came up with it together.”
Her mouth twitches, a light coming into her eyes. “Over champagne and bourbon.”
I didn’t notice that I’d been closing the distance between us, but I must have because I’m standing barely an inch from her now, one arm propped against the window, her head tipped back, blue eyes peering up into mine. “You going through half a stack of cocktail napkins while you worked out our vows.”
“Those were some badass vows,” she says softly.
“‘I, Sexy Stranger, take you, the woman temporarily known as Jane Jones, to be my wife…’”
She sighs. “I loved that name.”
I like hers better. “‘To protect you from the bullshit of romance gone wrong…’”
“I’m pretty proud of that part.”
I drop my voice to a low rumble. “‘From this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…’”
She bites her lip.
“‘To stand between you and some undeserving fuckwit’s betrayal, until death do us part.’”
“You nailed the finish.”
I nod. “Right?”
Suddenly, her eyes go wide, and her lips part on a gasp. “Our prenup!”
My head drops back.
Why did I have to mention the napkins when one of them very clearly states that we leave this marriage with what we came into it with?
Shit.
I had a plan. Start high, negotiate down so at bare minimum she walked away with a new car, but hopefully more than that. Now she’s spinning away, hands in the air as she goes in search of the “contract” that won’t hold up in court anyway but, for some ungodly reason, she’s saved in a locked file drawer behind her desk.
She pulls the slim manila folder out with a flourish and then sashays back to me looking so smug and cute, I’m reaching for her before I even think about it. It’s instinct. Gut.
Hell, maybe it’s the memory of that dark bar and how she scrawled out the short terms of our agreement and then sealed it with a kiss that left a glossy imprint on the paper.
Whatever the reason, the result is my hand at the curve of her waist, drawing her in so our bodies meet, pinning the folder closed between us. It’s her breath hitching just that little bit. Her eyes lifting slowly to meet mine.
Jesus, I should let her go. Get my big mitt off her, except all I can do is look at where my fingers span that soft dip, feel the heat of her body, and tell myself I’m supposed to be setting her back a step, not pulling her forward.
Only then do I realize I’m not the one pulling her in at all. My hand is on her waist, yeah, my fingers firm in a hold I’m trying to talk myself out of, but it’s her drifting infinitesimally closer. And suddenly it’s a year ago and I’m staring at the woman who just became my wife, and I realize I don’t want to let her go at all.
“Yo babe, got any paper clips?”
My head snaps toward the now open door to Stormy’s office and the fuckwit who just strode in without knocking… and called her babe.