Power Play. Nancy Warren
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nose. When she told a lie they plumped up. Or maybe it was talking about sex that did it.
“So, I’m your boyfriend, huh?”
“I’m sorry. It was all I could think of.”
“It’s not so bad,” he said, thinking. “Should keep Buddy the orthodontist out of your mouth.”
She groaned. “That is a horrible pun. And you don’t know my family. They’ll want to meet you.”
He heard the panic in her tone. “Am I so terrible?”
“No. Of course not.” She looked at him dispassionately. “If you shaved and wore decent clothes, you’d be perfectly presentable. But they have this charming quality where if you get to thirty and are still single they panic and try to marry you off. To anybody.”
“Right. But look at the good side. I can be your beard. You don’t want to get married, I don’t want to get married. We’re not really a couple, so nobody’s going to get pressured into anything.”
“You don’t seem very upset about being stuck with an instant girlfriend.” She was nibbling on that pouty lower lip now, a job, he realized, he’d gladly take over. You got to know a person pretty fast when you shared a confined space with them, and he was starting to like this person in the next bed. Even though it was his fault for answering the hotel phone, she seemed to feel guilty for lying about their relationship.
“I can see certain benefits,” he said, settling back.
Her eyes instantly narrowed and she released her lip from between her teeth.
“Not those benefits,” he told her. “I was thinking that if I agree to show up to the wedding, you might take pity on me and give me a massage—” he looked at her “—or two.”
And, because she still seemed a little skittish, he added, “Emily, I’m going to make you a promise. I won’t make a pass at you.”
She didn’t exactly look relieved. It was a big deal for him to promise to keep his hands off a desirable woman who happened to be sharing his hotel room. Instead of looking grateful she seemed—pissed off. He couldn’t imagine she felt insulted. She was gorgeous. Men must make fools of themselves all the time over her. But since he was the first person to admit he didn’t have a clue about women, he continued.
“You’re beautiful. And under normal circumstances, I’d be doing my level best to get you into my hotel room. But since you’re here against your will, I give you my word I won’t try anything.”
She picked up a brand-new set of sweats and disappeared into the bathroom. When she returned, she was wearing the gray fleece, and she’d also gathered a couple of towels and a bottle of some kind of oil.
He was doing his best to concentrate on CNN and not the fact that sometimes his principles really got in the way of his sex life, when she came toward him. She said, “So, you’re saying there’s no way you and I would ever have sex.”
“No.” She was so sexy he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. A woman walking toward him with a bottle of massage oil and he’d announced he wasn’t going to touch her? He must be a mental case. “I said I wouldn’t hit on you.”
She settled beside him on the bed, shifting his leg so she could spread the towel underneath him. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not at all.” When she was this close he could smell her skin and see that her eyes weren’t completely brown as he’d thought. There were flecks of gold and tiny slivers of green in them, as well. As she settled her hands above his knee and began to gently probe the muscle, he said, “I’m giving you an open invitation to hit on me.”
Her fingers stalled and her eyes widened.
He grinned up at her. “Anytime.”
5
DAY THREE OF LEANNE AND DEREK’S Wedding Week Extravaganza was almost done, Emily thought with relief as she sat quietly at the desk in her hotel room, blessedly alone, writing out place cards for the wedding.
Today she’d had lunch with her mom. She loved her mom, but the “nice, long lunch, just the two of us,” had been somewhat marred by her mother’s enthusiastic comments about Cousin Buddy and her wistful excitement about Leanne’s wedding.
Emily successfully navigated the conversation around dangerous spots, like how lucky Leanne and Derek were to have found each other when they were both so young, interspersed with hints about how it got more and more difficult to find a mate as you got older and more set in your ways.
Naturally, this led to the story of crazy Aunt Hilda who never married and ended up living on a rotting houseboat with nothing but seven cats for company. “All she ever bought was cat food. I’m not saying Hilda was eating it, but you have to wonder.” She shook her head. Did she really think Emily had never heard this story before? “At least she didn’t have to worry about mice.”
They made it all the way to coffee, when her carefully steered conversation hit a Titanic iceberg. Her mother’s eyes filled and she said, “You know I love Leanne and I’m truly happy for her, and for Irene. But if my sister gets to be a grandmother first, I’ll just die.”
She’d spent the rest of the day feeling guilty somehow and that she had to make it up to her mom, which meant she’d ended up volunteering to do the place cards. Maybe her mom couldn’t boast of a happily married, eagerly breeding daughter, but she could damn well be proud of having such a helpful one.
Her silence was rudely interrupted by the door opening followed by a series of crashes.
“What are you doing?” The unholy racket caused her to turn her head and see Jonah stumble in with a whole lot of hockey equipment hanging off him.
“Sorry, I was trying to be quiet.” He banged the door behind him and some sort of pad tumbled to the floor. When he bent to reach it, two hockey sticks banged on the wall.
“It’s like Marley’s ghost entering the room.”
“Looks like rain. I didn’t want to leave anything in the truck to get damp.”
“Great. This hotel room isn’t nearly crowded enough. What it needed was more hockey equipment.”
As one, they both glanced at the big orange pouf of a dress hanging from the outside of the closet because, just as in her first room, there simply wasn’t room to cram all that dress inside.
The dress cast a faintly orange glow over everything, she was convinced. It definitely affected her mood.
He looked doubtfully beyond his bed. “I could put the stuff behind that curtain, but it’s probably damper there than in my truck.”
“Don’t mind me. I’m feeling bitchy. No idea why.”
He hefted the sticks, bag, padding, two pairs of skates and a uniform over to his bed and settled it in an untidy pile. He grunted as he yanked the liners out of his skates and placed them in front of the radiator as he had the night before.
She turned back to her task. No wonder she was thinking of Marley’s ghost; her current task was positively Dickensian.
She tried to ignore the unmistakable sounds of a man undressing by focusing all her attention on the nib of her pen.
“Okay if I take a shower now?” the deep voice asked.
“Yes. Fine.”
He passed behind and she felt him pause. “What are you doing?”
“Calligraphy.”
“I know what it is,” he said, surprising her. “What I meant is, why are you doing it now?”
“I’m writing out the place cards for the wedding,” she said, carefully finishing the Y on Cathy and double-checking the spelling of Cathy’s last name from the list beside