“How’d the pickup game go?” I asked after he’d ensured I was secured into the passenger seat of his massive car.
He pulled onto the street with a grunt. “I was a few seconds slower than Connell today.”
“Seconds,” I gasped. “That bad?” I teased.
He growled from the driver’s seat but kept his eyes on the road.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, eying the length of his body as if I could answer the question by merely looking.
“No,” he said. “Top shape.”
“Then what’s with the slowness?”
He spared me a glance of shock, but that rough laugh escaped his lips, causing all kinds of delicious chills to tickle my skin. “Slowness, she says.” He shook his head.
“Well, you are the faster skater in the NHL.”
“Says who?”
“Everyone.”
Another small laugh.
The car filled with a familiar quiet, the sweet weight of comfort draping around my shoulders. We’d settled into a rhythm I rather enjoyed, and it didn’t occur to me until today how beautiful our normal could be…if we’d let it. If he’d allow it.
And it wasn’t until he’d pulled into home that he finally admitted, “I was distracted.”
“By what?” I asked as I followed him into the house. I headed to the kitchen island as he dropped off his bag in the mudroom.
“Things,” he grumbled.
I pulled out the grilled chicken and veggie plates I’d prepped this morning and stuck them in the oven to heat them up.
“Care to share?” I asked, eying him as he took a seat at the island.
A debate raged in his eyes, one I knew could take hours, even days. That was Cannon…calculative, thoughtful—unless someone lit his fuse, then all bets were off. Except for me, I suppose. Because despite our ability to crash against each other in verbal waves of sass, he never once snapped on me.
We shared a quiet dinner, something we’d settled into the past weeks together, and he cleaned up while I got ready for bed. I didn’t push the subject, not when I knew Cannon had to come to me—like some wild feral jungle cat. If I pushed, he’d retreat so far I’d never see him again. Luckily for him, I had the patience of a saint.
I slipped into another one of Cannon’s shirts—this one a freshly washed Reaper shirt with his number on the back—and delighted in my newest nightly satisfaction, watching Cannon struggle with the sight.
“Damn you, Princess,” he growled from his spot in bed.
“What?” I asked innocently and spun around to show him the name scrawled across my back.
Another low growl.
I practically pranced to my side of the bed, alight with the game we’d been playing.
He grabbed the book off his nightstand, opening it to the page where we’d left off last night.
“You didn’t even want to take a gander at the book I brought home?” I teased.
He refused to look at me as I settled in next to him, close, but not close enough to touch.
“I saw it.”
“Did you find anything interesting in it?” My heart raced.
He gave me a good side-eye before returning focus to the book. “I didn’t find it funny if that’s what you mean.”
I gaped at him in faux shock. “Well, I would hope not. The Kama Sutra is no laughing matter.”
He laid the book against his chest, glaring at me.
I raised my hands. “I wouldn’t need a book if I had a teacher.”
A muscle in his jaw flexed before his tongue darted out to wet his lips. God, that little tick. It made heat pulse between my thighs.
“You don’t need a book, Princess.”
“Then you’ll do it?” I asked, breathless. “You’ll teach me?”
He swallowed hard and shook his head.
I pretended not to deflate, and instead nodded toward the book on his chest. “Where did we leave off?”
He scooped up the book, the breath rushing from his lungs like he was equally glad and disappointed I’d given up the fight.
Tomorrow I might push a little harder, but for now?
For now, I reveled in this.
The sound of his voice as he read from the pages of the book he’d decided to share with me. The feel of his warm body next to mine, the scent of him drenching the sheets and my skin despite not touching. I fell into this sweet, deep sense of happiness with Cannon beside me—something beyond lust, beyond forced proximity.
Happiness.
A true happiness I’d never experienced before, and I had Vegas and a mishap to thank for it, but damn I loved my new normal.
9
Cannon
“I have to say,” Logan began as he rubbed the back of his neck as we stood outside our favorite restaurant in downtown Charleston, “it’s not as weird seeing you two together as I initially thought it would be.”
“Thanks?” I glanced toward Persephone as she talked with Delaney and Annabelle a few feet away and waited for that sense of dread to fill me—that deep, empty ache that this was all headed toward disaster…but it never came. We’d been married almost two months, and instead of it becoming more and more obvious that we were absolutely wrong for each other, it somehow got easier. Which was a good thing, considering Mrs. VanDoren had set our wedding date for October twenty-first, dragging this little lie out a couple of months longer than planned.
At least she was feeling better. Doctor called it a miraculous surge of health, which Mr. VanDoren attributed to our wedding plans, though he still glared at me whenever the girls weren’t looking. Did the asshole really think a good glaring was the worst I’d been through?
“He’s right.” Connell shrugged. “You two seem to balance each other out.”
“Like an opposites attract kind of thing,” Logan added.
“Exactly! And the way she took all the olives off your salad?” Connell gave a giant, mocking sigh while he thumped his chest.
“Or the way you ordered her a second sweet tea before she’d finished her first?” Logan chimed in with an equally absurd expression.
My eye roll could not have been stronger.
“What are you two going on about?” Persephone asked, sliding her arm through mine. That same electric jolt I felt whenever she was near zinged up my spine at the contact, and I suddenly wished I’d chosen a long-sleeved shirt. Maybe I would have sweat to death in the August heat, but it would have protected me from the immediate, intense flashbacks to having my hands elsewhere on her bare skin.
I was losing my fucking mind a little more every day as I fought my need for this woman.
“Oh, just telling your husband how cute you guys are together.” Connell winked at my wife.
Good thing I liked him.
“And on that note, we’re leaving before I end up thrashing you two idiots.” I gave them a wave, and Persephone did the same as she said goodbye to the girls.
We walked down the block in relative peace and quiet. The best thing about living in Charleston was the relative anonymity we had. I’d been hounded by reporters and paparazzi back in Detroit, all of them waiting for me to inevitably lose my temper and fuck up royally.