But then she’d totally surprised him with her frankly genius method for getting him to shut his trap. The method that had her hand over his Johnson—Sister Antoninus forgive him—and royal blue balls. He couldn’t think with her hand that close, and he definitely wasn’t about to move because then there would be friction. And he couldn’t be subjecting himself to friction in public.
Jesus Christ, they were in public. Granted, she was turned toward him and they were kind of in a corner, so no one could see where her hand was. But the fact that she was just staring at him calmly while her hand was where he’d wanted her hand to be since the night they first met—as though she wasn’t affected by it at all—was disconcerting. To say the least.
The move had been effective, because he couldn’t speak. It didn’t help that every time he opened his mouth, she put gentle pressure on his sack. He was too mixed up with his conflicting shame and desperate horniness to say anything.
“I’ve been watching hockey since I was a kid.” Her voice was the kind of dead quiet that women got when they were about to commit bloody murder. “You don’t need to explain what a puck is. Understand?”
He nodded when she gave his cock another slight squeeze.
“If I take my hand off of your dick, are you going to keep acting like one?”
Although he shook his head, that wasn’t a promise he could be making. He felt as though he was a walking dick—what with all the blood that ought to be going to his brain flowing straight toward her palm.
“Okay.” She smirked and pulled her hand away. He had to bite his lip to stop himself from making a distinctly unmanly noise. “Now I’m going to need you to flag down one of the concessions folks for more beers so that we can enjoy the game.”
He opened his mouth and immediately shut it again. Still terrified. And turned on.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JACK WASN’T SURE WHAT to make of his father’s phone call. There’d been so much loaded into Sean Nolan’s edict: “I want to meet this girl your mother told me about.”
First of all, why were his parents actually speaking to each other? As far as he knew, they hadn’t even set eyes on each other since Bridget’s law school graduation. Second, Jack had to reckon with the fact that he’d had no plans to subject Hannah to the rest of his family. Although he’d thought that introducing her to his mother would be off-putting, he’d gravely miscalculated that one. He hadn’t even been able to figure out a new way to lose a girl in the days since, and he was seriously considering scrapping the whole plan.
The only thing he could think to do was head up to the gym in his building and pound his feet against the treadmill until the pieces of his mind came together like Tetris and he knew exactly what to do.
Sweat dripped off his brow and landed on the display. He absently wiped it away with his towel but kept running. He’d run until he figured out how to make Hannah discount him as a romantic partner. The fact that she’d seen him flirting with another woman and hadn’t even thrown it into a conversation obliquely still puzzled him. Maybe he didn’t know how to lose a girl in the same way that his friends seemed to.
He’d certainly figured out how to lose every other girl in his life. It hadn’t even started with Maggie Doonan. The first woman who’d abandoned him had been his mother. And, sure, she’d been around after divorcing his father, but she hadn’t been interested in her children anymore. As much as she and his father cultivated an image of an amicably divorced couple, Jack knew that his father had never remarried because he was still in love with his ex-wife. Always would be.
That might be why Hannah’s similarities to his mother terrified him. It was certainly something to run a few more miles about.
Even though Jack didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and work with his hands, but instead had a job that his father had to financially underwrite—for the time being—Jack was more like his father than he would ever admit out loud. Beyond his gruff exterior, Sean felt things deeply. There was some deeply maudlin strain of emotionality that they shared—something passed down through thousands of years of Celtic ancestors. Maybe all Irishmen had a bit of Yeats in them. Perhaps it was just a family curse.
He didn’t want to introduce Hannah to his father—not because he wouldn’t like her; he would love her. She was sharp and beautiful and laughed easily. Just the sort of woman a sentimental Nolan man fell for and never got up from.
With his other girlfriends, Sean had winked and flirted and welcomed with his natural charm. Something in Jack’s gut told him that his father would be in awe of Hannah. Sean never mentioned the names of Jack’s exes after they were gone, sort of like Jack never mentioned his mother to his father. Jack knew that, if his father met her, he’d never hear the end of “that Hannah girl you let get away.”
But if anything was going to scare Hannah, it would be a snapshot of where she’d be and whom she’d be living with in thirty years. And that was what finally made planning easy for him.
By the time he was done, his lungs ached. More important, his mind was empty and his next step with Hannah was clear.
* * *
—
AS SHE RODE DOWN to a working-class, mostly Irish American South Side neighborhood she’d never been to, Hannah couldn’t figure out why Jack Nolan wanted her to meet his whole family. She hadn’t even had his dick in her mouth yet, and he was vetting her for wife material. At least, that was what he seemed to be doing. Unless it was some jealous, twitchy thing he was doing—like the night at the museum. Maybe the full cast of his ex-girlfriends would be there to surprise her. Or just one. If this was a sign that he was really into her, it would be easy to keep him on the hook for about six more days. If it was more insecure bullshit, she wasn’t sure she could stand one more day of it without her head exploding.
All she had to do was remind herself that Jack Nolan, in the long run, didn’t matter here. Sure, he was deadly sexy and gave great head. But he was a man—a highly educated white cis-gendered dude who presented as heterosexual. If she was going to make him believe that she was the kind of girl he could settle down with, she would have to do any amount of ego stroking he required. And now she would have to impress his entire family.
She was still concerned that Jack wasn’t seeing the full picture of things that could go wrong here, though. Sean Nolan sounded very old-school, which in her experience often meant low-key racist.
As delightful as she found it that Jack hadn’t asked her where she was from—the most-often-asked question on all of her first dates—she was pretty sure that her being biracial would be a big freaking deal to his baby boomer father.
This was why it was so strange that Jack was ready to introduce her to his parents on dates two and four.