I could feel him smirking. I glared at him as I lowered my arm back to my side. “That was not what you were going to say.”
“Nope.” He opened the passenger-side door and waited for me to get in before closing it. When he got around to the other side and closed his door, he added, “I was going to say it could be code for when I lick you down there.” His eyes flickered down there for the briefest of moments, turning dark and dangerous in the blink of an eye.
I groaned out loud. That was exactly what I’d been thinking he would say. I closed my eyes and sank back against the seat, horrified, even though he had waited to say it until we were alone, at least. And maybe I was intrigued, too. Okay, definitely intrigued. “You love to embarrass me, don’t you?”
He answered me with a kiss.
About ten minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot of an upscale restaurant. Since it was so late already, we didn’t have to wait for a table. Going to a place like that just for a dessert felt insanely awkward to me, but Liam didn’t seem to mind. He acted as if it was the most normal thing in the world for us to be doing at a time like this.
He ordered crème brûlée with two spoons, even though I swore I couldn’t eat a bite of it, a black coffee for himself, and a hot chocolate for me. With lots and lots of marshmallows. The waiter had given him a questioning look when he’d made that final request, but Liam didn’t react as though he’d noticed. He had been making sure to ask for marshmallows everywhere we went since he’d learned I loved them in my hot chocolate.
Apparently it wasn’t something people did in Sweden. He’d never heard of that particular tradition until he caught me making a cup that way one morning about a month ago, piling them high in my mug and letting them melt in a bit before I sipped.
When the waiter left to fill our order, Liam reached across the table and took my hand, letting his fingers tease my palm and the inside of my wrist, places he knew I was especially ticklish.
“I tried to convince Nicky to come with us after the wedding,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been quite as romantic as having you alone, but I knew you wouldn’t mind if he came.”
“Was he drinking?” I knew all too well how worried Liam was about his teammate. There’d been a couple of instances over the last few months when Nicky had ended up in the hospital because of an overdose or a bad combination of drugs and alcohol. We weren’t positive, exactly, what the cause was—we just knew he had a problem. And of course, if someone Liam cared about needed help, I wanted us to do anything we could to provide it.
“No, he wasn’t drinking. But it’s still early enough that I thought he might go out to a bar with a couple of the guys. He said he just wanted to go back to his hotel room, though.”
“You can’t force him to make the choices you want him to make.”
“I know. He has to want to do the right thing for himself. He’s getting there, I think.”
That was the best we could hope for. “Did you believe him? That he was just going back to the hotel room?”
He shrugged. “No idea. He overheard Luddy and Jens talking about getting a beer. They didn’t ask him to go along—pretty sure they know not to do that. But Burnzie’s staying at the same hotel as Nicky, and he was planning on going back to his room instead of going out, too. Maybe he grabbed Nicky and dragged him back there with him.”
“We can hope so, at least,” I murmured. That might be the sort of help he needed, at least for a while. Maybe Burnzie wasn’t so bad, after all. Granted, I’d never really considered him bad. He was just…different. Too good-looking for his own good. And I got the distinct impression that he knew it and used it to his advantage at every opportunity.
Suddenly, the tickling was getting to be too much, and I grabbed ahold of Liam’s hand so he would stop tracing his fingers over my sensitive skin. I leaned forward, propping my other elbow up on the table and resting my chin in my hand. “What’s the first thing you want to do when we get to Sweden?”
“I want to take you to the west coast archipelago to go kayaking,” he said without even a moment’s hesitation, as though it was something he’d been planning for a long time.
“I haven’t ever been on a kayak.”
“That’s okay. I have been plenty of times. You’ll be safe with me.”
That was something I never doubted, not even a little bit. Liam was perhaps the most protective man I’d ever known. He was always trying to ensure I was safe and well taken care of. It was how we’d met, actually—him trying to take care of me before he’d even known who I was.
The waiter came back with the coffee and hot chocolate. My mug was loaded with marshmallows, and he’d brought a small bowl with extras that he placed next to the saucer. “The chef had to send someone out to purchase them, so there’s a whole bag. We can bring you more if you need them.”
“This will be plenty, thank you,” I said before Liam decided to tell the man to bring the entire bag of marshmallows out for me.
The waiter nodded and started to back away from us. “We should have your crème brûlée out in just a few moments.” Then he scurried off to take care of one of his other tables. It looked as though he was the only waiter still working at this hour.
I sipped from my cup and smiled as the cocoa warmed me through to my bones. “And after we go kayaking in the archipelago? What then?”
“I’ll take you to meet my parents, and Liv’s family, and you can look through the wind chimes and decide which ones you want to bring back to Portland with us.” He’d worked his hand free, and he started to tickle me with his fingertips again. “And I’ll take you fishing, and we’ll clean and cook the fish you catch. Then maybe we’ll travel up north and stay up all night to see the midnight sun.”
“That all sounds like things you want me to do and see. What about you? What have you missed? What is the one thing you’ve been most desperate to do or see or eat again?”
He shook his head, a slight grin curving his lips. “That’s just it. I want to see Sweden through your eyes. I want to watch you fall in love with my country.”
“I already love it because it’s part of you.”
Liam gave me a look that made it clear he didn’t believe me.
“I do,” I insisted. “And I want to see it the way you see it, not like a tourist. I want to see the country you love so much so I can make it a part of me.”
His jaw dropped for a brief moment, but then he was shaking his head. “You’re talking like you already love Sweden.”
“That’s because I do. I’m sure I will.”
“How?”
“Because I love you.”
“I…” He kept staring at me, dumbfounded. “What if you don’t love it when we get there?”
“You don’t really think that I could hate the country you love, do you?” It seemed as though I already had been there, just from experiencing it through the way he would tell me about it. We’d looked at his pictures and videos online, and it was alive in my mind because of his obvious love for his home.
For a long time, he stared at me as though he was trying to figure out if I was telling him the truth or simply what I thought he would want to hear. That wasn’t me, though, and he knew it. I would never say something just to appease him. He knew I was telling him the truth. He had to know that.
“I wanted to talk to you about maybe living there half of the year or so. After I retire from the NHL. Not right away. But we could live in the house in Portland half the time so you could be near your brothers—”
“And live in Gothenburg so we can be near your family the rest of the time,” I finished for him.
“You’re smiling. Like you’re okay with that idea.”
I shrugged. “I thought it was fairly obvious that would work out best for us. Once you retire, at least.”
“Oh.” Liam stopped tickling my palm. “You would do that for me?”
“I would do that for us,” I corrected him. “I can be happy anywhere as long as I�
��m with you.”
He tugged my hand toward him and kissed the skin on the inside of my wrist that was already electrified from his touch, filling me with his warmth and love and every good thing under the moon. “Jag älskar dig, älskling. Somehow I love you more every day than the day before.”
“That’s good, because I love you more than I know how to handle.”
The waiter came back with his crème brûlée, setting it down between us and holding out a tray with two spoons for us to take.
“Okay, fine,” I said, laughing. I broke through the hardened sugary crust and scooped up a small bite of the creamy decadence. “Can we still stay up to see the midnight sun, though?”
“As often as you want. Someday when we’re there in the winter, we can see the aurora borealis. And we can go skiing and ice fishing and…”
He kept telling me all the things we would do when we were in Sweden, and I soaked it all in. He really came alive when he talked about his home, his family, and the way of life he’d known as a boy. I couldn’t wait until we arrived there tomorrow. It was just one more way I would be able to learn all there was to know about him, and Liam Kallen was a man I wanted to know every tiny detail about.
It wouldn’t even matter to me if I only knew a dozen words in Swedish as long as I knew him.
“YOU DON’T HAVE to do this tonight.” I looked across at Sara before opening the car door, trying to gauge the precise degree of pissed-off-ness she’d reached. “She gave you her phone number. You can call or even just send a text and say you just aren’t up to it after today. Then we’ll go back to the hotel, and you can spend some more time thinking about what you want to do and say.”
We were sitting in a Starbucks parking lot—the coffee shop nearest the wedding venue—where Dana was supposed to meet with Dina Connor. The plan was for the two of them to have some coffee and discuss what they wanted their relationship to be moving forward, and for that matter, whether they even wanted there to be a relationship at all. They intended to figure out if they wanted this enough to put in the effort, and I really hoped they decided to move forward with getting to know each other. Family is important. I wanted Sara to have as much family as she deserved.
Dina’s husband had taken their kids back to their hotel so there would be less pressure on Sara. That had been at my suggestion. It was one thing for Sara and her mother to talk and hash out the past. It was something else entirely to add half siblings and a stepfather, all of whom Sara had never officially met, to the mix. Small steps were key in a situation like this.
She didn’t try to hide her eyes from me, but Sara had never been one to shy away from a confrontation. She was far more likely to fly toward one with balled-up fists flailing than to sit back and think about things rationally, as evidenced by the bathroom incident. I supposed between the pair of us, I was the sensible half of our partnership. That was all right with me. Sara needed someone to balance her out, and I was more than happy to take on that role.
I hated seeing her as torn up over something as she had been all day, though. Most of the time, it was me doing something to piss her off. At least when I was the one behind it, I could weather the storm of tears and curses and sarcastic comments until we worked through whatever I’d done. When it was someone else—and particularly when it was someone as important to her as her mother—I didn’t know what I could do other than stay by her side. I just had to wait for her to need something from me or tell me to fuck off or try to punch me in the nose since it wouldn’t be a good idea to punch her mother.
But right now? She looked numb. I definitely preferred seeing her all fired up the way she had been earlier. I suppose the emotion of it all had combined to wear her out, and now she was just flat.
“Do you want to go back to the hotel?” I asked when she still didn’t respond.
Sara shook her head. “If I do that, I might never get up the guts to speak to her again.”
“Are you ready to go in, then?”
A moment passed before she let out a pent-up breath and gave a decisive nod. “Let’s get it fucking over with before I make myself sick.”
I shut off the car and got out, then made my way around to open her door. She took my hand to steady herself as she climbed out, and I used the brief moment while her skirt was pulled up slightly to steal a peek at her shoes. The color matched her dress, but they had peekaboo toes and a complicated ribbon system that went up her calves and tied below her knees. Her toenails were painted in a fire-engine red that made my engine purr.
When she let her skirt drop, I raised my gaze to meet hers, only to find her glaring at me. “You’d fucking better not be thinking about sexytimes when I’m about to go in there to deal with my fucking mother.”
I shrugged, hoping this might at least ease some of her tension before we went inside. “You know what your shoes do to me, baby.”
She dropped her grip on my hand, slugged my shoulder, and marched toward the front door to the coffee shop without me.
I rubbed my shoulder—she’d been a fast learner in terms of the self-defense I’d been teaching her—and hurried along so I could get there first and open the door for her. She sailed through it only to stop short almost as soon as she was inside. Her mother had found a small table in a quiet corner, and that was exactly where Sara was now staring. I settled my hand on the small of her back to get her moving again, nudging her toward her mother.
That was all it took—a brief moment of encouragement from me, even though I hadn’t said a word—and she was moving again. She took the empty seat across from Dina, and they both eyed each other warily.
“Can I get you something, Dina?” I asked. She hadn’t bought herself a drink yet, even though she’d probably been sitting in here for at least five to ten minutes while Sara debated whether she wanted to come in or not.
“A tall iced decaf?” she replied.
I took off to place an order before she could pull her wallet out of her purse. A minute later, I came back with her iced coffee and a Hazelnut Frappuccino for Sara, in case it would help to soothe her frayed nerves. They stopped talking when I walked up with the drinks, which meant that they had already started up a conversation. That was good. I set their cups on the table and walked away to find somewhere out of hearing distance but with a good sightline to sit and wait with my own drink. This needed to be between the two of them. I just wanted to be close enough to break things up if Sara looked like she was going to fly off the handle. I’d never known her to attempt to hit anyone but me, but I just wanted to be sure she didn’t change that now.
I sat back in my chair and pulled my phone out of my pocket so I could go through everything I’d missed while it had been turned off for the wedding. The first text message was from my sister Chloe. Well, it wasn’t really a message—just an image. She’d taken a picture of her left hand, highlighting the diamond ring she was wearing. I supposed that meant Dylan had popped the question and she’d accepted.
I’d known it was coming; Dylan had come to me a couple of weeks ago to officially ask for my approval, which I’d readily given him now that I’d gotten to know him some.
After I sent her a message congratulating them, I glanced up to make sure Sara and Dina were still doing all right. The fact that I hadn’t heard raised voices was definitely a good sign. At the moment Sara was crying, but she looked reasonably calm despite the tears. Her mother got up, grabbed some napkins from the counter, and brought them back to the table. Sara used one of them to blow her nose, grabbing a second before she’d finished with the first. There was no reason for me to get involved right now.
I went back to my phone, trying not to let Sara’s tears get to me. All I wanted to do any time she cried was pull her on my lap and hold her until it passed, but now wasn’t the time for that.
There were other messages from my mom and from my youngest sister, Cadence—both about Dylan and Chloe’s engagement and how romantic and sweet the proposal had been. One text was from Bu
rnzie, a blanket message he’d sent out to all the boys who’d been at the wedding, letting us know that he’d made sure Nicky got back to his hotel all right and would hopefully stay there. The last one I looked at was from Scotty.
Dina told me she’s there. How’s Sara? Does she hate me now?
There wasn’t a chance in hell that Sara would ever hate her father. She might not be too thrilled with him at the moment, and it would probably take her some time to forgive him for cutting her mother out of her life, despite whatever reasons he may have had for doing so…but he was still her father. Her Daddy. She was nuts about him.
I sent him a quick response to let him know I thought they could work things out once we all returned to Portland, even though he’d have to make a real effort to talk it through with her.
By the time I put my phone away and looked up again, Dina and Sara had both moved their chairs so they were right next to each other, and Dina had put her arm around Sara’s shoulder. It definitely looked like Sara was still crying, but the fact that she was letting her mother hold her made me believe they were making positive progress.
I finished up my coffee, checking on them from time to time and people-watching the rest of the time. Eventually, the baristas started trying to clean up so they could close the place down, so I figured I needed to go over and break the two of them up for now. When I got to them, Sara looked up with puffy eyes and a very red, very wet nose.
“Can we change our flights?” she asked me. “Mom wants me to meet my brothers and sister. She said we could have lunch.”
“If that’s what you want,” I said, but I felt like dancing a jig. Sara may not have realized she wanted a relationship with her mother, and she may not have had a clue that she wanted to know her siblings, but I’d been thinking, since that moment in the bathroom, that things in her life were about to change for the better.
Family was a big deal to me, and it was huge to her, too. The only family she thought she had was her father, though. This might not permanently change that—one or both of them might decide it was too much effort or they didn’t want to keep going with their relationship for whatever reason—but it had the potential to expand Sara’s world in amazing ways.
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