Power Play (Portland Storm Book 16)

by Catherine Gayle

  That just wouldn’t do.

  “Where did it get you?” I asked cautiously, because I certainly wasn’t following, and I didn’t think my current state of confusion had anything to do with the excessive quantities of tequila I’d consumed so far.

  “All alone in Mexico with no way to get home. And no home to go to even if I had a way to get there.” She sniffled, and a fresh wave of tears started filling her eyes. “How could I have been so stupid?”

  I didn’t know what I’d expected her answer to be, but it definitely wasn’t that. “You’re not stupid. You’re just young and maybe a little idealistic.”

  “Clearly too young,” she bit off.

  That gave me pause. Especially since she’d already told me she didn’t drink. “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one,” she said on a sniffle.

  Definitely a good deal younger than my twenty-nine, but I kind of liked the idea of being with someone young and innocent. It’d be good for me to see life through her eyes for a while. If I could manage it.

  “You’re going to ruin your pretty dress if you keep crying like that,” I said gently, brushing the tears from her cheek with the pad of my thumb. She jumped slightly at the contact, but I decided not to let that bother me. This Mackenzie was clearly upset, and she didn’t know me from Adam. “Come on,” I said. “Come sit with me and we’ll figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “What we’re going to do about it,” I said. Then I took one of her hands in mine and tugged slightly until she relented and followed me over to a somewhat clean table in the corner.

  “What do you mean we?” she asked through her tears.

  Good question, but it was one for which I didn’t have a ready answer. With any luck, my tequila would guide me to the answer soon.

  I pulled out one of the chairs, grabbed a napkin off the table, and used it to wipe down the chair. Once it was as clean as I could get it, I nudged her to sit. Then I took the chair next to her for myself without bothering to check if it needed to be cleared off. Judging by the slightly damp feeling under my ass and left thigh, that had been a mistake, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

  “I don’t know wh-what you mean,” Mackenzie stuttered, sniffling.

  The table was kind of gross, too, but there was a napkin canister in the middle of it. I grabbed one and pressed it to her cheeks, stopping the mascara-laden tears from dripping onto her dress. Then I pressed another napkin into her hand so she could mop up her nose.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know what I mean?” My brain started spinning from the complexity of the question.

  “When you said we’d figure out what we’re going to do about it.”

  “I meant I want to help you out.” And to my unending surprise, I meant it. “Tell me what happened.”

  “What happened is I was an idiot.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You don’t know me. Trust me, I was an idiot.”

  “Maybe I want to know you.”

  “Why would you want to know me?” A fresh wave of tears filled her eyes, which, in the bright Mexican sunlight reflecting off the ocean in the late afternoon, looked the same color as my favorite cream-laden, sugar-rich coffee, the kind I woke up to every day when the team was on the road.

  Eyes like those, I could easily lose myself in. And happily, too. “I bet your story’s not as bad as mine,” I said, hoping maybe I could get her to smile.

  Not quite, but she did lift a brow in a look of pure derision. “Try me,” she challenged.

  “All right, I’ll go first.” I reached for my shot glass, but it wasn’t there. Must have set it down somewhere when I’d brought Mackenzie over here. Damn. “This was supposed to be my honeymoon.”

  “Supposed to be?” Mackenzie sniffled again, but she no longer sounded like she was going to break down in a fresh bout of tears at any moment.

  “Yeah. Supposed to be. I was on a road trip with my team, but I got hurt.” I pointed down to my ankle when she raised a brow, but I kept going. “So, they sent me home early, since Amanda and I were going to fly down here for our wedding and honeymoon when the team had a break. But when I got home, I walked in on her in bed with someone else.”

  “Ouch,” Mackenzie said, scrunching up her nose in the cutest way. I wanted to kiss that nose.

  “Yeah, that hurt worse than my ankle does. But that wasn’t even the worst of it.”

  “No?”

  “Nope.”

  “How does it get worse than that?”

  I couldn’t get over how engrossed she’d become in my story. She was leaning toward me, resting her chin on her linked hands, her elbows propped up on the filthy table, and her eyes were locked on mine.

  I was definitely getting lost in those eyes. In fact, with as much tequila as I’d had tonight, I was well on my way to losing everything, and not caring one fucking bit. “You see, it was my brother she was in bed with.”

  She let out an outraged gasp. “Your brother?”

  “The one and only.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Told you my story was bad.”

  “I still think mine’s worse,” she said.

  “Yeah? I doubt it.”

  “No, I know mine’s worse.”

  “Try me.”

  She blinked a few times, as if trying to hold back more tears. But it didn’t work. A fresh drop spilled over and trailed mascara down her cheek.

  I snagged a napkin from the holder and dried her off, but she only started crying more. She tucked her hands in her lap and stared down at them.

  The urge to drag her onto my lap and hold her until she stopped crying nearly overwhelmed me. Shit, I was a mess. Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much tequila, but it was too late now. The damage was done.

  “I was so stupid!” she finally forced out through a fresh wave of sobs.

  “Promise, no one could be stupider than I was. My fiancée and my brother were screwing each other behind my back,” I reminded her. “And it had been going on a long time, but I didn’t catch on until I walked in on them. No clue until then. Massive idiot, right here.” I reached overhead and pointed down at myself. My self-deprecating admission was enough to draw out a tiny smile and a halfhearted laugh, at least.

  But then her expression shifted again, and this time I could only describe it as morose. Her tears started up again, but she didn’t seem to notice or care, simply allowing them to drip from her cheeks onto the filthy table between us. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she forced out.

  “How about you start with trying to explain it to me, and then we can figure it out from there?”

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes, but she finally started talking, telling me about how she’d sold everything she owned and flown down to Mexico to marry a man she’d never met before, only to discover he was her worst nightmare in human form and now she didn’t have anywhere to go or any money to get there even if she did.

  By the time she stopped talking, she’d nearly emptied the entire napkin dispenser, using them to dry her eyes and wipe her nose. I found myself vibrating with rage that some despicable piece of shit had taken advantage of someone so obviously sheltered and trusting—maybe too trusting—and then left her on her own in a foreign country, where she didn’t even speak the language.

  My anger over Mackenzie’s situation meshed with my anger at Amanda and Colby, until I was one big, hot ball of mad.

  Even worse, my anger was being fueled by tequila.

  Not a good combination.

  But then something that I never would have expected came to me. A way to get back at Colby, to shove it in Amanda’s face, and to solve Mackenzie’s situation, all in one fell swoop.

  “Why don’t you marry me?” I asked when she came to a lull in her explanation and reached for another napkin to dry her eyes.

  Yeah, maybe it was the tequila talking, and maybe I shouldn’t listen, but it was too late to talk
sense into me. I’d already tossed the question out there, and to be honest, I didn’t want to take it back.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she asked me, her tears coming to a sudden stop as she gawked in my general direction.

  “Maybe. Probably. But who cares?”

  She didn’t look convinced of my sanity, which meant she was smarter than she gave herself credit for.

  “Seriously,” I said, taking one of her hands in mine.

  I couldn’t get over how soft her palm was, brushing the pad of my thumb over the delicate skin. It made me think of how soft she must be all over. She definitely had a tender heart, one that ought to be cared for and protected instead of stomped all over like the asshole who’d lured her down here had done.

  I could do a lot worse than marrying her, that much was certain.

  “Look,” I continued, “you’ve already got the dress on and everything. I bet the officiant I’d arranged for is still available. We can do this. We can get married, you and me. Right here, on the beach with the waves and the sunset and all. You can come home to Portland with me. No need to worry about not having somewhere to go. I make more than enough money, so that’s not an issue.”

  The only problem I could come up with was that we didn’t know each other, but that could be solved with time. Maybe she wouldn’t like the way I loaded the dishwasher, and maybe she wouldn’t like the way I squeezed the toothpaste from the center of the tube, but those were the kinds of things every couple had to sort out.

  Something told me Mackenzie would never be a cheating bitch like Amanda had been, so she was already miles ahead of my ex, as far as I was concerned.

  Besides, she was sweet and pretty and didn’t deserve what had happened to her any more than I’d deserved what Amanda and Colby had done to me.

  “But…why would you do that?” she spluttered, those big brown eyes boring into mine.

  Revenge probably wasn’t the right answer to give her, but it was the one currently screaming for prominence inside my head. I forced it aside, wishing I had another shot of tequila to help me come up with something better, and said, “Because I can’t stand seeing a pretty girl like you crying on her wedding day, and I want to do something about it.” A flimsy response, sure. But it was all my tequila-soaked brain could come up with in the heat of the moment.

  Apparently, flimsy was better than nonexistent, because after an almost painful pause, Mackenzie nodded resolutely. “All right. Let’s do it. Let’s get married.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Apparently, I wouldn’t be spending my honeymoon all alone, after all.

  OUR FIRST KISS came right after the officiant said, “You may now kiss your bride,” his heavy Mexican accent making it difficult to sort out the words. Good thing I’d gone to enough friends’ and teammates’ weddings in my day that I knew what was supposed to come next in the ceremony, whether I could understand the guy or not.

  The sun was setting over the ocean, the sky turning to brilliant shades of purple and orange behind us. As far as weddings went, this one was epic. Tiny, sure, since I’d just snagged a couple of random people from the bar—ones who weren’t too terribly drunk yet—to act as witnesses, but the guest list wasn’t the important part.

  Kiss her? Yeah, that needed to happen. So what if we’d only met each other about an hour before the ceremony? We were going to have to do a lot more than simply kiss if this was going to work out.

  And I’d be damned if it wasn’t going to work. After everything that had gone down with Amanda and Colby only a couple of days ago…

  But first things first. “What was your name again?” I asked her. Yeah, I felt like a giant ass for not remembering, but I had just met her about an hour or so ago, after all. And I was pretty drunk. Really drunk, to be honest. That tequila had gone straight to my head, and nowhere near enough time had passed for me to sober up yet.

  Her dirty-blond hair was curling in the humidity, making me want to dig my fingers into it until they were knotted and tangled and stuck, and I was bound to get lost in her eyes if she kept looking at me like I’d just hung the moon and the stars.

  Not that I minded her staring at me in that way. It definitely served up a nice stroke to my wounded ego.

  She swallowed hard, drawing my eye to the slight bob in her throat as she did. I wanted to taste her there. Something told me her skin would be sweet, like everything else about her, not salty like the ocean air surrounding us.

  “Mackenzie Cain,” she whispered. “Only I guess it isn’t Cain anymore, is it?”

  Mackenzie. I could remember that, surely, no matter how drunk I was. Couldn’t I?

  “I’m Riley,” I said. Then I added, “Jezek,” since Jezek was about to be her surname, too. Actually, I supposed it already was. Unless she didn’t want to take my name. We hadn’t exactly talked about that.

  To be honest, we hadn’t really talked about much of anything.

  She nodded, blinking so hard and fast it seemed she was trying to keep more tears at bay. She shouldn’t be crying now, should she? Before, when her former fiancé had revealed himself to be an asshole of epic proportions and left her stranded in a foreign country, sure. That was a reasonable time to cry.

  But now that she was married to me and had a solution to her problems, shouldn’t everything be better?

  I was a stand-up guy. One of the good guys out there. Wasn’t I?

  I forced aside the niggling thought that I wasn’t such a good guy when considering my reasons for marrying her, because revenge against my brother and my ex didn’t seem so great.

  They weren’t my only reasons for marrying her. Or even the biggest reasons. Were they? I wanted to help her out. I couldn’t stand seeing her so broken and desperate, like she’d been when she first walked into the bar tonight. That was the biggest reason I’d offered to marry her. Right? Right. Had to be.

  Maybe she didn’t know much about me yet, but she’d learn soon enough.

  I decided it was better not to wait for her to actually start crying again before kissing her, dipping my head down toward hers and tipping her chin up so our lips could meet.

  Hers were soft and tentative as they brushed against mine, and a bit salty and wet from her tears. I inched my hand back toward the base of her skull, delving my fingers into the soft waves of her hair.

  She tasted like peaches, and a tremulous sigh fell from her lips to lodge between us when she gave in to my insistent tongue and opened for me. It was only when I finally came up for air that I realized I’d crushed her against me and lifted her from her feet, her soft curves molding to my body like she was meant to be in my arms.

  She’d wrapped her arms around my shoulders, holding on as if I were the one thing left to tether her to the earth and keep her from floating off in the clouds.

  That was another much-needed stroke to my ego.

  As I returned her to her feet, her lips were pink and slick and swollen from my kiss, and her eyes were slightly dazed. I’d never seen anything that turned me on more. Apparently, tequila dick wasn’t going to be an issue for me tonight. Thank fuck for that.

  Yeah, this was going to work out, all right. I’d make sure of it.

  Off in the distance, near the bar, a handful of other vacationers were hooting and applauding our performance. When Mackenzie noticed, she blushed, which only made her prettier. My dick stood up and took notice, which made me more certain than ever that everything would turn out just fine. Bam, just like that, I was hard as granite.

  Maybe we didn’t know each other yet, but that could come in time. And we could start out by getting to know each other between the sheets.

  There were worse ways to start a relationship. Weren’t there? Had to be.

  I dipped my head toward hers for one more kiss, nipping her lower lip between my teeth just enough to get her to open for me again.

  She sucked in a breath of surprise, but it was quickly followed by an almost imperceptible moan. I c
ouldn’t wait to learn what sounds she’d make when I was inside her, and I didn’t think we’d be waiting very long.

  The officiant cleared his throat. Reluctantly, I dragged myself away from Mackenzie long enough to glance over and see him waving the marriage certificate and holding out a pen, rattling off something in Spanish that I couldn’t make out.

  “Guess we’d better sign and make it official, huh?” I murmured, my lips still close to Mackenzie’s. Although, to be honest, I had no desire to stop what we were doing, unless we were going to move to the next step. I didn’t even care how many people were watching us right now. I was more drunk from kissing her than I ever could have been from tequila.

  She blinked a couple of times and nodded, stepping back from me. Then she stumbled slightly in the sand, so I shot out an arm to drag her against my side and steady her.

  To be honest, holding her like that helped me steady myself, too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so light-headed from nothing more than a couple of simple kisses.

  We both signed where the officiant directed us to, and he handed me some paperwork that was all in Spanish but which probably told us how to get an official copy of the marriage certificate to take home with us.

  “So,” I said conversationally when he walked away from us, laughing his ass off. “We’re married.”

  “We’re married,” Mackenzie repeated, sounding shocked.

  Now what?

  RILEY WAS LIMPING.

  I hadn’t noticed it before. Probably because I was too caught up in my own misery and beating myself up for being such an idiot, so I hadn’t noticed much of anything about him beyond the fact that he was the absolute definition of tall, dark, and handsome.

  He had wavy, dark hair and lean muscles that had flexed beneath my hands when he held me, and his brown eyes looked almost black now, at dusk. He seemed to be everything a romance hero should be, at least at first glance.

  But now that we were making our way along the beach, hand in hand while he carried my suitcase on the other side, I couldn’t help but notice his problem. He kept kicking the sand up with his right foot because of it.