by Bella Andre
Thirty minutes later, when Cole pulled into his garage, he had his head back on straight.
No question about it, he’d lucked out by picking Anna as his temporary wife. But that’s all their relationship was. Just a brief union that was never meant to be anything more. Sure, Anna had said she didn’t want anything from him, that she would play her part solely for his grandmother’s sake, but Cole was going to find a way to pay her back. In a big enough way to make sure they could both move on with their lives as they’d been before Vegas. No regrets for either of them.
He lifted her, soft and warm, out of the car, and even though she was still asleep, her arms went around his neck and she laid her cheek against his chest. Completely trusting, just as she’d been the previous night in his bed.
He carried her inside, up the stairs to his bedroom, kicked the covers open on his bed with one leg, then gently laid her on a pillow. She immediately curled up on her side and he had to smile as he looked down at her. The first time a woman entered his bedroom, she didn’t usually just go to sleep.
Her mother was right—Anna was definitely different from every other woman Cole had ever known.
Sitting at the edge of the bed, he slipped off her shoes and pulled the covers over her. Ten minutes later, he slid under the covers naked. Reaching for his wife, he tucked her small body into his and fell asleep.
That damn smile still on his lips.
Chapter Eleven
“You need anything, sweetheart, let Veronica know, okay?”
Anna nodded at the woman, and forced a smile. “I’ll be fine, Cole.”
He was giving her one of those looks she was starting to recognize, the one that said he knew she was anything but fine. But the truth was, she was less freaked out by being in the family VIP box before Cole’s game than she’d been earlier that morning when she’d woken up in his bed, fully clothed, after dreaming of being held in his strong arms all night long. He could have easily woken her up by undressing her for bed. And if he had, well, there was no doubt in her mind that they would have made love again.
Instead, he’d made sure not to wake her, had simply climbed into his big bed and held her.
He’d acted like a man who cared.
Her chest still felt tight whenever she looked at him. Not wanting to make a complete fool of herself in front of a bunch of strangers, she brightened her smile. “Have a great game!”
She leaned over to give him a quick peck and he said in a low voice against her lips,
“We’re newlyweds, remember,” then slid his hands into her hair and kissed her.
Any embarrassment she might have felt at his very public display of affection was quickly lost in the pent-up desire from the previous afternoon in his kitchen. Without realizing it, her hands went around his neck, her pelvis pushed against his, and she whimpered softly into his mouth.
Finally, he pulled back enough to gaze down at her. She tried to catch her breath, but she was a long way from being able to control her response to his kisses. After he’d pressed one more sweet kiss against her lips, she gratefully sank into the chair behind her and stared out at the football field.
* * *
“Honestly, I didn’t expect this from you, Cole.” Out in the hall, Cole nearly walked into his agent, Melissa, who was holding her phone up and shaking it in his face.
“Not only married, but your phone is clearly broken too, huh?”
Okay, so he’d ignored the half-dozen messages she’d left him since the news broke yesterday. Sue him. He’d been busy.
With his sweet wife.
“You were on my list.”
“Sure I was.” She rolled her eyes. “You should have given me a heads-up on this, Cole.”
“How is my marriage any of my agent’s business?” He crossed his arms over his chest.
“Last I saw you, I thought we were friends, too. I would have liked to meet the woman you’re planning on spending the rest of your life with for that reason alone. I would have liked to have a chance to congratulate you rather than ream you for keeping secrets.” Her expression hardened. “But if you just want to talk business, fine. As your agent, we both know that everything you do is my business.”
As if on cue, Julie appeared in the corridor. Unlike Melissa, she hugged him.
“Congratulations, stud.” A bemused grin on her lips, she added, “Got quite a situation with the press going on outside there. All over little ol’ you.” She pulled a handful of clippings from her shoulder bag, a dozen different pictures of him and Anna. “She’d different from your previous girlfriends. Really cute.” She raised an eyebrow, still smiling. “How’d you two meet, anyway?”
Cole looked over the two women’s heads for their husbands, Dominic and Ty, but the hall was empty except for the three of them.
Fuck.
“I’ve got to get down to the field.”
Melissa’s eyes narrowed as Julie said, “Just be sure to come right back here after the game, Cole, so that we can work out our PR plan on this.”
He stared at his team’s PR rep—and one-time friend—with a look that would have had most people running. “She’s my wife. I’m her husband. Our relationship is private. We don’t need a plan.”
Instead of looking scared, Julie simply shot one of her sassy little looks at Melissa, who suddenly looked less pissed off and more intrigued.
“Have a great game,” they said in unison as they walked away, their heads tucked together as they conferred with one another.
Well, he’d fucked that one up royally. He wanted to follow them back into the VIP box and protect Anna. He wanted to make sure they didn’t completely freak her out. But he was pushing it with his team as it was, should have been down on the field thirty minutes ago.
Dread drove every footstep he took away from his new wife.
* * *
“Congrats, buddy.” A hard slap sounded across his shoulders from yet another teammate. Only Ty and Dominic had kept silent, the two newly married guys who just shook their heads as they looked at him.
He’d never been happier to hear the whistle blow. After the past twenty-four hours, he needed these three hours playing a game that was so natural to him. It was as close as he was going to get to decompressing. He wouldn’t give up a second he’d spent with Anna, but her family, the press, and all of the crap swirling around them was another matter entirely.
Football. That’s all he was going to think about.
But even as he took his spot in the defensive lineup, he found his attention wasn’t entirely on the game. He’d never paid much attention to who was up in the VIP box watching him. But today, Anna was there. What was she thinking? Feeling?
And was she okay without him there to protect her?
* * *
“Hi there. Are you Anna?” Anna looked up to see two very pretty women standing in front of her. Getting to her feet, she hoped her legs weren’t nearly as shaky from Cole’s kiss as they had been a minute ago.
She smiled nervously. “Yes, that’s me.”
She was surprised when the slim blonde hugged her. “Wonderful. It’s so nice to meet you.
And such a surprise, too. Such a good surprise.”
Completely off balance from the warm greeting, she was glad when the curvy woman with the curly hair simply held out her hand. “I’m Melissa, Cole’s agent. And this is Julie. She does PR for the Outlaws. We’re also both good friends of Cole’s.”
“Or at least we thought we were.” Julie smiled as she sat down next to Anna, more put together and polished than Anna could ever dream of being.
Melissa grabbed a seat on her other side, her business suit not nearly stark enough to hide her soft, sexy curves. “And then he goes and gets married to a woman we’ve never heard word one about.”
Feeling neither as put together nor as sexy as either of Cole’s female friends, Anna was trying to figure out how to respond when Julie said, “Honestly, getting hitched in Vegas is something I would hav
e expected my husband to do.” At Anna’s shocked expression, Julie added, “Before we got serious, Ty used to be a bit of a player.”
Melissa laughed at that, her initial businesslike demeanor quickly giving way to friendliness. She leaned over to Anna as if she were sharing a secret. “Actually, the truth is that the team had to hire Julie as Ty's personal PR rep.”
Julie shrugged. “He’s a bad boy. But he’s my bad boy. Besides, you should know that Melissa met her husband, Dominic, when he hired her to be his agent.” She waggled her eyebrows. “I’ve never seen an agent that interested in her client.”
Anna had to bite her lip so she wouldn’t laugh at the way the two women were ribbing each other. At the same time, she’d noticed they both seemed to have a glow about them, especially when they were talking about their husbands. A little pang of envy caught her in the chest, similar to the way she sometimes felt when she watched her sisters with their husbands.
“So.” With unsettling abruptness, Julie and Melissa stopped teasing each other and turned their laser focus on Anna. “Tell us about yourself. What do you do for a living? How did you meet Cole? When did you know he was your forever?”
Oh God, what was with people and the word forever?
“I teach first grade.” She paused, readying herself to lie to these two nice women. Just one more lie to add to the heaping pile. But she couldn’t quite do it, not when they'd been so nice to her. “We met in Las Vegas. One of my sisters was getting married and he was visiting his grandmother.”
She would have stopped there, but she already knew neither of these women was going to let her get away with leaving the “forever” question unanswered.
Dropping her voice, she lowered her gaze to her lap. “I knew it was forever the first time he looked at me.”
Julie’s soft gasp echoed Anna’s own private reaction to what she’d just said.
To what she’d just admitted...to herself.
Oh God, had everything she was starting to feel for him already been there in that first glance, when he’d looked into her eyes and told her they were beautiful?
“It’s clearly mutual.”
Julie’s surprising statement was quite possibly the only thing that could have pulled Anna out of her shocked self-examination.
“Cole is usually pretty even-keeled, but he almost bit my head off in the hall before we came in here.”
Anna didn’t understand. “Why? What happened?”
“I told him I wanted to give the press our version of your story, rather than whatever random misinformation they’ll splash onto the Internet and the newspapers. I thought he was going to tackle me when he told me that your relationship is private. And that there wasn’t any story.”
Melissa agreed. “I’ve never seen Cole act like that about any other woman. I honestly never thought he’d find anyone he really, truly could care about. Not until you.”
Anna couldn’t believe how wrong these women were about Cole. He’d bit off Julie’s head because he was trying to keep their lies from being revealed, not because he cared about his new wife.
“I still can’t believe he managed to keep you a secret,” Julie said. “When did you say the two of you met?”
Anna knew she wasn’t a good liar. Not only did she preach to her first graders day in and day out about the value of honesty, but she simply didn’t like the way lying made her feel, like gears were grinding together in her gut, pulling and tugging at her insides.
Thankfully, before she could answer, the game began and everyone’s attention turned to the field. She peered out at the men in their uniforms. She wanted to ask which one was Cole, but it would be way too suspicious if she did. Fortunately, he wasn’t hard to pick out. Not when she already knew how he moved, the broad set of his shoulders, his tight hips. He looked up at the VIP box between plays and she couldn’t stop her body from reacting. From wanting.
Needing.
As she watched the players move on the field, she was glad to find herself quickly picking up on the rules. Time passed and she had almost started to feel comfortable, when suddenly Cole thundered into a player from the other team, knocking the huge man to the ground without even breaking stride.
“Oh, my God.”
She was too stunned by what she’d seen, by the brutal way he’d stopped the other team from advancing down the field, by what she now realized was his job, to keep the words from leaving her mouth, to keep what she was sure was a clear expression of shock from her face. He was paid to be violent, given so much money for being huge and hard and unstoppable that he could pay for a mansion on the hill in San Francisco, for an expensive sports car, for a penthouse in Las Vegas, for the jewels he’d offered to buy her.
But bigger than her shock at what she’d just seen her husband do, was her shock at herself.
Because instead of being horrified at the violence, instead of wanting nothing more to do with Cole as the other man was helped, limping, off the field, her body had heated up...and she wanted her husband now more than ever.
She wanted all of that barely leashed violence unleashed over her. On her.
In her.
Realizing that both Julie and Melissa were staring at her, questions in their eyes, she shot to her feet. She had to get out of here, had to go somewhere she could be alone and pull herself together.
Somehow, she had to figure out a way to stop reacting with such pleasure every time she saw Cole, or said his name aloud, or even thought about him, about little things like how good he’d been with her family, especially her mother. He’d been perceptive enough to realize that her mother was upset and he hadn’t pushed, hadn’t tried to get Jackie to like him. He’d just been himself, been easy with all of them, telling them football stories he’d had to know they would like, and by the end of the night, Anna had caught her mother smiling at him despite herself.
“I have to go—” She paused awkwardly.
“The restroom is just out the door and down the hall to the left,” Melissa said, concern lacing her brows.
“Thanks.”
Splashing her face with cold water in the bathroom, taking the time to repair her light makeup, Anna stepped outside a sliding door into the cool air off the Bay and tried to breathe deeply. But she didn’t have enough time to figure out a way to deal with her response to Cole, to tamp down on it and contain it in a little box, one she would only let herself open for the sensual pleasures he’d promised her.
Still, no matter how hard it was going to be to hold firm, she couldn’t give up the fight.
Not when she knew with utter certainty that if she gave in to the insidiously soft emotions growing by the second behind her breastbone, she was going to be in a whole lot more trouble than just being caught telling a couple of lies.
If she deviated from their agreement to simply stick it out through his grandmother’s illness, she was going to get caught wanting more. So much more that she could already feel herself drinking in every single one of Cole's touches, his kisses, his gazes.
If there was one thing she knew with utter certainty, it was that no man—especially one this rich, famous, and good-looking—would ever want his fake temporary wife to fall in love with him.
Finally, when she heard loud cheering and saw people beginning to file out into the parking lot, she made herself return to the VIP box. Cole would be worried if he couldn’t find her. Besides, she might not be the most adventurous woman in the world, but she wasn’t a total coward either. Not anymore, anyway.
Thankfully, neither Julie nor Melissa acted like anything was strange about her disappearing for so long. They introduced her to the other players’ families and everyone was incredibly nice, despite their clear curiosity over her sudden appearance in Cole’s life.
But all the while, she was waiting. For Cole.
“Sweet Anna.”
His arms came around her from behind, his heat enveloping her, his breath warm on her cheek, and there was no force strong enough in the wo
rld—not good sense or any one of the ridiculously big men from his team who were now in the room with them—to stop her from turning around in his arms and lifting her mouth to his for a kiss.
His smile was the first and last thing she saw before his mouth covered hers and she closed her eyes to sink into the pleasure of being in his arms.
“I missed you.”
He spoke against her lips, just loud enough for her to hear, and as pleasure lit her, inescapable and wonderful, she couldn’t remember what she’d been so certain she needed to fight against just minutes before.
“You’ll get her the rest of your life. Time to share your wife with the rest of us.” The low male voice behind her was laced with barely suppressed laughter.
Feeling her face flame with embarrassment at the way she’d forgotten there was anyone else in the room, Anna tried to pull out of Cole’s arms. But she should have known better. The man she’d married on a whim wouldn’t let her separate herself from him like that—whether they were surrounded by a crowd or completely alone.
Turning so that he was still holding her to his side while they faced the two couples in front of them, he said, “Ty, Dominic, I’d like you to meet my wife, Anna.”
Two of the best-looking men she’d ever seen live and in person smiled down at her. But as she shook their hands and said the appropriate things, instead of her heart beating and her skin tingling with awareness, she felt nothing.
Only Cole could make her heart feel like it was going to break through her ribs. Only Cole could make her skin heat and tighten with desperate need.
His hand lay warm on the small of her back, the only reason she felt at all secure in this strange new place.
She appreciated that neither Ty nor Dominic focused on her, that they both seemed to realize it would make her more uncomfortable than she already was. Melissa and Dominic moved away to talk to some of their other clients. As the conversation swirled around her about the game, about upcoming barbecues, about people they all knew, Anna was able to watch the easy way Ty made Julie laugh, her eyes lighting up every time her gaze landed on her husband.