by Cathryn Fox
He puts his finger on my lips to stop me. “I’ve learned so much about myself in the last couple months.”
“What have you learned?” I ask, my heart wobbling in my chest.
“Hockey is important to me, very important…but it’s not the most important thing in the world.”
“No?”
“No—you’re far more important,” he says, and my heart nearly explodes with all the love I have for him. “Without you, nothing else matters.”
As I look into his eyes, I see pure honesty. My brother was right, he’s always been a good guy, but he’s grown so much in the last few months. He looks past my shoulder into the baby’s room. “I wanted to show you what you meant to me. These rooms, they’re for our future.”
“Jonah—”
“This is the part where I’d ask you to marry me, but you’re already my wife.”
“No I’m not, I signed the papers.”
He pulls something from his back pocket and hands it to me. It’s our divorce papers, and they’re missing his signature.
“I want to be married to you, Quinn. For real. Not because of Shari, or Daisy, or the courts, but because I love you. I wanted this to be real the first time around, but you said you didn’t want a family, and I was trying to respect that.”
Tears spill from my eyes. “I do want this, Jonah. I love you, too. I just… I was afraid.”
He hugs me tighter, and his thumb brushes over my cheek. “I know, but I’m not like your mother, Quinn. I walked away from hockey practice and I’ll likely be benched the first few games because of it. But I did it to prove to you that you are way more important.”
My heart swells, knowing he did this all for me.
He brushes his lips over mine. “If you want to know the truth, I’ve been in love with you since you were sixteen.”
My eyes go wide. “You’re kidding me?”
He shakes his head. “Nope, but Zander…”
“I kind of figured he knew.” I look him over. “And you’re still in one piece?”
He laughs. “He’s a lover, not a fighter, and he’s happy for us.”
I go up on my toes and press my lips to his. He holds me to him, and when I break the kiss, I say, “I have a confession, too.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been in love with you for a very long time, Jonah. I only acted like I hated you because you treated me like one of the guys.”
“Had to. Bro code and all.”
I roll my eyes at him but I get it. “You should probably know, I spent days making hearts in my journals, putting ‘Quinn loves Jonah’ inside them.”
He laughs hard. “Are you kidding me?”
I shake my head and laugh with him. “I’ll show you someday.”
“Quinn?”
“Yeah?”
He pulls a ring from his back pocket. “Will you still be my wife?” he asks.
“Yes!” I say, and let loose a big squeal when he picks me up and spins me around.
“Will you help me fill these rooms with kids? I want a big-ass family.”
“So do I,” I say, and he picks me up.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting started.”
“On what?”
“Filling these rooms, of course.”
“Shouldn’t the Body Checker be in Seattle, doing what he does best.”
“Really, Quinn, after all the time you spent in my bed, you still think hockey is what I do best?”
“Well no…not really,” I say, my heart so full of love, and my body so alive for this man to take me again, I can barely think straight.
He carries me to his room, sets me on the bed and stands back. “Undress now,” he demands in a soft command, as his eyes rake over me. “The Body Checker has a body to check out.”
I laugh at that, and reach for the small buttons on my shirt.
The need making his eyes go dark, sends heat through my body. “Uh, are you fond of that shirt?” he asks.
I grin. “Not really,” I say.
He drops to his knees before me, grips the shirt and tears it wide open. I gasp, and his mouth goes to body. “That’s better, wife,” he says between kisses.
My heart soars, loving how he calls me that. “I’m going to go through a whole wardrobe with you, aren’t I?”
“Yes, and I’ll buy you a new one with no goddam small buttons.” His mouth leaves my flesh, and he stands, runs his tongue runs along my neck.
“You don’t have—” I begin, but when he tugs the cup of my bra down and closes his mouth over my nipple, all thoughts fade except for how much I love this man, and how I now have everything I’ve ever wanted, but never thought I could have. He draws my nipple in, and I let loose a soft moan that pulls a growl from him.
“Such a boob man,” I tease.
“That’s not all I’m into,” he says, his voice vibrating through me.
“I know,” I whisper, and rake my hands through his hair. “And now you have a lifetime to show me.”
“Some of those things might be weird.”
I laugh at that. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
Afterword
Thank You!
Thank you so much for reading The Body Checker, book three in my Players on Ice series. I hope you enjoyed the story as much as I loved writing it. Be sure to check The Playmaker, and The Stick Handler. Please read on for an excerpt of Single Dad Next Door.
Interested in leaving a review? Please do! Reviews help readers connect with books that work for them. I appreciate all reviews, whether positive or negative.
Happy Reading,
Cathryn
Single Dad Next Door
When my bedroom door flies open and crashes hard against the paint-chipped wall, I groan. “Go away,” I say, my voice muffled by my pillow. Not that my roommates will listen, even if they can hear me. Heck, I could scream at the top of my lungs and it wouldn’t faze them, much less send them running back to their rooms—not when the view outside my window is that hot.
Seriously though, sharing a house with four college freshmans is not my idea of a good time, not when I’m a senior and working my ass off to get into law school. But when I left NYU two months before the start of my fourth year and transferred to Penn State at the last minute, this place was all I could find—and afford. Ultimately, Penn State is where I want to do my law degree after undergrad. I just ended up here sooner, rather than later.
Someone tugs at my pillow and I open one eye to see Becca hovering over me. “Come on, Rach, he just took his shirt off,” she says. “You’re going to want to see this.”
Why oh why did my room have to come with the best view of the hot neighbor’s driveway?
“Thank God for this heat wave.” Sylvie, roommate number two, fans her face with her hand.
I groan and curl up into the fetal position. I just want one more minute in bed without every member of the house in my room. “I. Don’t. Care.” Well, that might be a lie. I like looking at the eye candy next door as well as they do, but after putting in a late night at Pizza Villa—I seriously have to find a new job—I need all the sleep I can get before class.
“Jesus, would you look at him,” Becca says, her voice a breathy whisper as she peers out the window. “Talk about slurpalicious. I could seriously lick that from head to toe, and back up again.”
“Leave,” I say on a yawn.
Ignoring me, Sylvie squeals. “He’s going back into his garage. Damned if he doesn’t look as good going as he does coming.”
“But I’d rather see him…coming,” Becca says, and they start giggling.
“Seriously. Are you both twelve?”
“Shh, he’s back,” Becca says and swats her hand at me, like I’m an annoying fly that needs to be shooed away.
I shift on my bed, not to get a better look outside my window. No, moving has absolutely nothing at all to do with the shirtless mechanic turning my roommates into dim-witted moths. The only reason I’m getting
up is to herd these girls from my room, and if I happen to get a glimpse of the hot, tattooed, badass daddy next door, well…then so be it.
I rub the blur from my eyes and toss my pillow at them. “Get away from my window, before he thinks it’s me.” They don’t need to know that the hottie’s bedroom window is also across from mine, and that late one night, he caught me staring into his room as he walked around in nothing but boxer shorts. Heck, if they knew that, they’d camp out for the rest of the school year, and that was so not happening.
“Ohmigod!” Sylvie leaps back. “I think he just saw me.” She puts her hand over her mouth and starts to giggle. Footsteps pound down the hall, announcing the arrival of my other two roommates. I shake my head as they come bursting in.
Kill. Me. Now.
“Is he out there?” Val asks, her big blue eyes wide and hopeful.
“Yeah, but he saw me looking,” Sylvie says. Despite that, she edges back around to sneak another look. Megan hurries across the room, and goes up on her toes to peer over Sylvie’s shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse without getting caught.
“Do you really think he killed someone?” Megan asks.
“That’s the rumor,” Val protests, though her tone holds uncertain convictions.
“Then why isn’t he in jail?”
“Maybe it was self-defense.”
“He’s such a badass.”
“He’s good with his little girl, though.”
“Bad Boy Daddy, now that’s hot.”
“Do you think he’d spank me if I was bad?”
Unable to put up with their incessant chatter and giggles any longer, I point my finger toward the door. “Out. Now.”
A chorus of grumbles ensues as they all sullenly walk to my door. Christ, I’m getting that lock fixed, even if I have to eat ramen noodles for the next month.
“God, you’re such a grouch in the morning.” Becca shoots me a wounded look over her shoulder.
“Doesn’t even have to be the morning,” Val adds with a hair toss.
“You need to get your nose out of a book once in a while,” Megan says.
“What she needs is to get laid,” Sylvie informs them all, but her solution to pretty much everything is sex. Problem is, this time Megan is nodding her head in sad agreement as she follows Sylvia out the door.
“I can hear you,” I shout after them. I shake my head and my mussed hair falls over my shoulders. “I’m still right here.” As I stand there, dressed only in my tank top and underwear, a warm breeze blows in and slides over my skin, a late reminder that I’d opened my window last night before crawling into bed exhausted. Great. Not only could the hot guy working on his car see my roommates drooling over him, he could hear them as well. And they just announced that I needed to get laid. How freaking mortifying. I stomp across the room and yell down the hall, “And don’t bother to close my door on your way out.” As usual my sarcasm is ignored.
I give the door a good slam, which helps improve my mood a little. With a deep breath, I turn around, not to see my hot neighbor, but to close my window. No way do I want him hearing anything else that goes on inside this place, or get the wrong idea that I might want him. I don’t. Not in a million years.
I’m completely off guys, trying to keep a low profile. After my ex-boyfriend turned violent and abusive, threatening to kill me if I went to the police, I snuck away under the cover of darkness and put several states between us. His was big and hard like my neighbor, his muscles born from rough carpentry work. Last year, when he came to do repairs on the house I was sharing with friends, I was flattered that I was the object of his attention. At first he was doting and attentive, but as time went by, he became possessive and controlling, and I came to find out later, he’d had other charges against him from numerous other women.
Jesus, why am I such a bad judge of character when it comes to men. Oh, probably because my only role model had been a mean-assed, alcoholic father who drove my beautiful, caring mom to an early grave and me out of the house the second I turned eighteen.
If I try hard enough I can still smell the cheap perfume on his shirt when he stumbled in after a weekend-long drinking binge. God, how I hated those women he slept around with almost as much as I hated my Dad. Mom used to try to protect me from his disgusting behavior, but what hurt the most was how dragged Mom down, aging her pretty face far too early.
My heart squeezes as I think about her. She was a good woman, but was too afraid to leave. Running is hard. I get that now. Not that she really had anywhere to run. Our only other relative was my father’s mother. She’s still alive, living upstate Pennsylvania where my Dad was born. While she liked me well enough, when it came to Mom and Dad, she always took Dad’s side. That’s how it is with parents, I guess.
I lift my arms, place my hands on the frame, and lean in to give it a tug when the hottie slowly lifts his head. Our eyes meet, hold a moment too long, and I suck in a quick breath as heat zings through me—and dammit, it’s not the autumn sun that has warmth pooling between my legs.
OMFG.
With a wrench clasped tightly in his right hand he stares at me, like we’re in a goddamn Mexican standoff. I swallow hard, and will myself to move, but can’t seem to tear my gaze away. Ah, what was that I said about dim-witted moths?
Close the window, Rachel.
While my brain struggles to call the shots, my body has other ideas. Ideas that involve staying exactly where I am and ogling the hottest guy I’d ever seen. Blue eyes, square jaw, a body I could play Plinko on, and low riding, well-worn jeans that accentuate bulges in all the right places, and holy hell, the man has a lot of right places. Want prowls through me, hitting every erogenous spot along the way.
Just shut the window already.
He shifts his stance and taps the wrench against his leg as he looks up am me. A small grin touches his mouth, and that’s when I realize I’m half naked. Please, ground, open up and swallow me. After hearing the girls, he probably thinks I’m trying to lure him to my room, fix that dry spell I’ve been going through. I grip the window ledge tighter and slam it down, putting the brakes on my body’s reaction, and shutting out six delicious feet of hard muscle and pure testosterone. This is so not what I need right now. Coffee. Yeah, that’s what I need. Lots and lots of coffee.
I hurry to the kitchen and shove a pod into the Keurig. I pour milk into a cup and set it on the spill tray. As I wait for the coffee to percolate, I wander into the main level bathroom and glance in the mirror. I look at myself and try to imagine how I appeared through the blue-eyed mechanic’s eyes. I see black smudges under tired eyes, boobs that only look big because I’m slender from work, school and lack of proper nutrition and rest. My hair is…wait… I grab a fistful of my curls and examine them closer. Oh, God, pizza sauce.
Could this day get any worse?
Christ, even if he did hear my roommates, I’m sure he’d never look twice at a girl like me—especially the way I look now. A guy like him probably goes out with women who are a little more put together, sexier. Although I have to say in the two months I’ve lived here, I’ve never seen a woman come or go from his place. Still, I’m certain a girl next door who always smells like marinara sauce and pepperoni isn’t even on his radar.
Good, because I don’t want to be.
The coffee machine beeps and I hurry back to the kitchen. I grab the mug to take a big sip. Heavenly. Desperate for a shower, to wash last night’s work from my hair, I hurry back upstairs to my room, hot mug of coffee in hand. I check the time and grab my clothes. Giggles come from Sylvie’s room across the hall as I dash into the bathroom. I turn the shower to cool, partly because it’s just so hot in the house, and partly because I need to calm my overheated body down. I might be off men, especially big, scary ones like my neighbor, but my body and brain aren’t working in sync this morning. Clearly my libido didn’t get the memo when I left New York.
I stay under the needle-like spray longer than normal, needing an extra m
inute to clear my head. When the water turns cooler, I jump out, dry off, and pull on a pair of shorts and T-shirt. I towel try my hair, then tie it back into a ponytail. I forgo makeup. Not only will it melt off my face, I’m not trying to impress anyone or draw any kind of attention to myself. Once done, I grab my purse, shove my textbooks into my backpack, and head for the front door, feeling a little more alive after the coffee.
The hot morning air hits like a slap in the face and I groan. It’s October for God’s sake. It’s supposed to be time for pumpkin spiced lattes. This is more like beach weather. Mother nature needs to get her shit together. I glance at my watch, and judging by the time—thanks to an extra-long shower—I need to get my shit together, too. This morning I’ll have to take my car to school, or risk being late for class. The walk to campus is long, around forty-five minutes, but I prefer it on days like today. I need to save my gas money for the colder winter months.
Since my driveway runs parallel to my neighbor’s, I keep my head down, toss my backpack into the back seat and climb into the driver’s side. Thank God the hottie is out of sight and I don’t have to go through the embarrassment of facing him.
I roll my window down and shove the key into the ignition. I turn it, only for the engine to make some god-awful sound and stall out. My heart races quicker. Shit. Shit. Shit. Frustrated, I give the steering wheel a thump with my fist. This can’t be happening. I need this car. Need to be able to depend on it if I have to run again. I might be an old junker, but it’s all I have. I can’t afford a new one. Heck, I’m on such a tight budget, I can’t even afford to have this one fixed.
I take a deep breath, throw up a silent prayer, and twist the key again, only for it to cough and gasp, like it’s dying a slow and painful death.
No. No. No
A tap comes on the roof, and I turn to see my hot—shirtless—neighbor with his arms braced over the door of my car. He leans down, his beautiful face close to mine. “Need a hand?”
“I…uh...it’s not working.”
Jeez, way to state the obvious.