“Do you guys want to come to dinner with us?” Katie asked when we were getting ready to leave.
Zee shook his head. “Soupy and Rachel insisted on a family dinner for me tonight.” That didn’t surprise me since Dana was Soupy’s younger sister and Zee had been his best friend since they were kids. “Rachel’s picking me up on her way home.”
“And Hunter’s going to a meeting of the goalie guild,” Razor put in cheerfully, ignoring the glares coming from Hunter’s corner. “Nicky, Bobby, and Jacks are planning to spend time with his hostile ass, for some reason, so we might as well go.”
Katie handed the photos and sonogram back to Zee, and we headed out to my car.
I got on the highway, heading toward the Old Town-Chinatown District. “What’s under Hunter’s skin?” I asked Razor.
“You mean besides his wife?”
I did a double take as I exited the highway. “He’s married?” The last I knew, Hunter hadn’t even been dating anyone.
“Yep. Miss Oklahoma or something. They’re fucking disgusting together, nonstop PDA and shit, but he’s surly all the time now. Well, surlier than normal. You’d think that if they’re all over each other like that, he’d be getting laid all the time. And you’d think that getting laid all the time would improve his disposition. I don’t see that one lasting, but what can you expect when a guy marries a piece of ass he’s only known for five seconds?” He looked over his shoulder at Katie, in the backseat. “Sorry. Language.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I can promise you, I’ve heard worse.”
That wasn’t the point, but I decided not to say anything about that. I was just glad Razor had corrected himself this time before I’d had to. Maybe he wasn’t always going to be a complete asshole. I scanned the side roads, searching for a place to park. “So he met this girl and married her? Just like that?” I finally found a spot not too far from the Davis Street Tavern and took it before someone else could come along and snag it out from under me.
“As far as I could tell. And he’s been a fucking bear to deal with ever since. Well, more so than normal.”
I took Katie’s hand as we crossed the street to the restaurant. When we got to the front door, she surprised me by stretching up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. I was almost positive I was blushing, but I didn’t give a shit. Not only that, but I wasn’t satisfied with a kiss on the cheek. That might be good enough for Zee, Hunter, and Razor, but I wanted more. I drew her in for a real kiss.
“Fucking surrounded by it everywhere I go,” Razor muttered when I let her go. “You two should get a room.”
The hostess seated us in a booth almost immediately. I slid onto the bench next to Katie, and the hostess passed around menus. Once she left, Katie set her menu down in front of her and focused in on Razor.
“So, what is this advice you gave Jamie?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said, shooting daggers in his direction in case he thought it would be a good idea to give her a solid answer.
“Advice?” He quirked up a brow and cocked his head to the side, eyeing me. I shook my head. He chuckled and turned back to Katie. “Oh, that advice. I just suggested Babs listen to the words of one of the greatest thinkers of our time.”
“And who’s that?”
“No o—”
“Beyoncé,” he said, cutting me off. “You know. The part in ‘Single Ladies’ about what he should do if he likes it.”
“Put a ring—” Katie stopped short as soon as she understood, her cheeks turning almost as pink as mine. She picked up her menu again and hid her face behind it, but there was no hiding how embarrassed she was from me. “I see.”
We’d barely decided we were dating again, so it was way too fucking soon to start talking about getting married, no matter how much I might want that to be the end result.
The waitress dropped off glasses of water and took our orders, scratching things down on a notepad before collecting the menus.
“And I think we all know he likes it,” Razor added as soon as she walked away.
I kicked him under the table.
“What? It’s not like it’s a secret.” He shifted down the bench so he was across from Katie instead of me, not that it would do him any good. I could still kick him if he deserved it, and chances were high that he would. He caught Katie’s eye and winked. “Maybe once he’s getting laid on a regular basis, he won’t be so tetchy. But then again, he might end up like Hunter and be more unbearable than ever.”
I was already pulling back my foot to deliver another solid kick when Katie smiled and said, “I guess there’s only one way to test your theory.” Her eyes flickered over to me for a fraction of a second before fluttering away, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I could have missed the invitation in that glance.
I froze.
The waitress returned with a bottle of wine and a basket of bread, and Razor caught my eye during the exchange. The corners of his lips twisted up in a shit-eating grin.
Holy hell.
We ended up spending hours hanging out with Razor before taking him back to the hotel, but Katie didn’t seem to mind. Actually, with the way she talked and laughed with him, the two of them ganging up together to tease me, I was pretty sure she had enjoyed it immensely. So had I. Today was the first time I’d spent quality time with Katie since she’d come back to Portland that had been free from either her tears or us talking about cancer. I just hoped we were going to be able to keep it up without him around, because he definitely would not be around for this next part.
We had barely left the hotel’s parking lot when Katie turned in her seat and asked me, point blank, “Do you have condoms back at your house?”
I nearly lost control of my car in shock. “No. Why?” Then I mentally berated myself for coming across as an idiot.
“We should stop at the drugstore and get some,” she said, ignoring the most senseless question to have ever crossed my lips.
“Are you— I mean, aren’t we… Don’t you think we’re rushing into things?”
“We don’t have to use them tonight if you think it’s better to wait,” she said, as calm and collected as ever. “I think we should have some on hand, though. For when we are ready. There’s nothing worse than being in the middle of things and having to stop to go to the store because no one has a condom on hand.”
“Nothing worse,” I repeated, hating myself for it. But I couldn’t stop myself. There were things I needed to know, and Katie had been the one to broach the subject to begin with. She’d opened the door. I might as well go through it. “So you’ve had that happen? You’ve been about to have sex with some guy and had to stop so you could go buy condoms?”
There wasn’t any way to hide the jealousy in my tone. No way to mask the fact that it hurt me that she’d been with someone else. If she had stayed in Portland, I was sure we would have been together by now, and God knew the girls I’d dated since her had done their best to get me in their beds. I wasn’t even entirely sure why I hadn’t slept with them other than it hadn’t felt right. I’d wanted them plenty bad enough, at least from a purely physical standpoint. My body had responded. My heart just refused to catch up. With Katie, my body was there, and my heart was fully in it. The only problem was my head kept telling me I needed to slow everything down.
We were coming to an intersection, and the light turned yellow, so I braked and stopped. Then I turned so I could really see her when she answered me.
“Yes,” she said. “I stopped him because we didn’t have condoms, and I went to the store to get some.”
“He didn’t go? Why didn’t he go with you?” Or better yet, instead of her.
She shrugged and looked down at her lap, where she was toying with the bottom of the zipper on her jacket repeatedly. “He was mad I made him stop over something like that. He said I should have thought to be sure we had condoms before things ever got as far as they did. So I went and got them, and I brought them back. And we had sex.”
“Does it matter who it was?”
The light turned green, so I adjusted my hands on the wheel and eased onto the gas, chewing on my frustration. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “You tell me. Does it matter who he was?”
Katie spun her head and stared out at the city as we passed it by. “It was Beau. With Jesse, his drugs were more important to him than I was, but he at least bothered to…to take care of me when we were in bed. The other guys I dated, it never got serious enough for me to sleep with them.”
“But Beau acted like the ass he is when you were alone together,” I finished for her.
“You have no idea.”
There was a part of me that wanted to leave it at that, to stop probing for more information when everything she told me made me want to drive to LA so I could force these guys to answer for how they’d hurt her. It might not have been them, though, but something had put that haunted look in her eyes. I couldn’t go hunt them down, anyway, and it didn’t have a thing to do with thinking I needed to know every detail of what had gone on in her life. Katie didn’t owe me anything. She didn’t need to explain herself to me. But I had a sinking suspicion that she felt the need to tell me, before we took things further.
The drugstore was about a block away. I changed lanes to turn in.
“Do you hate me?” she asked quietly, once we were in the parking lot.
“There’s nothing you could ever do to make me hate you.” I shut off the engine and sat there, waiting for her to look at me. When she finally did, I said, “I might not always be happy with every decision you make, but I love you. That’s enough.”
“But you don’t— I know how TMZ and the other gossip sites made me seem. They made me out like I was easy. A slut going from guy to guy. It was what Derek wanted. He wanted me to have some edge, so I could get different sorts of parts, and I just…I went along with the publicity stuff. I trusted him to know what was best for my career, and I shouldn’t have. When something felt wrong, I should have put my foot down and said I wouldn’t do it.”
I agreed wholeheartedly, but telling her so wouldn’t solve anything. “You can’t go back and change things,” I said. “It happened. What matters now are the choices you make moving forward.” Like the fact that she wanted to buy condoms to use with me. My hormones had been working in overdrive since she’d kissed me in her backyard earlier, and thoughts like these weren’t helping to cool things down.
Her hair had fallen into her eyes again, so I brushed it back, letting my fingertips trail over her cheek before I tucked the tendrils behind her ear.
“Promise me something,” I said.
“What’s that?” She blinked a couple of times, as if she were trying to hold back tears again. I didn’t want tears to have any part of things when I finally took her to my bed.
“Promise me that if I ever treat you as anything less than the princess you are, you’ll break my nose and then be sure your dad finishes me off.”
“How can you possibly think I’m a princess, that I deserve to be with someone as good as you, after—”
“Promise me,” I interrupted. “Don’t you fucking dare sell yourself short. Not ever again. I can live with a lot of things, Katie. I can accept that you did things you regret, that you made choices I would rather you hadn’t. But I can’t handle you thinking you’re not good enough. For anything or anyone. That’s not even close to all right. That’s the kind of thinking that leads to you accepting the kind of treatment those guys gave you. So you promise me you won’t ever put up with me treating you as anything less than perfect, because that’s what you are. At least to me, and if anyone thinks otherwise, then they need their thinking adjusted.”
I didn’t know where these speeches kept coming from when I was with Katie. There was a part of me that wished words would come to me like that when I was with the team because that was what they needed from me as their captain. It never seemed to happen with them, though. Only with Katie, who at the moment was looking at me with the most thunderstruck expression I’d ever seen.
“So are we buying condoms or what?” I asked. My face felt hot. I had to be fucking blushing again. I opened my door and got out, slamming it behind me because I was so damn pissed at my own embarrassment I could hardly function.
By the time I got around to Katie’s side, she’d already gotten out on her own.
“Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gotten upset like that.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.” Losing my temper with her over something that was my own damn problem would never be okay. “That’s one of those things you’re not supposed to let me get away with. You should be breaking my nose right about now.” I shut her door and pressed the button on my remote to lock the car.
When I turned around, Katie stretched up on her toes to kiss me.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Because you can’t even imagine half the ways I’ve screwed up, and you still think I’m perfect.” She reached for my hand. “Come on. Let’s go buy some condoms.”
“Do you have a type you prefer? Or a brand? There are those condoms that claim they enhance sensitivity. That could be good.” A box caught my eye, and I picked it up, holding it out to Jamie. “Ooh, or those super thin ones. They’re supposed to feel like they aren’t even there. That’s what the advertising says, at least, but I can always tell there’s something there. Can’t you? Or we could go with colored, flavored, magnum…” I intentionally left that last query hanging between us to see if he would bite.
He didn’t.
I’d seen him blush a lot over the years, but I had never seen him as bright red as he was right now. He looked like he would rather be anywhere but here, which made sense when I thought about it. Jamie had always been a private kind of guy. He never seemed to have a hard time talking to me about anything when we were alone, but I doubted he wanted his private life spread all over the news. I couldn’t say I blamed him for that. I’d had enough of the paparazzi to last a lifetime, and then some. That was another good thing about staying in Portland. I doubted TMZ would be hanging around here to catch me doing something they could twist into a scandal.
“Whatever you want,” he said quietly, keeping his head down. “You choose.”
I raised my eyebrows, a grin stealing over my lips. “You sure? I’m not terribly particular as long as it’s covered.”
“Same for me,” he said through gritted teeth.
If he wasn’t going to be picky, I might as well be adventurous. I grabbed a few boxes, just for fun: flavored, glow-in-the-dark, and another that claimed to be ribbed for her pleasure. I’d never known a condom to enhance my pleasure before, but for the most part, they didn’t diminish it, either. The diminished pleasure I’d experienced tended to fall squarely on the shoulders of the man wearing the condom, instead of the protective gear itself. Beau had never bothered to see to my needs, worrying only about his own. Every aspect of our relationship had been like that, but nowhere had it been more pronounced than in bed. We did things when he wanted, how he wanted, and as fast as he wanted, and tough if I didn’t enjoy myself.
There was no chance it would be anything like that with Jamie. He was so caring in everything he did, I knew without a doubt that it would carry over into the bedroom.
Once I was satisfied with my selections, we headed up to the checkout counter. I reached in my purse for my wallet, but Jamie beat me to the punch, handing over a wad of bills. The checker bagged everything up, doing his best to hide a knowing smile but constantly peeking up at me, and handed over the receipt. We left the store and got back into Jamie’s car.
Jamie didn’t start the ignition, though. He had put on his seat belt, but he was starin
g at the guy who’d rung up our purchases. When I glanced up to find out why, I could see him through the store windows with his phone in his hands as he leaned over the counter.
“What do you think he’s doing?” Jamie asked.
“Texting his friends that he just saw us buying more condoms than we could use in a month. Maybe tweeting it, but hopefully texting. And he could be adding something else to our purchases, like blindfolds and handcuffs. Something to make it seem worse than it is. That’s just what people do.” They always exaggerated the truth, whatever the truth was. I’d come to accept it as simply part of being somewhat famous.
“You think he knows who we are?”
“You think he doesn’t?” I gave Jamie a dubious look. “Maybe he doesn’t watch hockey, so you might be in the clear, but he definitely knew who I was. You saw the way he was looking at me.”
Jamie undid his seat belt. “I’m going back in there.”
“What? No.” I put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Why would you do that? Going in there again will only make things worse.”
“Because someone needs to tell him that what he’s doing is wrong!”
I flinched and let go of his arm, folding my hands on my lap. “Fine. You’re not the one who’s been dealing with this for four years, but surely you know best. Go on. I’m sure it’ll make everything better if slutty Katie Weber’s latest man goes in and threatens the guy who’s just letting the world know how slutty Katie still is.”
“I wasn’t planning on threatening him.”
“No? Then what? Skipping that step and going straight for the throat punch? Sounds like something Dad would do, not you, but maybe you’ve been paying attention and taking a few notes about how to be sure you draw more attention to the things you want to hide.”
Dropping Gloves Page 14