“Now listen, I’d really like to get you naked, but I also want to get to know you. So what would you say if we did something totally Vegas and took a gondola ride and talked?”
“I would love to get to know you better, Ryan Sloan,” she said. He held out his elbow, and she hooked hers through it, walking with him to the gondolier, excitement ping-ponging through her because they were starting something.
Starting over, and starting anew, and starting fresh.
They were going to make a go of this for real, stripped down and bare, hearts and minds.
And—probably pretty damn soon—bodies, too.
But for now, there was a boat, and there was water, and there was a fake skyline that looked like a bright blue summer day, so she settled into his arms and bobbed along the canals inside The Venetian.
“Why don’t you tell me more about hockey?” she asked.
* * *
Whew.
That was not easy.
That was like…scaling a mountain.
Lifting a car.
Leaping over a tall building.
But to have Sophie in his arms again, her lush, ripe body snuggled next to him as they floated down the manmade canal? Yeah. Worth it.
Giving voice to emotional truths was exhausting. But she was happy, so damn happy, to listen to him talk about hockey. And he was relieved, so damn relieved, not to have to dig any deeper right now. Fine, he’d probably have to later. But for the moment he explained the basics of a line change, the different penalties, and the puck-before-skates rule.
“So the puck has to cross the blue line before the skates when you move to the opposing team’s zone?” she asked.
“Exactly.”
“And if the attacker has both his skates across the line before that happens, it’s an offside and there’s a face-off,” she said, as she processed the rules he’d explained while the gondolier crooned a love song in Italian.
“You could be a ref now,” he said, clasping his hand more firmly around her shoulder. She wriggled closer, and the boat passed under a brick bridge.
“That’s my next calling, I’m sure,” she said resting her head against him. He stroked her hair, and this moment was one of the most surreal of all—living in the present on its own terms. “And why do you like hockey?”
He shrugged and smiled. “It’s just fun.”
“Fun is good.”
“Were you looking for some deeper reason? Like it was my dad’s sport?”
“No. But was it?”
“Nah. He wasn’t a sporty guy. He was all about cards, and cars, and poker, and pool. He loved this town because he loved the little bets. He had a regular card game going with his buddy Sanders and his other friend Donald. They played poker every third Thursday of the month. Never more than fifty bucks,” he said. He was tempted to add that his mom used to give his dad a hard time about playing, saying they didn’t have the money to spare. He’d respond by telling her that fifty dollars wasn’t going to make or break their month. He was probably right on that count. Besides, he was good at cards, and used some of his winnings over the years to pay for night school classes the last year of his life. But while Ryan might be able to share little details of his dad with Sophie, he wasn’t ready to delve into the fights his mom and dad had. Letting Sophie into his life didn’t mean baring every single tiny detail. It meant not hiding the things that mattered. Like his memories of his father. “He was a good guy. A good man. He wasn’t perfect, but he took care of us, and he taught us manners and respect, and he never missed a chance to go to the park.”
She slinked out from his hold and turned to face him. “He sounds like a great guy. I’m sure you miss him.”
“I do,” he said with a nod. “I really do.”
He sighed heavily, and Sophie must have decided hockey and this admission were enough for now, because she cupped his cheeks and brushed her lips to his. It was a soft kiss at first, and she explored his lips as if she were kissing him for the first time. Soon enough she pressed harder, nipping with her teeth, nibbling and sucking, and making him groan in the middle of the canal, with the stripe-shirted gondolier mere feet from them.
The kiss was a new beginning. A promise of more to share. A hint of what they might become.
And it blurred the rest of the world. Because all he knew, felt, and wanted had been reduced to the soft and sweet feel of her lips, the smell of her skin, and the scent of her hair.
Then she picked up speed, veering out of poetic and into ravaging. He’d never let her lead in a kiss before, but he did now, and she sure knew what to do to him. She knew how to play rough, how to kiss like a tiger, hard and hungry. She’d turned him on well past the point of propriety in a gondola.
He broke the kiss, clasped his hands on her shoulders, and looked her in the eyes. “Spend the rest of the weekend with me. Come to my house. Swim with me. Meet my dog. Play a round of pool. Besides, I have a change of clothes for you if you need one,” he said, holding up the bag with the peach dress in it.
She made grabby hands, and he yanked back the bag. “You can have it if you say yes.”
Her eyes lit up. She tapped her chin, pretending to think about it. “I feel like you left one very important thing off the to-do list.”
He lowered his hand to her ass and squeezed hard. “No, beautiful. That’s a given. Fucking you will be the main agenda item.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
He opened the sliding glass door to his deck and stood on the threshold, stopping to drink in the gorgeous sight before him.
Sophie wore a white bikini and huge black sunglasses as she stretched out on a lounge chair by his pool, reading her iPad under a big yellow umbrella. Her skin was so fair, he doubted she was a sun worshipper. But even so, she looked stunning with the rays casting their glow on her legs. Late-afternoon shadows fell across his yard, along with a quiet hush.
The stillness of the moment—both the silence and her beauty—felt like a dream. But the image was too sharp, too crisp to be anything but real.
His real life. His real chance. A real change.
Okay, some things hadn’t changed. He couldn’t keep his hands off her.
After a pit stop at her condo, since she’d insisted on picking up clothes, he drove her to his house once he’d ensured his family was already gone. He wanted Sophie to meet them, but he didn’t have the patience for a get-to-know-you session when he simply had to have her. They’d christened the hallway the second the door had closed. He took her against the wall, with Johnny Cash hiding his snout under a pillow on the couch as if he couldn’t bear to watch. Now, his mutt was sprawled on the cool grass under a tree, back legs sticking out behind him like Superdog.
But the woman.
Oh, the woman.
Sophie was all his for the next twenty-four hours. No dropping her off at midnight. No final kiss in front of her building. And no bumping into her brother.
He struck all thoughts of her brother from his brain as he walked across the deck, down the wooden steps, over the soft grass, and onto the tile edging the oval blue lagoon in the middle of his yard. He had two drinks with him, and when he arrived by her side, she lowered her shades to the bridge of her nose, looking exactly like a glamorous movie star on vacation.
“Are you playing my waiter today?”
“Maybe I’m the pool boy,” he said as he handed her a mojito.
She laughed. “I don’t have pool-boy fantasies, I assure you.”
He sat at the end of her chair with his Macallan on ice. “What fantasies do you have?”
She raised an eyebrow as she took a sip of the drink. “I fantasize about a man who can make a drink like this. This is divine. How did you know I like mojitos by the pool?”
He shrugged, quirking up the corner of his lips. “Lucky guess.”
She shot him a skeptical glance as she pushed her sunglasses on top of her head. “I’m not so sure that’s just luck. I suspect it’s more of your military intelligence training.”