Thank heavens. I’m really sick of hearing that man talk.
Scottie greets me in the hall with a wary look. “We all good?”
“Very good. I’ll meet you in the VIP Suite in a few minutes, all right? I want to call my husband.”
Scottie gives me a smug smile. “There she is.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SEAN
I’ve just gotten home when my phone buzzes in my pocket. I drop my keys on the entrance table, already grinning as I answer. Kayla’s dove-gray tumbler sits by the keys, and seeing it without her hand wrapped around the handle hits like a jab to the ribs.
“Hey, Boss,” I say, unable to keep the smile out of my voice. “Congrats on the win. How’d the rest of the day go?”
There’s a little pause, a quiet exhale that tells me more than words could.
“Pfft. It’s done,” Kayla says, like the tension is rolling off her. “But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to hear how things went with Otto! Tell me everything, starting at whatever’s happening next season. I’m on your side no matter what.”
This woman. How is she real?
I lean against the counter for a second, and my elbow bumps something soft—one of her thick brown hair ties. She must have forgotten it this morning when she came back to the house to getmy jersey. I hold the phone between my ear and shoulder and stretch the thick brown tie between my fingers before sliding it onto my wrist beside my watch.
“Sheesh, no warm-up? We’re diving right in?” I tease. “He liked what he saw. They want to offer me a conditional contract.”
“SEAN! That is such good news! But not surprising. I watched every second you played with the Arsenal. You’re amazing.”
She watched clips of me playing? Is she trying to make me fall for her?
“What are the conditions?” she asks.
“Me training hard all summer and passing a physical with the team doctor later in the summer.”
“How have your knees been?”
“Old.” I laugh. “But Otto gave me some modifications last season, and the Arsenal trainer put me on a different regimen than my AHL trainer did. They’re not as bad as I thought.”
“I happen to think they’re in great condition,” she says. “You didn’t seem to have any problem getting down on one knee, after all …”
I chuckle. “Am I allowed to groan at that?”
“No. You’re allowed to swoon and marvel at your wife’s delightful sense of humor.”
“Swoon,” I say in a mystical voice. “Marvel.” I stretch out the word like it’s magic itself.
She laughs, and the sound washes over me like a cool shower on a hot day, waking me up to something I haven’t felt in a long time.
Wanted.
“You joke, but you know you love it,” she says, still laughing.
I sit down at the small kitchen table, spinning my wedding band slowly around my finger. It has some kind of hammered, rough-cut surface that catches the light in broken flashes. I neverwould have picked something out that wasn’t a plain tungsten band, but this is so much cooler, so much moreme.
“I can’t deny it. Won’t even try.”
“Good boy.” She pauses. “Is that frustrating at all that your knees could have been better all this time, if you’d known then what you know now?”
“I can’t focus on that. Besides, how would I have met my spectacularly hot wife?”
