She gazes up at me through her eyelashes. “Oh? You thought that bunny costume was sexy?”
“I think you know exactly how you looked in that costume.”
“I’d love to hear your assessment, actually. In detail. Be thorough. Take your time.”
I lean down close to her ear. “Ask me again on our wedding night,” I murmur. “I’ll tell you everything I thought about that bunny costume. Slowly.”
Her breath catches. She looks up at me, and the teasing falls away from both of us for a second, and there's just her dark, beautiful eyes looking deep into mine.
“Our wedding night,” she says softly. “In separate beds.”
Right. Separate beds. The whole arrangement I proposed, the terms I laid out myself on that overlook. No sex. No complications.
It had seemed so reasonable when I said it.
We pass a cottonwood on the courthouse lawn, its goldenleaves fluttering and scattering with every gust of breeze. Up on the mountain the tamaracks are still green and stubborn, holding summer a little longer.
“At least we’ll get all four seasons together as husband and wife,” I tell her. “There’s so much I want to show you.”
She gazes up at me, smiling. “Like what?”
“This autumn we can take long trail rides. In the winter, we can ski and skate. Spring has some beautiful hikes, especially when the wildflowers start blooming. Summer we can swim in the lake.”
The smile is still on her face, but there’s something ambivalent about it. Almost guarded. “You leave for Denver when, again?”
“June.”
When I signed the contract, knowing I’d be taking a season off between now and then, June seemed way too far away. An eternity.
Now it seems way too close.
At the other end of Main Street is Lila’s boutique. She’s put pumpkins out by the door, not the plain orange kind from the grocery bin, but smooth ones in varying heights, deep orange and cream and one the color of sage.
The window display has changed since last week too. She’s done something with dried grasses and antlers and amber glass that makes you want to stop and look.
“You do that everywhere you go,” I observe.
“Do what?”
“Make things beautiful.” I nod toward the window. “Everything you touch. Like a Midas touch, but better. Because it’s not just turning to gold, it’s turning to something soft and cozy and warm too.”
Her cheeks flush beneath the shimmery powder she likes to dust on them. “That’s what you’re paying me for, right?”
Right. That’s what I’m paying her for.
It hits me, the irony of it all. My whole life I’ve hated games, except the one I play for a living. I always felt deeply uncomfortable with women wanting for my money or my name or my jersey number, wanting me for everything except the person I am beneath it all.
Now I’m paying the one woman I actually want to spend time with, and I’m about to walk her into a whole-ass fake marriage.
No wonder my family looked at me like I’d lost my mind last night.
“Your family was the fun part,” she says. “Next we tell mine.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“You haven’t met my mother. A barrel full of scorpions would be more fun.”
She looks truly anxious now, so I figure it’s a reasonable course of action to pull her into my arms and hug her.
