I joined in, until I realized exactly what Beulah was talking about and couldn’t halt the heat rising in my cheeks. I wasn’t a prude. I liked sex just fine, but being in a relationship like that, where you couldn’t keep your hands off each other no matter where you were... I’d only had that once – and it hadn’t been with my ex-husband. Teenage hormones were not to be taken lightly.
“Marnie, what’s that look?”
I blinked. “What?”
“You had a look, like you were thinking about…” she grinned knowingly.
I blushed even harder. “Oh no, it was nothing. I was just… to be in a relationship where you… you know… sex all the time. I’d forgotten what it was like.”
“What about David?” asked Lowe, ignoring Beulah’s frown.
I dropped my head with a shake. “He was away a lot, and then when he got home it wasn’t the first thought. He was always too excited to tell me about what he’d been doing, his new discoveries, that sort of thing. And then it was a lot of talking, and we’d fall asleep.”
I didn’t really understand the identical expressions Lowe and Beulah were wearing, but I knew I never wanted to see it again.
“What about Jupiter?”
If I thought I’d gone pink before, I’d now turned a deep shade of fuchsia.
“No, sorry!” Lowe waved me off before I could answer. “None of our business.”
I swallowed thickly. “No, that’s okay.”
Because I’d never really had girlfriends before, not since school anyway, I’d never really had ‘girl talk’, where I could talk about my feelings or what I was experiencing. Yet I found right then in the back of the Range Rover taking us to the plane that I wanted to.
“We were teenagers; you know how it is…” I chewed on my lips as my brain flashed with more memories I was trying hard to forget about. “But, yeah, we were like that. It’s not the same when you’re an adult with jobs and responsibilities, though.”
I look down at my lap. The dark of the car was doing a good job at hiding my face, both from the blush and the blatant lie. It was nothing to do with being an adult. I’d dated a few guys in college, and before David. Even though I’d had no one to compare Jupiter to when we’d met, it hadn’t taken me long to figure out nothing would ever match up after so I stopped looking for it to happen, which made it easier to forget.
“I know what you mean,” Beulah said, her hand resting over mine. “I was a pretty lonely teenager, so I didn’t discover what is was like to be in a relationship until last year.”
She smiled softly then her gaze drifted off, and I suddenly felt like I was intruding.
“Not sure I want to think about Jupiter Reeves as a teenager,” Lowe snickered. “Was he as intense then as he is now?”
“Yes, but not in a moody way. As long as he was with me or playing baseball, he was happy. And when we were together, we were either having sex or studying. Sometimes both at the same time,” I chuckled, then let out a long steady breath to calm the twisting in my loins before they heated to the danger levels of a nuclear reactor, “Phew, haven’t thought about that in a long while.”
Or at least since the other day, when the past had banged hard on my office door until I’d flung it open.
“Speak of the devil.”
Because we’d been so deep in boy, sex, and relationship chat, I hadn’t realized we’d pulled up at the airport and the car had stopped. I looked up as the driver opened the back door to see New York Lions painted along the side of a huge bus the team was disembarking from.
The three of us climbed out of the car and fell into line behind the enormous group. There were easily seventy people, made up of the players, coaches, and support staff.
As one of the tallest players on the roster, it wasn’t hard to spot Jupiter, even with his short dark hair hidden by the same Lions ball cap everyone else was wearing.
It also wasn’t hard to notice how broad his shoulders were, how narrow his waist was, how thick his thighs were, and how tight his ass was.
I’d always loved his ass.
In fact, for the first time since I’d arrived in New York, I had the luxury of looking at a real life version of him properly, without him noticing. Because it was perfectly fine to look if he didn’t know I was looking.
Which is what I told myself right before he spun around in the crowd, his eyes finding mine almost immediately; like a tractor beam.
Like he’d always been able to.
He walked backward for ten paces, all without dropping his piercing gaze. His jaw popped, followed by a slight curve on the corner of his mouth. Then he winked.
