Page 24 of Tricky Puck

“Then we’ll have to fake it.”

I almost spit out the water but manage to choke it down. “What the fuck?”

He turns to me with a determined gleam in his eyes, hard and intense and damn breathtaking as the green of his irises darkens.

“I’m serious. We can pretend for a while and give them some satisfaction. Until Christmas.”

“Then what?”

“We fade away, break it off before the wedding pans get underway.”

“Don’t you think that would be a worse disappointment than telling them right now it’s not going to work?”

He shakes his head, and my breath catches at the sorrow in his eyes. “Grandma is…”

“Don’t tell me.” I barely stop myself from putting my hands over my ears because I can’t stand to hear that he’s expecting his grandma to pass soon. “Fuck. I’m so sorry.”

He lets out a rattling sigh, and though his head is down, I can see his emotion. Oh no. I can feel his emotion, too, and it tears at me. This man’s sadness, someone who was a stranger a day ago, tugs at my heart so hard I reach out and touch his face, pulling it around to face me.

“We’ll do it your way. We can fake it for a while.” I don’t say until his grandma passes because it seems too much like a harbinger of death. “How old is she?”

“She turned 90 yesterday.” He smiles, shaking his head. “Seems like an age ago. That’s why she set me up with the matchmaker—because she said she doesn’t have a lot of time.”

Shit. I heave a breath to control my emotion and push past the growing lump in my throat, thinking of my own sweet Granny. “Maybe she’s wrong.”

He nods. “I hope like hell she’s wrong. But I don’t want her worrying about me in the meantime. I don’t want her worrying that I’m going to end up alone. I figure even if I have to tell her this match won’t work out, I can reassure her that she’s proven I can fall in love and that I’m over my refusal to settle down. That’ll make her plenty happy.”

“I get it. Maybe the same will be true for me. Maybe Granny will be happy to see me settled for just a while, enough to convince her I’ll stop resisting looking for Mr. Right.”

“Then, it’s a plan.”

I laugh. “Sure. Just like that. Not sure what it all means since I have other plans that don’t involve you.”

He shrugs. “We’ll get together when we need to…for show. I’ll be in Portsmouth, and you’ll be here in New York. We have a built-in excuse not to be in each other’s space all the time.”

“Right.” I don’t mention to him that I plan to leave the city and head up north to a friend’s cabin in the woods—and I’m especially not telling him that friend is George.

I mentally wince when I think about the scene at the restaurant. I wasn’t exactly civil to him. But he deserved it, parading his date around as if I might care and trying to interfere with my date.

I’ll have to make sure he’s still okay with me staying in his cabin. But he already gave me the key and said it was mine for six months—for the winter, until April if I want—because he only uses it in the summers. It was kind of a consolation prize for firing me, the turd.

“In the meantime…” Link says, his gravelly voice obliterating my thoughts. That pirate’s smile I’ve come to recognize and adore transforms his face—and lights up my sex nerves when I didn’t think it was possible for those nerves to have anything left.

He turns his body to mine and reaches an arm around me, cupping my ass and pulling me to his endlessly ready cock.

“You’re remarkable,” I say, more than a little breathless as I feel the hot wood of him against me like a tree branch on fire. Christ, even that image doesn’t diminish the pop of sizzle that runs through me, humming and bringing my honey-maker to life.

“How am I remarkable?” he whispers in my ear as he nibbles. My earlobe should be chewed off by now, but no, far from it. His nibbling lights up all the tiny hairs, electrifying them as they pulse signals to my core, bypassing my brain, which goes hazy now.

Didn’t he ask me a question? Oh yeah. “Your stamina is amazing.” My words come out breathy, like I’m transfixed, under his spell. Because I am. And in this state of wanting nothing else, seeing nothing else, feeling nothing else but him against me, his skin under my hands, and hearing nothing but his breath, I don’t care about whatever spell this is.

I don’t even care that if this keeps up, if I let him, he could own my soul...

Nine

LINK

Waking up with morning wood is nothing unusual, but finding a hot body next to me when I do is something that never happens. As I turn to my side, throw an arm over Delaney’s hip, and pull her in to spoon with me, I’m thinking I may need to reconsider my habit of not spending the night with women. I’d always pictured the prospect of the morning after as messy and unpleasant, but this⁠—