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“Don’t be.” She took a nip out of his ear and whispered, “I can take care of myself.”
“I know,” he said, but instead of sounding reassured, there was almost a hint of resignation in his voice.
Deciding not to pursue that topic any further at the moment, she pressed her lips to his. Joel seemed perfectly content to let conversation drop in favor of more pleasurable pursuits.
Chapter Fourteen
October slipped into November, and signs of the approaching holidays cropped up everywhere. It wasn’t a particularly cold fall, and the weather was beautiful for the most part. Nic found herself walking around with a perpetual smile on her face, causing speculation among her coworkers.
When asked by a few particularly shrewd friends, she didn’t deny that she was involved in a new relationship, though she didn’t volunteer any information they didn’t guess for themselves. She was resigned to being teased mercilessly when her coworkers found out she was dating a doctor, and that was exactly what she got when a couple of them learned the truth.
“Trying to marry money, eh, Sawyer?” one wise guy jeered as they finished up a two-car call to a particularly ugly domestic dispute involving drunken cursing and wildly swinging fists and culminating with one of their perpetrators vomiting all over everyone around him. “Hoping he’ll take you away from all this?”
Her nose still wrinkled in disgust, Nic handled the taunt with the ease of someone used to being the butt of jokes—and someone who also did a lot of the teasing. “Now why would I want to leave this life of glamour and nonstop adventure? Is there a better job in the world?”
Her fellow officer laughed and shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he said, cheerfully swabbing at his pant leg with a grubby handkerchief.
While Nic didn’t mind revealing that she was involved with Joel, she wasn’t sure he was ready to go that public. If he’d told any of his local friends that he was seeing her, she didn’t know about it.
They went out, of course. They had dinner, they saw movies, they attended a couple of parties. But Nic wondered if anyone who saw them together would realize that their yearlong friendship had recently changed.
Maybe Joel just wasn’t the public-display-of-affection type. He was certainly demonstrative enough in private—though they had yet to talk about their feelings for each other.
She didn’t know if he had told his family that they were now more than friends. She suspected that he had not. And she couldn’t help wondering if he was simply waiting to see if their new relationship had a chance of lasting or if he didn’t want to hear them express their disapproval. Didn’t want to try to defend his choice to them.
She was under no illusions that her effort to rescue Heidi had made Joel’s parents look at her differently. While they had expressed their gratitude on their friend’s behalf, it was still obvious that they didn’t see her as a fitting match for Joel.
She thought of her friends’ teasing about her angling to marry money. She understood they didn’t mean it. Anyone who knew her well had to be aware that she would never be motivated by something so shallow and ultimately unsatisfying. Of course, Joel’s fri
ends and family didn’t know her very well, so maybe they had concerns about that.
But during the few moments she allowed herself to contemplate their resistance, the main reason she came up with was that she was so very different from Heather. She didn’t want to believe that mattered so much, but she reluctantly acknowledged that the skeptics might have a point. If Joel had been so blissfully happy with Heather, why would he want to be involved now with someone who was almost diametrically opposite to his late wife?
But she wouldn’t think of that now, she promised herself. After all, she and Joel were just enjoying the present, right? There had been no talk of a future together, and she wasn’t looking for a long-term commitment anyway. Or so she told herself on an average of three times a day.
She didn’t see much of Aislinn during those early weeks of November. Aislinn claimed to be very busy with her cake-decorating business, but Nic wondered if there was more to her friend’s absence. Was she deliberately making herself scarce while Nic and Joel explored their new bond or was there something more to it? Was Aislinn seeing an ending that wasn’t going to be happy?
Because she was determined not to spoil her present contentment by worrying about a future she couldn’t completely control, Nic chose not to think any more about Aislinn’s uncharacteristic behavior than she did about Joel’s family’s opinions. This would all work out or it wouldn’t, she told herself prosaically. Either way, she could handle it. She’d survived broken relationships before, she could do so again.
Even as she made that brash vow to herself, she suspected that getting over Joel would be a lot harder than anything she had ever faced before.
Joel drew in a sharp breath as he parted Nic’s calf-length terry-cloth robe and looked down at her right leg. “Damn it, Nic.”
She chuckled, unchastened by his scolding. “It’s just a scrape. It looks worse than it is. And you should see the other guy.”
“You just recovered from all the bruises from your fall. Now your whole right calf is purple again—not to mention that nasty scrape.”
“It’s not as if I did it on purpose.”
“You aren’t supposed to tackle in flag football. That’s the whole point of the game. You know—so you won’t be hurt?”
“I had to tackle him,” she said with an unrepentant shrug and a grin. “He was going to score. And besides, he was taunting me. You wouldn’t expect me to let him get away with that, would you? But if it makes you feel any better, I think he’s going to have a black eye.”
“Why would that make me feel better?” Joel demanded, looking at her in disbelief. “You could have been hurt, Nic. You both could have.”
She sighed lustily. “Okay, so sometimes our flag football games get a little out of hand. I’ll start trying to be more careful,” she conceded unenthusiastically.
“Do that.”
