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I’m ready to knock off for a nap, when something occurs to me. “O’Brian?”
He turns his head against the rest to face me. “Hmm?”
“You had time to wash your hands though, right?”
When he flips me off, I’m pretty sure it means yes. But I make a mental note to get some sanitizer anyway… and take a bath in it.
Chapter 14
Natalie
The first week after we stopped fighting and gave in to this thing between us, I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting to find someone from the press camped outside my door when Vaughn opened it to leave at four thirty in the morning. Or for him to come to his senses and tell me he had to put hockey first—that I was a risk he couldn’t keep taking. But instead, he kept showing up. Devouring my mouth like a starved man, whispering dirty promises against my lips… delivering on them so thoroughly and completely, that by the time he was done, I didn’t have the strength to worry about anything at all.
The second week, I realized he was right. No one was watching us.
The press cared about his hat trick in the game against the Maple Leafs and whether tensions were easing between him and Greg. No one caught on to how often our eyes met across the bar. They didn’t notice how my cheeks kept turning red from the texts he sent. They didn’t see the way he brushed past me in the crowd, close enough that I could feel his cock rub against my ass in a tease so effective it’s a miracle I didn’t jump him right then.
The third week, I wasn’t thinking about anything beyond how many hours it would be before I had his hands on me again. Before he was inside me, making me feel like no one and nothing had ever made me feel. I told Helene, who was ecstatic, and George, who was not. I was laughing out of nowhere, thinking about the way he held me in his lap and told me the latest “Bunny Incident” with Quinn O’Brian and sighing over the stories he’d shared from when he was growing up.
Now we’re doing the backward dance we’ve perfected around road trips, overbooked schedules, and family commitments. My toes barely touching the ground as Vaughn guides me toward my bedroom, pulling me in and up, his mouth barely breaking from mine long enough for air.
We’re halfway to my room when I remember the conversation that started before I left for the clinic and bounced from phone to text to video and back again throughout the day. I dig my heels in and press my hands into his chest to stop him.
Having come straight from practice, he’s freshly showered, wearing cuffed jeans that hug and hang over the hard-packed contours of his ass and thighs just right, and a navy button-down that’s fitted so perfectly it looks like they sewed him into it on the way over. And it takes everything I have not to feel him up over his clothes.
“You don’t think it’s weird that we’ve been fooling around this long and I haven’t seen your place yet?”
“It’s not weird.” Flattening his hands over mine, he drags them past his pecs to his shoulders. “Your place is awesome and mine—mine isn’t.”
God, this guy’s body does crazy things to me.
And Vaughn knows it too, because that cocky smirk is in place as he dips down to catch my mouth in another dizzying kiss. His tongue slides past my lips, stroking in and out in a dirty promise that has every part of me tightening in needy anticipation.
Sifting my fingers into the still-damp waves of his hair, I’m about to climb him right here, but I force myself to take a breath instead.
“So I can’t even see it? Ever?”
This time when he comes in for a kiss, I pull away.
His brow arches in surprise—and seriously, big, bad, tough Vaughn Vassar’s surprised face is kind of adorable. Which makes holding out on that kiss I want so bad even harder. But this thing with his place has gone on long enough. I get it that we can’t go out—I don’t want to—but my place is so small. And he already said it wasn’t a security thing. Apparently his digs are very private.
So it’s starting to feel kind of weird that he doesn’t want to show them to me.
I cross my arms and shrug.
“Natalie,” he growls, giving me the crabby scowl that intimidates everyone who gets within fifty feet of him, but not me. Honestly, it makes me kind of hot, but I still don’t budge. And when his head drops forward in defeat, I leap up and shower his neck and jaw with kisses as he bands one arm around me and walks us to my room. “Pack a bag.”
* * *
“It’s notugly,”I say, shrugging off my black puffer coat in the back entry to Vaughn’s place. “I mean, it isn’t really what I’d have expected for a twenty-nine-year-old professional hockey player with the kind of disposable income you have, but—”
“Babe, it’s ugly.”
Fine, it is. It’s really ugly and not in any cool or intentional sort of way. From the outside it looks like any other graystone. Nice. Garage in the alley. Fenced-in little yard and a covered breezeway leading up to the back door.
But once you get inside… “I don’t get it,” I finally say, shaking my head at what looks like an amateur rag-rolled zebra-patterned paint job, the brass accents, and Old-West-themed runners at the top of the walls. “How did you end up livinghere?”
“I told the agent what I needed security- and privacy-wise. And moved in sight unseen.”
