Chapter 8
Even though his words are meant to be funny, a joke, I feel the harsh realness of the truth that I’m not good enough for him to settle down with. Though, what the hell do I care about settling down anyway? Still, his words smack too much of rejection, and I don’t like it.
I’m the one that does all the rejecting, aren’t I? Maybe this is a good lesson to know how it feels to be on the receiving end. Maybe I should take better care of men’s feelings and let them down easier in the future.
“Not that you’ve been looking,” I remind him.
“Touché.” He runs a hand across my collarbone, then drags his calloused fingers across the sensitive skin of my breasts, raising goose bumps and making me shiver, effectively disarming me. “So, why are you so afraid to sing?”
“I’m not afraid,” I scoff. I’m terrified.
“Why aren’t you working in the family bar? Where does your interest in music come from?”
“Getting awfully nosy, aren’t you?”
“Of course. Grandma expects me to get to know you. I can’t face her without a full accounting.”
“Liar. You’re just pressing what you think is my weak spot like a big bad bully, but I’m not that girl you can get an edge on. And I’m not sure why you’re working so hard to dominate me anyway—why are you?”
“Says the expert deflector. I’m not that guy who bullies girls. I’m genuinely interested in what makes Delaney Collins tick.” He circles my nipple with his thumb, staring at me with those sea-green eyes, and I can picture him as a swashbuckler.
“I don’t believe you.” I push his hand away. “And stop trying to distract me.”
“Is that what you call it? I thought you enjoyed?—”
He leans in and nuzzles my neck, landing hot kisses along my pulse point, and I draw in a deep, shuddering sigh.
“My mother. I got my interest in music from my mother. She’s the real singing talent. I don’t have the kind of talent for a successful career as a singer. But, she’s why I love songwriting and music.” He pulls back, and I take a deep breath. “Happy?”
His lazy grin answers me. “Hard to imagine a happier place right now.”
“What about you? How’d you end up playing hockey?”
“My grandma is a New York Rangers fan.”
“They’re a hockey team?” He laughs, fully amused, his eyes crinkling and flashing all kinds of sparks in my direction. Even if he is laughing at my expense, it’s hard not to be sucked in and charmed by his good humor.
“Was your mother a successful singer?” he asks.
Boom. The bottom falls out of my glow, and the smile I caught from him fades away.
“She should’ve been. You would think she’d be a superstar, famous, and… I don’t know.” I turn away and shrink down into my pillows.
“But?” He touches my chin, bringing my face around to meet his eyes. The sheer intensity of his interest, almost to the point of caring, forces me to answer him.
“My father owns my mother’s soul and stole her dream to sing.”
His eyes widen, and the pirate in him disappears, leaving a vulnerable, caring man in its place. “Shit,” he whispers, caressing my cheek, telling me with his expression that he understands how devastating that is. “Dream-stealing is a serious accusation.”
I nod. “It wasn’t my father’s fault he devastated her. She fell hard and fast and gave up everything for him.”
“Shit.” His Adam”s apple bobs, and his brows knit together like he doesn’t get it. But then, neither do I.
“When I was really little, my mother used to sing to me at bedtime. That was before she went to work at the pub eighty hours a week, and Granny took over the role of mothering. We’d make up songs and sing them together. I knew even then how beautiful her voice was, how special. I’ll never be as good a singer as my mother was.” I stop to fight off a wave of sadness.
“Was?”
“I haven’t heard her sing in years—and I can only guess why she stopped—but I remember her voice.” I try again to shake off the melancholy and aim a determined smile at him. “I also remember the songs and how wonderful it felt to make them up. I fell in love with words, songwriting, and poetry in a true pitiful Irish soul way.”
I yawn and then cough.
“You’ve been talking too much,” he says, teasing. But he’s not wrong. There’s a glow of orange on the horizon, signaling the arrival of morning soon.
Surprising me, he gets out of bed and brings me back a glass of water. I take it from him gratefully, fighting to keep my sleepy eyes open. I take a sip, and it revives me enough to understand him as he slips back into bed.
“We need to talk about what we’re going to do about the matchmaking scheme.”
I sit up. His words hit me as if he dumped that glass of water on my head. “Shit. Granny has her heart set on wedding bells.” I lick my lips as I watch his face, looking for alarm or panic, but all I see is his smile because he knows my game by now. He knows I’m not expecting wedding bells.
I sigh. “And as much as I love the woman—owe her everything—I’m not ready to marry a stranger to please her. Nothing personal.”
“I’m hurt that you still consider me a stranger.” He sits up and leans against the pillows, pulling me next to him.
“Fine. I’m not ready to marry anyone. In fact, true confession, I’m not planning to ever get married.”
His brows go up in mock surprise, and I swat him.
“I get it. No judgment from me. I’m not exactly the marrying type, either. You said it yourself—I’m a pirate, and that’s as far away from husband material as a guy can get.”
“You’re really going to hide behind your pirate mask?”
“It’s not a mask. It’s the real me underneath the unassuming, wealthy superstar hockey player.”
I laugh because it’s probably true. “Either way, you can’t be trusted. I get it.”
“Trust issues? Really? That’s so cliché. I expected something more interesting from you.”
I laugh again because he’s right. “Okay. The trust issue is minor and temporary, but my need for independence is not. Did you know I’m the only one who ever moved out of my Granny’s house before getting married? My family is wonderful—and smothering. The men—which outnumber me five to one—are particularly bothersome with their overprotectiveness to the point of controlling.”
“And that’s why you don’t want to get married?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t picture it. I can’t picture myself all dressed up in white, walking down the aisle to an organ playing that cliché death march—and then having children. There’s a big world out there, and I’ve barely seen it.”
He smirks, then nods as if he’s thinking about what I’ve said, contemplating me as if he cares.
“Never mind.” I wave a hand. “The bottom line is that neither of us wants to settle down and get married.” I swallow down a gulp of emotion. “Not even to please our beloved grandmothers.” I meet his eyes, letting my serious pain about disappointing Granny show through and looking for the same from him.
He clears his throat and nods, and I see the trouble in his eyes before he looks away. I take another sip of cold water to fortify me.
“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...