Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sadie
I’ve been at Leo’s house for an hour and a half, waiting for him to come home.
Or in Monopoly time, just long enough for Nola to establish real estate dominance.
“It seems statistically improbable that one person would land on Boardwalk so many times in a single game,” Milo grumbles.
“And yet you have. That’ll be two grand, please.”
“Pass.”
“That’s not how this works.” Nola sticks out her hand. “Pay up, short king.”
Milo practically seethes. “I am not a short king.”
“Sorry. Average-height king.”
“Be nice to your brother,” Mrs. Romero-McLaren—Eva, as she asked me to call her—demands as she bites back a laugh. She ruffles her younger son’s hair. “His growth spurt will be here any day now. And if not, he’ll still be the most handsomest boy in the world.”
Milo fixes his hair before forking over his cash to Nola. “I hate this family, by the way. Sadie, you looking for a roommate?”
Nola sneaks a five-hundred-dollar bill into Milo’s cash pile when he’s not looking.
Secret softie.
“I’ve got one roommate already, and we’re kind of loud,” I inform Milo. “I doubt you’d be happy there, bud.”
“Living in a house with the Sadie Rivers and Vivian Starling? I’d be very happy.”
“Gross,” Nola says. “Plus, Sadie will probably be your sister someday. Don’t make it weird.”
I choke on my breath. “Whoa, Leo and I aren’t together, Nola. Not like—I told you, I’m just here as a friend, to check on my…”
“Friend?” Eva offers with a wry grin.
Brilliant. So glad Leo’s mother is getting a great impression of me.
The front door swings open.
I jump to my feet as soon as Leo steps inside. “Hi.”
“Not how I act when my ‘friend’ arrives back home,” Nola whispers to her mother.
“You only have ‘friends’ until you’re sixteen, per our house rules,” Eva whispers back.
“Tell that to Milo.”
I pretend not to hear them. That’s rather easy since my pulse is pounding in my ears, and intensifying by the second.
My gaze homes in on his sling, and a pang of something powerful stabs me in the chest. I should’ve come sooner. I should’ve brought the food deliveries I had sent here myself, just for an excuse to see him.
Leo runs a hand through his gorgeous hair. “Hey. I saw your car.”
I’m about to say yes, I drove here, when Eva mercifully saves me from myself. “Leo, we need to take a trip to Walmart. Can we borrow your truck again?”
He’s still looking at me when he answers. “Keys are on the hook.”
I clean up Monopoly just for something to do with my hands while they gather their things and head out.
He moves closer until he’s beside me. We don’t touch, but I feel him anyway.
“Please stop cleaning. Let me make a fire so we can talk.”
“You don’t need to be doing any manual labor right now. Let me make it. You’ll have to remind me of the steps.”
I say remind like I’ve ever actually made a fire myself.
I expect a fight, but he gives in. “I’ll talk you through it.”
Something in his voice makes me ache to gather him close. To hold him in some way that’s comfortable with his sling. Run my fingers through the thick strands of his hair and scratch his scalp. “Let me get my coat. It’s in your room. I wasn’t snooping, that’s just where your mom tossed it.”
“It’s fine. All you would’ve seen is an unmade bed and a bunch of water cups on my bedside. It’s embarrassing how many there are at this point.”
“Water cups after surgery.” My tsk is solemn. “Never meet your heroes.”
He tilts his head toward the bedroom.
Our lighthearted moment slips away as he shadows me down the hall. He’s so solid beside me.
This little errand is something I could’ve done alone, and I think we both know it.
I slow down as we step into a space that smells like him, pine and winter and the faintest hint of cologne. The window is cracked, intensifying the effect.
My coat is draped over the foot of his bed. I don’t know where to start, or if it should be him who speaks first. I’m overwhelmed as he watches me carefully, like he’s waiting for me to go first.
I fold with a shuddering breath. “You didn’t text back.”
“Sadie…” He drops my gaze. When he finds it again, determination replaces his hesitation. He puts his good arm around me to pull me close into the warm wall of his body. My heart clenches as if squeezed in a fist. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.” I try hard not to jostle him in any way, resisting the urge to melt against him even though that’s all I want to do. “You were recovering.”
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to. Or that I didn’t think about you around the clock. Fuck, it’s all I do.” He buries his face in my hair, sending goose bumps across my whole body as he breathes me in. “Thinking of you is what gets me through it. Every day.”
His words are like being scooped off the ground and spun around until I’m dizzy. A surrendering hum vibrates my throat. “I would’ve been here. Sitting right beside you.”
“I know.” He tightens his hold, cradling the back of my head as his lips find my forehead. He doesn’t kiss me so much as rests them there, staying long enough to gauge my temperature. The way I burn for him.
You’d think we did this all the time—touched each other freely—with how much I’ve missed it. It’s as though I only needed a little taste of closeness to know I don’t want to live without it.
But I step back, giving us the physical space we need to talk. “Please sit. It can’t be comfortable standing.”
He sighs, slow to release me. When he finally does, he perches on the edge of his rumpled bed.
I leave a foot of space between us as I face him, hugging my chest. “If you and I are going to work, we need to be able to talk. You can’t shut me out for weeks when you need me the most.” I swallow, throat tight.
“And I can’t say one thing, like ‘this can’t happen,’ and then behave like we’re together.
I was giving you mixed signals. That wasn’t fair. ”
“As if I made it easy. I couldn’t step back from it, even though I should’ve.
All the things I’ve wanted in my life, I could train for.
Work for. Then I met a person who I wanted more than any trophy or victory, and it confused me.
Nothing had ever derailed the importance of hockey in my life, until you.
So I focused on being what you needed, ready to play for our team until it killed me. ”
Regret passes through his eyes like a puff of smoke, there and then gone. “That’s why I shut down and shut the world out. I needed to figure out my next move—something that would be good for me, and make me good enough for you. It’s not an excuse, but it’s the truth.”
I step between his thighs, my heart clawing out of my chest as if to wrap around his. “You have always been more than enough for me, hockey or not. We exist outside this sport, even when we’ve let it consume us.”
He takes my chin between his fingers. His gaze drinks me in. “If we’d met somewhere else, say, at a bar—”
“I would’ve slipped into the chair beside you, pretending not to notice the most noticeable man in any room.” I falter as his thumb traces my bottom lip, my voice breaking. “But I wouldn’t have lasted long.”
“You would’ve spoken first,” he tells my mouth.
“Said something about a game on the television. Not hockey, of course. Not in this other world. I’m running my mouth about college football.”
“Even in this alternate universe,” he murmurs, “you’re still perfectly you. And thank God for that.”
I move deeper into the cradle of his legs as his hand slides behind my neck. I think he’ll kiss me, but he doesn’t. The look in his eyes is so reverent, I’m afraid it’ll shatter me.
I close my eyes and breathe him in. My heart is radically charged, madly beating.
His cheek brushes against mine, sandpaper against smooth skin, as intimate as a kiss.
“I, um— Isla and I talked about a plan to handle our relationship—”
“Marry me, Sadie.”
“—and a statement we’ll eventually— What?” I carefully pull back to look at him.
“I’ve already told the world I’m on LTIR, and everyone knows what that means.
No one can say shit about favoritism if I’m off the ice.
” He presses a kiss to the corner of my lips.
“And they can’t say much else about what might’ve happened when I was on the team—or speculate about what else you might do—if you’re my wife. ”
My wife. No two words have ever hit me so hard and so softly all at once. But I try to keep hold of my runaway heart before I get ahead of myself. “You’re proposing…to avoid a worse scandal?”
“No. I’m proposing because I’m so fucking in love with you.
Because I want to buy Cleo’s place and turn it into something that makes you proud of me.
I want to start a life here with you in this town I never thought I’d call home.
So that you can move into my house as soon as humanly possible with a ring on your finger the size of my fucking face so everyone knows exactly what this is. I want a family with you.”
His hands are all over me, stroking and claiming as my cheeks grow wet. “I love you, Leo.”
“And if you don’t want to publicize this yet because you’re scared of what people will say, even better. Marry me in secret. That’s my fucking dream. Something small and intimate, just for us. Nothing for them.”
My heart lurches dangerously. “If I was your wife…”
My question is supposed to mimic what he asked me, if we’d met somewhere else. But speaking it out loud is like sinking into the most wonderful bath. A full-body immersion into something that transcends physical feeling.
Something so right I could live inside it for the rest of my life.
“Then instead of waking up and thinking of you”—he leans forward, nuzzling my neck—“I’d wake up and see you, right here in this bed, every day, for all of my days. We’d be together, and nothing else would matter quite as much.”
I always thought it’d feel like I were making a choice, if ever someone proposed to me. But with him, the yes came first, and all thinking came second. We felt right together before we were allowed to be right.
Emotion expands inside of me, barely contained as I hold his face in my hands. “Yes. A very easy yes.”
His eyes briefly shut, relief painting his features in light. And then he gives me his laugh, a deep, rumbling thing. “Easy, yet you still made me work for it.” His hand slides inside my dress to feel the bare skin at the back of my thigh. “I’d expect nothing less.”
I carefully place my lips on his, leaving one hand only on his left cheek so I don’t accidentally get carried away and hurt him.
He growls into my mouth. “Sadie, please.” His tongue parts my lips and I open for him, taking what he gives, pained with restraint as we spiral into a sweet yet perfectly filthy kiss, peppered through with licks and bites that reveal us for the animals we are.
He makes me into someone wild and a little feral.
I like it.
No. I love it.
His breathing grows erratic as he explores my body in an increasingly undignified way.
“Leo,” I moan, lacing my fingers behind my back. “You can’t.”
“The fuck I can’t.”
“No, really.” I pull back, my own choppy breathing evident in the rise and fall of my chest. “It’ll hurt you.”
“It’s been two weeks of nothing. At all. Now my fiancée is standing between my legs, looking like this”—he grips my hip—“and my body doesn’t know what can’t means.”
I chew my cheek as I stare at him.
And then I walk to his door, closing and locking it.
“Stack a few pillows and lie back, legs off the edge of the bed and feet on the ground.” I lower down on the floor, crawling toward him.
“Holy shit.” His eyes darken with barely restrained lust. “To be clear, I wasn’t demanding you—”
“What’s that?” I pause, brows lifted. I may be on all fours, but I’ve never felt more powerful. Or more adored. “You’re turning me down?”
“Fuck no, I’m not,” he growls. “I just don’t know how not to participate. I like making myself useful.”
“Too bad. Because if you move, or strain yourself in any way, I’ll stop.”
He stacks two pillows and lies back.
As I reach him, I glide my hands up his legs until I reach the waistband of his joggers. The fabric does little to hide the fact that he’s sinfully hard.
I move slowly, pulling them down with his boxers in tandem.
“I’m already close,” he warns the second he’s freed, his tone suggesting he’s mad about it. Like he wants this to last a long, long time.
“That’s okay.” I wrap my hand around his fevered skin. He hisses at my touch, growing even harder under the tug of my right hand. Moisture beads at the tip as his hips lift off the bed. He needs this badly. And I need him just as much.
“I want to touch you,” he grits out.
“I know.” I kiss the crown, getting my lips wet. He shudders and leaks more, his thigh flexing under my left palm. I treat him to a lick, and then another. “And you will. For the rest of our lives.”
Turns out, he really was close.