Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
JANE
“Do you think I need to worry about Austin being with other women?” I asked Hazel as I shifted closer to her on the sofa, hoping that Mom and Dad were too absorbed by Dad’s ongoing commentary on the replay of the game to hear me.
My stomach was still tangled unpleasantly from watching those women follow Austin and Nick out of the stadium earlier, and I needed reassurance.
Hazel glanced at me but didn’t make a big fuss of the question, which I appreciated. “Was he a player before you guys got together?” she asked, toying with a strand of her hair. “Did he bring girls back here?”
“No.” The tangles in my gut loosened slightly. “I never saw him with anyone.”
I tucked my legs beneath myself. It was cozy in Austin’s place. I’d turned the thermostat up—finally brave enough to do that in the common living areas now that I was no longer Austin’s employee. He could turn it down later if he wanted, but for now, I wanted to be warm.
She lifted one shoulder and dropped it. “Then there’s no need for you to worry. If he wasn’t a player when he was single, why would he become one now that he’s with you?”
I rested my head against the cushion. “You’re right. Thanks, I needed to hear that.”
I’d let myself get worked up about nothing. I knew Austin. I’d spent months learning how he operated. There was no reason to second-guess myself now.
“Foul!” Dad shouted at the referee. “That was a foul! Any idiot could see that.”
Hazel and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“Calm down, Pete,” Mom said from where she was perched on the arm of his chair. “We already know how this plays out. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“But that was blatant—” He cut off when Mom put her hand across his mouth.
“There,” she said smugly. “That’s better.”
I snickered.
Hazel watched them curiously. I recalled what Austin had said about how his father had treated them both growing up and remembered how he’d shouted at them outside the house earlier in the week.
I hoped that Hazel knew my dad wasn’t like hers.
He wasn’t actually angry. He just got worked up during games.
“Don’t mind him,” I whispered. “He just likes to yell.”
She worried her lower lip. “He won’t try to critique Austin, will he?”
“No,” I assured her. “Not unless Austin asks him to.”
“Okay, then.”
I reached for my half-drunk bottle of beer on the coffee table and took a refreshing mouthful. When I put it back, I grabbed a pretzel and popped it into my mouth, enjoying the saltiness.
Hazel tilted her head. “Is that a car outside?”
Dad paused the TV, and I strained to listen.
“I think it is,” I said. “Do you think it’s Alec or Austin?”
“Austin.” She grinned. “He won’t want to be away from you for any longer than necessary.”
I dismissed her comment with a wave of my hand, but I couldn’t deny the warmth that filled me at the possibility she might be right.
A couple minutes later, both Alec and Austin entered the living room. Together, wearing tailored trousers and button-down shirts, they looked like something from the cover of GQ.
Alec caught sight of the TV and chuckled. “Really, Dad?”
“You know your father has to yell at the refs,” Mom said, ruffling Dad’s hair.
“We still have plenty to go, if you want to join us,” Dad said, extending the offer to them both.
Austin turned to me. “Jane, can I talk to you in private?”
“Um, of course.” I got to my feet and walked over to him. He took my hand and led me through the house to his private suite.
I’d been inside his rooms before when I’d needed to fetch things, but even though the suite wasn’t new to me, I looked around as if it were.
After all, the few times I’d been in here had been as his employee, and now I was here as—hopefully—his girlfriend.
Or, if not that, then the woman he was dating.
The walls were pale blue, the roof was hexagonal and angled up to a peak. The curtains were beige with faint vertical lines, and the floors softly carpeted.
As he guided me farther inside, I did my best to ignore the massive four-poster bed that occupied the center of his bedroom.
It was a strange design, with posts rising from each corner to form a cube with the bed as its base, but there were no curtains hanging from it.
As far as I could tell, the posts were purely a design feature with no functional purpose.
Considering Austin wasn’t the kind of person to care about interior design, I assumed that someone else had chosen it for him. Perhaps Hazel.
There were two comfortable beige armchairs positioned in front of the windows. Every time I’d been in here, I’d envied the window box. It looked like an excellent place to relax in the sun and read a book.
Austin gestured for me to sit on one chair. He dragged the other around, so they were facing each other and close enough that, when he sat, he was able to reach out and take my hand.
“What’s going on?” I asked, afraid to enjoy the warmth of his palm on mine because there was something worrying about the way he’d immediately separated me from my family upon coming home, especially given the lack of closure over what he’d done earlier.
He sighed, his chest deflating. “First off, I need to tell you about something that happened tonight.”
“Oh?” An uncomfortable squirming sensation started in my gut. He was clearly reluctant to talk, and I was afraid of what that might mean.
“A woman came onto me while I was at the bar. I immediately told her I had a girlfriend and wasn’t interested, but she touched my arm.
Rebecca Jansen was there and I saw her pointing her phone at us.
I’m a bit worried that she got a photo and that it might find its way into the tabloids tomorrow with some headline about me cheating on you. I’m really sorry.”
I shook my head, trying to make sense of what he was saying. I’d been uneasy, but something like this had never been on my radar.
“Why are you sorry? It’s not your fault.”
No, I didn’t like the idea of him being hit on while I wasn’t there and, if I were honest, I hated the idea of our relationship being something the world got to see and discuss, but my conversation with Hazel earlier had really driven a point home.
Austin was someone I could trust.
He grimaced. “It might not be my fault that it happened, but it’s my fault that people care.”
I considered that for a moment. “You’re not wrong, but if I want to be with you, then this is just something I’ll have to get used to. I know you wouldn’t have crossed any lines. You’re not that sort of person.”
The brackets around his mouth softened. “You believe me, just like that?”
I nodded. “Just like that.”
His expression didn’t give anything away, but I got the feeling there was a whole lot going on inside his head. I squeezed his hand, hoping to reassure him.
“Thank you, Jane.” He raised my hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. “Honestly, I’m not sure I deserve you.”
“You deserve everything,” I said fiercely.
He’d already lost so many things he should have had. A childhood. Parents who treated him like a kid and not an investment. If I could ease that at all, I wanted to.
“I know,” he began, his expression turning sheepish, “that we’ve kind of tiptoed around what we are, and then I went a bit rogue earlier, but you need to know now that I’m all in.
I want a relationship with you with all the bells and whistles.
But if we do this, then it probably won’t be the last time our relationship is dragged into the spotlight, and I have no idea how my bosses are going to react to what I did in that interview, so if any of that is too much for you, I need to know now because I’m not sure I can handle it if you pull out later.
I’m not as heartless as some people think. ”
My instinct was to immediately assure him that I wasn’t going anywhere, but I could tell how much this meant to him, so I gave his words the thought they deserved.
I didn’t want to lose him.
Being with him was so many things I never expected. The tabloid stuff… Yeah, it sucked. It was going to be a long time before I felt comfortable showing my face in some places, but being the subject of that scrutiny also wouldn’t last forever.
I’d seen that myself with my own family.
Post-retirement, Dad and Uncle Wayne made their way into the online news every now and again, but it was nothing compared to the fame they’d once had. The same would happen with Austin.
Besides, unless the same thing happened to me as had happened to Rebecca Jansen, and I saw a photo of him with another woman in a tabloid, then I’d pretty much already faced the worst. I couldn’t think of anything more horrible than being exposed during an intimate moment.
I didn’t have to worry about suffering as she had, though. Austin and Connor Taggert were two very different people. He’d never do to me what Taggart did to her.
As for the uncertainty around his career, I could hardly protest when he’d done it to show me how much he cared. My heart swelled and I drew in a breath, but before I could speak, Austin scrambled off the armchair and dropped to his knees in front of me.
“Say something, Jane. Please. Because the truth is that I love you. I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way, you became indispensable.
Please be with me. If you want me to hang my skates up at the end of the season because the media attention is too much, we can discuss that.
If you’re concerned because we don’t know where I’m going to end up next year, we can talk through it and make a plan. Just give me a chance.”
Wow. My eyes widened. I hadn’t expected that.
I cupped his face in my hands. “I don’t want you to choose me over your career. I…”
Did I love him?
The thought of leaving him made my heart hurt. The idea of one day looking at the front of a magazine and seeing him with another woman made me murderous.
Everything had changed so quickly that my emotions had been all jumbled up, but looking down at him, hearing how he felt about me, everything became clear.
“I love you too,” I told him, bending to press my lips to his. “I can’t promise to ever like public attention, but I’m willing to deal with it if it means getting to be with you. As for the rest, we’ll work it out.”
“You mean it?” He searched my gaze. “I know I can be difficult. Arrogant sometimes. Not the best at communicating, and I’m overly focused on hockey. But I promise to do everything I can to make sure you don’t regret choosing me.”
“I mean it.” I laughed. “You are everything I want, exactly as you are. You have my heart, Austin Harris.”
His smile was breathtaking. “I’ll protect it with everything I have.”
I shuffled back on the chair. “Get up. Kneeling there can’t be doing your knees any favors.”
“Only if you come over here and sit on my lap.”
I rolled my eyes, secretly pleased as I rose and made myself comfortable on his muscular thighs. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me close, peppering kisses along the side of my neck and jaw. I turned my head to meet his lips.
The kiss tasted of joy. If you’d asked me a few days ago how joy tasted, I would’ve had no idea, but now I could confidently say that it was the perfect combination of chocolate and man, with a faint hint of peanut, as if he’d stolen one of the peanut protein cookies he loved so much from the pantry earlier in the day.
I melted into him and reveled in the delicious slide of his tongue against mine.
His hand curved around the side of my neck and a frisson of awareness ran through me.
For some reason, I really liked having his big hand around one of my most vulnerable places.
It wasn’t cutting off my air, just existing and grounding me in the moment.
I moaned and felt around, blindly pulling up the hem of his shirt and edging my hand beneath the waistband of his pants to cup his cock. He rocked his hips into my palm and I stroked his erection, loving how much he wanted me.
“Wait,” he breathed against my lips. “Your family is in the house.”
I grinned. “So?”
“So we just got caught doing something we shouldn’t, and we probably ought to behave ourselves with other people around.”
I snuggled closer to him. “None of them are going to sell us out to the media. We’re in your bedroom. Where else is safer for us to be doing this?”
He chuckled, and the rumble of it excited me. “You’re supposed to be responsible, not the devil on my shoulder.”
I sighed. He was right. “We can go back out there right now.”
He grabbed my hips and held me in place. “Wait… Are you really game for this?”