Chapter 7
7
Wyatt
T he run helped. The last of the Vegas booze was out of my system, the rage I felt listening to that woman bait Sydney over and over again, and that extremely poorly timed boner I got from kissing Sydney in front of all those people – all gone.
I was myself again.
Everything fully in control.
Feeling loose, I walked the last fifty yards back to the house to cool down. I had made the right decision. Staying married to Sydney felt like protecting Sydney. That was kind of my thing. I was excellent at it. In fact, I made a shit ton of money doing it.
I would protect her like I protected my teammates, my goalie, my brother, my father.
She might say she didn’t need it, but damn, in my life, I didn’t know anyone as vulnerable as her. As alone as her.
A lost fairy who got dropped in the middle of a pack of wolves.
I looked up at the house. Sydney was there, sitting out on the deck. She waved and I waved back.
We probably needed to talk about that kiss. It had been stupid. That terrible woman said prove it and I went full caveman. Syd had every right to push me away. At first, I’d felt the tension of her body against mine. I’d thought – yep, there I go making things worse again. But then…she melted. She melted right into me. Her body curved so perfectly against mine, it was like she was made of sweet golden honey. All those assholes in the room vanished and it was just me and Syd.
Me and my wife.
Sex could complicate things, yes. It sure as hell could make things easier too. Slice right through the bullshit. And Syd had a whole lot of bullshit around her.
The July 4 th holiday was coming up, then preseason would start mid-September.
That’s, if you go back, said the voice in my head that had started saying these kinds of things to me. Every morning when I woke up to the throbbing pain in my shoulder from the arthritis that had settled in after my surgery, and I hobbled to the bathroom because my ankle was stiff and sore, the voice had something to say about it.
The run I just went on? The voice was in my ear for the first ten minutes.
This sucks. If you just retired, you wouldn’t have to get back into hockey shape every season. If you just retired, you’d never have to run again.
The voice was an asshole.
But I have a point.
I climbed the steps from the beach up to the deck and Sydney was there with a bottle of Gatorade, the blue kind, cold and waiting for me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Beatrice had groceries delivered,” she said. “There wasn’t any research for her to do on specific foods you like, but she stocked up on the Gatorade.”
I fell into the lounge chair next to her and twisted the top off. The sun was high, the ocean was fucking beautiful. A person could quickly get addicted to this view.
“I like food,” I said, and took another drink. “All kinds. I’m not picky.”
I sighed after another big gulp and turned to look at her. Taking her in. She’d changed her clothes and was back in a pair of short shorts that left her legs bare, and an oversized t-shirt that slipped down her shoulder. I wanted to press a kiss to that collarbone and that dimpled knee.
She was writing something in a notebook and I noticed her guitar beside her.
“I figured salad was your favorite food,” I said, embarrassed because it was such a cliché. “That’s why I made the comment about the ranch dressing. I just assumed all thin women only ever eat salad, which probably makes me an asshole.”
She closed her notebook and smiled. A real smile. My Vegas girl smile.
“You getting unblocked?” I asked, looking over at the guitar.
“No…. I mean, maybe. One chorus doesn’t make a song. But I wrote something and it felt good.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said, and we both stared out at the Pacific, letting those waves and the sunlight work their magic.
“You want to know a secret?” she said.
“Of course.”
“I actually hate vegetables. I know they’re good for me. I know I have to eat them. I know they’re the best option for health and everything else. So I eat them. But I hate them. Sometimes Beatrice will make me these super charged smoothies where I can get them all in at once.”
“That is the lamest secret I have ever heard in my life.”
She laughed again and I could get addicted to the sound of it.
“You got a better one?” She asked.
“Doesn’t everybody?” I said. It was an invitation to tell her my secrets. Nick and my mom. The R word I couldn’t say out loud but kept thinking about.
A fake marriage didn’t need all that.
I lifted the Gatorade bottle. “So Beatrice is what, exactly? Like a personal assistant combo house maid?”
“Oh please, don’t ever call her that,” Sydney said with a quirk of her lips. “Beatrice simply…anticipates. She excels at it.”
“You’ve been with her a long time?”
Syd nodded. “Since I was seventeen. My agent at the time, who had encouraged the emancipation from my mother, thought I needed a steadying influence. Beatrice actually worked for the Royal Family before she worked for me.”
“She left a job like that to come work for you?”
“At her interview I’d just come from my lawyer’s office. My debut album had gone platinum. The court case was all over the press and my mom was suing me for support. I was just frozen inside. Locked down. I couldn’t make a decision. I walked into that interview and burst into tears. She handed me a Kleenex and asked when she could start.”
“That is very cool of her.”
“I don’t know how cool it was, but she definitely took pity on me. Does that ever happen to you? With all the pressure of your career?”
“Do I cry? No. Not ever.”
“No,” she smiled. “Do you ever freeze up?”
I laughed. “Uh, no. I’m not saying that to be a dick either. It’s just what I do. On the ice, off the ice, my special skill set is instant decision making.”
“Wow. I bet you don’t take too long to order at restaurants.”
I laughed again and thought how easy it felt to sit on this deck and just talk.
Her short cropped hair blew in the breeze and her skin seemed too fine to be real.
Damn, she was beautiful. Beautiful and sweet and there it was again…that pull inside me. Something between desire and need. I wanted her. On her back, on her knees.
On my face.
I groaned. Involuntarily. Relaxed by the run and the sunshine, it just came out.
“You okay? You hurt yourself?” She asked, and I felt like a pervert.
“No, listen… the way I see it, we’re going to be in this marriage for at least ten weeks.” I explained how I had to go back to work at the end of August for training before the season starts.
“Ten weeks,” she said. “Is that a long time? Or a short time?”
“Depends on how we spend it, I guess,” I said, and her cheeks went pink so I knew we were thinking about the same thing. “We need to talk about that kiss earlier.”
She tucked her hair behind her ears, looking shy. “You said it was just for show.”
“Yeah, but you know…” I said, my voice trailing off. She had to know it was for show, yes. But it was for real too. This attraction between us was constant and getting harder to ignore.
“I’m a hundred percent certain I don’t know. Listen, Wyatt, you probably have a lot of preconceptions of me from whatever you’ve seen on entertainment shows or social media-”
“Babe, I watch sports and I don’t do social media,” I said, cutting her off.
“Still, in the overall zeitgeist, I have a certain reputation.”
“You get guys, but you can’t keep them.” I said the thought out loud, because other than knowing she was a pop artist, it was probably the only other thing I knew, or thought I knew about Sydney Malloy.
Anytime I ever looked up and saw who she was dating, my only thought was ever…
She could do better.
“Yeah, that,” she said. Instantly, I could see I’d screwed up. She took the sunglasses that had been perched on her head and dropped them over her eyes. “Anyway, just don’t believe everything, okay? I’m not quite the seductress I’m made out to be.”
“I’m going to believe whatever you tell me, certainly not anything I see on social media. But we have to talk about it. We’re attracted to each other.”
“How did that kiss prove I’m attracted to you? I was just pretending.”
“You were faking it?”
There was no way. I wasn’t the player my brother Liam was when it came to woman, but I knew damn well when a kiss was real. I felt it down to my toes. Hell, my dick got hard from that kiss.
“No, I wasn’t…but…you asked me what the rules were.” she said, and my whole body braced for impact. Like throwing my body in front of the goal to stop a shot off my brother’s stick. “That’s one of my rules.”
“More kissing?” I said.
“No, no kissing. We’re not complicating an already extremely complicated situation with sex.”
“You know,” I said, peeling the label off my Gatorade bottle. “Sex could actually make things easier.”
“For you, maybe,” she said.
“Honey, if you don’t think sex can make things easier for you too, than you’ve been with the wrong kind of men.”
Those glasses made it impossible to see her eyes, and I would have given a million dollars to know what was going on in that head.
“I just think it’s a bad idea,” she said, and I sat back, taking the hit like a pro.
“All right,” I said. “If that’s your rule, I will obey it.”
She was nodding and also biting her lower lip like she was bothered by something.
“That means no touching and no more kissing,” she said.
“What about in public? Like if we’re selling this marriage thing?”
“We can hold hands,” she said. “I like the hand holding part.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
She stood, her arms still wrapped around her slim body like she needed them to hold all the pieces together.
“And…if, while we’re still officially married anyway…”
She stopped and I could tell she was struggling to get the words out.
“If you could, maybe not…be with another person. At least not so that people can find out. That’s how it always ends. For me. With someone cheating on me and it makes people think…well, I’m trying not to care what people think so much anymore. But it makes them think I’m the problem.”
“These douchebag assholes cheat on you and you’re the problem?” I was getting mad again.
“When they all do it, it becomes a theme.”
I got off the lounger and stood in front of her, looking down, while she stared at my chest. Eventually, I put my fingers under her chin and tilted her face up towards me. The height difference was real. She was going to have to get used to looking up. I lifted those glasses of hers so I could see her grass green eyes. They were like her music, sad and angry and embarrassed and hopeful all at the same time.
“I’m not going to cheat on you. We’re married. That means something to me even though we’ve agreed to keep the marriage platonic. Understand?”
“Okay.”
“But you need to know this, Syd. Yes, I put on a show earlier with that kiss, but I wasn’t faking anything.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “Me neither. I don’t know why I said that.”
It was going to make these rules of hers really hard to follow. I swiped my thumb over the edge of her jawline. Where soft skin covered hard bone that defined Syd’s beautiful, unique face. I snatched my hand away before I could move on to her cheek bones.
Shit, I could swear my fingers tingled with…something.
Probably fucking fairy dust.
“Do you swim?”
She beamed. “Of course I swim. I live by the ocean.”
“Then go get your suit on and I’ll race you.”
Saying that triggered another memory. Her, in that hot white bikini in the hotel pool, smiling up at me when I dared her to a race.
As a rule, no one wanted to race me. I didn’t lose.
She must have remembered too because she was shaking her head and smirking.
“Oh no, I’m not falling for that again.”
“I gave you a lead.”
“The length of your body is not a lead. I need a full lap, and pulling on my ankle as I swim by you is called cheating.”
“Fine, we won’t race,” I said. “Unless we see a shark, then all bets are off.”
She cocked her hip to the left. “You would let a shark eat me?”
“Honey, if it’s you or me, I’m feeding you to that shark so fast you won’t even believe it. And he’ll be so satisfied, I’ll have all the time in the world to get back to the beach. Because I bet you taste real good.”
“I thought you were my champion,” she cried, heading back into her house to change.
But for real…I bet she did taste real good. Everywhere.