Chapter 9 #2
When the locker room door opened and the speediest dresser of the men came out, Charline realized why the other women had been standing farther away.
Startled by the thrust of movement and wake in the air about the large man who emerged from the locker room at full power, she stepped back a few paces.
A steady stream of men emerged. Not all of them had someone waiting.
When Charline thought the locker room must have a back door because it was surely empty and it had been several minutes since anyone had opened the door, she sensed Trent. His soap, his man-scent.
She hadn’t realized her anticipation was heightened to this level of sensing, but when Trent stepped through the door and headed right for her, with his signature careless smile in place, every nerve in her body stood up and zapped her with an aha of recognition.
“Hello, sweetheart. Sorry to keep you waiting. You know I like to take long showers.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and swept her up to walk with him, kissing the top of her head in greeting. The suggestive invitation about long showers sparked her.
Some dormant neediness in her responded to the flirtatious attention, to his easy affection, to the mix of soapy clean and his own personal scent.
She responded to the point of having heart palpitations and a tongue-tied lack of ability to respond.
Her heart leapt in her chest like a bouncing miniball.
She did not want to be one of his minions of heartbroken women.
She remembered what that woman had told her, and reminded herself first that this was all pretense—except maybe the chemistry—and second, that even if it was real, it would be temporary.
All attention to females by Trent Lockheed was temporary.
And at her age she was not going to play teenybopper with a crush. Never had as a teen, and wasn’t about to start now. She’d always been in control of her relationships with men. She needed to take control of this situation now.
“Let me see your arm,” she whispered.
“Wait till we get in the car.”
“Where are we going?” She slowed her steps to keep from feeling like a grain of sand in a tidal wave.
He looked at her in surprise. “I thought it was settled—we’re going to my jeweler to get your engagement ring.” His eyes sparkled—a little-kid look and a far cry from his careless smile. All the more enticing.
“Stop grinning—it’s a pretend engagement ring—remember?” Her whisper was fierce.
“A guy can have a little fun, can’t he?”
She sighed. “This is business. Maybe we should order it. You know your jeweler very well, according to Ralph.”
She watched his grin disappeared to be replaced with chagrin, confirming his reputation. “So it’s true,” she said. “You’re a regular.”
“I’m generous to my ladies. I have boatloads of money—why not? You have a problem with that?”
“You mean a personal problem with you or a philosophical problem in general?”
“Never mind.”
They reached his car in the blessedly empty parking lot—no press—not even any security guards.
She almost opened her own door, but Trent put his hand over hers and said, “I always open doors for ladies. I’m a southern gentleman at heart.
” His careless smile was back. She realized it was a part of him, automatic, like breathing.
After getting in the car, she looked around the parking lot again for curious onlookers.
She saw no one and took his arm. He pulled off his jacket and slipped his arm from his sweater, moving it aside.
Then he leaned toward her so she could examine his deltoid.
She used a monocle to inspect the tiny pinprick.
The injection site hadn’t changed. There was not even a smidgeon of irritation and that surprised her.
Other subjects sometimes had a small amount of pink or tiny bumps which she had determined as normal and not dangerous.
“Nothing,” she said.
“That’s good, right?”
She looked up at him as she slipped the monocle back in her bag. “For now.”
“When can we expect to see results from the drug?” He put his arm back in his sweater, but kept his jacket off.
She hadn’t heard him sound so serious or gravely hopeful since they’d met.
“Hard to say. Measurable to me—inside a week. Measurable to you, on the field, longer. And that’s if you’re not impeded by further injury.”
He didn’t smile. She missed it. She wanted to see him smile right then.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be throwing a hundred-yard pass in the Super Bowl before you know it,” she said. He laughed.
“Lucky thing I know you’re kidding or you’d have my hopes real high.
I’d be truly grateful to be passing a ball like I did three years ago before the shoulder injury.
Hell, I’d be grateful to wake up in the morning without the stabbing pain forcing me to reach for a bottle of aspirin followed by a bottle of Tums.”
“I can get you something better than aspirin if you—”
“No. You don’t understand, Doc. I can get all the drugs I want. All the painkillers. I stay away from them. Nothing besides the injections to help me in a game and some topical stuff. I’m careful. I have been careful about what I put in my body. Careful to never break the rules.”
“Until now,” she said.
After he parked in the downtown Boston garage, they took the elevator down and entered the jewelers’ building lobby from there.
His man stayed open late for him when he called.
Trent wanted something big and expensive even if he suspected she wouldn’t.
But he knew she wouldn’t want to fight about the ring size in front of the jeweler since they needed to fool him about their relationship too.
His jeweler would be tough to convince after all the gifts Trent had bought for women over the years.
Charlie pulled Trent aside as soon as they walked in the door. “I want something demure. Something that won’t dwarf my hands—they’re so small as it is.” She frowned at her hands as if they were somehow offensive.
“Your hands are a perfect size,” he whispered against her hair, wondering why the hell she’d be defensive about her hands.
She snorted and said, “Not so perfect if you’re looking to be a surgeon.”
“Your father was a surgeon,” he said. “Ralph told me. Let me guess. Your father was a skeptic about your career.” Her eyes remained cast down and focused on her ring finger, rubbing it. Wishing he’d kept the insight about her father to himself, he cupped her chin and made her face him.
“You give a mean injection with those hands.”
She pressed her lips together.
He added, “And you’re not so bad at massages either.”
At that she laughed. The jeweler, who’d been standing patiently at a distance near the case of his most expensive gems—because he knew Trent very well—cleared his throat.
“Is everything okay? Can I get you a refreshment?”
Trent looked at the man and winked. They needed to convince him that their engagement was real.
They could do it with the one thing he knew was very real.
He pulled Charlie in gently until she was flattened against his chest. Then he bent his head down, caressing the back of her neck, and kissed her, making slow love to her mouth, tasting, lightly sucking and nibbling, and grazing every corner delicately with his tongue.
He licked her lips, whispering his mouth against hers until she was totally mesmerized, until she wouldn’t know her name if someone asked her.
When he felt himself slipping, he separated from her. With great difficulty.
Damn.
When she looked up, his eyes were lidded and glazed with banked fire. He took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against his chest to gather her scattered wits, to slow her racing pulse—to calm the excitement between her legs.
She almost groaned when he kissed the hair on top of her head, lingered there, breathing heavily, running his hands down her back, lightly pulling her close enough to let her know about his own excitement.
“Trent . . .” Her voice was hoarse.
“I know, babe.” He moved his hands to her upper arms and pulled her from him as if fighting a magnetic force, then turned to his jeweler.
“We’ll go with whatever Charlie wants.”
Trent ushered her to the counter with a light, proprietary touch of his hand at the small of her back. She felt it as if his hand on her was the only thing in the universe, as if she were in a sensory vacuum save his hand.
“What would you like to see, Miss—Charlie?”
The words registered and she made herself let go of that heady feeling of comfort, floated back to feeling her feet on the ground and focusing on the dazzling display case in front of her.
As she scanned the case, she had less of an idea about what she wanted and more of an idea about what she didn’t want.
“They’re all so beautiful. I truly don’t know where to start.”
She felt Trent tense at her side, realized he was as strung out on their attraction as she was, and added, “I want something moderately sized.” She put her hand out, splayed her left hand on the counter. “Something that will look the right size on my hand.”
The jeweler smiled, glanced at Trent with a look that said, Buddy you just hit the jackpot, and said, “I have a selection I can show you. Give me a minute to put it together.”
The jeweler wisely brought back only five diamonds, all at two carats, all with a minimum of fuss or embellishments. In the end, she chose a two-carat marquis with a bluish hue and a small amount of filigree in the setting.
The jeweler slipped the ring on her finger and gave Trent the empty box and papers.
She’d take it off as soon as she got into her car to go home.
She had no idea what to say to Suzette, to her mother.
Not yet. She sighed, hated knowing what a coward she was, what a liar she was, and hoped it would all be justified in the end.
“Do you want to choose the matching wedding bands now?” the jeweler asked.