Page 55 of Hockey Wife

She sighed into his mouth and finally let go of what was holding her back. No more jokes. No more denials. Just this onslaught of feeling.

Her surrender spurred him on. The kiss turned real. Gone were the tentative nibbles, timid brushes of lips. This was now an exploration of her mouth. She loved how good it felt, the spice of him, the scent of male flooding her nostrils.

His hand curled around her jaw, held her in place to be plundered. His beard scratched, heightened every sense. The kiss was better for it.

He pulled away, his lips wet and a touch puffy, and she wanted to dive back in and suck, on the lower lip particularly. She was panting and barely holding on.

“Is that why we married?” she finally managed.

“I think it’s part of it.”

He still held her, one hand at her neck, the other curved over her ass. That hand flexed, checking for fit. Absolutely perfect, she wanted to say.

“That’s quite the superpower you have there, Big Guy. One kiss and ‘here comes the bride’.”

“It was your idea.”

Her mouth fell open. “What?”

“We had just got done watching the Bellagio fountain?—”

“Before or after the club?”

“After. You on that dance floor … well, let’s just say it did things to me.”

“Lowered your inhibitions?”

His eyes glowed. “Something like that. We went for a walk, and you were excited about the fountain, some opera song.”

“‘Time to Say Goodbye,’” she said, the memory taking a clearer shape as it broke the surface. “Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli.”

“Right. And when it ended, you said, ‘I don’t want to say goodbye.’”

“I did?”

But she remembered. Every word.

His nod was solemn. “And I said, ‘let’s not. Let’s keep going.’”

“Which I took as an invitation to get hitched?”

He considered that for a moment. “More like, neither of us wanted the night to be over. I think we were looking for a way to keep that feeling alive. Sometimes those feelings are your best guide.”

Into hell. “We went to that bar, the small one behind the Palms.”

Another nod. “And we had another drink and by the end of it, I think we knew. Neither of us wanted to return to … before.”

Before. For Georgia, that meant alone in a crowd, missing Dani all the time. For Banks, it meant … she had no idea.

Because he wouldn’t tell her. She had no idea what he was getting out of this.

“So we thought the very deliberate action of going to the marriage license place and finding someone to marry us was the next logical step? Instead of sex?”

She pushed back and slid off the counter, though he didn’t let her do that alone. Not that she needed his help, but his hands held her steady at the waist as he guided her down. For a moment she enjoyed the fluttery sensation of being in the clouds, suspended inside some dream state where people fell in love and got married and it mattered.

Her feet hit the floor and reality rose up to meet her like a two by four.

“I know you want to think that this wasn’t an accident, Banks. That a man as solid and sensible and straight-shooting as you wouldn’t be stupid enough to hitch your star to someone you had just met. But that night, I was in a strange place. It had been two years since—since Dani died.”

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