Page 30 of Play for Keeps

“And in the absence of any other information.” Avery made a circling motion with her hand, prompting her to be more forthcoming.

Millie inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, savoring the familiar and not-at-all-sexy scents of Calhoun’s—stale beer, industrial cleansers, and postadolescent pheromones run amok. God, she wanted to talk to them. She’d always thought she could tell her best friends anything, but this was hard. How did a woman admit she failed as miserably at long-distance relationships as she did the ones up close and personal?

“No one lives in a vacuum,” Kate whisperedsotto voce.

Millie narrowed her eyes at Kate, annoyed her friend had the balls to throw her words back at her, but even more irked she wasn’t big enough to kick Coach Snidely-Snyder in the ass.

“Fine.” She pushed her drink to the center of the table and clasped her hands primly on the sticky surface. “You want to know what happened?”

Avery rolled her eyes so hard, she almost toppled off the stool. “We’re mildly curious.”

“And if you answer with ‘nothing,’ we’ll know you’re lying.” Kate tucked her hair behind her ear and focused her full attention on Millie. “Something happened. We’ve been trying to wait for you to come around to telling us, but you’ve lost the giddy, and now we want to know why and how badly we need to hurt Ty.”

“We had phone sex,” Millie blurted.

Avery gripped the edge of the table as she reared back. “Whoa. So not what I expected.”

Kate barked a laugh, fluttered her eyelashes in disbelief, then knocked her ear against her open palm a couple of times as if to knock some water out. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you clearly.”

“We. Had. Phone. Sex.” Arching her eyebrows, Millie eyed each of them challengingly.

Avery’s bright, inquisitive eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Has to be more than that.”

“Obviously,” Kate said, bobbing her head. “You had phone sex, and his head exploded?”

“As far as I know, Coach Tyrell Ransom was last known to be alive, well, and unexploded in Reno, Nevada.” Millie looked from one woman to the other but found only the bafflement she’d been feeling for the last two weeks written in their expressions.

Kate shook her head. “I’m still processing the leap from phone sex to no phone.”

Swallowing what was left of her pride, Millie gave up the tough-girl act and leaned in close. “Everything was going so well. He kissed me the night he spouted off to Jim Davenport on the phone,” she said in a hushed rush.

“He owed you at least a kiss for shooting his mouth off,” Avery said in an officious tone.

“Before, not after,” Millie clarified.

“Either way, I’m not surprised,” Kate interjected. “You two have been throwing off more sparks than a soldering iron since the day he came here. Of course he kissed you.”

“Again when we went to New York…” She paused, not sure how to explain how conflicted she’d been about the events of that night. “We kissed, but nothing else has happened.”

“Until now,” Kate concluded.

“Nothing’s really happening now. I’m here, and he’s there,” Millie sputtered. But her friends knew her too well to buy into the spin.

Avery definitely wasn’t buying. “Other than the phone sex.”

Kate cocked her head, her face open and curious but not condemning. “Did you want something to happen? Then, I mean. Knowing he was still married.”

“Technically,” Avery interjected. When both heads swiveled in her direction, she lifted a shoulder in a defensive shrug. “I think we can all agree the marriage pretty much had a fork sticking out of it.”

“Still, he was married.” Kate’s voice was firm and uncompromising.

Millie’s cheeks burned as she recalled the ambivalence she’d felt about his marital status as they’d jolted through the New York streets in a darkened town car. She might have slept with him. She wanted to—a fact she wasn’t exactly raring to admit to her newly married friend. Millie had long ago given up any illusions she might have had about the matrimonial state. The old saw about taking two to make a relationship work was heartbreakingly true. No one person could love another enough for the both of them.

Bypassing the moral quagmire, she steered the conversation back to the facts. “We kissed. Things were said. Certain…implications were made,” she said, choosing her words as carefully as she would for a press release.

Avery ran a fingertip around the rim of her highball glass. “Dirty implications?”

Millie considered her answer carefully. “Somewhat.”

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