Page 9 of Playing for Keeps

“Hello? Mrs. Stag?”

I poke my head in the hall and quickly wrap a towel around myself. “Don’t call me that. I’m keeping my name.”

He grins. “So, you made it.” Gunnar scratches his neck, looking uncomfortable in jeans and a polo shirt with PITTSBURGH FURY embroidered around a hockey logo. I love the idea of us both working for organizations with Fury in the name. Not that I work for String Fury. Yet. But he should ditch the jeans and polo…gah! I cannot be ogling the professional athlete I married on a drunken whim. I cannot. As if I’d have any idea what to do with a man once he took off his clothes. Speaking of…

I step out of the bathroom, still in the towel. “I have an issue.”

After Gunnar procures a pair of boxer briefs and a hoodie for me to wear, we sit on his couch to figure out how to create a starter wardrobe for me until I can send for some of my things from my parents’ apartment in the city. I’m not entirely convinced my father won’t have it all burned just to teach me a lesson. There’s not really anything back there that I’d mourn if he did.

Gunnar slides a shiny silver laptop toward me and says his password is GOALIE, where the ‘o’ is a zero and the ‘I’ is an exclamation point. This is also the password for his Wi-Fi and, apparently, the mailbox downstairs. “You run a tight ship,” I joke, shaking my head while pulling up a web browser.

“My cousins are always giving me shit about getting hacked. I figure I’ll cross that bridge eventually.” Gunnar looks over my shoulder, smelling excellent despite also having endured a cross-country flight. Maybe he showered at the hockey place. Perhaps he just always smells awesome. “My credit card should be saved in the checkout for Nordstrom.” Gunnar reaches around me to type a login with one of his thick fingers. I need to stop staring at his hands.

I clear my throat. “You shop at Nordstrom?”

He chuckles. “They do alterations. I need special sizes for basically everything.” He holds up a foot. “Even socks.”

“How largeareyou?” I eye his bass-sized chest and thick thighs before my stomach starts flipping again, and I pull my eyes back to the computer screen.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, wife?” Gunnar nudges me with his shoulder, and I shake my head. I’ve always assumed some combination of factors made it so I never thought too much about men’s bodies or what I might do with one at my fingertips. Pressure to perfect my craft, concern about my parents, their insistence that I have the wrong body type for men of our social standing…it all added up to a total lack of interest. And now my body seems to want to make up for lost time with this strangerI married. I’ve been thinking impure thoughts about him, and they ramped up when he offered to seduce me, probably out of a sense of obligation. Gunnar mentions again that money is no object. I frown.

“I don’t need to use your credit card. I told you I have the money from my Vegas gig.” Not that it will last much longer.

“And I told you, you can use mine.” But then his face softens, and he elaborates. “I don’t want to control you, Emerson, that’s not what I mean. You’re helping me out big time. The least I can do is buy you some clothes.”

He waggles his eyebrows, looking too adorable for me to stay upset about this. He’s not wrong…I heard how his agent insisted we have to put on a big show about being wildly in love and that Gunnar is supposed to shower me with gifts. “Okay,” I accept. He flashes dimples at me, and I wonder how much of a lie it is to claim infatuation with this man.

I order ten black shirts, ten pairs of my favorite black pants, and ten pairs of generic socks. I click over to order some underwear and bras, and when I glance at Gunnar, he’s turned bright red and sprung up from the couch like it was on fire. “Something bite you?” I realize I enjoy teasing him. He’s like a giant, friendly pit bull…all muscles and emotions.

He smirks at me. “Emerson, I’m going to let you be while you order what you need. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving and going to get some food going.” He walks toward the kitchen and halts. “Do you have allergies or anything?”

“I eat it all.” Which can finally be true, with nobody here to sneer at my size or ask me if I really need a third bite of carbs. What will he cook for me? I don’t care. And I love that. I smile as his face transforms into a more relaxed state. Gunnar clangs around the stove while I finish on the Nordstrom site and order some toiletries from a nearby drugstore. If this were New York, I’d walk to get them, but I splurge for same-day delivery sinceI have no idea how to navigate this city, which leads me to downloading a transit app and loading up a digital bus pass. I’m feeling pretty accomplished when the smell of onions, garlic, and cooking meat hits my senses. “Wow,” I tell my husband, sliding onto a stool at the island in his kitchen. Our kitchen? “That smells amazing.”

I realize I haven’t eaten in a long time, and I am incredibly eager for Gunnar to finish plating the chicken, spinach, and mushrooms he has whipped into a fragrant tease. He slides me a fork and a heaping portion and then sits beside me with an even larger mountain of food on his plate. We eat ravenously for a few minutes—both of our hangovers gone just in time for jet lag to set in.

Gunnar swallows the last bite of his food and glances at my plate, where I’ve not made nearly as big of a dent. “I need to tell you about my family.” He swirls a water glass in a circle, staring out the window at the city below.

“Okay. It sounded like your parents are not thrilled about this.” I gesture between us.

He sighs. “It’s not that at all. They’ll love you.” I know his words are generic, but something about the way he says it has me vibrating inside. What would it feel like for parents to dote on me rather than view me as an extension of their image? Gunnar reaches for my food when it’s clear I’m not able to continue working on it. He takes another big bite and shakes his head. “The issue is that I got married without them there. The Stag family is … sort of aggressively affectionate.” He rolls his eyes.

I purse my lips. “I have zero experience with that.”

He pats my hand. “Well, buckle up, babe. You need to know that they’re all going to want to meet you. And by want, I mean they’re going to insert themselves and overwhelm you and possibly show up here with very little notice.”

I dab at my mouth with a paper napkin from a stand at the edge of the counter and hand a napkin to Gunnar, who has now finished all remaining morsels of food from both our plates. “That doesn’t sound too bad. I think I saw your brothers, right? So that’s half the family.”

Gunnar laughs, and my brows shoot up. He places a hand on mine and squeezes before hopping up to grab our empty plates. “Emerson. Sweetheart. That wasn’t even all of my brothers. The Stag family moves in a giant herd—there are dozens of us.”

I arch a brow and lean on my elbows as he starts washing dishes. I wriggle in my seat, fully aware that I’m wearing a pair of his underwear because that’s all that would fit me, as this hulking man washes dishes after cooking for me. “Dozens? Seriously?”

Gunnar pauses, and I watch his lips move as he counts. “Yeah, including you. I think we are at two dozen, which is plural for dozens. Boom!”

My face must betray my hesitation at the idea of meeting multiple dozen Gunnar-sized people. I’m used to being scolded for my size, for taking up space when I’m meant to be serene and blend into the background. What would it be like actually to feel small in a room full of people? Do they all have Gunnar-sized personalities? He keeps scrubbing the pan and tells me his father has three brothers, each with a wife. “So that’s eight. Then, Uncle Hawk’s mom and her wife make ten adults.”

“Aren’t you an adult?” I flutter my eyelashes at him because, of course, I understand he’s divvying up generations.

“Not quite,” he insists. “Anyway, my family has four kids, plus six guy cousins and my cousin Birdie. And actually, my cousins Wes and Wyatt have serious girlfriends whom we consider family, which brings the total higher. Oh!” He claps and stares into the middle distance like he’s thinking of somethinghappy. “My brother Odin’s keeping his lady, Thora. So, wifey, you’re twenty-five.”

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