Page 63 of Dirty Groom (Slayers Hockey 7)

“Stub?” Her description makes me want to vomit, but I fall back against the couch laughing. “I love you.”

Once I get myself together again, I tuck my legs beneath me and sigh.

“That said. Please don’t go spreading the details of my suddenly extraordinary sex life around our parents’ company. Mom and Dad don’t deserve that.”

Her mouth pulls to the side. “Fine, fine. I won’t even have to spread the gossip if you start showing up to work looking like this. And I’m not talking about the sex hair and sus beard burn. It’s the glow. The smile. This light in your eyes that looks a heck of a lot like the one I’m seeing in the mirror every morning.”

“Ha! You’re so jacked up on Noel’s pheromones, you’re hallucinating.” This look isn’t anything like hers. The glow and smile and light coming off my sister is about love and the kind offoreverfairy tales are made of. “The onlyglowhappening here is of the needs-a-shower variety.”

She doesn’t buy it.

But whatever. All that matters is thatitdoesn’t happen again.

* * *

“Rumor hasit I rocked your world last night, Mrs. Diesel.” Liam’s voice is a low rumble, tinged with an amusement I’m relieved to hear in conjunction with that statement.

It’s late, and he’s back at the hotel after a win so close I’m not sure I breathed for the last five minutes.

Now, I flop back on the bed with a sigh.“Misty.”

“Gonna take a minute to get used to the grapevine we’ve got going.”

“I’d like to think it will dry up once Misty realizes there’s nothing to see here. Last night was…” I search for the right word to convey that it was an anomaly, a single-time event, but the only descriptors coming to mind aren’t really sending the right message.

Words like intense. Amazing. Life-altering. Magical… Addictive.

“Last night.” Liam’s voice is so midnight dark, it stirs an ache in my belly.

I swallow. “Yeah.”

And that breathiness? Ugh. Way to play it cool.

Though based on Liam’s low chuckle, he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Misty have her hopes up for something more?”

Something like side-by-side houses in the burbs. Matching swollen bellies and our babies born minutes apart. “You could say that.”

“You let her down easy?”

Ha. “Umm, no. Misty doesn’t work like that. Give her even the most remote possibility and she’ll be decorating our nursery.”

I like his huff of laughter and the way it sounds like he’s lying back himself.

“She’ll be disappointed. Kids aren’t for me.”

“I remember that from Vegas.” There’d been no hesitation. No uncertainty when Liam stated he wasn’t interested in a family, in any combination. He’d joked that he didn’t even do friends, but he’d make the exception for me because I was having a bad day.

“You ever want kids? Before you found out about Ray, I mean.”

My smile evaporates. I don’t like to think about this stuff. I don’t talk about it.

But there’s something about the sound of Liam’s steady breathing that unlocks the vault where I put so many things away.

“Yeah. If you’d asked me a week before we met… I would have told you that I hoped to have a baby by now. Maybe the second one already on the way.”

“Honeymoon baby.”

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