Bury the Hatchet (7 page)

But me? My entire life had been built around becoming Miss USA. There was no Plan B. There wasn’t a backup plan for when that fell through. And I didn’t have the first clue what to do with myself. All my friends were my sorority sisters and other girls who competed in pageants, and I wasn’t going to be around them. The Delta Delta Delta girls were honestly the first people in my life in a very long time who I could call friends. Mama and Lance had kept me in poise classes, dance classes, singing lessons, wardrobe fittings, speech training, and a thousand other pursuits that were designed to help me reach one goal, and one only, so there had been no time for anything along the lines of creating friendships of the sort that would last. I had acquaintances, and many of them likely claimed I was their friend, but how many of them knew me? Even my major in college had been decided for me with no thought as to what I might want or what I would do with it when my pageant days were done. Now I was facing a future that scared the life out of me because it was so open and full of possibility that it made me want to cry.

Because all of a sudden, I had choices. But I’d be damned if I had the first clue how to make decisions for myself, and the thought of it made terror creep through my veins like ice, leaving me shivering.

“Are you cold?” Hunter asked, narrowing his eyes.

I shook my head, not sure how to explain. The air conditioning in this restaurant was working overtime, but that was a necessity at this time of year. My body was used to going from intense heat outside to full blast AC inside. It wasn’t the temperature. Not at all.

The waitress came to clear away our plates before Hunter could question me further. “Do you want me to box the rest of this up for you?” she asked, indicating my nearly full dish.

I shook my head. The thoughts racing through my mind were going to make eating the rest of it later as impossible as eating it now. “Unless you want to take it back to your hotel?” I suggested to Hunter once the idea struck me. He might want something to eat later, and there was no good reason to let it go to waste.

“Take it,” he said, schooling his features. “And we’re ready for the check.”

“Oh, but the chef was making dessert—”

“We’re ready for the check,” he repeated firmly.

She gave him a nod as she scurried away.

“I’m sorry,” I said out of habit.

He reached up and brushed a tendril of hair out of my face, tucking it gently behind my ear and making me shiver even harder than I already was from the tenderness of his touch. “Why the hell are you sorry?” he demanded, his tone so thoroughly incongruous with the way he was touching me that I felt breathless, like I was running and couldn’t keep up. My head sure couldn’t.

“I don’t know,” I forced myself to say. “It just seems like I’ve done something to upset you, so I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t apologize for something unless you know what the fuck you’re sorry for.”

Apologizing for everything was just part of who I was. It was as innate to me as breathing, something that came from growing up in the South just like saying
Bless his little heart
or putting salt on your watermelon in the summer. I bit down on my tongue to keep from apologizing again for apologizing the first time, because I got the distinct sense that another
I’m sorry
coming from my mouth was the last thing he wanted to hear right now.

The waitress brought the bill, and Hunter shoved a credit card in her direction. As soon as he did, she left with it, taking the not-so-subtle hint that we wanted to get out of here quickly or that he wanted us to be alone, whichever the case might be.

He didn’t say anything while she was gone, so I took his cue and kept my lips zipped. The most likely thing I might say would be to apologize again, so it was probably better all around.

She returned a moment later with a to-go bag and the payment slip. She passed the bag to me while he scribbled in a tip and his signature.

“Dessert,” she said quietly to me. “Compliments of the chef.”

I nodded and put my handbag inside the brown paper bag to make it easier to carry.

“Let’s get out of here,” Hunter said, not even sparing the waitress a second glance. He reached for my hand, and instinctively I set mine in his. He helped me slide off the bench, gently but insistently tugging me close to his side as we headed toward the exit.

A slew of photographers had come together just inside the front doors.

“Seriously?” Hunter grumbled in my ear.

I dropped my voice so only he could hear. “That’s what this was about, isn’t it? The reason we’re here?”

He gave a noncommittal grunt, sweeping me outside into the sweltering heat. It was dark out, but the parking lot was so brightly lit that we couldn’t see the stars in the sky. Instead of guiding me to his rental car, though, Hunter suddenly turned toward the side of the building. “I suppose we might as well give them the sort of show they’re hoping for, then,” he said, turning me so my back was against the wall.

That was all the warning he gave me before his lips were on mine. Hard. Hot. Possessive. His tongue slid across the seam of my lips, and I opened with a startled gasp, dropping the bag to the ground. He teased me with his tongue, his hands drawing me closer until I was completely enveloped in his heat and lost in a sea of sensation.

I wasn’t ready for this. I hadn’t yet braced myself for his sensual assault. In my head, I knew this was all for show, but my body didn’t seem to get that memo. Not at all. Every stroke of his tongue sent jolts of awareness down to my sex. Every brush of his hand—gentle even as he left no doubt as to his pure, raw, masculine strength—had my nipples beading and my panties getting wetter. Ready or not, I wanted him with an intensity that had no business in this relationship.

His lips left mine to explore the length of my neck and the curve where it met my shoulder, and I pressed my head against the wall with my eyes squeezed tight, trying to remember how to breathe. I had to find a way to get my body to stop reacting. I had to find a way to keep my heart out of this, because there was no room for an emotional attachment to this man.

But he was all man. Of that, there was no doubt. His hands weren’t the only part of him that were strong and gentle. The muscles of his chest and torso brushed against my body. He lifted me against the wall, one of his powerful thighs splitting mine as he held me in place with his hips and his hands, his erection pulsing against me through the barrier created by our clothing.

In a strange way, the realization that he was just as affected by the show we were putting on for the cameras helped to calm me, aided me in distancing myself from what was happening. If we were going to be convincing with what we wanted the world to see, we were going to
have
to be convincing for ourselves, I supposed. I wasn’t alone in this. Hunter was as hot and bothered as I was, and we were barely getting started.

Gathering my wits enough to remember why we were doing this in the first place, I put both my hands on his broad shoulders, holding on while he continued his assault on my senses. When I peeked through my lashes, I found photographers snapping away, just as expected. It was working. We were going to be all over the local news tomorrow. I eased my left hand over Hunter’s shoulder so it rested on his back and they would get a clear shot of the engagement ring, even as he raised his head again and met my lips for another kiss. This one was soft and slow, a delicious counterpoint to the visceral attack the first kiss had been.

He lifted his head from mine, his lips still a hair’s breadth away. “Is it working?” he murmured.

While I knew he was referring to the cameramen, asking if they’d followed us out to invade our privacy, there was a part of me that wondered if he didn’t also want to know if it was having an effect upon me. There wasn’t really any way to hide my body’s reaction to him. No point in trying. I bit down on my lower lip, still tasting the essence of him there, and nodded. My answer would be the same no matter which of those questions he was truly asking.

He kissed me again, just a tease that wasn’t anywhere close to enough, and said, “Good.” Then he lowered me to my feet, picked up the bag I’d dropped, and took my hand in his. I walked along beside him on wobbly legs, slipping past the throng of reporters who were blinding us with their flashes, until we reached his car. He helped me inside and kissed me again, his tongue gliding over the spot I’d just bitten, before closing the door and waving to the cameras.

One year. I could get through one year of this. I might go through a mountain of batteries and wear out my vibrator, but I could do it.

THIS WAS DEFINITELY
hell, this place in life where I existed now. To be clear, I no longer thought that simply because of how hot it was all the time. Had to be hell. I must have fucked up even more royally than I’d realized, and someone had decided to put me in a permanent state of misery, and I’d ended up in purgatory. There was no other reasonable explanation. I’d survived telling both Mom and Carrie about the upcoming nuptials, but I wasn’t sure the hearing in my left ear would ever be the same after Mom told me exactly what she thought of it all. Carrie had been far more understanding. Maybe too understanding. Shouldn’t she have been bothered by it, at least to an extent? But all she’d said was that she understood, and she’d see if she could come. Those two calls had hardly touched the surface of the hell my life had become, though.

For one thing, I was being bombarded at every turn by jackasses shoving cameras and microphones in my face. That wasn’t supposed to be part of the deal, playing hockey in the South. I mean, if I were in Montreal or Toronto, maybe New York or Chicago, then sure. That was just how it tended to go in the big-time hockey hotbeds. But in Oklahoma? I was supposed to be able to live like the masses, to go places and not be recognized as someone important enough to care about. Or at least not important enough for them to shove a mic in my face. I was supposed to be able to blend in even better down here than I had in Portland. Instead, the complete opposite was happening, and I hated every second of it.

In general, I was a private person. I preferred to keep my personal life personal, but right now I was having to broadcast it to anyone who cared to see it…and there were a surprisingly large number of people who cared. They were doing the same thing to Tallie, but she seemed resigned to it, so much so that I was beginning to understand her better. All indications pointed to the fact that this had been her life for quite some time, and she expected it to be part and parcel of her life going forward. It wasn’t her choice, but for some reason she allowed it to happen.

The one good thing to come of it was that our efforts seemed to be having the desired effect, at least as far as we could tell from such a small sample size. Already, I’d seen pictures of the two of us popping up in the local newspaper’s gossip and celebrity section, and there’d even been a brief article on the sports page. Tallie said that she’d seen positive talk along with some video on one of the websites she visits regularly, and there was quite a bit of buzz going on social media sites. We were making an impact. So far, no one was exactly sure what to make of us, but the fact was they were talking. So there was a start.

If the fact that the media was following us around constantly wasn’t bad enough, now we could add to it that every time some obnoxious camera guy focused in on the pair of us, I had to be all over Tallie. Getting cozy with her, in and of itself, wasn’t a horrible thing, beyond the fact that I liked to keep things like that behind closed doors. Tallie was sexy as sin, and I was about a hundred times more physically attracted to her than I wanted to be. The problem came from the knowledge that no matter how turned on I got while we played our parts, there wasn’t ever going to be anything permanent between us.

Don’t get me wrong. I was down with the idea of a one-night stand under the right circumstances. But nothing between us would allow for it to be just one night. It would be awkward when I would be taking her home with me every night for a year but then we’d be parting ways once we shut the cameras out. Was there such a thing as a one-year stand?