Girl Least Likely to Marry (13 page)

The fact that Cassie wanted nothing from him other than a
little libido-taming sounded damn good to him. And most of all it was honest.
She was the only woman who had ever been straight with him about what she
wanted—not even April had been honest about that.

And
damn
if that didn’t feel
good.

EIGHT

The following week
Reese called as Cassie walked to the apartment after
a full day at the Earth Sciences building. The campus was a virtual ghost town,
with most of the summer students heading home for the looming Fourth of July
celebrations. Cassie understood the importance of the holiday to Americans, but
it was annoying to be losing a day at the university when she was finally back
on track with her studies.

After some preliminary chit-chat about Cornell and the PhD, and
Reese and Mason’s state of bliss, Reese said, ‘So, Mason and I are having a big
Fourth thing here, and we were hoping you could hop on a bus tomorrow and come
join us.’

Ordinarily Cassie would have said yes. She’d missed Reese, and
although she had kept in touch over the years it was a novelty for them to be in
the same country!

‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘Tuck has plans for me.’

‘Tuck?’

‘Yes,’ Cassie said. ‘Some big surprise he’s arranged.’

‘
My
Tuck?’ Reese clarified.
‘You’re…still seeing each other?’

‘Uh-huh.’ There was silence at the end of the line for a
moment, and Cassie realised maybe this news was the type of thing that
gal pals
shared with each other. ‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘Well, it’s not like that. I mean, it
is
…but… It’s just a libido thing. It’s just…sex. I only moved in
with him for the sex.’

‘You
moved in
with him?’

Cassie held the phone away from her ear as Reese’s squeak
reverberated loudly around her ear canal.

‘Okay,’ Reese said. ‘Whoever this is, stop goofing around and
put my friend Cassie on. My friend Cassie with a mega-brain, who lives and
breathes astronomy and
does not
shack up with a man
she met not even a month ago. Who doesn’t
shack up
period!’

‘Funny,’ Cassie murmured, holding the phone slightly away from
her ear as Reese’s voice became more and more shrill.

‘Cassie…honey…this is completely out of character for you…’

‘I know that,’ Cassie said. ‘But my work was suffering. All I
could do was think about him…it was so…
dumb!
Then
Tuck got a place at Ithica and suggested how logical it was that I move in—’

Reese snorted. ‘I bet he did.’

Cassie shook her head vehemently. ‘No, he was right. This way I
get to satisfy my brain
and
my libido.’

‘Win-win,’ Reese said.

‘Exactly,’ Cassie agreed.

There was some more silence before Reese spoke again.
‘Honey…Tuck’s my cousin, and I love him, but…he can be a bit of a…hound dog.
Just look at this latest news about that woman in Vegas.’

‘It’s not his baby, Reese.’

‘Oh…are the paternity results in already?’

‘He doesn’t need them,’ Cassie said. ‘He’s infertile. He found
out when he and April were trying to get pregnant.’

‘Oh, no,’ Reese gasped. ‘Poor Tuck. I didn’t know that. I knew
he was going through a hard time a few years back, but I didn’t realise…’

Cassie stopped and waited at a pedestrian light. ‘He’s fine,’
she dismissed.

‘Are you sure? Tuck’s always had a pretty big ego, and most
men’s identities
are
wrapped up in things like their
jobs and their virility. To have someone popping up and throwing his inabilities
in his face… I don’t know. It has to be a blow…’

The light changed and Cassie crossed the road. ‘Well, he sicced
his lawyer on to it with great delight and hasn’t mentioned it since, so…’

‘Men don’t, though…they brood and bury it. Just look at how
screwed up Mason was. It’s not very healthy. Have you asked him about it?’

‘No.’ Cassie felt a pang. Was Reese right?
Was
Tuck bothered by this more than he was letting on? ‘Should I
have?’

Was
she
supposed to do something
about it?

This was why she preferred science. It made sense. She knew
what do with it.

‘No, no…’ Reese assured her. ‘Anyway, I have to go, but maybe
Mason and I could come to Ithica next weekend for a visit? I’ll have probably
wrapped my head around the whole Cassie-living-with-a-man thing by then. Maybe
we can all get together? I’ll see what Gina and Marnie are doing.’

Cassie hung up a minute later, the apartment in her sights. But
for the first time in three weeks the spring in her step was missing.

‘You’re quiet,’ Tuck said an hour later as he picked up
their plates and headed for the kitchen.

Normally Cassie was full of the day’s developments, where she
was at with the project, or the latest thing of beauty a telescope had captured
somewhere in outer space. But tonight she’d eaten and let him do most of the
talking.

Cassie opened her mouth to deny it, but then she realised he
was right. She’d been preoccupied with what Reese had said and trying to puzzle
out what was expected of her. If this whole thing with Jenny had suddenly
brought Tuck’s infertility to the fore and he was feeling somehow less…
masculine,
was it her role to restore his sense of
worth?

Was she supposed to get him talking about it? Give him an
avenue for discussion? Did he need his hand held? His ego stroked?

Should
she have asked him about
it?

Argh!
She’d never felt this inept
in her life. Where was Gina when she needed her?

‘Reese thinks that this paternity thing may be magnifying a
sense of injured masculinity stemming from your infertility and that you may be
brooding and burying your feelings in an unhealthy way,’ she blurted out.

Tuck blinked. ‘You told Reese about my infertility?’

Cassie shrugged. ‘I assumed she already knew,’ she said
matter-of-factly. She missed the tightening at the angle of his jaw as she
ploughed on. ‘Is she right?’

Tuck turned to face the sink and flicked the hot water tap on.
‘Reese should mind her own damn business.’

Cassie stared at Tuck’s back. Right, then. That seemed a fairly
definitive
stay-out-of-it
to her. Except she knew
enough about social interaction to know that words and actions could often
contradict.

She stood and headed towards him. ‘If she is, I was thinking
maybe I could…help you through it.’
Somehow
… ‘Like
the way you’re helping
me
with my libido
issues.’

Tuck turned back and smiled at her, a gleam in his eyes. ‘Oh,
you’re helping.’

‘I am?’

‘Sure—nothing like a steady supply of great sex to soothe a
man’s ego.’

So his ego
was
bent out of shape?
She pulled up at the other side of the bench. ‘I think that might be the
unhealthy part.’

Tuck leaned his butt against the sink. ‘I don’t know about you,
but I’ve never felt more healthy.’

Cassie had to admit, as every cell in her body purred beneath
the blast of sexual energy arcing between them, that the man made a good point.
But this hadn’t exactly been the easiest thing for her to do, and she wouldn’t
let him, or her libido, derail her from her objective.

‘Tuck. I’m trying to…to be sensitive to your…issues…’

Tuck was momentarily stunned, and then he laughed. ‘Well, look
at you,’ he teased. ‘Going all Dr Feelgood on me.’

‘Tuck.’

He sobered. ‘I’m fine.’ He turned back to the sink. ‘I was
married, my career tanked, we couldn’t have a baby and then I wasn’t married any
more.’

‘Two years isn’t very long,’ she said to his beautiful broad
back. Even her parents, who lived in a strange kind of separate togetherness,
had managed thirty years.

Tuck shrugged. ‘I doubt anyone was surprised. We’d only known
each other for a few months before we got hitched.’

Cassie tried to absorb the enormity of such an impulsive act.
It seemed as crazy as Reese falling for Mason in a week all those years ago. Or
Gina sleeping with the betrothed Carter.

And just as unfathomable.

‘That seems a little rash,’ she said.

Tuck stared at the suds covering his hands. It
had
been rash, but at the time it had seemed so damn
right. He turned again, shoving one soapy hand on his hip. Cassie was looking at
him cluelessly, her eyebrows scrunched together in a frown, a pencil behind her
ear. He doubted she’d understand his state of absolute desperation in her world
of crystal-clear logic.

But he suddenly wanted her to.

‘She was a nurse where I was having my physical therapy. I’d
been through several operations and my career was stalled, she was young and
sweet and adorable, and I felt old and clapped-out and impotent. She believed in
me in a way that wasn’t fake like so many others around me and I
needed
that. Football was all I had. It was all I
knew.’

He raked a hand through his hair, angry at himself still for
taking all her youth and sweetness and sucking it out of her as his career
spiralled downwards.

‘When she wanted a baby it seemed like the one thing I
could
give her—because the glamorous life of an
athlete’s wife hadn’t exactly been rainbows and unicorns. And, even though part
of me knew that bringing a kid into the crumbling mix of our marriage would be
stupid, she loved me and I was
trying
to hold on to
that. To have one part of my life going right. It seemed like a way to hold us
together.’

Cassie frowned. ‘For a smart man that was a really dumb
move.’

Tuck gave a short, sharp laugh. Trust Cassie to tell it like it
was. ‘I don’t know… It might have been okay if I’d loved her like she’d loved
me, if we’d got pregnant. But we couldn’t…and when we found out that it was
me…it was my fault…it hit me worse than the tackle that gave me a concussion
during my first Super Bowl. I mean, I was the
QB,
I
was
the man
…and then I wasn’t. I couldn’t be a
father and I couldn’t play football either, so what was I?’

Cassie could hear the anguish twisting his words and knew it
was her turn to say something. Her role to make it better. Her social
awkwardness closed in around her. ‘I don’t think your…ability to father a child
defines you any more than your ability to kick a football around.’

Tuck crossed his arms. ‘It sure didn’t feel like it at the
time. I think I spent a lot of time
defining
myself
as a right SOB for a while there.’

‘And now? With football and babies off the table?’ she
asked.

‘Not much point wanting something you can’t have, is there?
Football is over, and I’ve come to terms with that. And to be honest I’m not
really sure I want a kid anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve moved on.’

‘For what it’s worth, I don’t much care about having kids
either.’

Tuck chuckled. ‘And that’s what I like about you. So you can
assure Reese I’m just fine. That my
masculinity
…’ he
dropped his gaze to her breasts ‘…is just fine.’

Cassie swallowed.
Oh, yes, indeed it
was.

Tuck’s mobile rang later that night, just as he finished
Skyping with a software engineer about the app. If it had been anyone else other
than Dylan he wouldn’t have answered. The shower had just been turned on and a
wet, naked Cassie was exactly what he needed after a day of dealing with lawyer
crap—and their conversation earlier had roused old hurts.

But he’d spoken so little to his best friend since Reese had
jilted him a month ago he knew he had to take the call. They chatted for a while
about the wash-up from the wedding-that-wasn’t, and Tuck was satisfied that
Dylan really seemed okay, and they chatted about the most recent paternity
allegations against Tuck.

‘So…’ Dylan said. ‘Reese called me earlier.’

‘Ah,’ Tuck said. His meddling cousin
had
been a busy little beaver, hadn’t she? ‘Don’t you think it’s odd
to be taking phone calls from the woman who so recently jilted you?’

‘Nice try at deflection, buddy. But you know Reese is worried
that Cassie will get hurt.’

Tuck frowned. So this wasn’t about him and his masculinity. It
was about Cassie. And Reese was sending her ex-fiancé to do her dirty work.
‘Reese should know that Cassie is not the kind to emotionally invest. She’s just
having fun. Blowing off some steam. We both are.’

‘Right…but maybe you want to think about not getting involved
for a while? Let the dust settle from this Jenny thing? Trust me, you don’t die
from celibacy.’

‘It’s fine, Dylan,’ Tuck assured him. ‘It’s the perfect
relationship. She’s not some groupie. She doesn’t want to marry me
or
have my babies. Which is just as well,
considering…’

Tuck had tried not to make that sound bitter, but Dylan was the
only person other than April, a couple of doctors and apparently now Reese who
knew the truth, and this week in particular his infertility had come back to
haunt him.

‘She’s here for three months, bro, and I’m her drug of choice,’
he hastened to add. ‘It’s a temporary thing. It’s…symbiotic.’

Dylan laughed. ‘Symbiotic? She turning you into a scientist
too?’

Tuck laughed too. ‘Just getting my geek on.’

‘She doesn’t really strike me as your…type.’

Tuck shrugged. ‘I think I’m getting myself a new type.’

‘Okay…’

‘No, I mean it,’ Tuck said. ‘She’s amazing, you know. She has
all this serious geek thing going on, and she walks around with this pencil
behind her ear all the time, and it’s so damn cute. But underneath it all she’s
incredibly passionate. And she doesn’t do any of that clingy, needy stuff—’

‘I thought,’ Dylan butted in, ‘you
liked
them clingy?’

Tuck had to admit that up until now that had been true. He’d
liked being the
big man,
squiring around his women,
treating them like princesses no matter how brief their acquaintance. But that
had been the role his celebrity, a string of eager women and examples from his
peers had forced him into early in his dating career, setting up an unhealthy
pattern.