Risky Business (25 page)

He already knew she was by the tightening of her body, the little tremors in her pussy pulsing against his cock. He took her waist firmly in his hands and lifted her enough that he could thrust up hard like his body screamed out to. She clung to him, crying out, her breath releasing in hot bursts against his cheek. Her pussy pulsed, telling him it was okay to get selfish now.

He moved his hand higher to brace against her back, then rolled them over, into the wet grass. The jacket fell off, but he couldn't help it. He'd held back for too long and all he could do now was obey the commands of his body, pounding her harder, claiming her like some fucking Neanderthal. He came hard, growling, grinding into her. The feeling was almost too much, just for a moment. He squeezed his eyes shut, recovering, then rolled off of her and sat, then gathered her in his lap and got the jacket back over their heads. They were both soaked through, but he didn't want the rain falling on her face any longer than necessary.

She cuddled into him, humming her satisfaction.

“You make me happy. I never thought that was possible,” he whispered.

She raised her head and looked at him. Tears or rain, or both, streamed down her cheeks. She looked spent and full of wonder. “Can you say that in English, please?”

Damn nervous tic. “You had nothing to be nervous about. You were perfect.” He wasn't sure why he suddenly had cold feet about telling her what he'd originally said, but it could wait. He could savor his discovery in private for a little while yet. They had all the time in the world.

One thing was clear to him, though. As clear as what he wanted from Allison. This wasn't the place or the time, but he had a lot he had to get this off his chest—the ugliest part of his past and his hopes for his and Allison's future.

“Allison, we need to talk.”

“We are talking. And cuddling.” As though to illustrate her point, she wiggled more snuggly against him.

“I care about you. A lot. And I want to be with you.”

She drew a heart on his shirt with her finger. “I want to be with you, too.”

“But for me, what that means is that I can't work for you anymore.”

The evening dragged on.

Theo had made his case, and it was a good one. He didn't want to be Allison's employee. She got that, she really did. She didn't want him to be her employee either. But the declaration came too fast on the heels of one of the most profound experiences of her life for her to process it all. She'd asked for a few hours to think, and they'd agreed to meet up after Katie was asleep to talk things through.

Chelsea was off somewhere at a gig, so the timing was perfect.

She sat on the couch in her newly restored living room, cradling a cup of tea as she waited for him. Duke and his crew had done a terrific job on the room. The new wood laminate flooring was top quality, as was the wall and ceiling repair and paint. The fireplace didn't work yet, but Theo had asked her the day before to be patient because he had a surprise coming for her regarding that.

She'd needed time apart from Theo to think because, the whole ride home from the sandbank, she hadn't been able to shake the panic that no sooner had her life righted itself that everything had gone sideways again. That hollow, hummingbird feeling of being close to drowning had hit her hard and was with her still.

She released her next exhale on a huff. Silly Allison. This wasn't scary. It shouldn't be. As Theo pointed out today, this was just him and just her. This was just the two of them, Allison and Theo, the same people who'd made love in the rain that afternoon—so, then, why did she feel like she was drowning now?

She didn't remember many specifics about her near drowning. Only flashes and impressions and what came to her in dreams. Water in her face, in her mouth, cold and powerful, like it had latched onto her ankles and pulled. The palette of the memory was green/gray and fireworks behind her eyes like flashes of hot, white fear.

The office's back door opened. “Hey,” Theo said.

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them wide, breathing through the rush of memory, bottling up the hummingbird. Finding the peace at the center of the cyclone of emotions, she held fast to it and let it grow. This wasn't like drowning. Theo wasn't like drowning. He'd saved her from it.

“Hey, yourself,” she said, standing.

Theo stood just inside the door, holding two mugs and looking as anxious as she felt. “I brought you hot chocolate, but you already have something.”

“It's just tea. I'd rather have chocolate. Thank you.”

He set the mugs on the coffee table, then, after a moment of awkward silence, he muttered something in French and pulled her into an embrace.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She rested her cheek on his chest and let out a long, slow breath. This was nothing like drowning. Not at all. “Definitely.”

He kissed the top of her head. “You looked upset when I came in. Was that because of me?”

She thought about demurring, but that wouldn't be productive. They were finally talking, finally being honest with each other, so she owed it to them both to tell the truth. “Yes. I don't want to lose you.”

His hold on her tightened. “I'd like to tell you something about my past, something I started to tell you about this afternoon, but I lost my nerve. I need you to know this before we get any further in whatever this is between us. It's not a happy story, and I'm not proud of what it says about me, but I need you to hear it.”

Just like that, she was hollow-boned again, her heart racing. “Okay.”

“Let's sit down.”

When they were settled on the couch, he handed her a mug, then set his hand on her knee. “I was a hockey prodigy. My mother and father figured that out when I was young, maybe six or seven. I was an only child and, other than our church—which was a very conservative Catholic church that was almost cultlike in its hold on the community—hockey was our life. My parents liked to talk about how they sacrificed everything for me and my hockey career.” He huffed and shook his head. “Even when I was ten years old, they referred to it as my career.”

“That must have been so much pressure on you.”

“It was fine for a long time because I loved the sport, but you're right. It was too much. They leveraged everything and quit their jobs to follow me in the junior majors, which is the most elite level of junior hockey. Most people in the business think of it as the scouting grounds for the NHL.”

“Your parents sound like those obsessed stage parents you hear about, except with you, it was hockey.”

“Yes. Precisely. But by the time I was sixteen and in the junior majors, on that trajectory for greatness, the weight of who I was, of what my parents expected of me, and what our church expected of me, became unbearable. Before my games, prayer services were led. The whole church community traveled across Canada to watch me play.

“The Father sat me down when I was seventeen and talked to me about giving back to the church, about tithing when I went pro to help save their failing finances. My parents used to pray for God to help me go pro out of high school to save them from their debts, too. Everyone's futures hinged on mine, or so they made me feel, year after year.”

Allison was speechless. No wonder he bristled at the idea of being heroic. He'd had more pressure put on him than any child could handle. It was a wonder he'd turned into the kind and decent man he was. She set her mug down and took his hands in hers, pouring her support into her touch. “You didn't go pro, so what happened?”

He drew a slow breath. “That's the part I need you to know. What happened was that I felt so trapped that I sabotaged myself and my future.”

“I thought you were going to say that you joined the army. But sabotaging yourself is so much more extreme. Did you start playing bad hockey on purpose or something?”

“Not that. For some reason, that felt over the line to my eighteen-year-old mind. No, what I did was such a more spectacular failure. I slept with a girl named Noelle, who was the daughter of our church's most influential deacon. She'd been my groupie of sorts, for lack of a better word, for a while, waiting for me outside the locker room after games, watching practices, which was all against her parents' wishes. They wanted her to be a nun. I think she saw me and my career as her escape ticket.”

“Even your groupies were hanging their futures on you.”

“Yes. Noelle clearly had an agenda, just like my parents had an agenda, as did her parents, and our church. I slept with her knowing that, but I was pissed off because her father had come to me the day before warning me away from Noelle and cautioning me that my every action was a reflection of the church.

“That's what made me snap the first time. I felt like I couldn't escape the agendas of everyone around me. Or the agenda of God. So I sabotaged my future by sleeping with Noelle. Two weeks later, almost to the day, she told me she was pregnant. We'd used protection, which was saying something because it was against the church and not immediately available, but she came on to me too strong and had a diaphragm with her.

“I should have known better than to trust her. When she told me she was pregnant, she admitted she'd lied about the diaphragm. Of course she had. She was desperate to escape the life her parents had laid out for her.”

Allison's stomach lurched. It was unbearable, thinking of him as a young man, with no one to count on, and with everyone counting on him. He'd gotten a girl pregnant. Which meant that he was telling her he had a child. She forced her expression to stay neutral, determined for him to finish telling her his story on his terms. “What happened?”

“She told her parents immediately. Part of her agenda, I'm assuming, because the next thing I knew her parents and my parents were planning our wedding.”

It was all so horrific. Like a tidal wave that couldn't be stopped—his parents', Noelle's parents', and Noelle's agendas had had the force of an ocean behind them. And she'd thought she was the only one of the two of them who'd nearly drowned.

“So you were supposed to marry Noelle, be a father at eighteen, and go on to have a career as a professional hockey player so the money you made could save your parents and your church?”

He released a harsh chuckle. “That's it, exactly. When I learned of my impending wedding, I was enraged, beyond reasonable thought.” He looked up from their hands to her face, sadness etched on his features. “This is the part I need you to hear, Allison. I don't tell this to people. I've never spoken a word of it to anyone after I left town and quit hockey and started over in the Canadian Royal Guard. I'm telling you because . . . because I need you to know all of me.”

She let go of his hands and wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled herself onto his lap. “I want to know all of you.”

“And I'm not trying to scare you off, but I'd understand if you are.”

She skimmed a hand over his hair, then his cheek. “I know the man that you are, Theoren. You can't scare me away.”

He lifted her from his lap and set her back on the couch. “I was so outside myself, so angry at being forced into a corner, my future laid out for me. I snapped. I wanted Noelle to pay for manipulating me, so I told her I was leaving, that I wouldn't support her in any way if she had that baby. I all but made her get an abortion.”

That wasn't at all what she expected. She was bracing for him to tell her he was still married or had a child somewhere in Canada. She was already debating what to feel about that and wondering what his child looked like and when she'd get to meet him or her.

“What do you mean ‘you made her'?”

He looked past her, to the darkness beyond the window. “I let her believe she didn't have any good choices left. She told me the night that we argued that an unwed mother would ruin her family's standing in the church. She was afraid that her parents would disown her and I told her I didn't care.” His voice was tight, his words whispered. “She begged me to take her with me when I left town, but I couldn't hear her over my own anger.”

Allison's heart broke for him and for Noelle, for the hell they'd each gone through. Even if his assessment of Noelle's motives was correct, if she'd consciously tricked him into getting her pregnant and marrying her, she must have been so scared and desperate if she'd seen that as her only option.

“I found out that she'd gotten an abortion when her father arrived at my door, ready to kill me. It was the worst scandal the town had ever seen. My parents disowned me. I quit hockey and went into the military because I was so pissed off, every waking day. I wanted to see action. I wanted to kill or get killed. It didn't take me long to figure out that the military is no different from my parents or their church. You can't escape the agendas of others. It's just that, in the military, you're at the mercy of politicians.”

You can't escape the agendas of others.

No wonder he'd been so threatened by Allison's arrival at Cloud Nine. No wonder he held everyone at arm's length. It was a minor miracle that he'd opened his heart to her. She crawled back onto his lap and kissed his cheek. “I'm not scared off.”

He stroked her back. “Good. I'd like you to know I realize now that I was wrong. I thought I was the one backed into the corner, out of options, but it was Noelle who truly was. She was underage, without skills beyond being a dutiful Catholic daughter. I had the freedom to leave, the freedom that came with excelling at a very profitable sport. She was using me, but looking back, I think I really was her best bet, her one good option. I can't fault her for that any more than I can fault you for assuming ownership of Cloud Nine because it was your best and, really, only good option.”

Allison wasn't crazy about being lumped into the same category as a poor, scared seventeen-year-old girl, but she saw the point Theo was making. She'd used Lowell for her own agenda, and she'd used Theo, too. The realization made her stomach lurch. “Have you seen her or talked to her in all the years since then?”

He shook his head. “I've thought a lot about that, but I decided a long time ago that I don't have a right to contact her. What if me reasserting myself in her life dredged up a past she didn't want to remember? What if I hurt her all over again? I couldn't stand it. It helps me cope to imagine that the abortion and the fallout from it ended up being a catalyst for her to leave and build a better life on her own.”

“It's very possible that's what happened,” Allison said.

“The baby would be seventeen now. Isn't that something? It would've been Noelle's age when I got her pregnant.”

“So, then, you do wonder what would have happened if she'd had the baby?”

Theo took a sip of his chocolate, considering. “All the time. Being around Katie has been good, but at times it's been hard. Before you and Katie arrived, I didn't think about it except on certain dates throughout the year. But, being around Katie and you, I've been thinking about it almost every day now in some way or another. I like being around Katie. I think I would have grown into being a good father.”

“You would have. Katie loves you.”

“I don't begrudge women the choice to have an abortion, not at all, and I still can't decide if I regret her getting the abortion because I wasn't ready. I didn't want to be trapped there in that town, in a loveless marriage. My life is better for having escaped all that. But I can't stop wondering. It's such a complicated issue. I don't know where the line is between right and wrong.”

Allison reached for her mug only to discover it was already empty. She set it back on the coffee table. “What would you do about the baby if you were granted a do-over?”

“If I had it to do over again, I don't know. I'd listen to Noelle more and try to help her the best I could instead of trying to control her with my own agenda.”

She liked that answer, and she liked that he acknowledged that he had his own agenda throughout all that, too. “What about your parents? Have you been in contact with them?”