Blindsided (6 page)

“Of course, you did.” She stared directly into his eyes, as if she could see all the ugliness he kept so carefully hidden from the world. “You wanted a quick lay, and I was convenient.”

Tanner squirmed, feeling like the selfish ass he was. “I’m sorry. Believe me when I tell you it was more than that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, really? Then why didn’t you call?” Her blue eyes shot through him like a dagger, full of accusation.

Now they were getting to the reason for her anger. He’d heard that same accusing statement from women more times than he could count. Usually he charmed them out of their anger and their clothes. Only this time was different. This time it stung and made him feel all kinds of crappy. He held out his hands, palms up, and sighed. “I didn’t think it would be a good idea.”

“You’re right.
It
wasn’t, and
it
isn’t.”

Tanner scratched his head. Women never ceased to confuse him. One minute she was chewing his ass for not calling and the next she was saying it was better he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, deciding simple might be best.

“Whatever.” She shrugged, sounding so much like Bella he was immediately reminded that he’d had a brief but tempestuous relationship with her older sister, which made this thing between them even more complicated.

“Got any blanks,” he asked, pointing toward the slips spread on the table.

She frowned at him. “Why?”

He grinned. “I think I’ll take a turn or two at the mic.” At the raise of her eyebrow, he chuckled. “What’s the matter? Afraid I can’t carry a tune?”

“Something like that.”

Tanner caught the amused sparkle in her eyes and knew he stepped back on semi-friendly ground with her. “Well, sweetheart, be prepared to have your socks knocked off. This boy can sing.”

He leaned in close until their shoulders touched, and he could feel the warmth from her body. Plucking a blank slip from the table, he stole her pen, ignoring her protests, and scrawled a song on the slip. “Be right back,” he said as he briefly left to give his slip to the DJ.

He turned and caught her staring at him. Sliding back into his chair, he put a hand on her shoulder. “You were staring at my ass.”

“I was not,” she shot back, but the red tinge to her face betrayed her embarrassment at being caught ogling his backside. He didn’t mind one bit. She could look all she wanted, especially if she touched later.

Damn, but he was playing with fire, and he couldn’t seem to help himself.

The DJ called Emma up the stage, and Tanner sat back to enjoy the show. She could sing, a rare treat among the other tone-deaf karaoke singers present. When she came back to the seat amid a smattering of applause and loud whistling and clapping from him, he tilted his head and gave her his most disarming grin.

“You’re good. I mean crazy good. Awesome good. Your parents are in the music business, how come you don’t give it a shot? They have to have connections.”

Emma’s eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she rubbed them viciously with a napkin. He’d hit a nerve with an innocent question, and his instant regret threw him off-balance. Tanner rarely regretted anything, except getting caught, yet he regretted making her sad.

Her shoulders shook as she buried her face in the napkin. Tanner watched helplessly, never comfortable with a woman’s tears and completely uncertain what to do next. He rubbed her back, feeling awkward and off his game.

He wanted to know why his question upset her so much, which was a problem in itself. Tanner didn’t really care why people did what they did. He only cared about whether or not they liked him, at least on the surface. So why did he care about Emma?

That answer was buried in an emotional pit he hid from the world, and he wasn’t sure if there was a backhoe big enough to excavate what lay under all the outer bullshit.

* * * *

Emma was mad—at herself. She’d revealed her biggest weakness to Tanner of all people. And for what reason? Heaven only knew. She sure as heck didn’t. He wasn’t the One, and she had no business telling him her secrets because he didn’t really care.

“Are you okay?” Tanner stared at her, his mouth set in a grim line, while a lone muscle jerked in his jaw.

Emma shook her head. His concern wrenched another bout of sobs from her. How stupid and ridiculous and weak? She was crying over karaoke for heaven’s sake. Except she knew it was more than that. She was crying because she wasn’t strong enough to follow her dreams like Avery or willing to give up the safe and known for the dangerous and unknown. Emma liked everything lined up in neat little lines, liked her life mapped out, all the way down to her someday wedding dress she’d clipped out of a bride’s magazine and stored in what she called her
Notebook of Dreams.
Tanner was in there, too, as her dream man—the guy she measured every other guy against. Of course, she didn’t really know him, only his public persona as a guy who did lots of charity work and was known for his easygoing, generous lifestyle with a lot of partying thrown in.

“Oh, man, sweetheart, I’m sorry.” He wrapped his strong arms around her. She stiffened briefly, but couldn’t resist him no matter how hard she tried. Emma relaxed into him, letting his warmth seep into her cold places, comforting her in ways she’d only imagined. She’d certainly never been comforted by her parents as a child. Izzy tried, but Izzy wasn’t exactly into warm-fuzzies. Yet, this man she barely knew made her feel better with just a hug because he was good at this. Really good. She reminded herself she meant nothing to him. He was not the One, she repeated over and over in her head. Only her heart had donned noise-cancelling headphones and was picking out wedding music.

Sniffling, Emma pulled back. “No one in my family knows I sing karaoke, and they can’t know.”

“Why?” Confusion spread across his handsome face.

“We have a pact—my sisters and I.”

“A pact? Not to sing karaoke? Seriously?” His brow creased in confusion and made him look so adorable, his expression helped staunch the flow of tears.

“No. We have a pact to never follow in our parents’ footsteps and become entertainers. We’ve lived that story of being on top, crashing to the bottom, and spending the rest of their lives trying to get back to the top again. The drugs, the drinking, the late nights, the complete and total disregard for anything but the music, especially your children.” And why was she telling him all this?

“Oh,” he seemed at a loss for words. “But you sing at the parties you crash?”

“That’s different.”

“Because Izzy approves of it?” he guessed, and Emma nodded slowly. “So you come here once a week to sing?”

She nodded again, surprised at how perceptive he was.

He rubbed his chin as if deep in thought then refocused those deep green eyes on her. “Your secret is safe with me.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah,” he said softly, his voice deep and husky, a voice that instantly made her panties wet and brought forth thoughts of steamy nights and naked bodies.

Oh my
. Her hands flew to her mouth as she inwardly cringed at her wayward thoughts.

He patted her back, wrongly assuming it had to do with her broken dreams. He had no idea he was a large part of them. The DJ called him to sing, and she sat back, relieved to have a reprieve and happy to have an excuse to watch him without coming across as a stalker or a desperate woman with an even more desperate crush.

He had to be the hottest man in the room. Judging by the other women hungrily watching him, she wasn’t the only one who thought so. Tanner picked up the mic, nodded to the DJ, and grinned straight at Emma, making her feel as if she were the only woman in the large bar. She expected harsh music or even rap, only he pulled another surprise out of his bag of tricks.

Tanner’s gaze held hers captive as he started to croon a classic country ballad made famous by George Strait. It happened to be one of Emma’s personal favorites, and Tanner sang “The Chair” as well as George Strait had himself.

Emma couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t form a coherent thought as Tanner expertly wound a cocoon around the two of them with a song he sang as if he sung it just for her. His voice rolled over her like a warm ocean breeze, gentle and mesmerizing.

The man could sing, and Emma went from a crush to being hopelessly, undeniably in love with the man before he got to the chorus.

“Don’t look so shocked,” Tanner said after he sauntered back to his seat and sat down next to her. With a satisfied smirk on his face, he sipped his beer, the same one he’d been nursing all night.

“Country? You?” Emma wasn’t shocked, not at all. She was smitten, completely under his spell, and already dusting off that wedding dress in her mind. And how ridiculously stupid was that?

He glanced around as if checking to see if anyone noticed. “Yeah, I like country. We all have our secrets.” His lopsided smile would’ve won her heart if he hadn’t already owned it.

“I’m not the only witness,” she said, surprised she could actually tease him when most men left her tongue-tied.

He leaned forward, as if he only wanted her to hear him. “One of the advantages of playing for the NFL’s worst team in a remote corner of the country is I can come to a place like this and rarely be recognized, so let’s keep my identity a little secret between us.”

“I promise,” she whispered as she leaned into him, intoxicated by the woodsy scent so uniquely his. Tanner was full of contradictions; his scent was one of them. She’d have expected him to smell like an expensive, trendy men’s cologne. Instead he smelled like an old-growth forest after a light spring rain.

He gazed down at her, his eyes sparkling with mischief, as if he were contemplating some kind of new mayhem. “Let’s do a duet. You and me, we’ll rock this place.”

“Okay,” Emma squeaked, scared and thrilled at the same time.

“You pick. You’ve heard me sing. You know what I’m capable of.”

“Full of yourself, aren’t you?”

He gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “Oh, yeah, definitely, and I go after what I want.”

“And you want to sing with me?”

“Ah, babe, that’s just foreplay.” His teasing grin tempered his suggestive words.

Emma licked her lips and stared into those incredible eyes. Maybe they should sing “You Had Me at Hello.” Except he’d had her longer than that, much longer. One of his big hands gripped her thigh right at her knee in a decidedly possessive touch, as he grinned at her, smiling with his mouth and his eyes.

“Why did you come here tonight?” she heard herself asking.

“To see you.” The intensity in his gaze turned her spine to gel and her panties even wetter. “We do have unfinished business.”

“You want to finish it?”

“Don’t you?”

Emma contemplated how to answer that question. She had the
vow
to consider, and she was stone-cold sober, though being in Tanner’s presence made her tipsier than five glasses of wine. “You said it was a mistake.”

“Maybe at the time, but the biggest mistake I made was to bring my phone along. This time I’ll eliminate all interruptions and give you my full attention.”

Emma shook her head. “I can’t.”

Tanner blinked several times as if he couldn’t quite wrap his head around her answer. “Why not?”

“I came here to sing. That’s all. That other night, that was just alcohol talking.”

“Fine, then, let’s sing,” He groused, almost as if she’d insulted him or hurt his feelings. He recovered quickly, his easygoing smile replacing that momentarily scowl. “You and I together will take no prisoners.”

Emma thought for a moment and chose “Picture” made famous by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow.

A few minutes and a healthy tip later, the DJ called them up to the stage out of turn. Tanner wrapped his big hand around hers, engulfing it, and led her to the stage. Emma wasn’t a small woman. She was five-foot-ten in her bare feet, yet Tanner’s large six-foot-four frame made her feel small and delicate.

Picking up their mics, they turned to face each other. Emma heard whispering in the crowd, followed by flashes from phone cameras. From the murmuring across the small group of patrons, Tanner had been outed, and their quiet night together most likely had ended. Those pictures would be all over Twitter and Facebook before they sang the first chorus.

And Emma would be outed, too.

She had no time to think any further because Tanner started singing, and his voice wove magic around the two of them. Emma gazed into his eyes and forgot all about their audience, her sisters, and the possible notoriety she’d unwittingly gained.

Holding his mic in one hand, Tanner grasped Emma’s hand in the other, singing to her as if he meant every word. When Emma’s turn came, she started out shaky but gained her footing and put her all into the song. They harmonized beautifully on the chorus.

As they finished the last line, Tanner leaned into her, his face only inches from hers, and his eyes burning into her very soul. Even when the people scattered at the tables stood as one to give them a standing ovation, Emma didn’t move.

Tanner placed a thumb under her chin and tilted her head up. He kissed her softly, gently, deeply until her world spun around her like a slow merry-go-round. She held onto him as she kissed him back, wishing their kiss would never end, and he’d make all her dreams come true.

Too soon, he drew back and grinned at her. “That was awesome.”

Emma cleared her throat. “It was.” She didn’t know if he’d been referring to the kiss or the duet. They’d both been awesome—beyond awesome—more like epic.

Remembering where she was, she looked around the casino bar and spotted people holding up phones, not only taking pictures, but most likely video. At that moment, reality sacked her for a loss. As soon as her family and their significant others saw the video, she would be in deep, deep trouble.

The weird thing was that she was almost relieved, but she wasn’t so sure Tanner shared her relief.

* * * *

For Tanner, his fans always came first. His former girlfriends had understood that. Now that everyone knew who he was, he couldn’t help himself. He worked the tables in the bar, like a seasoned politician. He wasn’t oblivious to Emma, though. He glanced her way several times as she patiently waited at their table for him. He liked her patience, and he also appreciated the total absence of jealousy in her expression.