Bury the Hatchet (16 page)

I closed her door and headed for my shower, turning the spray as close to ice as I could get it. Not that it helped. I ended up jerking myself off, images of her lithe body swirling in my mind and the fruity rum taste of her on my lips.

When I finished, I put on some clothes and cracked open the door to her room to be sure she was all right. She was passed out, sprawled across the bed exactly as I’d left her. Moving quietly, I went inside and pulled a sheet up over her.

In her sleep, she curled closer to me, grabbing hold of my hand and murmuring something unintelligible.

How the hell was I going to get through a year of this? My balls were already blue, and it had only been a few days.

JUST AS I
expected, Tallie didn’t remember anything about the way she’d tried to drag me into her bed that afternoon once the liquor wore off. At least, if she did remember it, she never said anything about it. Maybe she was embarrassed. There wasn’t a fucking thing for her to be embarrassed about, so I hoped that wasn’t it. More likely, it was the mai tais that had caused not only her lapse in decorum but also her faulty memory.

Whatever the reason, I did my best to put it out of my mind. She didn’t try to jump my bones again during the remainder of our stay in Hawaii, so I tried to ignore how hard I got every time I looked at her in one of those bikinis.

They weren’t the skimpiest I’d ever seen before—not by a longshot. They were perfectly respectable, just like everything else about her, an adequate amount of skin covered to leave some things to the imagination, but plenty out in the open for me to ogle.

And I did. A lot. We spent most of our honeymoon out on the beach or in the ocean, and I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off her the whole time.

Which led to a lot of time alone in my room buffing my banana. By the time we flew back to Tulsa, I was positive the hotel was short on cold water due to all the icy showers I’d been taking, and I was ready to get back to some semblance of a normal life, where it wasn’t just the two of us all the time. I figured I could get into the gym and determine where I could get some ice time in preparation for the upcoming season, and Tallie could find something to do that she would enjoy, and we could settle into whatever our life together was going to look like.

Mom, Dad, and Kade hadn’t gone back home yet by the time we returned, though, which threw a wrench into things right off the bat. The problem was that the hospital insisted on putting Kade into a rehab program, but he wasn’t cooperating, so my parents were still here trying to force him to get the help he didn’t want. Mom couldn’t let go, and Dad wouldn’t leave without Mom.

With Tallie and me effectively out of the spotlight for a week, apparently the local news outlets had focused in on Kade after his overdose at the wedding. That meant we returned to Tulsa and walked into a hornet’s nest.

John and Darren met us at the airport when we landed. They’d stayed behind to get my new house set up so Tallie and I could move in as soon as we returned. Before too much longer, Darren would have to head home so he could go back to work. John’s work was dealing with shit for me, though, so I didn’t mind asking him to do things like that. I’d asked him to do damage control while they were at it, but from the look on his face when I found him at baggage claim, that hadn’t gone too well.

He reached for Tallie’s carry-on bag and gave me a look that spelled trouble. “I don’t suppose you’ve talked to your parents much since you left?” He sounded hopeful even though he should know better.

I raised a brow in response, a scowl finding its way to my mouth, and Darren took one of the bags from me.

“Didn’t think so,” John said. He sighed. “So you should both know that things here haven’t gone as smoothly as everyone had hoped. Of course, half the state watched the wedding live as it was happening.”

“So everyone saw Kade’s meltdown,” I added for him.

He nodded. “And with the two of you out of the limelight for a week…”

“Has Kade done anything else stupid?” I asked even though I knew that was absolutely what this was about. No real point in asking
if
something had happened. I should have just asked
what
had happened. Better to cut to the chase and get it over with.

“Not exactly,” Darren said.

“What does that mean?”

John gave his younger brother a let-me-handle-this look. “It means that without you two here to follow around, the media decided they’d hound Kade instead. He’s been all over the papers, social media… Everything he’s done, or not done, they’ve blasted it everywhere.”

“So basically, everything that they’d hoped would happen by the two of you getting hitched, Kade’s presence is having the opposite effect.”

Which just meant that I needed to kick his ass out of my life once and for all, only I didn’t have the first clue if I could get Mom to go along with it.

Tallie had been quiet since we’d landed, her arms crossed over her chest as she took in everything my friends said. She leaned over and reached for her bag as it came around the carousel, but I grabbed it before she could, setting it at her feet.

“Thanks,” she murmured. Then she eyed each of the three of us before settling her gaze on me. “I guess that just means we’re going to have to step up our efforts even more than we already had been now that we’re home.”

That wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but there were worse ways to spend my time than putting on a massive PDA show with Tallie for all of Tulsa to see. If not for the fact that I would still be going to bed alone.

My hand should get a good workout, even if the rest of me didn’t.

HUNTER AND I
had been back in Tulsa for a week now and—surprisingly—I hadn’t heard from either Mama or Lance once. Without their interference, we were starting to settle into a pattern, one which I supposed we’d follow for the rest of our year together, more or less.

Every morning after breakfast, we went to the gym together. He’d hired a personal trainer named Easton, who was putting Hunter through some of the craziest workouts I’d ever seen to help him prepare for the upcoming season. Easton had him jumping up on wooden crates and running with a huge tire chained to his waist, and dozens of other things I’d never dreamed of doing.

I had no clue how they were supposed to help him prepare for his job as a goaltender, either, but then again I didn’t really know the first thing about hockey. I knew Hunter was a goalie, but watching all of this made me really curious about what a goalie did. I’d always thought they just stood there and waited for the puck to come their way. If that was the case, though, why would he need to do anything beyond be as big as possible, so there wasn’t much room for the puck to slip past him? It was beyond me, that was for sure.

While he was busy doing that, I went through my regular workout consisting of enough time on the elliptical machine to work up a good sweat, a couple of strength training circuits, and some laps in the pool to cool down. I was usually done well before he was. He suggested I go get a massage or a facial while I waited for him to finish, since they had a spa area here at the gym. I did once, but most days I found a quiet corner in the snack bar, drank a smoothie, and read a book.

After that, we would go out and have lunch somewhere that we’d be seen together. It was all about appearances, after all, and we were doing our best to be seen out and about as often as possible. We kept up the lovey-dovey hand-holding stuff the whole time we were out, whispering in one another’s ears. Occasionally he would kiss my cheek. I thought we were pulling the charade off well. Maybe too well, but now the gossip sites were focusing on the two of us again instead of delving into Kade’s life, according to John. Hunter had put his agent in charge of keeping tabs on all that so we wouldn’t have to, because it was really weird paying so much attention to the way the media portrayed us.

In the afternoons, Hunter was hauling his skates and other hockey gear and heading up to Thunderbirds Headquarters so he could spend some time on the ice. As if the crazy workouts in the gym weren’t enough. He wasn’t alone out there, either. Since the school year was about to start, his teammates who had school-aged children were showing up and getting settled in their new homes. I kept thinking maybe he would introduce me to the guys, or to their wives and kids at the very least, but so far that hadn’t happened. I was beginning to wonder if it ever would happen. But maybe he didn’t want to share that part of his life with me. Maybe that would feel too much like we were developing a real relationship.

While he was at the rink, I devoted my time to figuring out what the heck I was going to do with myself for the next year. I didn’t have classes to go to. I didn’t have my girlfriends from Delta Delta Delta to hang out with. I wasn’t busy preparing for my next pageant, so all the things Lance would prefer to have me doing were pointless now. I’d never gotten too close to any of the people I’d gone to school with, because Mama and Lance had kept me so busy there hadn’t been time for friends or extracurricular activities. So unless I was going to hang out with Mama and Lance—which would
not
go over well, in addition to the fact that I had no interest in doing so—I had to find some hobbies.

I wasn’t used to having free time. Throughout my entire life, every moment of my day had been laid out for me, strictly regimented. In my teens, I’d even had to resort to reading with the lights out after I’d gone to bed because Lance had insisted upon a specific amount of beauty sleep every night. It was the only way I was able to sneak any time for myself.

For the first few days after we returned, I did a lot of reading during those hours when Hunter was gone. While I enjoyed that freedom, it wasn’t long before I started to feel like I was wasting time that would be better spent doing something useful.

One day, I bought a cookbook and attempted to make a recipe from it for our dinner. I even invited Hunter’s parents and brother to join us. They declined, and it was probably for the best that they did, because I made a massive mess of it. By the time Hunter returned home, I’d managed to air out most of the smoke and other horrid smells, but there wasn’t anything salvageable from what I’d cooked. He took it in stride, even trying to get me to laugh it off. We left and ate dinner at a swanky downtown restaurant instead. Clearly, cooking was not going to be my forte, and there was no chance it would prove to be useful to anyone.

Another day, I decided to try a different tack. I went to one of the women’s shelters in the area, hoping to find some way I could help out. During my pageant years, women’s education had been the cause I was most vocal about. I thought I could keep going with something along those lines. But when I got to the shelter, they didn’t want me to help educate the women. They wanted someone to work in the kitchen or to donate items like tampons and condoms.

“Education is a great idea,” one of the workers told me, “but we’re still trying to focus on the immediate needs. We have to meet those before we can even begin to worry about the rest.”

I could do those things, of course, but they weren’t what I felt called to do. Still, I stuck around for a few hours, but by the time I left, I felt more defeated than ever. What could I do if no one wanted my help? Daddy had said that the player wives would get involved with some charitable events once the season got underway, but the season was still a ways off. Not only that, but so far, Hunter hadn’t been including me in anything to do with the Thunderbirds. He said it was because he didn’t even really know his teammates yet, so he couldn’t exactly introduce me to their wives. I started to wonder if he just didn’t want me to be involved in any part of his life, though. And I couldn’t blame him, I supposed. The less we got tangled up in one another’s lives, the easier it would be to end things when the time came for our impending divorce.

I couldn’t seem to help myself, though. That night at dinner, I asked Hunter if I could spend the next afternoon with his mother.