Delay of Game (27 page)

“No wonder you always smell so good,” he said. “This stuff makes me want to just eat you up.” Once it was all rinsed away, he shut off the water and carefully wrapped a towel around me. I tucked the ends in over my breasts so the towel would stay put.

“Sit down for a minute,” he said, which I thought was an excellent idea. I practically collapsed onto the toilet seat, and he took another towel to secure around his waist. It didn’t do much to hide his hard-on. I could barely take my eyes off him—the definition in his chest and abs, and the sheer size of his arms. “Where’s your hair dryer?” he asked.

My hair dryer was the last thing in the world I wanted to be thinking about when he was standing there all dripping wet and wearing nothing but a towel. A towel that actually hid nothing from the imagination. And I had a very good imagination.

“The cabinet over your head,” I finally responded despite my thick tongue. “But there’s no way I can keep my arms up that long.”

He smirked—a sexy grin that made heat-shivers race all over my body—and reached up to remove it. “All you need to do is sit there. My arms can manage just fine.”

“Oh.” It came out as a kind of awed, whispery sound, which made me feel all of twelve years old. He was going to dry my hair? He’d already bathed me and washed and conditioned my hair. No one had done any of those things for me since I was a little girl unless I was at the salon and paying them to do so. He wanted me as much as I wanted him, there was no hiding that, but he hadn’t done so much as attempt to steal a kiss, let alone touch me.

Cam plugged the hair dryer into the outlet and picked up my vented brush from the counter, and the next thing I knew he was blowing my hair dry like an old pro, even spinning the brush to curl the ends under.

“Where did you learn how to do that?” I asked.

“I have three little sisters. Goes with the territory.” By the time he was done, I was dry all over. Well…
almost
everywhere. He helped me into one of my satin nighties, and he pulled on the same boxers and undershirt he’d taken off before helping me shower. “You sure you want to try sleeping in your bed tonight?”

I didn’t know if I’d be able to manage it, because lying down flat with these cracked ribs had been about the most excruciating kind of torment I’d ever experienced before, but I nodded anyway. “I want to at least try.” Sleeping upright wasn’t exactly easy to do. Too many nights of that and I would be just this side of loopy.

Who the fuck was I kidding? Nothing was easy right now, and I was well beyond loopy.

“Do you want me to stay or go?” he asked.

I didn’t have to think about that. Not this time. Everything I did hurt, but somehow he made me feel better. About everything. Damn it. Damn him.

Damn
me
.

“Stay,” I whispered.

Cam went over to my bed and pulled the covers down, and he climbed in. I sat on the opposite side and tried to lie on my side—the good side—without crying out in pain. I managed that, but not without cussing beneath my breath.

He brushed the hair away from my face and tugged me to his side. “Tell me if it starts to hurt too much. Tell me if you need to move.”

I nodded, focused on trying to will away the pain. He rolled onto his back and edged slightly closer still, and I inched over until I could rest my head on his shoulder. I put my hand on his stomach, and his dick jerked.

“You’re going to kill me, you know,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I know.” I was going to kill him, and he was going to pamper me. Not quite a fair trade-off, but he didn’t seem to mind too much.

Buster jumped up into the bed and burrowed under the covers, worming his way all the way down until he reached my feet. He propped his chin on one of them, let out a contented doggy sigh, and settled in for the night.

At least one of us would be comfortable.

SLEEPING LYING DOWN
wasn’t comfortable with these damn injuries, but it wasn’t any more uncomfortable than sleeping upright on the couch had been last night. The part that truly was troublesome, however, was waking up with Cam halfway on top of me. Even though he was only pinning my good side, I moaned. That was more than enough to jolt him awake, though.

“Shit,” he said, rolling us until he was on his back and he’d pulled me partially onto him. He brushed my hair back from my face and searched my eyes. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

Our change in position woke Buster, who grumbled and whined with his cute little doggy voice. He got up and walked in a circle three or four times before settling down again with what I swore sounded like an indignant huff.

I shook my head. “Nothing permanent,” I mumbled in my pained sleep haze.

The crazy thing was that I couldn’t stop thinking that if I hadn’t had those stupid cracked ribs, there was no way I would rather wake up than with Cam on top of me. I didn’t know where that idea came from, but judging by the erection pressing into my belly, I was pretty sure he felt the same way.

“You’re sure I didn’t hurt you?” He kissed my forehead, smoothing both hands over my body as though he was assuring himself that he hadn’t broken me.

I didn’t want just a little peck on the forehead. I wanted more. I stretched up until I could touch my lips to his, and I straddled my legs around his waist to keep me solidly in place. Amazingly, lying in that position eased some of the discomfort on my ribs. I was able to support some of my weight with my legs, which kept the worst of it away from my core.

It was a slow kiss at first, sleepy and languorous, but it wasn’t long before things got a lot more heated. Too heated, actually, because I needed to take deeper breaths than were comfortable, and I had to pull away and end it.

“You
are
going to kill me,” he said, his voice gravelly and scratchy like his facial hair had become due to that stupid playoff beard superstition guys all over the NHL seemed to believe in. He kissed my cheek, letting his lips linger. “God, Sara.”

“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure why I was apologizing. It just came out.

I wasn’t sorry for kissing him, that much was for sure. If anything, maybe I was sorry that I couldn’t follow through with what I’d started. Yeah, that part stung. For both of us, actually.

I lay my head on his chest while we worked on remembering how to breathe, and he brushed his hands over my head, my hair, my back—always gentle, in an almost loving manner. I shouldn’t let myself think like that. Words like
gentle
were fine; words like
loving
belonged in an entirely different arena, practically on a different planet. We weren’t starting to hang out in the realm of love. Were we?

He grunted. “Don’t be.”

Buster shifted around under the covers and finally stilled just beside my foot again. Then Cam let me shift and squirm until I got into a comfortable position. Long after I’d gotten situated into my spot, my head resting on his pecs and my legs draped over either side of him, he was still lazily touching me. He trailed his fingers through my hair, and he let them tease my back and hips and thighs, and eventually we drifted back to sleep.

I could get used to sleeping like that. Even though his body was hard all over, he was like a pillow beneath me—a big, warm, firm pillow that cradled my body in just the right ways to keep most of my pain at bay. The thought of how easy it had all been scared me. A lot. Definitely a lot. Until Cam, there had never been a man who was an all-night, stay-in-bed-together sort of man for me. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it all.

Somehow, we settled
into a routine after that night, even though it wasn’t anywhere close to the sort of routine I would have ever expected to have. Not just me, Cam, and Daddy, either. There was a whole army of people surrounding us and foisting these changes upon me.

When the guys had practice or a game-day skate, either Noelle or Dana and her mom came over to hang out with Daddy and me. Dana was great about making my father get up and move like the doctors had instructed him to do. She’d spent a number of years working as a personal trainer before she’d moved from Providence to Portland to live with Zee, and she was still more than able to whip out that in-your-face, take-no-prisoners sort of tone that someone as muleheaded as Daddy sometimes needed.

The days that she came with her mom, we spent a lot of time working on wedding plans. Even Daddy got in on the act. Well, at least he had when we’d been deciding on cake samples.

He was particularly fond of the one that had both a lemon curd filling and some sort of raspberry jam. “That’s the one,” he insisted. “None of the others even come close to comparing.” Then he went back in to finish that particular sample off despite my reminders that he was supposed to be eating better and staying away from empty fat and calories. One thing that undoubtedly qualified as
empty fat and calories
was cake. He responded by licking his fingers and smacking his lips at me, which made both Dana and Mrs. Campbell grin at him as though he was some big comedian.

Regardless of his participation in the cake decision-making, he didn’t get anywhere near as involved when talk turned to floral decorations or color schemes. He even got up from his La-Z-Boy on his own and claimed he needed a nap when we started looking at fabric swatches for the bridesmaid gowns.

Buster followed him down the hall at that point. I didn’t see either of them again for hours afterward while we continued talking about wedding attire. In fact, I was fairly certain he let Buster nap with him, which seriously screwed with all of my ideas about Daddy not liking dogs.

Since I wouldn’t be able to go with the other women when they went dress shopping because of all my injuries—trying on dress after dress sounded like my own personal idea of hell at the moment—we did a lot of looking online to get ideas in advance. Mrs. Campbell made an executive decision that they would FaceTime me when they had Dana and Rachel in gowns they were considering so I could give my input, and it was determined that each bridesmaid would have a dress that suited her own personal style, but they’d all be made from the same fabric so we would look like we belonged together.

The days that Noelle spent with us couldn’t have been more different from those with Dana and her mother. Noelle brought her puppy, Puck, for each visit, and it seemed as if he was bigger every single visit. For large chunks of those days, we wasted a lot of our time watching Buster chase Puck or, alternatively, watching Puck chase Buster. There was a lot of laughter during Noelle’s visits, especially from Daddy.

Nothing could have surprised me more. He’d never allowed me to have a dog when I was growing up, so I’d given up hope of ever having one—at least not as long as I lived with him. But I had always assumed that his refusal was because he didn’t like dogs. That didn’t seem to be the case at all, considering how he was acting with these two around.

In fact, Daddy was a lot more active during the hours that Noelle and Puck joined us than at any other time. He was happy to let both dogs jump up on his lap, and he didn’t even complain when they got up in his face and gave him doggy kisses. He laughed—more than I could remember him laughing in years—and I could see in his eyes how much he wanted to get down on the floor to play with them. The only thing that stopped him was the postsurgical pain. The light in his eyes was like that of a little boy. When he walked his laps through the living areas while Noelle was with us, both dogs raced circles around him, staying right by his side the whole time and barking excitedly. That only made him laugh more.

She brought flowers with her fairly regularly, either that or some homemade potpourri she was experimenting with, and she was always tidying things up, perpetually in motion. Whereas Laura could be a whirlwind of talk, Noelle was more like a tidal wave of action. She usually stayed just this side of driving me insane because she never held still.

After a couple of days hanging out with us, at one point when she was helping me to get up so I could use the restroom, she completely threw me for a loop.

“I really like your father,” she said.

Most people didn’t like Daddy. He was so different around everyone else than he was with me, usually. But then, he was different around Noelle than he was with other people, too. Maybe because
she
was different. Hell, she wasn’t anything like who I’d initially pegged her to be.