Girl Least Likely to Marry (12 page)

At six o’clock his wardrobe and his home office, which his PA
had packed up and put on an Ithica-bound chopper, arrived, and he spent the next
hour setting up. He unpacked the suitcases of clothes and set up his office in
the spare bedroom, leaving the desk area in the master bedroom for Cassie’s
stuff.

Relocating his life was no big deal when the constraints of the
everyday—like a job and a budget—were non-existent, and for that Tuck was
grateful. It didn’t matter where he was—he could do what he did anywhere. As
long as he had access to Cassie.

It was just after seven when he was done. He knew Cassie often
didn’t get back to the dorm until after eight, so he jumped in the car he’d
rented and bought enough groceries to fill the fridge. Lucky for Cassie he was
an awesome cook, and he whipped up a quick pasta meal for them both before
girding his loins and
heading back to the dorm.

Cassie recognised Tuck’s voice as soon as she entered
the dorm, holding court as he was in the lounge area to a group of rapt
teenagers. No big surprise, really. She was beginning to think she would
recognise his voice underwater amidst a pod of whales.

Her pulse skipped a little. Hadn’t he got her note? She
couldn’t decide whether the feeling in the pit of her stomach was anger or
relief. Whether she was mad at him or likely to tear all his clothes off in
front of impressionable teenagers.

God knew, she’d thought about nothing else all day.

She shook her head. Just over a week ago she hadn’t had any
indecision about her emotions. Her life, her feelings—should she have had
any—had been completely cut and dry. And then along came Tuck. And her brain had
gone into hiding!

She felt a momentary quiver of something that felt a lot like
anxiety. She recognised it from those troubled teen years, before medication had
helped her control a brain that sped constantly ahead.

She pushed it away on a hard swallow.

‘Cassie.’ Tuck stood as he spotted her. ‘Okay, guys.’ He
apologised as he prepared to leave, despite the protests. ‘Gotta go now.’

He caught up with Cassie outside her door, searching through
her bag for her key. ‘Evening, ma’am,’ he murmured near her ear, low and
drawn-out, just as he knew she liked. The falter in her brisk activity was
satisfying.

‘I left you a note,’ Cassie said as his pheromones embraced her
and she shut her eyes to resist them. She
fitted her key in the lock and
opened the door.

Tuck followed her into her room. ‘I got it,’ he said.

Cassie folded her arms, because they were aching for him and
she just didn’t trust her body when she no longer understood it. She glared at
him. ‘This is not cold turkey.’

Tuck smiled at her cranky face. Her eyebrows were drawn
together and she was looking at him like mould under a microscope. But he could
see the telltale signs giving her away. The flutter of the pulse in the hollow
of her throat, the slight flare of her nostrils, the beading of her nipples
which, thanks to her folded arms, he could see clearly.

‘I had a better idea.’

‘It doesn’t look like it from where I’m standing,’ she
said.

‘I rented an apartment. It’s ten minutes’ walk from here and I
think you should move in with me.’

Cassie blinked. Had she heard right or had he finally dumbed
her down enough that she’d surpassed stupid and slipped right on to crazy?

‘Just think about it,’ Tuck said, jumping into the silence,
holding up his hands as if he was expecting her to attack at any minute. ‘It’s
logical, really.’

Yeah, he knew that was a low blow, considering the plan was
three-quarters insane. But he knew he had to make a logical argument.

‘You said in your note that you couldn’t concentrate. And that
all you could think about was me. I’m proposing that living with me will give
you the best of both worlds. No need for cold turkey. If I was here all the
time, if you had access to me all the time, you wouldn’t have to spend all day
thinking about
not
having access to me. You’d know I
was here to come home to.’

Cassie, who had been girding her loins to throw him
out—preferably without ravishing him first—considered what he was saying.

‘Part of the problem the last week has been that you’ve been
deny ing your urges until they’ve built up and up and your libido is at
screaming point. If I was here all the time they wouldn’t have to build. Your
libido could calm down.’

Cassie remembered the days when her libido had been
non-existent.
The good old days.
‘I was hoping that
my libido might have…had its fill by now.’

‘Well, libidos can be tricky things. Sometimes these things can
take a while to burn out.’

Wasn’t that just what Gina had said? ‘How long’s a while?’ she
demanded. ‘Define it.’

Tuck shook his head solemnly. ‘Well, that’s not easily
definable—there are too many variables.’ Tuck wasn’t above a bit of geek-talk to
sway her his way. ‘It could be a week. It could be your entire three months at
Cornell. That’s a long time with shot concentration.’ Tuck shoved his hands into
the pockets of his track pants. ‘
Very
unproductive.’

Cassie didn’t like the sound of that. Maybe a ‘calm’ libido was
the best she could hope for while this thing
burnt itself
out,
as Tuck had put it. It certainly wasn’t showing any sign of
abating yet if the very powerful urge to kiss him currently playing havoc with
her willpower was anything to go by.

‘Why not give it a trial run?’ he suggested. ‘I think you’ll
find it beneficial to your concentration, but if you don’t…’ Tuck shrugged. ‘You
can always come back here.’

Cassie had to admit it did sound logical. A trial. Another
experiment. She had no doubt that he was manipulating her lifelong obsession
with logic, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t right. And, more than ever, she
needed logic in her life.

Cassie nodded. ‘Okay. Agreed. Can you get my suitcase down from
the top of the wardrobe?’

It was Tuck’s turn to blink. He’d thought it was going to be
much more difficult than that. He had arguments stacked up that he’d been
rehearsing for hours.

‘Well?’ Cassie said as she looked at a stationary Tuck. ‘Are we
going or not?’

Tuck grinned. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

And it worked brilliantly. Tuck had been right. Knowing
he was there to come home to freed up all her head space and she was finally
able to get into her work. Sure, she got a little spacey towards the end of the
day, when her libido was obviously starting to run a little low on its Tuck hit,
but Cassie was so productive she was almost delirious with it.

Having a constant supply of sex also meant more sleep, which
Cassie knew was a major requirement of her overactive brain. Instead of days of
famine which had kept her awake and hungry, followed by a night of feasting
which had kept her awake and sated, she had a constant source of fuel and
something more potent than sleeping tablets to get her off to sleep.

Not that she would ever stop taking
them.
She might be on top, but the memories of a time when she hadn’t
been still burned brightly and she relied on the pills to help her maintain her
mental balance.

Still, things were good. Way better than Cassie would have ever
thought possible. And if every now and then the thought that she was
living with a man
confused her logic she put it in the
‘too hard’ basket along with her libido and concentrated on her work.

Their first Sunday morning together threw up the first
potential hurdle, and it came from out of the blue. Tuck had been out after an
early round of sex and bought every paper he could lay his hands on. It was a
bit of a Sunday morning ritual for him, and Cassie was content to sit with him,
eating the omelette he’d made, and work her way through the papers too.

‘Why’d you get this one?’ she asked, holding up a tabloid well
known for bizarre stories on alien life and other things belonging in the realm
of the wild and whacky.

Tuck looked up from a sports section. ‘Force of habit. It’s
amazing how much you find out about yourself in the pages of a tabloid.’

Cassie raised an eyebrow. ‘I think that’s called narcissism,’
she said as she flicked to the second page.

Tuck grinned. ‘No. It’s called protecting my reputation.’ He
turned his attention back to the college ball scores as he said, ‘Plus I know
who to sic my lawyer on.’

Cassie shook her head, her gaze falling on a particularly
startling headline. ‘Do you mean like this?’ she asked, holding it up for him to
see. ‘“Tuck is my Baby Daddy”’.

Tuck’s head snapped up as the blazing bold headline jumped out
at him. His NFL official photograph was there, along with a picture of a vaguely
familiar busty blonde woman with a toddler on her hip. ‘What the…?’ he said as
he stood and headed to her side of the table.

‘Do you know someone called Jenny Jones?’ Cassie asked as she
scanned the article.

Tuck leaned on Cassie’s chair, rage building inside him as he
read over her shoulder. Sure, he remembered Jenny. He’d spent two nights with
her in Vegas just after his divorce was final.

‘Yeah.’ Tuck’s jaw clenched. ‘I know her.’ He reached for his
phone and stalked to the bay windows that looked down onto the street.

‘Who are you ringing?’ she asked.

‘My lawyer.’

It went to voicemail and Tuck left a terse message about the
amount of money he was paying him and how he expected to hear from him in the
next ten minutes.

‘It’s a lie,’ he said, turning to face Cassie. He couldn’t
believe the bare-faced audacity of the paper to print such a wild,
unsubstantiated claim. Generally his management would have been asked for
comment, given a heads-up, but sometimes rags like this didn’t bother with
clarification.

He was going to sue their goddamned asses off. They were going
to be sorry they’d
ever
s
crewed with him.

Cassie blinked at Tuck’s vehemence. He started to pace, his
fists curled, his face stony. ‘So you don’t know her?’ she said, tracking his
restless prowl. ‘You didn’t sleep with her?’

‘Oh, I know her,’ Tuck said, abruptly halting his pacing. ‘And
I slept with her. Exactly as she claims in the article.’

‘So…you
could
be the father?’
Cassie said. It seemed logical to her.

Tuck shook his head emphatically. ‘No.’

Cassie frowned. ‘You used condoms?’

‘Yes, we did. I
always
use
condoms.’

‘You know they only have a ninety-nine percent accuracy, right?
Statistically it is still possible—’

‘It’s not possible,’ Tuck interrupted.

‘Well, there is a one percent—’

‘No,’ Tuck interrupted again. ‘It’s
not
possible.’ He shoved his hand through his hair. ‘I’m infertile.
Probably have been most of my life. “Idiopathic”, they call it. Which just means
they don’t know what the hell’s caused it. But they suspect it was a virus that
laid me low when I was eighteen…totally screwed up my season too. Trust me—I can
tell you, for sure that I couldn’t get a woman pregnant if she was the most
fertile female on the planet. Which is kind of ironic, considering the number of
paternity tests I’ve faced over the years.’

‘How long have you known?’ she asked.

‘I found out when April and I tried to get pregnant.’

It had been a particularly nasty whammy, on top of the
recurrent knee injury screwing with his career. Nothing like being a dud at
everything—quarterback, husband, man.

Cassie didn’t know what to say. With absolutely no desire to
have children herself, she didn’t understand the drive. But she could see that
Tuck was gutted by it. ‘I’m…sorry,’ she said.

The phone rang then, and Tuck answered immediately. Cassie
listened to the one-sided conversation. Although perhaps
rant
was a better word. Tuck was steamed, and she wasn’t sure she’d
ever heard that many four-letter words.

Tuck ended the call and threw the phone on the table in
disgust.

‘I take it this happens a lot?’

He nodded. ‘This will be the eighth paternity claim against
me.’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘Sorry, you probably don’t need this. But
I can assure you it’s not true.’

Cassie frowned. ‘No need to apologise. Nothing to do with
me.’

Tuck blinked. He’d been with women in the past when these
accusations had come at him and they’d been spitting mad. Cassie just sat there,
looking at him all nonplussed, and he couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You’re the only
woman I know that wouldn’t have a hissy fit over this.’

‘It’s not really my business, is it?’ She shrugged.

‘Well, most women in your position would think it
was
their business.’

‘They would?’

Tuck nodded. ‘They’d be kind of pissed.’

‘Because of the jealousy thing?’ Cassie asked.

Tuck laughed again. ‘Ahh…yup. Most women want me to marry
them
and give
them
lots of
little quarterbacks. They’d be
more
than annoyed
that someone else was trying to claim that place in my life.’

Cassie thought about that for a moment. She supposed human
jealousy and other less evolved emotions might come into play here—but not with
her.

‘But I don’t want to marry you,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to
have your babies. I’m here for three months, then I’m going back to Australia,
and next year I’m going to Antarctica. And all of the years after that are going
to be dedicated to my career which, as my mother could tell you, is not
family-friendly. This is just a libido thing, remember?’

Bloody hell—she was hard on a man’s ego. An ego that had
already suffered a few hard years with the triple blow of a tanking career, a
crumbling marriage and infertility. And just when he was on the up Jenny came
along to sink in the boot.