Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
“It’s not early for hockey. Most guys are in by nineteen.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Do you follow hockey?”
“I’ve never actually watched a game.”
I chuckled. “Average retirement age is twenty-nine. So if you’re not in early, you’re significantly cutting down your chance at seeing ice time. There are outliers. Gordie Howie and Chris Chelios played twenty-six seasons. But for every one of them, there are ten guys who don’t make it two years.”
“Retirement at twenty-nine. Wow. That’s so young.”
“It’s a physically demanding game. There’s a reason players are shifted in and out every minute or so.”
“They change players every minute?”
I laughed. “You weren’t kidding around. You’ve never watched a hockey game, huh?”
“No. Never. A minute seems so short.”
“Not when you’re playing the game. I think the average shift is about forty-seven seconds. Top players can stay in for a minute or better; lower-level guys sometimes are out in forty seconds. All depends on stamina.”
“How long were your shifts?”
I wasn’t cocky about too many things in hockey. I was never the best, never the worst. But I was proud of my play time during my heyday. “A little over a minute.”
“Jeez. No wonder I needed the Epsom salt.”
She gazed out the window after that. I wondered what she was thinking, even considered asking—something I would normally never do. But she beat me to the punch.
“Did you have a good time when we…you know?”
She couldn’t possibly be questioning whether I liked fucking her. “You know…what?”
“When we fooled around. Had sex.”
“Why in the world would you ask me that?”
“I don’t know. I guess because we did it so many times. When we were in the moment, I thought it was because we couldn’t get enough of a good thing. But after…I don’t know. I guess I have doubt because of Noah cheating on me. If he was satisfied, why would he have cheated?”
I shook my head. That asshole ex of hers had done a number on her, even more than I’d realized. “Sweetheart, when a man cheats, it usually has nothing to do with his sex life or the woman he’s with. They cheat because they have self problems. They’re self-absorbed and have low self-esteem. How hard would it have been to break things off with you before deciding to fuck around? Not hard at all. But he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Don’t let that asshole put his issues on you. Got me?”
She didn’t look convinced. So I put my blinker on and got off at the next exit, even though we still had a half dozen to go before we got to the one for the place we were staying. Once we were off the highway, I pulled into an empty parking lot.
“What are you doing?”
I parked and made sure I had her full attention. “Fucking you was phenomenal. I missed my exit driving to the lumberyard the other day—a place I could get to with my eyes closed—because I was picturing what my dick looked like going in and out of you, the way you milked me like a tight fist, only better. Every day this week, I woke up thinking about you underneath me, and I went to bed jerking off, remembering the sound you make when you come. So whatever dumb-ass doubt that moron you were with planted in your brain, get rid of it. Because I didn’t have a good time, Josie. I had the best time.”
Her eyes watered. “Oh my God. I needed to hear that.”
“Didn’t tell you because you needed to hear it. Told you because it’s the truth.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled over the center console onto my lap. Pressing her mouth to mine, she mumbled, “I want you.”
“Here?”
She nodded and reached down for the button of my jeans. “Please.”
The only thing better than this woman taking charge was her saying please. I wanted to hear that word from her lips every damn day. Which was a problem…but one I’d think about when I wasn’t about to have Josie Preston sink balls-deep onto my cock.
CHAPTER 24
* * *
Slap a Label on It
Fox
Josie watched the dance floor while I watched her. That comment she’d made in the car yesterday—how she knew how much her father loved her mother because she’d often caught him staring at her—crept to the forefront of my mind. But I pushed it back and looked away, sucking back my last wine sample.
“You know, you’re supposed to taste the wine,” Josie commented. “Let it roll around your tongue to savor the taste and figure out the flavors you recognize. Not knock it back like a shot of tequila.”
“You have your way, and I have mine,” I said.
She smiled and looked back at the crowd swaying to the music under the tent. I hated dancing. Vertically anyway, but she’d given me what I wanted—and then some—last night and again this morning, so I figured it wouldn’t kill me this once. I stood and held out my hand.