Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(39)
“Let’s get you and the peanut to bed.”
And as much as he wanted to turn right in the hall and take her back to his bed like he had this afternoon, he couldn’t. A blue line had been painted onto the ice. Crossing it didn’t just mean going into the opposing team’s territory, it meant skating out into uncharted territory and that wasn’t what a man who lived and died by the schedule did. So he turned left and tucked Tess into her own bed.
“Wait,” she said, her eyes half closed with sleep. “Thank you.”
“For what?” He wasn’t fishing. He had no clue and thinking while she was in his arms was kinda hard.
“For yesterday at the shop. For tonight. I know Kahn and I have messed with how you like to do things. Thank you for making room for us until my apartment is ready.”
She sat up and brushed her soft, full mouth against his in a kiss so brief, it shouldn’t have stopped his world—but it did. Gliding the pad of her thumb across his bottom lip, a vulnerable bittersweet half smile came on her face as she watched him with the wary resignation of someone who’d been kicked by life one too many times. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I know you have your constants. It won’t happen again.”
Cole could barely breathe. Thinking wasn’t even a possibility. Whatever alarm bells there were warning of the danger ahead were muted by the overwhelming roar of lust rushing through him, stringing him tight and hard at the mercy of the one woman he couldn’t have and shouldn’t want.
“Good night, Cole.” She lay down and pulled her covers up to her chin. “Congrats on the win tonight.”
He might have mumbled “thank you” as he made his way to the door. He could have sung “Jingle Bells.” He had no fucking clue. All he knew was that as he turned off the light switch and walked out into the hall, he had no idea what in the hell had just happened to make everything feel different.
Chapter Eleven
Kahn was missing again. Well, not missing. Tess knew exactly where he was when she woke up kitty-free in her own bed the next morning. The kitten had to be in Cole’s room. It was where he went every morning for some predawn cuddle time. Part of her couldn’t blame him. The other part of her dreaded having the delicate sense of connection she had with Cole severed because her cat had a crush on a man who wanted nothing to do with animals, let alone kittens.
She knew firsthand how easy it was to mess up a precarious living situation. When she was ten and her one-week summer stay with her second cousins had stretched into three, a spilled cup of grape Kool-Aid on the newly installed cream carpet had resulted in a quick hustle to another relative’s house until her mom finally made it back from a road trip with her latest boyfriend.
And all that ugly was the last thing she was going to expend the emotional energy on this morning. She had more important things to deal with, specifically how to get Kahn away from the guy she had shamelessly kissed last night, which was the absolute last thing she should have done. It was second in embarrassment only to all the things she wanted to do to him and had dreamed about in high-def detail last night.
It had to be the pregnancy hormones. According to the pregnancy app she’d downloaded, her sex drive wasn’t supposed to increase until the second trimester because of a powerful lust cocktail of increased estrogen and progesterone with a garnish of more blood flow to her lady bits.
Of course, science had probably never studied the effect on desire from living with a sexy-as-sin professional hockey player as a factor. That—it turned out—trumped morning sickness, pregnancy exhaustion, and her better judgment, which explained why she was lurking outside Cole’s open door while he slept inside with Kahn draped across his neck like a fur scarf.
Your cat’s going to try to strangle me…
Okay, it had sounded like he’d been joking last night, but who really knew? Her uncle Ted sounded like he was kidding before he’d started throwing plates against the wall the one time she’d stayed for a week with him, Aunt Chrissy, and their three kids. The best course of action was to tiptoe into Cole’s room, retrieve Kahn, and get out of there without waking him up. It was a travel day. Morning skate followed by a plane ride to Minneapolis and a central US road trip until the end of the week. It was amazing how much hockey knowledge a person could pick up reading Harbor City Ice Knights obsessed website The Biscuit.
Holding her breath, she got right up next to the bed—keeping her eyes locked on the kitten and not the rise and fall of Cole’s magnificent chest, or his hard-etched abs, or the way his mouth softened in sleep, or how freakin’ long his eyelashes were across his cheeks, or— Oh my God, Tess, dial down the stalker a little bit, all right?!
She was just reaching for Kahn when everything happened at once. Cole’s blue eyes snapped open. The cat jumped a million miles straight up in the air and sprinted out the door. She jolted back, letting out a startled squeal, and tripped over her own feet. The only thing that saved her from going down on her ass was Cole’s strong arm wrapped around her waist and yanking her in the opposite direction—toward his bed. She landed mostly on him, managing to wrap her hands around the ironwork of his headboard before she pushed a still-covered-with-her-sleep-shirt boob into his face.
“Morning, Tess,” he said, his hand moving from holding onto her waist to resting lightly on the outside of her thigh.