Page 3 of In Love with My Secret Husband

He slowly looked around him. On the wall opposite the kitchen, the framed photo from his retirement ceremony still hung where Laina had insisted on putting it. Troy at center ice in The Res, the Waymakers' arena, with the crowd on their feet and Old Goldie's voice cracking over the speakers as he said,And that's the last shift for the greatest player this franchise has ever seen.Laina had cried harder than anyone that night. He remembered that now.

He saw the cabinet door she'd left open swung in the draft. The divorce papers on the counter, and her signature on it, which didn’t resemble at all the tiny, pretty mess of scrawled lines he was more familiar with.

Her signature on the divorce paper looked like she had spent hours on it. Like every line...made his wife bleed.

He put the papers down.

He had to.

The next thing that drew his attention was her mug. The Mrs. B one. She didn’t go anywhere without it. The one time he had asked her if she would like to replace it with a newer andexpensive one, Laina had looked at him, aghast. This is the first thing I owned as your wife. I would never part with it.

And yet...

She had left it behind her now.

Troy set the mug down and looked at the staff badge. Her photo beamed up at him: Laina Blackett, Kindergarten Teacher, mid-laugh, hair falling into one eye. The Laina in this photo was the Laina he had met the first time. Beautiful. Innocent. Optimistic. And as he stared at her photo, his mind slowly drifted to the past.

He remembered what she impishly insisted on calling their ‘meet-cute’, mostly because she loved seeing his pained expression every time she did so. And as for their so-called ‘meet-cute’, it was when at a hockey game he had attended as a spectator, way up in the bleachers, and she hadn’t recognized him at all. She had accidentally dumped an entire tray of nachos into his lap, and even to this day, he recalled how her face had completely turned red like cherries.

“I am so, so sorry, I'm not usually—I mean, I guess I’m usually this clumsy, but not usually onto people, and you have cheese on your—oh no, it's everywhere, I'm so—"

He'd handed her a napkin. She'd used it on his shirt instead of her own hands. Three weeks after that, he had proposed, they had their secret courthouse wedding, and on their wedding night, she had somehow ended up wearing one of his old shirts, and he remembered thinking, Mine.

Seeing her in his shirt, that was when it had hit him.

This beautiful, innocent girl whose smile could light up even the darkest of nights...

She was his.

That first night, she had babbled like usual, her words only stuttering to a stop when his hands curved around her waist, and her fingers ended up curling into the front of his shirt.

Her eyes had been big and dazed when they met his, her words spilling out in a whisper.

“I’ve n-never—”

“I know.”

“I’m probably going to be terrible at this.”

“You won’t be.”

“You can’t possibly know—”

He had cut her off with a kiss, her lips immediately parting under his, and of course he had been right. She had not been terrible. In fact, she had been the opposite. From the moment her arms had gone around his neck, and her shaking body had arched into his, everything had been perfect because she was perfect.

Seven years had passed since that night, but Troy still hadn’t forgotten what it meant and how it felt when he had slowly pulled the shirt over Laina’s head, and she had covered her face with both hands.

“D-Don’t look at me—”

“You know I’ll do more than that.”

“T-Troy!”

But of course that only had his gaze gleaming even as he took her wrists and gently moved them away from her face. Her eyes collided with his, and the way she had stared up at him, Troy remembered how it had him swallowing hard. Even now, he still couldn’t find the right words to describe it. He just knew she was the only girl to have ever looked at him like that.

Mine.

It had made Troy want to possess her and cherish her at the same time. To devour every inch of her in an instant, but also to savor every spot his lips touched and tasted.