Page 44 of He Has Pluck

“No, because I’m not easy. For anyone but you.” It’s the hard honest truth, and I hold my breath waiting for her response. But as she reaches an arm around me, gazing into my eyes, and my arms glide up the silky smoothness of her back, I hear the clicking of the camera and know for certain I want this photograph.

“Perfect,” she says and bounces back up out of bed, escaping my grasp.

“I thought this was supposed to be an escape from work, the one place where we—”

“It is. This isn’t work, Jason.” She hardly ever calls me Jason, so I sit up and pay attention as she stows her camera.

I’m sweaty and tired, and I have a bruise on my hip that I’ve been ignoring while my endorphins are busy feeding my brain all kinds of pleasure sparks. But I shift her against me, and I need to feed my curiosity more than rest.

“Tell me about Ruminski.” She stirs and makes a sound like a would-be laugh.

“Why?”

“Indulge me. Pretend I want to know everything there is to know about you because…well, I do.”

“You know curiosity can be dangerous, right?” She braces on her elbow, taking some weight off me and brushes her hand across my hip in a healing caress like she knows it’s sore.

I stare her down, and she lets out a sigh.

“Fine, but only because that last orgasm weakened me.”

I smile and wind a strand of her silky hair around a finger, absently playing with it because I can’t stand not to lay claim to some part of her, to be touching, possessing her.

“He was a friend of my dad’s mostly from grad school, I think, but maybe undergrad, too. He was around a lot when I was young and became that dear family friend you hear about. All the way until mom left…” She fades away and lays back on her pillow, putting some separation between us, and I lose the strand of hair as it unwinds from my fingers.

“Tell me about your mother.” I lean in and kiss her temple, then trail kisses around the shell of her ear until she shivers.

“What’s to tell? She got bored with old dad and found herself a young stud. A fucking professional water skier.”

I take her by the shoulders and turn her to face me. “She left your father for a professional water skier?” She nods. “And that’s why you hate hockey players?”

She laughs. “You’re so ridiculous. No. I hate all professional athletes, not just professional water skiers and hockey players. If you’re going to develop an irrational hatred because your mother betrays you, you go big—or at least that’s the way I do things.” Her self-mockery is new, and her expression vulnerable and soft. I push the hair away from her face, caressing it, and want to kiss the hurt from her, so I do.

“She left?”

She nods. “My sophomore year in high school. I had a choice to go with mom to Florida or stay with dad. But that was no choice at all.” I see the pain in her eyes and hear the devastation in her voice, losing her mom. “I begged her to stay,” she admits, her voice a whisper.

“Damn, I’m so sorry, darlin’.” I pull her in for a tight hug, but after a beat and a deep inhale, she shoves me away.

“I’m over it,” she says. It’s a fucking lie.

“Liar. I didn’t think you were the kind of person who would kid herself.”

She snorts a laugh. “Touché. You got me. I cry every night in my pillow.”

“Not when you share a pillow with me.”

She snaps her eyes to mine and stares. Then a slow smile curves her succulent lips, and I get so lost in those glorious blue eyes of hers that I’d walk on fire for her right now. She strokes a hand down my abdomen and then stops short when she reaches the trail of hair leading to my stirring cock.

“Truthfully,” she says. “I lost respect for mom. I could never understand why she would choose a wasted life compared to life with the heroic man dad was.”

Ouch. I have no doubt she’s including me in that wasted life comment.

“Maybe your dad thought his heroic life was more important than she was, and she needed to be someone’s top priority in life.”

She gives me a look, the kind that says how dare you question my judgment because you don’t know anything.

“I say this because I’ve heard it from my mom. She was never dad’s top priority, even when he quit hockey to stay home with our family, to settle down and work a normal job so he could be there for dinner every night. It worked for a while, but not really, if mom’s words are to be trusted. And I trust mom like no one else. She’s as real as they come.