Catch of the Day Page 9

  She nipped him back, then smiled. “So I guess if I’m naked, you’re picking up the takeout, right?”

  They’d ordered some Thai from the place down on Colfax—the best Thai restaurant in Denver—but had gotten distracted before either one of them had gone to pick it up. Clothes lay scattered in the hallway beside shoes, briefcases and cell phones.

  With a frustrated groan, he withdrew from her, lowered her to her feet. “I guess so. But you have to stay naked—no bathrobe, no towel, nothing but your gorgeous hair and a smile. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  She watched him gather up his clothes and dress, enjoying the sight of him naked, his back to her—his broad shoulders, the bulge of his triceps, the powerful V of his back as it tapered to his waist, the tight mounds of his bare ass, the hint of testicles any time he bent over.

  There were definite advantages to being the fiancée of a former football star.

  When he turned to face her, his trousers were already up to his hips, so she caught only a glimpse of his wonderful cock. But his chest, with its dark curls and flat brown nipples, was still bare. She let her gaze follow the groove between his pecs down past the ridges of his belly to where it disappeared in a trail of curls beneath the waistband of his pants—and nearly moaned when the white fabric of his shirt ruined her view.

  He grinned, revealing his dimples. “Hold that thought. And stay naked.”

  Then he grabbed his wallet and keys and was gone.

  Lissy quickly picked up her clothes and sorted them into piles headed for the dry cleaner’s or her own washing machine. Then she went into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub and began to rinse between her thighs.

  How had she gotten so lucky? And it had to be luck—or divine intervention.

  She hadn’t liked Will when she’d first met him years ago. They’d been introduced when he first joined the staff of the paper as its new celebrity sports columnist and she was assistant features editor. Instantly repulsed by his hotter-than-hot looks and the knowledge he’d once been a college football hero of some kind, she’d turned up her nose at him, regarding him as a brainless jock with little going for him beyond a perfect body, thick dark hair, gorgeous blue eyes and a devastatingly handsome face.

  How wrong she’d been.

  She stood, patted between her legs with a fluffy towel, then took up her comb and began to work the tangles from her hair.

  It hadn’t been until that Saturday morning she’d gone jogging in City Park and stepped into a sprinkler hole that she’d gotten to know him. She’d wrenched her ankle badly and was sitting on the ground, in pain, calling herself names for not bringing her cell phone, when he’d emerged from a group of little boys who were playing football on the other side of the park.

  Dressed in faded jeans that accentuated the perfection of his ass and a black T-shirt that seemed stretched across the muscles of his chest, he’d knelt down, carefully removed her running shoe, and - gently peeled her sock away to reveal an ankle that was purple and swelling.

  “You don’t need a ride home,” he’d said. “You need a ride to the hospital. If you can wait a few minutes, we’re almost done for the day. Otherwise, I can call a cab.”

  Thank God she hadn’t asked him to call a cab.

  He’d carried her to his beat-up Chevy pickup—weren’t football stars supposed to drive flashy sports cars?—and driven her to the ER. Then he’d waited with her while the doctor examined her ankle, took X-rays and pronounced it broken.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened. Not much you can do to come back from an injury like that,” the doctor had said to Will, seemingly out of the blue. “Can I have your autograph? What did you think of the TV movie version? Made my wife cry. It must have been weird to watch your own life on the screen.”

  “I didn’t watch it,” Will had answered, graciously signing his name in black felt marker on the doctor’s blue scrubs.

  TV movie version?

  Lissy had gone online that night, done a little research and discovered there was much more to Will Fraser than she could possibly have imagined. According to archived newspaper articles, he’d been raised by a single mother who’d worked as a waitress in Aspen, where he’d grown up in poverty amid wealth. He’d excelled both in academics and in sports in high school and had gotten a full scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he’d been their starting wide receiver—which, Lissy’d later learned, had to do with catching the ball.

  He’d been on his way to a lucrative professional career, when his knee had been shattered in the second-to-last game of his college career. He’d been in the second of four surgeries when CU had won the Orange Bowl that year. His football career abruptly over, he’d graduated magna cum laude with a degree in history, only to learn that his mother was dying of lung cancer. Though he’d spent - every dime he’d earned by selling the rights to his story on the latest medical treatments for her, he buried her less than a year after he’d buried his dreams of playing professional football.

  For several years, he’d worked for CU as a receivers coach. Then he’d joined the staff of the Denver Independent, covering football, commentating for the local ABC affiliate and coaching inner-city kids in his free time.

  And Lissy had thought him a mindless jock.

  On her first day back at work, she’d hobbled over to his desk on her crutches to thank him for his help and had asked him if she - could repay him with dinner at his favorite restaurant. He’d accepted, and the two of them had ended up on her floor rutting like wild animals until dawn, as he’d helped her find creative ways of keeping her ankle elevated.

  A month later they’d given up on pretense and moved in together.

  Eight months after that, he’d proposed, getting down on his bad knee and offering her the most beautiful engagement ring she’d ever seen—a two-carat antique oval diamond set in filigreed white gold. She’d barely been able to speak, but somehow she’d said yes.

  She set her comb aside and glanced in the mirror, smoothing her hands over her auburn hair and down her naked body, mostly content with what she saw and even more pleased by the way she felt—warm, languid, sexy.

  She reached for her bottle of Chanel, then stopped.

  He’d said naked—nothing but her hair and a smile.

  She walked around the condo, lighting candles, her pulse quickening in anticipation of the pleasure to come. Sex with Will was . . . indescribable. No man had ever made her feel the way he made her feel—as if life began and ended in his arms.

  She loved him more than she’d ever thought she could love anyone.

  She had just turned down the covers on their bed, when the phone rang. Knowing Will would be back in a few minutes, she was tempted to let it ring through to voice mail. Then she saw the number on caller ID.

  Lead in her stomach, she picked up the receiver. “Hello, Mother.”

  Will stepped around the orange cones that blocked the sidewalk in front of their condo complex. Lord knew how much longer this construction project—which seemed to eat more of the street and sidewalk every day—would take the city to complete. He couldn’t wait until they moved out of this place and into the old Victorian they’d bought a few blocks away on Capitol Hill. He’d finished fixing it up last week, and they’d started moving their belongings one pickup truck-load at a time. When they got back from their honeymoon in France, they’d rent a U-Haul, and Will and his friends would make short work of the rest of it—furniture, clothes, dishes, the new plasma TV.

  He took the front steps to their condo two at a time, oblivious to the pain in his knee, the spicy-sweet scent of chicken pad thai wafting from the plastic bag in his hand. He was ravenous—in more ways than one. The thought of Lissy waiting for him, warm and willing and naked, was making him intensely horny.

  He slipped the key into the door, pushed it open and saw a handful of candles lit on the coffee table. He smiled. “Honey, I’m home.”

  Saying it amused him, p
leased him. Perhaps it was the suburban normalcy of it. Or perhaps it was the fact that at age thirty-two he’d almost given up on the idea of having a honey to come home to. Not that there hadn’t been lots of women in his life, but most of them had been more interested in fucking his name than in having a relationship with him. Once they’d discovered he wasn’t rich and realized how mundane the life of a sports journalist was, they’d moved on to the next bit of beef in a jockstrap.

  But not his Lissy. The very things that attracted other women to him had left her cold—perhaps because she knew how little money could buy.

  That and she’d had a pathological loathing for sports.

  He found her in the dining room, setting china plates, silverware and water glasses on the table they’d so recently sanctified, her long coppery hair swaying as she moved, her luscious round ass bare. She looked over her shoulder at him, her lips curving in a smile that made his blood run hot.

  Then he saw the look in her green eyes.

  He set the plastic bag on the sideboard. “What’s wrong?”

  She turned toward him, hair spilling over one soft shoulder, and walked into his arms. “Nothing really. My mother called.”

  He ought to have known. He pulled her closer, felt the tension in her body, reined in his own temper. “What was it this time? ‘He’s marrying you for the money,’ or ‘He’s marrying you for sex’?”

  “Both. Maybe we should just elope so she’ll give up.”

  “Since I’m after your money and your body, I’ll do whatever you want to do.”

  She laughed. “What I want to do is eat! I’m starving.”

  It wasn’t until hours later, when the pad thai was long gone and other appetites had been temporarily satisfied, that Will got an idea as to what her mother must have said to upset her.

  She sat before him in the tub, her back against his chest, her head resting limply against his shoulder, her damp hair clinging to his skin, while he lazily fondled a lush breast.

  “Do you think it’s possible for a couple to have too good a sex life?”

  He managed not to laugh out loud. “Hell, no. Are you kidding?”

  “What I mean is could a couple get together and end up getting married just because they had a great sex life? Could they mistake hot sex for love?”

  She wasn’t kidding.

  There were times Will wished he could rip the phone line out so Lissy’s mother could never call again. The woman had all the misery her late husband’s money could buy, and she seemed to be doing her best to make sure her only child was miserable, too. Thank God she hated snow and lived in San Diego!

  A wealthy attorney and his useless trophy wife, John and Christa Charteris had led a cold life, not a shred of affection between the two of them, as far as Will could tell from the stories he’d heard. John had wanted Christa for sex and looks, and Christa had hooked onto him for money and prestige. Their marriage had generated very little love in which to nurture a child.

  Lissy’s relationship with her father, never warm, had soured after she’d left the pre-law program at Cornell to double major in art and English. Her father had cut her off, both financially and emotionally. Though he’d eventually resumed paying her tuition, he’d died of a heart attack without making amends. Her relationship with her mother, a calculating woman who clearly did not approve of her daughter’s independent streak or her choice of man, wasn’t much better.

  Lissy Charteris. Poor little rich girl.

  Growing up, Will wouldn’t have thought it possible to be wealthy and unhappy. He’d watched his mother literally work herself to death to feed him and keep the overpriced roof over their heads and had thought having money must be the solution to everything. He’d planned to earn millions through football, only to have that ripped away from him. It was his mother’s illness and death that made him see money for what it was—a convenience, but no substitute for health or life or love. Eventually he’d come to disdain those who’d had the way paved for them, preferring to spend time with people who’d earned their way through life.

  Lissy was both. Born to privilege, she’d turned her back on it in order to live the life she wanted. It was just one of the things Will cherished about her.

  Feeling the frustration he always felt when he thought of how her mother treated her, he said the first thing that came to mind. “Hot sex is a better reason than most to get married. Look at all the people who marry for money or power or property.”

  Like your parents.

  He felt her stiffen, knew he’d somehow said the wrong thing, so he hastily added, “Of course, when it comes time for me to walk down the aisle, it will be for the right reason, the only reason that matters—my bride’s cooking.”

  Her snort, followed by giggles, told him he’d been reprieved.

  Lissy lay with her head against Will’s sweat-slick chest, running her fingers absentmindedly through his chest hair, her body limp and glowing from their most recent round of crazed sex. She loved these nights when she had him to herself.

  An unpleasant flutter in her stomach drew her mind back to what she’d spent all evening trying to forget—her mother’s call. She was still trying to get Lissy to postpone the wedding until Will signed a prenup, dangling cash in her face as if she could be bought. Hadn’t she proved long ago that she didn’t give a damn about her parents’ money?

  But it wasn’t the usual discussion about divorce and assets that had bothered her; it was her mother’s comment about sex and love. She had quoted some study showing that couples who’d lived together before getting married had a higher divorce rate than those who waited to have sex until after marriage.

  Lissy had argued that the study, like most, was skewed from the beginning, as people who waited until after marriage to have sex tended to be people who also opposed divorce. Statistics never told the whole story. Any good journalist knew that.

  You wouldn’t be the first woman to confuse a man’s sexual attention with love, Melisande. Just wait till he gets his fill of you and the hormones wear off. Men like him marry for two things: sex and money.

  Not her Will. No way.

  “Do you realize that a hundred or even fifty years ago, we’d both be virgins?” She didn’t know she’d spoken until she heard her own voice.

  His fingers stroked the hollow above her hip. “Good thing it’s not a hundred or even fifty years ago. My balls would have burst by now.”

  “But don’t you think things were more romantic then? Sex would have been a great mystery for us.”

  “I doubt it would have been that much of a mystery. We’d probably both have grown up in the country and seen our share of farm-animal lovin’.”

  “The point I’m trying to make is that neither of us would have any personal experience with sex until our wedding night.”

  “That’s assuming that I hadn’t already charmed my way into your bloomers or found some ‘loose woman’ willing to let me defile her.” His voice dropped to a dark, velvet purr. “I can be very persuasive.”

  Lissy sat up, trying not to laugh, and glared at him. “You’re ruining my fantasy.”

  He grinned, stretched and folded his muscular arms behind his head. “Oh. Sorry. Go on. I’m listening.”

  “After the reception, we’d go to the bridal chamber, where everything would be roses and candles. There’d be a fire in the hearth—”

  “—if it were winter.”

  She ignored him. “You’d undress me first and then yourself. I’d probably never have seen a naked man before, so I’d be shy and afraid—”

  “Oh, Will, it’s soooo big! Please, don’t hurt me!”

  “—but you would soothe me and assure me that everything was going to be fine. Then you’d undress yourself, carry me to the bed and make passionate love to me.”

  He reached out, ran his fingers down her hair. “Are you sure that’s how it would go? I think you’ve read too many novels. If it were a hundred years ago and we were both virgins, I think it wou
ld go more like this.”

  “Do tell.”

  “We’d have been raised to see nudity as shameful, so the room would be dark, and you would have changed from your wedding gown to a proper white nightgown and gotten into bed before I entered the room. I’d come in, wearing my nightshirt, and crawl into bed with you. You’d be worried that it was going to hurt, and I’d be worried that my dick might not work. I’d lift your gown up to your hips, spread your legs, and it would be over in a minute. You’d hate it, and you’d get pregnant—with the first of my twelve children.”

  She fought back a giggle. “Thank you for that enchanting vision of romance.”

  “You’re welcome.” His knuckles grazed a nipple, sent heat skittering into her belly.

  She batted his hand away. “You’re just afraid you can’t do it.”

  He frowned. “Do what?”

  “Wait.”

  He raised a dark eyebrow, raked her with his gaze. “It’s a bit too late for that, isn’t it?”

  And then it came to her. “Not if we start over.”

  “Start over?”

  “You know—wait until our wedding night to have sex again.”

  The look on his handsome face almost made her laugh out loud, but there was something about this that felt important to her.

  Then he sat up and brushed a strand of hair from her cheek, the humor gone from his eyes. “This is about something your mother said, isn’t it?”

  She hated that he was able to see through her so clearly. “I just think it would add to the romance if we held back a little bit, made ourselves wait. It’s only two weeks. Unless you don’t think you can hack it.”

  Will was tempted to end this conversation by pulling her beneath him and showing her just what she’d be giving up, but something told him saying the wrong thing just now would be a bad idea. Besides, he wasn’t one to turn down a challenge.

  “If you want to wait until after the wedding to have sex again, that’s fine.”

  The surprise on her face mirrored the astonishment he felt.