She fidgeted before touching her hair, trailing her fingers upward and tucking it behind her ear. A small gold hoop snuggled against her lobe and three more tiny blue gems winked from holes farther up her ears. This woman enticed me—a contradiction of class and feisty Bohemian spirit.
I wanted to get to know all of her. “Can I tell you about that inside? Or would you feel more comfortable talking about it out here?”
Keelie snorted. “In a dark parking lot with a man twice my size?”
“When you put it that way…” I waved her forward. “Let’s go in.”
As much as I wanted to place my hand at the small of her back, to guide her, to touch her to see if her skin was as warm as I imagined it to be, even through the material of her dress, I didn’t. Not with her so wary of me.
Mybad-boy phase, Pete had called it. I grimaced, tugging at my collar. I didn’t want to begin by explaining my failed relationship to Keelie, a woman I wanted to romance.
But she deserved to know.
Hell, part of me wanted to tell her everything—and to make sure she wanted kids. Because if her life goals aligned with mine and if our chemistry remained this hot without touching, I might never let Keelie go.
Though that made part of me want to run fast and far, because those feelings were almost entirely foreign. And after five years of feeling nothing, they were certainly too much, too fast.
Chapter5
Keelie
By the time we were seated at a table toward the back of the restaurant, I’d chewed off my lip gloss. I’d assumed Cormac relished the attention and hero worship that came with his professional-athlete status, but so far, he seemed much more focused on me than on the other diners.
He slid my chair in for me before he rounded the table. I peeked at him again. The fine, dark-gray wool of his suit fit him well. He’d left two buttons of his dress shirt undone, showing off the tanned column of his throat. He undid the single button on his suit coat before settling into his chair.
He smiled at the waiter, who handed us menus, but there was tension around his mouth.
“We’ll need a minute before we order.” He glanced at me. “Is that okay?”
I nodded. Like Cormac, I wanted to get this awful tension over with as quickly as possible. He set his menu down in front of him and rested his forearms on it, clasping his hands together.
“They drafted me right out of high school,” he began. “To the NHL, not the minor leagues. That first year proved a brutal lesson in the differences between junior- and professional-level competition.” He paused, falling into some memory.
“I married Shannon, my high school sweetheart, before we moved from our small town outside of Toronto into the city. She wanted to attend the University of Montreal in pre-law. Eventually she became a lawyer.”
I knew all this…and I wasn’t sure how it made me feel. I didn’t love that he’d been married before, but really, what man in his thirties didn’t have a past? I was twenty-six and had plenty of mistakes under my belt.
At my nod, he continued. “She started working at a law firm, but I wanted her to focus on our marriage—the family we’d postponed so she could finish school and start her career. She…didn’t want those things.”
I reached out and laid my hand over the top of his clenched fists. “I’m sorry.”
“When she told me she never wanted a family, that her career was more important than me, that she wanted a divorce, I felt used. I’d paid for her education, and then she ditched me.”
Wow. I hadn’t readthaton the internet. “Totally understandable.”
“But I still loved her.”
I sat back, removing my hand, feeling as if a boulder sat in my lap, crushing me. “Oh.”
“That’s when the write-ups about my bad temper hit the papers. I drank more—the reporters said I was partying more—but it was too many beers, trying to forget the hell I was living. Anything I did or didn’t do, like missing a visit to the children’s ward at the hospital, made the papers.” He hung his head. “I just couldn’t go. Seeing other people’s kids, knowing my wife didn’t want kids with me…”
Oh, this man. I blinked back tears and held my tongue.
“When I drug my feet signing the divorce papers, she had an affair with another player. That led to the fight on the ice—the one that landed me in the penalty box during an important playoff game. My actions were stupid. I knew better.”
“You were hurting,” I murmured. “And since you came to Houston, the press has had only glowing things to report. I wondered about that—the change.”
Cormac’s expression set, his eyes earnest and filled with shadows. “Getting out of Canada ended up being an excellent move for me.”
