Finally, he crossed his arms and nodded. “Did you already make plans?” he asked quietly.
I heard the unspoken words behind his question:Did you make plans with Brad without telling me?Not an accusation, but there was a hint of hurt in his voice.
I shook my head. I found his legs under the table and tangled them with mine.
“No, Niklas. I haven’t spoken to him at all since we saw him at my parents.”
His jaw unclenched a little. “Okay. Which car do you want?”
I blinked. “Is that it? No argument?”
Niklas’s eyes lit up with amusement. “I thought you said you didn’t like conflict?”
“I don’t, but if you were meeting up with your ex-girlfriend who…” My voice trailed off.
Niklas finished my sentence for me. “…who had just brought me flowers to lure me back to me house and get me naked?”
“The kind of flowers he should know I don’t like,” I muttered.
The corners of his mouth quirked up. “Are you asking if I’m the jealous type? If I’m going to carry you over my shoulder to the bedroom and strip you down and make you scream until you promise not to go?”
“Not exactly. I don’t know what I’m asking.”
“I can do the whole bedroom thing if you’d prefer.”
I shook my head. Niklas’s voice was serious when he spoke again.
“What do you want to know?”
I frowned a little. “I guess I want to know what you think about it.”
Niklas took a long breath, and his smile faded. “I, the last thing I want you to feel like is some sort of kept woman, where you need to ask my permission to meet up with your ex-boyfriend or anyone else.”
“But I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “With something like this, I’m not sure you’d tell me if I do.”
Niklas chuckled. “Maybe you’re right.”
He stroked my hand with his thumb as I waited for him to speak again.
“The truth is I don’t love the fact that you’re meeting up with someone you’ve been intimate with. Someone you lived with for years. Someone who could fit neatly between travel jobs, who’ll just wait for you until you get home. Someone who I’m not.”
Deep furrows creased his brow, and I had the urge to walk around the table and sit on his lap and stroke them until we disappeared.
“So if that’s jealousy, then yes, I’m jealous,” he continued. “But I saw the way he tried to get under my skin the other day, going straight for what he thought would hurt the most. At some point, he’ll probably do the same to you. Which tells me I shouldn’t be anywhere near him.”
Niklas’s words confirmed my suspicion: He knew his own flashpoints and deliberately avoided them off the ice, but that wasn’t the same as making them go away. I wondered the same thing that had probably crossed Niklas’s mind hundreds of times: What would he do when he no longer had hockey as an outlet?
I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer. I stood up and came to him, and he wrapped his arms around me.
“I’m not going to let him get to me,” I said, though even I could hear my own hurt leak through these words.
He pulled me tighter into him.
“He’ll go straight for your defenses, Caroline. With me, he just guessed, but he knows you better.”
“Well, maybe I’ll have to punch him out on your behalf first,” I said.
Niklas chuckled. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”
One of Niklas’s hands rested on the nape of my neck, gently massaging. Though Brad and I had been together for years, never once had Brad held me this intimately. I let my body relax into Niklas’s arms as we comforted each other before facing the rest of the day.
I leaned my head on his shoulder and felt the stubble of his jaw under my fingertips.
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
“I know you will,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean you won’t get hurt, too. And it makes me mad as hell that he’d try to do that to you.”
