“Good, good.” She replied, turning to me. “And the police department?”
“Ready.” I replied cooly, forcing myself to finally break eye contact with Goldie. “We’re set with eight.”
“Eight?” Rhea snorted, “So you don’t plan to do many line changes then, huh?”
I leaned back in my chair and turned toward her, bracing my elbow on the table, and her gaze intensified under the power move. “We don’t need water breaks. We’re strong, capable men, who can get the job done.”
Her lips parted into a smirk as she cocked her head to the side. We weren’t talking about hockey anymore, and she knew it. “Strong, capable men.” She mused, glancing over at Goldie. “Who don’t call in backup, got it. I’ll remember that.”
Across the table, Goldie shifted in her seat again, fingers worrying the edge of her notes. Her cheeks had gone a deep, distracting shade of pink. Every time she glanced up, her gaze snagged between us—the back-and-forth, the teasing, the current that kept winding tighter around the table.
“And the menu is done,” Goldie bit out in a rush, breaking the silent tension building as the chairwoman scratched notes in her pad. “I’ve got the starters, snacks, and main courses all lined up, and of course, the desserts. And I’ll have a fully operational kitchen by then, no problem.”
“Good, great. That’s all spectacular. This charity tournament is set to be our biggest one ever, the children’s home is going to get all new computer equipment from this event, so it cannot go wrong.” She said pointedly, looking around the table until we all withered a little bit. “But I trust you to pull it off. I’ll leave the three of you to finalize the raffle list. And we’ll meet again in two weeks.”
She rose, gathering her stuff and filling her bag before scampering out of the room on her way to put out some fire somewhere more important. When the door shut behind her, the silence that followed felt alive.
Rhea leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, a grin sharp enough to cut glass.
“Well, that was productive,” she said. “Except for the part where someone stopped paying attention halfway through.”
I kept my tone even, “Maybe I was distracted by all the innuendos you kept throwing out from your side of the table.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that so?”
Goldie made a small sound, half laugh, half gasp, and dropped her pen. It rolled, stopping between us like a line in the sand.
Rhea’s gaze flicked from my face to where my hands were clasped on the table. Her dark eyebrow arched. “Are you sure you’re not just feeding into some schoolboy fantasy in your head? That might explain why you were rock hard at a charity event meeting.”
She was trying to embarrass me, and judging by Goldie’s startled gasp from across the table; she hit her mark.
The problem was, I was so damn tired and horny that I didn’t take the bait. Instead, I countered her, playing offense instead of catch up like I usually did with her. “Yep, sure was. Can’t help it when Goldie comes into the room looking that good and your cocky smirk was just salivating at the chance of teasing me with snippets of your day like you had her all twisted up on her prep table while you were alone.”
“Tanner!” Goldie hissed in shock, and I glanced over at her.
She wasn’t angry. Maybe a little scandalized that I just admitted something so intimate to Rhea and her. But more than that, she was turned on.
“I don’t regret it though,” I said, standing up and grabbing the packets of info the chairwoman had left us with. “Because I’m hard, and Goldie’s wet.” Turning back to the spitfire that started it all, I stared down at her. “What’s that make you?”
I didn’t wait for an answer, but I did catch the way her eyes fell to my zipper once more, and my cock twitched in ways it shouldn’t have when the woman I lusted over more than anything sat across the table. I was just too tired to control it.
“On that note,” I stepped back from the table, throwing away my to-go dish of food and wrapping the silverware back up to take home with me to wash. “I’m going to go relieve some pent-up sexual tension before I go spend the evening at the bakery. I’ll see you there, Goldie.”
“O—okay.” She stammered, and she swallowed again, but the same hint of excitement burned in her pretty blue eyes.
Giving Rhea one last passing glance, I smirked at her, fighting fire with fire, “Have fun working the next twenty-four.”
And with that I left the community center, intent on going home, and jacking off as many times as it took to get the images of Rhea spreading Goldie out like a thanksgiving feast out of my mind so I could focus on the work we had to do tonight.
It was going to take a long time though, because the longer I felt the tension building within this weird little triangle thing we had going, fighting for Goldie’s attention, the more it felt like maybe I wasn’t competing against Rhea at all.
Maybe I was just competing for the right to let Goldie have both of us.
Nighttime at Honey& Hearth felt different. The bakery was quiet, something it rarely ever was. The lights were low, there was peace inside the shell of warmth it used to be.
Would be again.
Still, the quiet pressed against my skin, soft and knowing, like my home was promising to wake back up with life and love again someday. Someday soon.
