The Marriage Effect, page 13
part #3 of Washington Wolves Series
Molly smiled. “I like having you here, Paige. None of my friends have a supermodel for a big sister.”
I groaned. “Oh, those days are far behind me. Didn’t you see how much pizza I ate for dinner?”
She stood with a laugh. “I guess. Plus, you dipped it in the…” Her voice trailed off, eyes dawning with understanding when she looked at the bottle. “The ranch,” she finished.
“Ohhh, they messed with the wrong woman,” I whispered.
“Are you going to tell Logan?”
With a grin, I shook my head. “Hell no. They just started a war, and they have no idea.”
Molly and I kept our lips sealed as the girls got ready for bed, not a word was spoken about the ranch hair serum. A few times, I caught the twins give me curious looks, but I simply smiled while herding them toward bed.
Once the house was quiet, I changed into soft sleep pants and another tank, bra discarded into the top drawer. When I walked to the guest room, I was knotting my hair on top of my head. The light from the end table cast Logan in a small circle of warm light. The headphones had been removed when the girls went to say good night, but his face was still lit blue from the screen of his iPad.
“Need more ice for your knee?” I asked.
His eyes tracked down the length of my body before he answered. “Sure, thanks.”
I grabbed a pack from the freezer, along with a thin towel to wrap it in, and contemplated pressing it against to my hot cheeks before going back into the bedroom. Why did helping him feel like the most intimate thing we’d done since I kissed him?
Logan was quiet when I entered the room, his iPad dark on the bed next to him. The black T-shirt he wore stretched tight across his chest, and with each deep breath, I saw the outline of muscles underneath the cotton.
Only a sheet covered the lower half of his body, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him when I pulled it back.
“I can do that, you know,” he said gruffly.
“What kind of wife would I be if I didn’t help?” I teased. Carefully, I set the ice pack on top of his knee, eliciting a hiss from his lips. “Sorry.”
“The fake kind,” he answered.
I blinked up at him. Those three words felt harsh, but I could see how aware of it he was, so I didn’t call him on it. The twins got it from somewhere, so did Isabel, that desire to shove people backward and see the amount of force they could use before the person toppled.
Logan had made it perfectly clear, from day one, what this was to him and what it wasn’t. I was the one trying to blur out the lines with the sheer force of my lust-crazed will. Like I could scrub those boundaries into something faded and crossable because I wanted to know what his skin tasted like under my mouth.
“You hate that I’m helping you,” I guessed. “It makes you uncomfortable.”
Even saying it, I was trying to spur him into a reaction. See what it did to him when I pegged him correctly. See if I could draw out some sort of reflex that he was desperately shoving down. Tap on the right spot, and he’d kick out at me. Or if I was lucky, kiss.
Lord knows he could use the distraction as much as I could.
As he watched me, I remembered the line from a song that Allie liked, one that made my skin itch because it felt like someone was shining a harsh spotlight on me. Something about not kicking up the dust around me just because I was lonely.
Except I didn’t feel all that lonely. I felt restless. The chaos of the home during the day kept it strangely at bay, but at night, when it was quiet and he looked at me like that, I felt an edgy coiling under my skin that I wanted to let out.
“I hate when anyone has to help me,” he admitted, shifting on the bed with a wince. “Nothing personal.”
“Liar.”
His eyes snapped to mine.
“You were fine when Maggie was helping you. When Doc was helping you.”
“Trying to make yourself feel more important?”
“Oooh, you’ve got sharp teeth when you’re cranky.” I propped my knee on the edge of the bed near his hip, and he clenched his teeth. His eyes glinted dangerously. “You remind me of myself.”
Logan snorted. “Don’t do this, Paige. Just because I didn’t imagine you being the perfect domestic helper doesn’t mean I’m having an internal panic attack at needing your help.”
His hackles were raised, and if he’d been an animal backed into a corner, I imagined a big tiger, pacing and panting, baring his teeth because he didn’t like what I was doing.
“So it’s not me,” I repeated.
Logan sank his head back against the bed frame and closed his eyes impatiently. “Nope.”
With a quick smile that he couldn’t see, I shifted my weight onto the knee that was already on the bed and swung my other leg over to straddle his lap.
His eyes flung open wide. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Proving a point.” I set my hands on his chest, looking over my back to make sure I was well clear of his knee. Logan moved to remove my hands, but when I made a small swivel of my hips, he hissed again.
It was not a hiss of pain.
And judging by what happened underneath my ass, it was the kind of hiss I wanted to hear from him every single day.
It was torture. Longing. Unwilling desire that had been wrenched from his body. By me.
Logan held my eyes and moved his hands from mine, a slow trek up the length of my arms, over my shoulders and down the curve of my back.
Like a cat, I arched into the surety of his touch, practically purring as he did. I moved my hands to the sides of his head, lowering my mouth to his.
“I think,” I said against his lips, and closed my eyes when his hands closed around on my hips, “that you’re lying to me.”
Still, he admitted nothing. His fingers flexed, hard enough to make me inhale sharply.
“It would be so good, wouldn’t it?” I whispered. The shaky exhale from his lips had me achy and wanting, my breasts sensitive under the thin cotton of my shirt. “Just think about how we could spend this little pocket of time we’ve got together. So many ways to make it fun.”
“Paige,” he said, the edges of his lips brushing mine.
“Yeah?” I rocked my hips forward again, smiling when his fingers tightened to the point of pain.
That was when he lifted me off him, dumping me unceremoniously onto the bed next to him.
His jaw was clenched tight, eyes shut, chest heaving on deep breaths. “You need to go.”
I might have been embarrassed, but under his black athletic shorts, he was as hard as a rock and big enough to have me licking my lips.
Sighing heavily where I sat on the mattress, I gave his lap a loaded look. Logan's eyes opened just as I did. He grimaced, pulling the sheet back up over him, which didn’t help in the slightest.
“Okay, Logan.” I stood and raked shaky hands through my hair. “Text me if you need … anything.”
“Good night, Paige,” he said firmly.
“Could’ve been a better one,” I told him with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s not a smart idea, so it’s not happening.”
Oh, the people in this family had no idea who they were dealing with, I thought with a grin. Right in front of my face, he’d just waved a scarlet flag.
14
Logan
I woke up cranky and edgy. And turned the hell on.
Two nights in a row, I’d dreamed of her while I slept on the too-soft mattress of the guest room.
If I’d closed my eyes after I woke, I probably could have slid back into the dream that I’d been having about Paige. No surprise, the dream version of her rose over me, skin bare, hair tangled in my hands and curling over her shoulders.
While the thoughts I had of her while I was awake were faster, harder, and designed to quiet her smart mouth—except for moaned words and pleas for more—my subconscious lingered over her body.
Probably because ever since she settled her weight onto my lap, all I could think about was how good it had felt and how I wanted more. I wanted to lean forward and see what the skin between her breasts smelled like, tasted like.
The gasp that came out of my mouth when I woke was loud enough that I was afraid someone heard me even though I knew I was the first awake. I always was. Before Paige or the girls got moving that morning, I hobbled to the bathroom and back into bed, popping two ibuprofens to alleviate the ache in my knee.
Robinson had called me old man, and hell, I felt like I was a hundred as I lowered my body back into bed.
And hundred-year-old me had a wife who was driving me slowly into sexual tension-induced madness.
Wouldn’t it be easy? one side of me asked. We were married. The relationship was supposed to be real, for all intents and purposes.
The girls thought it was, that was for sure. If Isabel thought it was fake, she might have actually given Paige a chance because it meant Paige was no emotional risk.
That’s why, a sneaky, snake-like voice hissed in the back of my head.
That’s why you think you can’t touch her, it said as it grew even louder. You know the risk if you allow her in. You can’t love people in halves, and going all in with her would leave you with nothing because she’ll be gone as soon as the time is up.
I dropped my head back, hitting it a couple of times to knock that voice right out. It was stubbornness. That was all. She was so sure that I’d cave that I felt the need to dig my heels in even further.
It had nothing to do with the fact that Paige was the riskiest bet I could’ve taken. Nothing. Even as she straddled me, pouring lurid images in my head of how it would be between us, she managed to remind me that this was temporary.
This was a payday to her, and to me, it was everything that mattered in my life. That fundamental difference in how we were looking at a finite amount of time was enough to keep my hands off her, no matter how she felt sitting astride me. How tempting it would be to unleash all the things building inside me.
I sighed as I scrubbed a hand down my face.
The sounds of the four women I shared a roof with trickled into the room as they woke, started breakfast, and got ready for school.
The day before, my first day post-injury, Paige had been gone most of the time that the girls were at school, texting me throughout the day to make sure I didn’t need anything.
Paige: Going to Allie’s to do some foundation work. Need me to grab anything?
Me: No thanks.
Paige: Done at Allie’s. Have kickboxing at noon. Want me to pick up a late lunch? I’m always starving when I’m done.
Me: Just had a shake. Thanks, though.
I’d locked the damn door when I knew she was getting home because the thought of her sweaty from the class she was taking was almost more than I could handle.
That was probably where the dream from night number two had come from. The one I still couldn’t get out of my head. A soft knock sounded on the door. One of the girls. Because Paige would’ve just walked in, as I’d learned.
“I’m up,” I said.
Molly poked her head in with a broad smile. “Need anything?”
“I’m not completely helpless, you know.”
She rolled her eyes and opened the door wider. “I know. Paige is helping the twins pick clothes. Or trying, at least. If she can get Claire to stay away from another all-purple ensemble, I think she might earn a Pulitzer or something.”
“That’s for writers,” I pointed out.
“Whatever. You get my point.” Molly leaned her back against the doorframe. “She’s cool.”
“Twins leaving her alone?”
“Erm, you know, it’s getting late. I should go. I still need to drop the twins off.”
Her avoidance was obvious, but I could ask Paige easily enough after the girls left for school. Now that Molly had been cleared to drive, she was back to dropping the twins off at their middle school, just down the road from the school that she and Isabel attended.
I glanced at the bedside clock. “You have at least twenty minutes before you need to leave.”
She sighed. “Do you want some coffee or not?”
I swung my legs carefully to the edge of the bed and stood stiffly. I grabbed the crutches and wedged them under my armpits. I hated the damn things, but I was stuck with them for at least one more day until Maggie cleared me to switch over to a hinged brace.
“I’ll come with you. I could do with a change of scenery.”
I was just hobbling into the kitchen when an ear-splitting scream came from the twins’ bedroom. Molly glanced up the stairway, rolling her eyes when I started swinging my crutches in that direction.
“Is everyone okay?” I yelled, cursing the fact that I couldn’t move quickly or easily.
There was quiet, and then I heard the low tones of Paige’s voice. When one of the twins replied to her, every word spoken too far away for me to discern, I cocked my head to the side.
“Fine,” Lia called down. “I just … it was nothing. I thought I saw a spider, but it was lint or something.”
I narrowed my eyes, but nothing else happened, so I turned back to get my coffee.
The girls were uncharacteristically quiet when they came downstairs, followed by a peacefully smiling Paige still clad in the same soft gray pajama pants and tank she’d been wearing the other night.
“Everyone okay?” I asked again as they loaded up backpacks and laptops for school.
“Fine,” Claire said quickly. “You know how Lia is about spiders.”
I accepted hugs and kisses before they all filed out to the garage, Molly shouting at them not to touch anything in her car. Paige was shaking her head when the door finally slammed shut behind them.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Paige sipped her coffee, eyeing me over the rim of the mug. “How’d you sleep?”
Unable to stop myself, I glanced at what she was wearing, those stupid tank tops that hugged her body and hinted not so subtly at all the things I wanted desperately to uncover and the pants that hung off her hips, showing a sliver of her toned stomach.
“Like a baby,” I lied smoothly, pivoting on the base of my crutch so I could fill my own cup.
“Moving back upstairs tonight?” She hitched a hip on the counter and watched me.
“Most likely.”
Her eyes glowed at my answer.
The entire day stretched out in front of me when she looked at me like that. No girls to interrupt us, no reason for me to sleep downstairs anymore now that the constant pain was subsiding.
Forty-eight hours of keeping my knee as immobile as possible, Maggie had said. After that, early movement is better for recovery. Paige heard her say it. There were no more excuses, no reason for me to sleep separately from her. Except now, I wasn’t leaving for work at dawn every morning. Wasn’t practicing all day every day, watching film late into the evenings to prepare for Sunday.
I’d help my team where I could, be on the sidelines once cleared to, and help the coaches and players win. Even if it meant I held a clipboard, called plays, or was the fucking water boy if necessary.
But I had no reason to be there for twelve hours like I normally would during the season. No hiding from the redhead currently staring at me like she wanted to eat me for breakfast. I turned away from her because if I closed my eyes, I’d think about how easy it would be to slip my hands under her ass, boost her up onto the counter, and do some feasting of my own.
My phone rang from the guest bedroom, and I went to answer it as her low, amused laughter followed me like the hounds of hell licked fire at my heels.
Surviving the day had been easy enough. I spoke to Allie. Spoke to Coach and Doc Hendricks and had a plan laid out with Maggie for my recovery. The aim was for me to return to the field six weeks later. Eight, if the tear healed slower than anticipated.
I’d only miss half a season.
And in those eight weeks, I’d make damn sure well that the entire defense played their asses off, even if I had to shove a bullhorn in their faces during practice.
Paige came and went. While I sat on the back patio talking to Maggie figuring out my game plan for when I was able to come to the facilities the next day, Paige walked into the kitchen with bags of groceries, unloading them like she’d been living in my home for months and not a mere matter of weeks. When she pulled a massive squeeze bottle of mayo out, I narrowed my eyes because it wasn’t something I usually kept in the house.
She left again shortly after that, waving at me through the slider while I watched film. Beneath a see-through black shirt, I caught a glimpse of an electric blue sports bra. High-waisted black leggings with a sheer panel running down the sides of her legs covered her bottom half. Her hair was pulled back tight from her makeup-free face.
I pinched the bridge of my nose when she walked away because a host of images bombarded me in the wake of her exit.
The girls came home from school while she was at her class, and listening to their happy chatter, something I usually only got to witness in the winter and spring, was the only positive side effect of my injury. If my impromptu marriage hadn’t forced Nick off my back, then me being home due to my knee wouldn’t have hurt.
I was sitting at the island with Isabel, working on her math homework, when Paige got home.
“Hey,” she said. Her face was flushed and damp, the front of her sports bra soaked through, sheer shirt nowhere to be found.
My mouth went dry as she wet some paper towel to wipe her forehead.
“You’re all sweaty,” Isabel said with disdain.
I almost chastised her, but Paige laughed. “Hell yeah, I am. If you got your ass kicked like I did for the past hour, you’d be sweaty too.”
Isabel set her jaw, and even though I saw the carefully hidden spark of interest in her eyes, she didn’t comment.
“When did you start doing that?” I asked when she pulled matte black boxing gloves out of her gym bag. I motioned for them, and she passed them over. My eyebrows popped briefly at the beat-up state of the gloves.
