Power Play

“Nope.”

“What is it, then?”

“Gone with the Wind.”

Derek was incensed. “You can’t say Gone with the Wind. Every chick says her favorite movie is Gone with the Wind. It’s like not having an opinion at all.”

“Except that it really is my favorite movie. Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable? When he carries her up the stairs?” She sighed gustily, all the women at the table nodding in agreement. “Are you kidding me? You don’t see movies like that anymore.”

“Know what my favorite movie is?” Buddy asked loudly, not seeming to realize the question-and-answer game was restricted to the bridal couple.

“What?”

“21.”

Derek said, “Isn’t that the one about those MIT kids who clean up in Vegas?”

“Yep. It’s based on a true story. These kids invented a system to win at the casinos using math. Brilliant.”

“So, you’re a gambler?” Leanne asked.

He shrugged. “I think above-average intelligence allows certain people to achieve above-average returns. I don’t call that gambling.” He slurred a little over his words.

“How about you, Emily?” Derek wanted to know. “What’s your favorite movie?” She couldn’t help wondering if Derek was trying to pull her and Buddy into some kind of compatibility game. If so, she’d happily prove that she and the money-obsessed dentist couldn’t be more different.

“My favorite movie is Wall Street. It’s about how greed destroys people.” She smiled demurely and sipped her water.

Leanne pulled her aside, ostensibly to discuss bridal matters. “Wall Street? What is the matter with you? Sense and Sensibility is your favorite movie.”

“Buddy’s getting on my last nerve. All he’s interested in is money. Who cares about his Mercedes Coupe? There’s more to life.”

Leanne sighed. “He’s trying to impress you. I bet he’s a really nice guy once you get to know him.”

“But not my type.”

“I only want to see you as happy as I am with Derek.” She gave Emily a quick hug. “We all do.”

“I know. And please don’t remind me I’m not getting any younger because your mom and mine already tag-teamed me on that one. Thirty-one is not exactly ancient. I’m picky, that’s all.”

“I know.”

Unfortunately, Buddy hadn’t listened when she’d tried to tell him that Uncle Bill’s homemade wine was about four hundred percent pure alcohol. Leanne had made her feel a little bad so she went and got him a coffee to go with his tiramisu. He ignored both and downed more of the red hooch, moving his chair closer to hers and slurring in her ear. Buddy was becoming an annoying drunk. The sooner he passed out the happier she’d be.

But he didn’t pass out. He got…amorous.

He moved his chair even closer so their knees butted against each other. She moved hers farther away so Kirsten could be forgiven for thinking she was making a pass.

He put an arm around her, big and overwarm. She was sure she could feel his sweat through the wool of his jacket.

She shifted so the arm fell off her and next thing his hand was on her thigh, making her thankful her temporary wardrobe was all wash and wear.

Finally, obviously realizing he was being too subtle, he said to her, “Let’s you and me get out of here.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on, I want to show you something.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see it.”

He giggled. “You’re cute. Mature, I like that in a woman.”

She glanced around with “help me” blazing from her eyes. No one seemed to notice or thought about rescuing her. No one. Leanne was too busy being in love with Derek, Kirsten was on her cell phone, presumably tracking down the whereabouts of her loser boyfriend, and everybody else was busy with their own affairs. Everyone except for her mother and father, who were watching Buddy hit on her with hope shining in their faces.

“I really have to go now,” she said at last to Buddy. “I’ve got a headache.” Maybe it was rude to leave so early, but she had had enough. Perhaps because she was inherently polite, or maybe because her parents were watching, she added, “It was nice meeting y—”

Her words were cut off by his mouth. His big, sloppy, wet, bad-red-wine-tasting mouth. He kissed her as though she were an air mattress he was trying to blow up in a hurry. He fastened his mouth on to hers, creating an air lock. When she grabbed his shoulders and yanked her face away she was sure she heard a pop.

Outraged, she looked around for her protective family to come and deal with this drunken moron. She caught her parents exchanging a high five, and her aunt smiling broadly, already taking credit for the match.

She jumped to her feet and headed for the exit, too fast for anyone to catch up with her. On the way she pulled a tissue from her bag and wiped her mouth. Yuck.

4

“HI, HONEY. YOU’RE HOME EARLY,” a gravelly voice said when she threw open the door to 318 a short time later. “Did you have a good time?”

“Don’t even get me started.”

Jonah glanced up from the hockey game he was watching on television. “Wow, you look mad. What happened?”

“Cousin Buddy happened. He got drunk and hit on me and—” Unable to adequately describe how gross the entire escapade had been, she said, “Eeew.”

“Got it. Want a beer?”

“Desperately.”

He popped the top of one and handed her a cold can.

“Thanks.” She took a grateful swig, hoping it would erase Buddy’s taste. “Why are you here? I thought you were boozing with the boys tonight.”

He pointed to his leg and she now saw the ice pack wrapped around his thigh.

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. I pulled something. Hurts like a bitch.”

“How long have you had the ice pack on?”

“I don’t know.” He squinted at the clock. “Forty minutes or so?”

“Take it off. Give it a rest.”

“Can you do anything for me? In a professional capacity?”

“Depends. If you’ve torn the muscle, then no. If it’s in spasm, then yes. You want me to have a look?”

He nodded.

The room phone rang. Jonah leaned over and answered it. “Yeah?” A pause. Then he glanced up at her, looking sheepish. “No, you got the right room. She’s right here.”

He passed her the phone.

“Hello?”

“Who was that?” Leanne asked her.

Damn. “Why didn’t you call my cell? You always call my cell.”

“I had to lend Derek my phone since his died. I’m at my mom’s and I couldn’t remember your cell number so I called the hotel.” Her voice grew low and intimate. “I guess you’re busted. Was that Buddy? Did I interrupt something?”

“No! It’s not Buddy. He is a disgusting drunk, only interested in his fabulous cars and amazing stock picks. Did I tell you what he told me about his portfolio?” She thought if she babbled on enough about Buddy she could get Leanne to forget about the man who had answered the phone in her hotel room.

Her plan didn’t work.

“If that’s not Buddy in your room, then who is it?”

“It’s…well, it’s kind of complicated,” she started, trying to think of something fast, words that would explain a strange man answering her phone, while at the same time not including the word bedbugs or making her seem like a skank. Seconds passed.

“I’m listening.”

“His name is Jonah.”

“Nice name. And?”

“And, he’s…” Jonah was looking half guilty, half amused as she stumbled her way through half phrases. “He’s—” What? Why was it that whenever she needed to think fast on her feet her brain froze over. Only one idea came to her and once it had lodged in her brain nothing better came along. “He’s…my boyfriend,” she ended in a rush.

She didn’t know who was more surprised when the words came out of her mouth, her or Jonah.

Or Leanne.

“Your boyfriend?”

“Yes.” She turned her body slightly so she was no longer looking at her brand-new boyfriend. “His name is Jonah.”

“You already told me his name. What I want to know is if you have a boyfriend in town why you never said anything. How come he wasn’t at dinner tonight?”

“It’s sort of complicated.” She tapped her nails on the beer can wondering how she could possibly have come up with such a ridiculous story. “He’s in town for the hockey tournament, so he couldn’t come tonight.”

“And you never told me about him because…?”

She felt her cheeks beginning to heat. She really wished her unwanted roomie would go somewhere else for five minutes and give her some privacy, but he’d even muted the TV so he could eavesdrop better. He seemed as fascinated by her halting explanation about him being her boyfriend as Leanne was.

“I guess I didn’t want to share him.” Now that she’d settled on an explanation, it was easier to embellish. She could absolutely see herself hiding a boyfriend from her family—if she actually had a boyfriend. “You know what the family’s like. Dad would be asking him his intentions and Mom would be pricing wedding invitations and Aunt Alice would probably grill him on his sperm count.” A choke sounded behind her. “That’s why I keep my private life private.”

“Wow. You could have told me, though.” Leanne sounded a little hurt. “How long have you two been going out?”

“Not long.” In fact, she could count her relationship in minutes.

“You left so early tonight, I was worried about you. Now I know why.”

“Yeah. You know how it is at the beginning of a relationship.”

In her peripheral vision she noticed Jonah settle back against his stacked pillows, obviously enjoying her predicament hugely. A certain speculation in his eyes.

Leanne sighed, the sigh of a true romantic. “You mean when you think about them all the time and can’t wait to be together? When you think about sex all the time?”

“Uh-huh,” she agreed weakly. “All the time.”

“How is the sex?”

The whole situation was so ridiculous, with Leanne rhapsodizing about her made-up love life and Jonah doing his best to listen to every word, that she found herself giggling. She turned to Jonah and said aloud, “My cousin wants to know how the sex is?”

His grin was instant and wolfish. The way he looked at her made her suddenly realize it was not smart to tease a wolf. “Tell her it’s fantastic.”

She rolled her eyes. Leanne was cracking up on the other end of the phone. “I definitely want to meet this guy, when you’re not too busy having fantastic sex.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“I’ll meet him at the wedding, anyway, right?”

“Um, it depends on his hockey schedule.”

“No way. He has to come. Tell him.”

“Okay.”

“Now. Or put me on the phone and I’ll tell him.”

She held the phone away from her ear once again, and wished she was home in Portland in her pajamas watching a chick flick on DVD. Anything but this.

Since it was his fault for answering in the first place, she held out the phone to him and smiled sweetly. “Leanne wants to make sure you’re coming to the wedding.”

JONAH ALMOST FORGOT THE PAIN in his thigh watching his roomie trying to explain why a man was answering her room phone. He’d never seen a more incompetent liar. And hadn’t she dropped herself right in it?

“You can stop smirking,” she snapped when she got off the phone. “This is your fault.”

He leaned back against his pillows, his gaze never leaving her face. Cute face, kind of flushed right now, and her lips seemed a little plumper. Maybe they were like Pinocchio’s nose. When she told a lie they plumped up. Or maybe it was talking about sex that did it.

“So, I’m your boyfriend, huh?”

“I’m sorry. It was all I could think of.”

“It’s not so bad,” he said, thinking. “Should keep Buddy the orthodontist out of your mouth.”

She groaned. “That is a horrible pun. And you don’t know my family. They’ll want to meet you.”

He heard the panic in her tone. “Am I so terrible?”

“No. Of course not.” She looked at him dispassionately. “If you shaved and wore decent clothes, you’d be perfectly presentable. But they have this charming quality where if you get to thirty and are still single they panic and try to marry you off. To anybody.”

“Right. But look at the good side. I can be your beard. You don’t want to get married, I don’t want to get married. We’re not really a couple, so nobody’s going to get pressured into anything.”

“You don’t seem very upset about being stuck with an instant girlfriend.” She was nibbling on that pouty lower lip now, a job, he realized, he’d gladly take over. You got to know a person pretty fast when you shared a confined space with them, and he was starting to like this person in the next bed. Even though it was his fault for answering the hotel phone, she seemed to feel guilty for lying about their relationship.

“I can see certain benefits,” he said, settling back.

Her eyes instantly narrowed and she released her lip from between her teeth.

“Not those benefits,” he told her. “I was thinking that if I agree to show up to the wedding, you might take pity on me and give me a massage—” he looked at her “—or two.”

And, because she still seemed a little skittish, he added, “Emily, I’m going to make you a promise. I won’t make a pass at you.”

She didn’t exactly look relieved. It was a big deal for him to promise to keep his hands off a desirable woman who happened to be sharing his hotel room. Instead of looking grateful she seemed—pissed off. He couldn’t imagine she felt insulted. She was gorgeous. Men must make fools of themselves all the time over her. But since he was the first person to admit he didn’t have a clue about women, he continued.

“You’re beautiful. And under normal circumstances, I’d be doing my level best to get you into my hotel room. But since you’re here against your will, I give you my word I won’t try anything.”

She picked up a brand-new set of sweats and disappeared into the bathroom. When she returned, she was wearing the gray fleece, and she’d also gathered a couple of towels and a bottle of some kind of oil.

He was doing his best to concentrate on CNN and not the fact that sometimes his principles really got in the way of his sex life, when she came toward him. She said, “So, you’re saying there’s no way you and I would ever have sex.”

“No.” She was so sexy he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. A woman walking toward him with a bottle of massage oil and he’d announced he wasn’t going to touch her? He must be a mental case. “I said I wouldn’t hit on you.”

She settled beside him on the bed, shifting his leg so she could spread the towel underneath him. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Not at all.” When she was this close he could smell her skin and see that her eyes weren’t completely brown as he’d thought. There were flecks of gold and tiny slivers of green in them, as well. As she settled her hands above his knee and began to gently probe the muscle, he said, “I’m giving you an open invitation to hit on me.”

Her fingers stalled and her eyes widened.

He grinned up at her. “Anytime.”

5

DAY THREE OF LEANNE AND DEREK’S Wedding Week Extravaganza was almost done, Emily thought with relief as she sat quietly at the desk in her hotel room, blessedly alone, writing out place cards for the wedding.

Today she’d had lunch with her mom. She loved her mom, but the “nice, long lunch, just the two of us,” had been somewhat marred by her mother’s enthusiastic comments about Cousin Buddy and her wistful excitement about Leanne’s wedding.

Emily successfully navigated the conversation around dangerous spots, like how lucky Leanne and Derek were to have found each other when they were both so young, interspersed with hints about how it got more and more difficult to find a mate as you got older and more set in your ways.

Naturally, this led to the story of crazy Aunt Hilda who never married and ended up living on a rotting houseboat with nothing but seven cats for company. “All she ever bought was cat food. I’m not saying Hilda was eating it, but you have to wonder.” She shook her head. Did she really think Emily had never heard this story before? “At least she didn’t have to worry about mice.”

They made it all the way to coffee, when her carefully steered conversation hit a Titanic iceberg. Her mother’s eyes filled and she said, “You know I love Leanne and I’m truly happy for her, and for Irene. But if my sister gets to be a grandmother first, I’ll just die.”

She’d spent the rest of the day feeling guilty somehow and that she had to make it up to her mom, which meant she’d ended up volunteering to do the place cards. Maybe her mom couldn’t boast of a happily married, eagerly breeding daughter, but she could damn well be proud of having such a helpful one.

Her silence was rudely interrupted by the door opening followed by a series of crashes.

“What are you doing?” The unholy racket caused her to turn her head and see Jonah stumble in with a whole lot of hockey equipment hanging off him.

“Sorry, I was trying to be quiet.” He banged the door behind him and some sort of pad tumbled to the floor. When he bent to reach it, two hockey sticks banged on the wall.

“It’s like Marley’s ghost entering the room.”

“Looks like rain. I didn’t want to leave anything in the truck to get damp.”

“Great. This hotel room isn’t nearly crowded enough. What it needed was more hockey equipment.”

As one, they both glanced at the big orange pouf of a dress hanging from the outside of the closet because, just as in her first room, there simply wasn’t room to cram all that dress inside.

The dress cast a faintly orange glow over everything, she was convinced. It definitely affected her mood.

He looked doubtfully beyond his bed. “I could put the stuff behind that curtain, but it’s probably damper there than in my truck.”

“Don’t mind me. I’m feeling bitchy. No idea why.”

He hefted the sticks, bag, padding, two pairs of skates and a uniform over to his bed and settled it in an untidy pile. He grunted as he yanked the liners out of his skates and placed them in front of the radiator as he had the night before.

She turned back to her task. No wonder she was thinking of Marley’s ghost; her current task was positively Dickensian.

She tried to ignore the unmistakable sounds of a man undressing by focusing all her attention on the nib of her pen.

“Okay if I take a shower now?” the deep voice asked.

“Yes. Fine.”

He passed behind and she felt him pause. “What are you doing?”

“Calligraphy.”

“I know what it is,” he said, surprising her. “What I meant is, why are you doing it now?”

“I’m writing out the place cards for the wedding,” she said, carefully finishing the Y on Cathy and double-checking the spelling of Cathy’s last name from the list beside the neat stack of cards.

“They had to get an out-of-town guest to do those? A couple days before the wedding?”

She put down her pen and turned. “Obviously, you’ve never been a bridesmaid.” She wished she hadn’t turned. She found herself at eye level with his scrumptious abs and the waistband of his gray sweatpants. She could smell him. He smelled athletic, of clean sweat and hard work. If she ran her hands over his body his muscles would still be warm and pliable from exertion.

“Good guess.” He sounded amused. Again.

“It’s part of my responsibility to help with all the little details that may have been overlooked.” She glanced at the stack of cards waiting to be painstakingly written, and lied through her teeth, “I really don’t mind.”

“I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.”

“Honestly? I’m missing another potluck dinner. And the choosing of the embarrassing baby and child photos to be shown on the projector at the reception. Frankly, I prefer this job.”

“As soon as I’m cleaned up, I’m meeting a few of the guys for a pizza. You want to join us?”

She was genuinely surprised by the offer. And she smiled her thanks at him. “Thank you. But if I don’t keep going, I’ll never get these done. Besides, I’ve got a yogurt and a couple of granola bars if I get hungry. I’ll be fine.”

“Suit yourself.” Then he ambled into the bathroom and soon she heard the shower running.

Three place cards later, he was out again, freshly shaved and smelling of soap and shampoo. In her peripheral vision she noted he was wearing nothing but a towel, and that the hair of his lower legs was dark and his big feet were leaving damp prints on the carpet.

When he was past her, she allowed herself a quick glance at his back view, on the grounds that a hardworking calligrapher needed a little treat now and then. She was happy to note that his hairiness didn’t go as far as his back. That was smooth of skin and heavy with muscle. This guy did more than play hockey to stay in shape. Her professional eye noted that his right deltoid was more developed than his left. He was definitely right-handed.

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