Out of the Game3 (6 page)

Chapter Seven

After dinner, Erin needed Claire to help her in the bathroom. Because the portable restrooms, although nice and clean, gave Erin the heebie-jeebies, they made the trek up to Elliot’s house.

“So you think it’s going well?” Erin asked.

Claire held Erin’s dress up as she used the toilet. “It’s the most beautiful, wonderful wedding I’ve ever been to. And I’m not just saying that because I helped plan it.”

“It is, isn’t it? I’m so happy, sis. I never thought I’d be this happy.”

“I’m happy
for
you. You deserve this.” Claire helped her sister get off the toilet and rearrange her skirts. “And I think it’s safe to say now that I’m glad you didn’t end up with that doctor character.”

“Dr. O? You never even met him.”

Claire shrugged. “I know. But from what you told me about him, he seemed kind of boring.”

Erin laughed, but Claire wasn’t finished. “I...I’m just really glad you didn’t make the same mistake I made.”

With a soft gasp, Erin grew wistful. “Oh, Claire. I—”

“No, sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. This is your special day and I will
not
ruin it by bringing up my messed-up marriage.”

“Hey, listen to me. We’re sisters. Your pain is my pain and any time you want to vent, I’m here for you. I know it’s been really hard on you. I wish you and Vic had figured things out years ago.”

“You and me both.”

“But hey, look at you. You’ve made yourself over—or at least back into the Claire I used to know and you’re ready to find yourself a wonderful, loving...what? What’s with the face? Are you not ready? Because I totally get that you might not be ready.”

Claire smiled as they left Elliot’s house and started back to the tent. “No, I think I’m still in that transition phase. I’m okay with dating someone, but I don’t want a relationship. Not yet. In fact...” Claire shook her head. “No. Never mind.”

Erin scoffed. “Nope. Too late. In fact, what?”

“I’m thinking about...going on a fun trip with someone.”

Erin beamed. “I think that’s a fantastic idea. Where? Who?”

“The destination’s still up in the air.”

“Who are you going with?”

Claire picked up her pace.

“Claire...” Then she gasped. “Oh my God, don’t tell me you’re thinking about hooking up with Alex Sullivan.”

“All right.”

“Claire, no! That man is nothing more than a walking penis.”

“That’s not true. He has plenty of good qualities.”

Erin stopped short. “All right. He’s a walking penis who can play hockey.”

“Come on,” Claire said. “He’s funny and fun to be with. He’s a wonderful public speaker. You can’t deny that.”

Erin resumed walking. “And he has a booty babe in every major city in the United States
and
Canada.”

“Which is exactly why he’s safe. We’d both be going into it knowing it’s just a fling.”

“Famous last words.”

They were halfway back to the reception and Claire could see quite a few people skating now. Their laughter carried on the evening air. Really, the night was perfect. The stars were out. The weather was not too hot, not too cold. She also saw Tim standing at the entrance to the tent. He had his hands clasped in front of him and a smile on his face as he watched Erin approach.

“Hello, Mrs. Hollander.”

“Hello, Mr. Hollander.”

“I thought you might want to go skating with me.”

Erin winced. “You know how bad I am at it.”

“You’re not bad,” Tim said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “You’re learning. And besides, if you have a skating rink at your wedding, you should at least do one lap. You, too, Claire.”

“Oh, I already tried it.”

“You did?” Erin looked surprised, then annoyed. “Oh. With Alex.”

Tim glanced at Claire, then back at Erin. He raised one eyebrow. “What am I missing here?”

Erin shrugged, leaving the ball in Claire’s court.

“Your wife doesn’t want me to see Alex. She thinks he’ll take advantage of me.”

“Alex
Sullivan
?” Tim looked surprised.

Erin prodded him in the chest with her fingertips. “Tell her it’s a bad idea, Tim.”

Tim looked at his watch. “Three hours married and I’m already henpecked. Ouch!” He laughed when Erin poked him in the stomach this time.

“Okay.” He sighed. “Here’s the deal. Alex is a great guy, a very good friend. He’s a lot of fun to be around and...the ladies seem like enjoy his company. If you think you can have a good time with him and walk away, I say go for it. You deserve some happiness. I really mean that. But fair warning, if you think you might fall for him, it’s probably better to not get things started in the first place. I’ve never known Alex’s relationships to last longer than a summer.”

“Thank you, Tim. At least someone around here thinks I can make my own decisions.”

Erin scowled at her husband.

“It’s her life, Erin. Let her live it.”

Having clearly lost the battle, Erin downgraded the scowl to a pout. “I have half a mind not to skate with you.”

“Aw, come on, Mrs. Hollander.” Tim bent and gave her an Eskimo kiss. “We haven’t been on the ice together since I proposed.”

After a moment, a smile emerged slowly on Erin’s face. “It’s not real ice,” she reminded him.

“Doesn’t matter. If you’re with me? Nothing else matters.”

With a lovesick sigh and an apologetic wave, Erin left with Tim and headed toward the rink. Claire waved back, but inside she felt a stab of jealousy and then a stronger one of guilt. She shouldn’t be resentful of her own sister. Claire’s life wasn’t exactly a shithole. She was healthy. She had enough money from the divorce to do whatever she wanted. Happiness was a choice and if she only focused on what she didn’t have, she’d never be happy.

So, what
would
make her happy? A summer fling with Alex Sullivan? Maybe. If they went away together, chances were high that they’d end up in bed. The idea excited her. She’d never been to bed with a man in peak physical condition. As a businessman, Vic had been largely sedentary with a bit of a paunch. Claire hadn’t seen Alex naked, but she’d watched him play hockey. He was two hundred pounds of intensity on the ice. When she thought about him bringing that intensity to the bedroom, her entire body came to life with eager anticipation.

But Tim had a great point. Could she trust herself to keep her emotions out of it? She wanted to think she was smart enough not to fall for a proven Lothario, but she’d never done anything even remotely like this before. Hell, she’d never even had a one-night stand, let alone run away with a man she barely knew. After her parents passed away, she’d been the head of the household at nineteen years old. Dan and Jake had been only eighteen and Erin, the baby, fifteen. Dangerous ages. So much could have gone wrong. The burden of responsibility had been so great, she’d felt like an invisible judge was weighing in on her every move. She’d been careful not to do anything that could be construed by her siblings as permission to follow suit.

Although they all turned out to be upstanding citizens, Claire couldn’t help but feel a little cheated. Like Tim had said, she deserved a little happiness and some fun times. She’d spent ten years restrained by responsibility and obligation, but no longer. She was single. At twenty-nine, she was still young. And damn it, she deserved the chance to kick up her heels with a gorgeous sexy hunk of man for once in her life.

* * *

Alex knew something was up the moment he saw Claire’s face when she came back from the restroom. She walked right up to him and said, “We have to talk. But not here. Somewhere more private.”

“Okay.” Part of him did a victory dance. Anytime a woman wanted to go somewhere more private, the probability of a fuck rose dramatically. However, the look on her face did not scream, “I want you, Alex,” so he followed her, curious as to what the issue was and hopeful it might turn into a make-out session at the very least.

“What’s up?”

She had led him to a covered patio near the big house. They sat on a sofa that seemed too nice to be outside all the time. Beautiful potted plants spruced up the area and there was a fire pit, but no fire. He was careful not to sit too closely to her. She seemed to have her feathers ruffled. He schooled his face into something resembling patience and mild curiosity.

“I’ve decided to go on the trip with you.”

In his mind, he dropped to one knee and fist-pumped energetically.

“
But
I have some ground rules,” she said.

“Okay. Shoot.”

“We get separate rooms, like you said.”

“Done.”

“I also need you to be okay with it if nothing happens. In bed.”

He smiled. “What about out of bed? Because I’m fine with doing it other places. The shower...the floor...armchairs are good, too.”

“I mean it,” she said.

He inhaled, exhaled, then rested his elbow on the back of the couch and leaned toward her. “I know you mean it.”

“Are you okay with that?”

“I’m not gonna lie. I’ll be disappointed, but honestly, nothing will happen without your say so. It’ll be like a really long game of Red Light, Green Light.”

And he expected all green lights because he was this very minute vowing not to rush her. With women, just like in hockey, sometimes you had to have patience. You had to play with that puck a little and wait for the perfect opportunity, because when it finally went in, nice and slick, it was fucking amazing.

“All right. Separate rooms. Possible platonicality. Anything else?” he asked.

“Not that I can think of right now.”

“Okay. I have one rule of my own.”

She cocked her head at him. “What is it?”

“That you kiss me good-night, every night.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Can it be on the cheek?”

“If you want to chicken out like that, sure. Cheek kisses can count. Any contact with your mouth on my skin will count.”

He noticed her nostrils flare. He wasn’t sure if that was because he’d called her a chicken, or if she was thinking about her lips on his skin, because
he
sure was. He was thinking about her kissing his neck, licking and biting her way to his mouth. He was thinking about her big tits, all nice and soft against his chest. How great it was going to feel when he finally pushed himself into her tight, wet body.

“All right,” she said.

He smiled.

Game on
.

Chapter Eight

The very next day, Claire woke to her cellphone ringing. Her first thought was of Erin and Tim and that something had gone wrong with their honeymoon, but it wasn’t the newlyweds. It was Alex.

“How soon can you get ready for breakfast with me?”

Claire glanced at the clock—seven o’clock in the morning. “Alex. I need at least two hours. It’s too early. Especially after the wedding last night.”

“I can’t wait. I’m too excited. Let’s go to breakfast and make some plans.”

“Oh, God.”

“You’re not a morning person?”

“Not particularly.”

“Come on. I know the perfect place for breakfast. Hot coffee. A croissant breakfast sandwich. It’s pricey, but it’ll hit the spot.”

The mention of coffee roused her enough to say yes.

Forty-five minutes later, she was getting into Alex’s Mercedes. “Hey,” he said, greeting her with a wide smile. “I’m glad you wore comfy clothes. Do you have your driver’s license with you?”

“Um, yes.” She fastened her seatbelt.

“Good.” He pulled away from the curb of the CityView apartment building where Claire lived, a luxury high rise in the heart of downtown San Diego.

“Am I driving somewhere?” She stretched out her legs, noticing a scuff mark on her gladiator-style sandal. She’d worn a belted summer maxidress and light sweater.

“Nah. You need the license for ID.”

“Alex, no one’s carded me in ages and it’s too early to drink anyway.”

He made a dismissive noise. “We’re not going drinking. We’re going to talk about where we want to go on our trip. You have any ideas? Because I want to go someplace I’ve never been.”

“That rules out any city that has a hockey team. What’s that? Thirty cities out of the running?”

“Something like that, but it still leaves a lot of places. What do you like to do when you’re on vacation?” he asked.

“Relax. I read a lot. I shop. What about you?”

“Same thing,” he said. “Except for the reading and the shopping.”

She laughed. “So, you relax.”

“Kind of.” He laughed. “Relaxing to a hockey player isn’t the normal kind of relaxing. I can’t just lie around. I have to stay active otherwise it’s too hard to get back into shape. Sad to say, but I’m not young anymore.”

“How old are—hey, wait a second.” She sat up, realizing for the first time where they were. “Are we going to the airport?”

He grinned. “Yup.”

“Alex, did you...did you buy us tickets somewhere?” The possibility was both exciting and daunting. Vic’s idea of a surprise was to bring home a new fish for the aquarium.

Alex merged into a lane leading to one of the parking lots. “I thought about it, but I didn’t want to take the decision out of your hands. I figured we would just decide here. Over breakfast. It
is
the most important meal of the day.”

“But we don’t have any luggage. At least,
I
don’t.”

“I don’t either.” He pulled into a parking spot and cut the engine. “I figured we’d just buy what we need. It’ll be an adventure.”

“You’re crazy.”

“It sounds like fun though, doesn’t it? Come on. Let’s just go to the departures board and choose a place.”

She had to admit, it did sound like fun. But it was so...unconventional. Who went to the airport with no destination in mind? And with no luggage? She wasn’t worried about the money. She had plenty of that. So did he, presumably.

“This is insane.”

“But fun.”

Making her decision on the spot, she turned to him and smiled.

* * *

After getting breakfast, they looked at the twenty flights listed on the departures board of American Airlines. Some destinations they nixed right away—New York, Dallas, Chicago, D.C. Those big cities all had NHL teams. Other places were too far, causing them to agree on nothing over five hours flight time, which automatically excluded anything overseas, except for Hawaii. They didn’t have their passports anyway.

“What about Hawaii?” Claire asked, remembering her trips there with Vic. “That’s a beautiful place. Lots of activities for you. Lots of beaches for me to relax on.”

“As much as I love the idea of seeing you relaxing on the sand in a skimpy bikini, the food there is too weird. I’ve heard guys say that poi made them want to puke.”

Claire wondered if the man ate anything that wasn’t fast food. “So don’t eat poi. There are plenty of things to eat other than poi.”

“You’ve been there before?” he asked.

“Several times. You really should go. It’s a paradise.”

“Maybe someday. But I think we should go somewhere neither of us has been before, so it’s new to both of us.”

They looked at the board again.

“San Francisco?” he asked.

“Been there,” she replied. “Phoenix?”

“The Coyotes play there.”

“Oh, I forgot.”

She scanned the board one more time. “That leaves Salt Lake City.”

“Anything interesting in Salt Lake City?”

“You know,” someone said from behind them, “if you’re talking about Salt Lake City itself, it’s like any capital city. I used to live there. But a few hours away are some amazing places.”

They turned to find a man with a rolling suitcase and a garment bag. He was about forty, wearing slacks and a shirt, no tie.

“Like what?” Alex asked.

Claire was curious to find out, too. Utah was not high on her list of locales to visit.

“Zion National Park.”

Alex grinned. “She likes national parks.”

“Then there’s Bryce Canyon, too. Park City hosted the Winter Games. In fact, Robert Redford has a resort up that way. I think he was filming
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
when he fell in love with Utah.”

“I love that movie,” Alex exclaimed. “They filmed it there?”

“Parts of it, I think,” the stranger said. “But if you’re interested in going to anything in that area, you’re better off going to Vegas first, not Salt Lake City.” He pointed to a flight departing in an hour. “SLC is a lot farther north than you need to go.”

After sitting down on a bench, Alex looked up Zion on his phone and Claire took Bryce Canyon.

“Claire, look. Man, this is cool. Look at this.”

He showed her pictures of a beautiful, narrow stone canyon with vertical walls that looked a hundred feet high. A stream ran through it and she could imagine the soft gurgling noise it would make. Oddly, it reminded her of New York City and how you couldn’t really see the sky unless you looked straight up, but obviously in the outback of Utah, there wouldn’t be exhaust or litter or traffic noise.

“That really is beautiful,” she said.

“What did you find on Bryce?” He leaned over to peer at her screen.

On her phone was a barren but beautiful landscape with misshapen stone towers, arches and rippling ridges that were the same colors as the Grand Canyon.

“That’s on Earth? It looks like the backdrop for a science fiction movie. I bet they’ve filmed stuff there, too.” He twisted to read the departures board. “Come on, let’s go. The flight to Vegas leaves in forty-five minutes. Plenty of time to buy tickets and get to the gate.”

He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. In a last ditch effort, her brain tossed out all the reasons why this was a bad idea—the dentist appointment she had scheduled on Wednesday, all the food that was in her refrigerator, the possibility that Erin would go ballistic when she found out—but Claire found she didn’t really care about any of that. For once she was going to do something completely crazy.

* * *

During the forty-minute flight, Claire made a list of what she needed to buy when they landed. Alex spent his time trying not to think about how easy it would be to spread the blanket over them both, reach under her dress and bring her to orgasm with his hand. Fuck, that’d be sweet. But he’d promised himself not to rush her.

He surreptitiously checked out her to-buy list. She was thorough. He was doing fine until he saw the word “underwear.” Was she planning on getting all-purpose undies or did she have something sexier in mind? As far as he was concerned, he’d never seen a pair of panties he didn’t like, probably because by the time he was peeking at panties, he was well on his way to getting laid.

When they disembarked, they went straight to a rental car facility and got an SUV. After that, they hit a mall, split up and got the basics. He was done long before Claire, so he went to the food court and had a couple corn dogs, some fresh-squeezed lemonade, and a steaming hot pretzel with cheese goo as a dipping sauce. As an afterthought, he had a salad too, remembering he needed to eat healthier. After the salad was gone, he still needed to kill more time—”I just need twenty more minutes” she texted—so he wandered into the Apple Store and left with an iPad, since he’d left his at home. He was at a table back in the food court, looking at accommodations in Springdale, where the entrance to the Zion Park was located, when Claire finally returned, loaded with at least a dozen bags. She seemed to have picked up a little sidekick, a woman in her early twenties who, judging from the bags she held, had done quite a bit of shopping of her own.

The woman looked Alex over then nodded approvingly. “Is this him?” she asked Claire. “Oh my God, he’s gorgeous. Hi, I’m Megan.”

He shook the proffered hand. “Alex.”

“Do you have any brothers? Just kidding. I have a boyfriend,” she said with a squeak in her voice. “Oh, and there he is!”

A man in his forties—shorts and a designer polo—approached. He tapped a very expensive watch. “Time to go, Megs.”

“Corey, come meet Alex and Claire. This is Corey, my boyfriend.”

“You ladies finished buying out the stores?” Corey asked.

“For today, anyway,” Megan said, laughing. “Look, Claire and I got matching shoes.” She pawed through the bags but couldn’t locate the right one. Alex didn’t blame her. It looked like she had at least four with shoe boxes in them.

As Claire tried to help Megan, Corey leaned toward Alex. “Shit,” he said in a low voice. “You’ve got it worse than I do. A word of advice from a man who’s been in the trenches twice. Get a prenup.”

Alex shook his head. “I appreciate the advice, but we’re not that serious.”

“Smart man. Keep it that way.” Corey slapped him on the shoulder then said to Megan, “Come on, Megs. Let’s get a move on. You can show me your shit back at the hotel.”

The other couple left and Alex took the bulk of Claire’s bags. There were a lot. She must have spent a couple thousand bucks. “Did you get everything you needed? Because none of these bags seems heavy enough for a kitchen sink.”

“Very funny,” she said as he guffawed. “But I got rid of a lot of my clothes, remember? Not all of this is for the trip.”

“I’m just teasing you. Wanna make a pit stop before we hit the road?”

“No, I’m fine.”

But she didn’t sound fine. In his experience, women usually went through a post-shopping buzz during which they liked to conduct a verbal inventory of everything they’d purchased. Case in point, Megan had started in before she’d even left the mall.

Yet Claire said nothing. Until they got into the car.

He was pulling out of the mall parking lot when she said, “So, um, what did that guy say back there?”

“Who, the boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t like the look he gave me when he was talking to you, that’s all.”

“He told me I should get a prenup.”

She gasped. “What a jerk. I
knew
it had to be something like that. He had such a condescending smirk on his face, I almost chirped him. Did you say anything back?”

“Yes. I told him we weren’t getting married.” He glanced at her. “I hope that’s not news to you.”

She recoiled. “Oh, no. Not at all.” She scoffed. “Us married? That’s completely insane.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Glad we’re on the same page.”

She laughed, but the vibe was still off. Something was bugging her. He hoped it wasn’t the kitchen-sink comment, because if she couldn’t take a joke, it was going to be a long fucking trip.