Page 38 of Making the Save

“You okay? You hurt yourself?” She asked, and I felt like a pervert.

“No, listen… the way I see it, we’re going to be in this marriage for at least ten weeks.” I explained how I had to go back to work at the end of August for training before the season starts.

“Ten weeks,” she said. “Is that a long time? Or a short time?”

“Depends on how we spend it, I guess,” I said, and her cheeks went pink so I knew we were thinking about the same thing. “We need to talk about that kiss earlier.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears, looking shy. “You said it was just for show.”

“Yeah, but you know…” I said, my voice trailing off. She had to know it was for show, yes. But it was for real too. This attraction between us was constant and getting harder to ignore.

“I’m a hundred percent certain I don’t know. Listen, Wyatt, you probably have a lot of preconceptions of me from whatever you’ve seen on entertainment shows or social media-”

“Babe, I watch sports and I don’t do social media,” I said, cutting her off.

“Still, in the overall zeitgeist, I have a certain reputation.”

“You get guys, but you can’t keep them.” I said the thought out loud, because other than knowing she was a pop artist, it wasprobably the only other thing I knew, or thought I knew about Sydney Malloy.

Anytime I ever looked up and saw who she was dating, my only thought was ever…

She could do better.

“Yeah, that,” she said. Instantly, I could see I’d screwed up. She took the sunglasses that had been perched on her head and dropped them over her eyes. “Anyway, just don’t believe everything, okay? I’m not quite the seductress I’m made out to be.”

“I’m going to believe whateveryoutell me, certainly not anything I see on social media. But we have to talk about it. We’re attracted to each other.”

“How did that kiss prove I’m attracted to you? I was just pretending.”

“You were faking it?”

There was no way. I wasn’t the player my brother Liam was when it came to woman, but I knew damn well when a kiss was real. I felt it down to my toes. Hell, my dick got hard from that kiss.

“No, I wasn’t…but…you asked me what the rules were.” she said, and my whole body braced for impact. Like throwing my body in front of the goal to stop a shot off my brother’s stick. “That’s one of my rules.”

“More kissing?” I said.

“No, no kissing. We’re not complicating an already extremely complicated situation with sex.”

“You know,” I said, peeling the label off my Gatorade bottle. “Sex could actually make things easier.”

“For you, maybe,” she said.

“Honey, if you don’t think sex can make things easier for you too, than you’ve been with the wrong kind of men.”

Those glasses made it impossible to see her eyes, and I would have given a million dollars to know what was going on in that head.

“I just think it’s a bad idea,” she said, and I sat back, taking the hit like a pro.

“All right,” I said. “If that’s your rule, I will obey it.”

She was nodding and also biting her lower lip like she was bothered by something.

“That means no touching and no more kissing,” she said.

“What about in public? Like if we’re selling this marriage thing?”

“We can hold hands,” she said. “I like the hand holding part.”