NOW THAT OUR
relationship had turned physical, I
really
couldn’t seem to keep my hands off Tallie—and she didn’t appear to want me to. She was sexy and sweet, she had a heart as big as the whole fucking state, she was both responsive and giving in bed, and she was starting to ask for what she wanted without acting like it was a huge imposition. Right now, I might think she was a dream come true, if not for the fact that her arms were once again covered with bruises caused by an utter asshole.
I wasn’t satisfied with bringing her to orgasm only one or two times. For that matter, it wasn’t enough to find my own release with her only once or twice in a night. We kept coming back to each other, seeking more when we ought to be sleeping. A simple touch turned into a full round of hot, sweaty, sticky sex in no time. And her hands? She put them right where I’d encouraged her to, covering the tattoos on my ass, beckoning me for more and even taking control of the situation sometimes. She was learning what she liked, what she wanted, and just asking for it wasn’t enough; she was reaching out and grabbing the bull by the horns. That turned me on more than I could have ever imagined.
The morning after her most recent run-in with Lance, I convinced her she had to file a restraining order against him at the very least. But she didn’t consent without some serious argument. She was right that going to the police for any reason would only bring more attention down on us, and likely not the variety of attention we were supposed to be trying to get, but her safety was my bigger concern.
The man was going off the deep end, and I wasn’t on board with letting him take her along for the ride.
I got her father involved, too, since for the most part, he seemed to have Tallie’s best interests at heart.
“I always knew that little prick was trouble,” he said when I called and explained the situation. “I’m glad Tallie has you looking out for her now, son.”
He called me
son
again. And this time, I didn’t mind. I chose not to analyze that at the moment. Neither of us mentioned the fact that my marriage to Tallie wasn’t meant to last or that she likely wouldn’t have me looking out for her beyond the time we’d agreed upon.
He took the day off work to accompany her when she—reluctantly—filed a police report and started the process for filing the restraining order. They did all of that while I was at practice. In the afternoon, he went with her to visit Kade, waiting in the rehab center’s lobby while she was inside. I wasn’t sure what he told her mother, if anything. I had to wonder what Mrs. Roth would think, since she seemed to be under the impression that Lance Benton was practically a god.
As for me, I spent the afternoon at a security firm with John at my side, working out details for a personal bodyguard for Tallie. My job wouldn’t allow for me to be with her all the time. Hell, I would have to be out of the state—sometimes out of the country—for days at a time, maybe even longer than that. I’d be gone as often as I was at home. John had offered to stay with Tallie, but my agent wasn’t exactly security material. I felt much better trusting him to look after my business endeavors and finances than asking him to protect my wife from a crazy man.
And even though Mr. Roth was taking some time off now, he couldn’t be with her constantly, either. Besides, I honestly wasn’t convinced he was enough to protect her from Lance. The way I saw it, he hadn’t done a very good job of looking after her before I’d come along.
They were going to send some guys over for me to interview on Friday. I wanted to do it sooner, but I had the Ice Breaker coming up and another game, and there wasn’t time. Still, if we hired someone on Friday, they could get started before I had to leave with the team for our first road trip. And I would be able to feel more confident about her safety while I was gone.
That was another bone of contention between Tallie and me. She seemed to think I was going overboard with trying to protect her from Lance.
“He’s not going to try anything else,” she said that evening from across the bar, tossing some sliced cucumbers into a salad bowl. Her father had waited at my house until I returned, saying something about how he had some business to attend to with her mother as he headed out the door. She rinsed her knife and cutting board and patted them dry with a paper towel before starting work on a tomato. “He’d be stupid to, especially now that the police are going to talk to him. And there’s the restraining order.”
“Which is really just a piece of paper,” I reminded her.
“Exactly, which makes it silly that you insisted I get one.”
“You won’t think it’s silly if he
does
try something again, and you decide it’s time to press charges. This way you’ll have a paper trail. It’ll go a long way toward getting his ass locked up behind bars.” Which was exactly where he belonged, as far as I was concerned.
Tallie wasn’t of the same opinion. “He’s not like a common criminal,” she said, now moving on to some fresh carrots.
“Oh, isn’t he? What do you call a man who physically assaults a woman here in Oklahoma, then?” My sarcasm was back with a vengeance. I should have taken a step back from the situation, calmed down before I said something stupid as I was so apt to do.
I didn’t walk away. I stayed put, right where I was, taking a sip from my water glass.
“You’re blowing this way out of proportion, Hunter.”
“Is that so? So I’m making this into a bigger deal than it is, huh? Around here, it’s okay for a man to leave bruises on a woman—not just once, either—and everyone’s just going to brush it off? No problem here? Well, she must have been asking for it? Is that how it goes around here? No wonder all those fucking hicks had a problem with me calling them backasswards. They
are
, and this just proves it.”
“So I’m backasswards?” she demanded. She tossed her butcher knife on the counter so hard it rattled before settling.
“If you’re going to say stupid things, I’ll call you stupid,” I shot off.
“Now you quit being ugly, Hunter Fielding,” Tallie said, hands on her hips and eyes molten gold. “For one thing, I am
not
stupid. I’ve got a 4.0 GPA in college, and I was salutatorian in my high school class. Besides all that, you’re pitchin’ a fit over nothing. Lance is harmless. You’re picking at him and just making things worse.”
“How the fuck am I making things worse?”
“You don’t think getting served with a restraining order is going to rile him up? If not, you’ve never seen a gay Southern man throw a temper tantrum.”
“I may not have seen a gay Southern man throw a temper tantrum, but I’m sure as hell seeing a Southern belle throw one now.” Damn if it didn’t turn me on, too.
Tallie didn’t look like she was getting turned on, though. If anything, she was getting madder by the minute. I was glad she didn’t still have the knife in her hand—based on the look in her eyes, she might very well use it on me if she thought of it—but it was within reach. I needed to calm her down, so I moved around to her side of the bar and tried to put my arms around her waist.
She spun around and glared at me. “Don’t you be trying to get frisky with me right now, buster. I’m madder than a wet hen, so you’d better take a step back if you know what’s good for you.”
I held up my hands in surrender and backed up a few steps. “Not getting
frisky
.” Not that I’d be opposed to it.
“Well, you’d just better take a page from my mama’s book and keep your hands to yourself.”
“All right.” I took another step back and wondered how long it would take her to cool off and think things through rationally.
She picked up her knife again and went to town on another carrot. “I don’t need a bodyguard,” she muttered.
“So are you saying you won’t cooperate at all? No matter what, you’re going to resist the idea of letting me protect you?”
“I’m going to resist the idea of letting you make a mountain out of a molehill and exacerbate things worse than they already are,” she said, sounding petulant and dangerous all at once.
I sighed, deciding to let the subject drop for now. We clearly weren’t getting anywhere by arguing, and we were both digging in our heels, refusing to budge an inch. We ate our dinner in near silence. Afterward, we cleaned up side by side, neither of us saying much.
For a while, she sat in the living room reading a book, and I sat nearby playing mindless games on my phone, much like we had done on the beach in Hawaii. Only there, the silence between us had been comfortable and easy. Here, it was stifling.
It was still very early when she stood up, closing the cover of her tablet. “I’m tired. I think I’m going to bed,” she announced. Even though she’d spent the last two nights in my bed, she headed down the hall toward her room without another word.
“Tallie?” I called out before she disappeared completely.
She stopped and turned, wordless.
“I don’t like the idea of us going to bed mad at each other.” Letting anger like this fester was only going to cause more problems down the road.
“Well, maybe you should try not to be mad, then,” she said. Then she spun around again and disappeared.
Fuck.
THESE MEET-THE-FANS TYPES
of events had always been things I simply had to suffer through. The Thunderbirds Ice Breaker wasn’t much different. If anything, it was worse than most of them because people in Tulsa didn’t know the first thing about hockey. All they knew at this point was that we’d lost our first couple of preseason games by an embarrassing margin, so therefore, we sucked.
Oh, yeah. There was one other thing. They also knew they hated me because I was an asshole. There was that.
I had a line in front of me that went out the door, but for the most part, they weren’t looking for my autograph. They wanted to tell me what they thought about my comments over the summer, that I wasn’t good enough for Tallie, that I should go rot in rehab with my brother because if he was a drugged up asshole, I must be as well, that they hoped I got cut from the team before the season started, and a thousand other things.
Like the guy in front of me now. He had a massive beer belly pressing against a Western-style shirt and bulging over an enormous belt buckle. He seemed to really want me to notice the buckle, too, if the way he was gripping it while rocking back and forth on his cowboy boots was any indication.
“Now you just listen to me real good,” the guy said. Or I thought that was what he said. I’d only thought I’d heard a true Oklahoma drawl before this moment, but Buckle Dude was putting that assumption to the test. “You git on away from Tallulah Belle before someone decides to hurt you. She’s a good Southern girl. Ain’t got no need for the likes of some loser like you bringin’ her down in life.”
I bit down on my tongue and signed a glossy five-by-seven photo from the stack the team had left on my table.
The second I handed it over to him, he ripped it in half and dropped it to the ground, rubbing it out with his toe before stomping away.
The only effect people like Buckle Dude had on me was to reinforce the fact that everything Tallie and I had been trying to do was for naught in my case. Her image was possibly being rehabilitated, but more because the people of Tulsa hated me with a blinding passion, and they wanted to protect her from me.
If only they knew I wasn’t the real threat.
Since we still hadn’t hired a bodyguard, John was sticking close to Tallie’s side throughout the event. Not only that, but I’d talked to Gary and Alan, asking if they could have the team’s security keep a close watch on her while I was otherwise occupied being berated. Once I explained about the restraining order, they had agreed. It wasn’t as good as having one of the security officers at the event focused solely on protecting her, but it was as good as I could get on such short notice.
For the most part, she’d stood off to the side with a couple of the other WAGs while I did my best to smile through having my ass repeatedly handed to me on a silver platter. I’d been searching the crowd for her every once in a while, making sure she was still where I could see her and not in any kind of trouble. I had to chuckle when I found her this time because she had a line of her own, with people who actually wanted her autograph. No doubt they were busy telling her to leave me as soon as she could get away.
The next person in my line was a young boy, probably around twelve years old, with out-of-control curly ginger hair, pimples, and braces. He had on a turquoise Thunderbirds home jersey that was easily three sizes too big for him, but maybe he’d be able to wear it for a few years before outgrowing it. If he was much like I was as a boy, he was due to hit a big growth spurt soon. I forced a smile to my lips, or I attempted to, but I feared I only managed to keep myself from grimacing as I waited to hear what he had to say.
“C-can I have y-y-y-y-y—” He stopped and turned around like he was going to walk away before he could get it out, but a man with the same hair waved an arm, encouraging him to stay and try again. The boy shrugged, and that was when I noticed his jersey had my name and number on it. He might actually be a fan, unlike almost everyone else here. So slowly it was almost painful, he spun to face me again.
This time I managed a real smile. Not because the kid might be a fan of mine but because I wanted to make him as comfortable as I could.
“Can I-I-I-I-I-I have y-y-your autograph?” he forced out.
“Sure can. Want me to sign your jersey, too, or just a picture?” I reached for the stack and took the pic from the top, scrawling my name over my image.
He grinned. “M-my jersey, too.”
I got up and walked to the front of my table, Sharpie in hand. “What’s your name, buddy?”
He turned to the side so I could sign on the white number thirty-one on his back. “Hunter, just like y-y-y-y-y-you. I p-p-play goal.”
“Is that right? You any good?” I capped the marker and patted him on the shoulder.
He turned around and grinned at me. “B-better than you. S-s-s-six goals in half a g-game? That’s pathetic.”