Remy(12)

I decide to touch her. Tease her. I want to make her smile. Hell, I want to see her smile at me.

I cup the nape of her neck and I lean in. “Look at me.”

She opens those gold eyes, lowers my hand, and smiles in bemusement. Fuck me standing, but she was getting worked up with me and every inch of my body knows it.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing.” I smile, but I’m hot and bothered and delighted, all at once. “I’m very impressed. You’re very thorough, Brooke.”

She grins almost innocently. “I am. And wait until I get to your shoulders and back. I might have to stand on you.”

She amuses me. So much I poke her biceps with my fingers. Then her triceps, and I say, “Hmm,” and when I place her hand around my biceps, her eyes flare wide. I love it. I know she likes how big and hard it is, but she pretends otherwise and playfully responds, “Hmm.”

We laugh. We’re laughing when she seems to realize Pete and company have fallen quiet and are watching us.

She pulls something out from her bag, and I glare at Pete, silently telling him, Back off, bozo!

She clears her throat and sets an iPod and headphones on her lap. Curious, I snatch up her iPod and connect my headphones and start going through her music, handing her mine in return. She has tons of recent songs and some earlier older ones I recognize. She drops her headphones and grabs her iPod back, returning mine.

“Who can relax to that?” she protests.

“Who wants to relax?” I taunt.

“I do.”

I give her back my iPod. “I’ve got to have some easy listening for you. Listen to one of mine and I will listen to one of yours.”

I scan my iPod, sure of the song I want. I don’t regularly listen to it, but the times it comes on shuffle, I hear every fucking word, and now the need to play it to her is becoming more intense by the second.

A song plays for me from her library, and it’s sassy, but I’m mostly watching her listen to the one I picked for her.

She ducks her head to cover her profile with her hair. Her hand trembles on the iPod.

I can’t take it and lean forward to catch her expression.

I keep listening to the song she played me. How she won’t write me a love song. That’s okay. She’s still playing me one, really.

My lips twitch and I chuckle, but she ducks her head to her lap as she listens to the rest of the song.

My smile fades, my body tight. Fuck, I want her. I want her to get it. I want her to get me.

She listens quietly to “Iris” from the Goo Goo Dolls, then she slowly removes her headphones and returns my iPod. “I wouldn’t have guessed you had slow songs in there,” she murmurs, talking to my iPod as she returns it.

I keep my voice low so that only she hears. “I have twenty thousand songs—everything is in there.”

“No!” she automatically protests, then checks my iPod and notices it’s true. God, she’s adorable.

“Did you like it?” I quietly ask her.

She nods.

Her cheeks are flushed, and it takes all my effort not to kiss her. Instead I search for another song on my iPod and pass it over to her, playing “Love Bites” to her so she hopefully gets an idea of how very much I want her.





PRESENT


SEATTLE


It’s not really fun to ride in a convertible when you’re stuck in traffic,” Pete muses as we hit some traffic and sit there like mannequins in a storefront.

The people inside the cars around us are staring. “You’re breaking a couple hearts just sitting there, Rem,” Riley chuckles from the back and angles his thumb over at a car filled with coeds.

They start squeaking when I look at them, and my guys laugh.

Turning straight ahead, I curl my fingers into my fist and slip my ring back on, then I survey my knuckles. I’m so ready for the season. Brooke is already packing for Racer. Seems like the plane luggage is going to be full of baby stuff, strollers, and everything Racer has invaded us with since he was born. I’m fucking anxious to have Brooke just for me for a night where she doesn’t need to hurry out of my arms and tend to him.

“Hotel suite ready?” I ask Pete as the traffic finally starts easing.

“Yep.”

“My iPod?”

“Yep. Took it this morning, and headphones.”

“Every detail to the T as discussed?”

“Everything,” Pete says.

I raise a brow at him, but he starts to drive forward, leaving me musing on the word everything.

I can’t wait to take her in my arms.

I can’t. Fucking. Wait. To marry her again.

The first time I married her, it was in City Hall, now we’ll be in a real church.

I wanted to ask her to marry me with a song after last season’s final, but Racer decided to drop by early, and I ended up proposing with Brooke in the beginning of labor in my arms, breathing in short, panting breaths of pain. “The song was supposed to ask you to marry me, but you’ll have to settle on me doing the asking,” I’d whispered, looking intently into her eyes. “Mind. Body. Soul. All of you for me. All of you mine . . . Marry me, Brooke Dumas.”