Home Ice (10 page)

He made an appreciative humming sound and raised a brow. “If you ever need a guinea pig to practice on, I’m sure it wouldn’t take much arm twisting to get some of the boys on board.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, winking at him.

In truth, I was slightly shocked and more than just a bit disappointed that he hadn’t volunteered himself. I’d been dying to get my hands on him—
really
explore his muscles—ever since I’d first seen him last weekend. Having watched his players and spent some time close to Mattias, he seemed as fit as any of them, and likely a heck of a lot stronger than many of them. There was a certain sort of strength that came to men as they got older, and I had no doubt he had it in spades.

I speared a piece of roasted potato with my fork and popped it into my mouth. Then I almost melted from how good it was. “How do they make something so simple taste
so good
?” I asked, still chewing.

“Something tells me they won’t be giving us their secrets.”

“Too bad. I could teach the girls to make it, and then we could make a killing out of my kitchen.”

“I doubt the government would look too kindly on slave labor,” he joked.

“No slaves involved. We’d call it their chores and pay them an allowance. It’d be all aboveboard.”

He laughed. Mattias had a rich, deep laugh, much like his voice. It rumbled through me and made me want to be closer to him, to feel it beneath my touch. Once I started thinking along those lines, though, I doubted I’d be able to stop anytime soon. I bit my lower lip again.

“If you don’t stop doing that, I’m going to have to join you,” he said.

I arched a brow in question.

“Biting your lip.”

“Be careful not to hurt yourself.”

He lifted his wineglass and tilted it in my direction. “I meant I’d bite your lip.”

I downed a large swallow from my own glass to hide the rush of heat that flooded my face, not that it was likely to do any good. Besides, I wasn’t fifteen. I was a grown woman. I could flirt and tease and talk about adult things without blushing like my daughters would, couldn’t I? Determined to prove I could, even if only to myself, I met his gaze. “Try not to draw blood when you do.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“More like a promise of things to come.”

He sipped and let the wine roll over his tongue for a moment before swallowing, taking his time to answer. “I like promises,” he finally said. “Maybe as much as you like kisses.”

So apparently keeping myself from blushing was going to be next to impossible. As soon as I’d seen what Sophie had written in her letter to him, I’d known he was going to pounce all over that one. Good to see he didn’t intend to let me down on that score.

I cut into my steak, searching my brain for any topic I could turn to in order to deflect the attention away from me, at least for long enough that I could refocus my thoughts. With Sophie on my mind, the first safe subject that came to me was Mattias’s sister.

“So, does your sister ever come to visit you?” I asked, taking a large bite of steak so I wouldn’t have to talk too soon.

A soft expression came into his eyes the second I mentioned his sister, but he shook his head. “Not often. Linnea lives in a group home in Stockholm, and our parents are close by. I spend as much time with her as I can when I’m home in the summers, but it never feels like enough.” He stopped there and shook his head, as if he didn’t want to go on.

“What?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I told you she has a boyfriend and she wants to live with him now, didn’t I?” When I nodded, he said, “His name’s Johan. He was the one who helped hold her together when her first boyfriend died about five years ago. I was here, coaching. I couldn’t be there to help out, and my parents were at a loss about how to help her understand and grieve. But Johan took Linnea under his wing. He brought a book to work one day.
Adjö, herr Muffin
, it was called.
Good-bye, Mr. Muffin
. It’s meant to help kids understand about death and grief. He took her aside on their break and read it to her, and he let her cry on his shoulder. That started a routine. Every day, he would bring some children’s book or another to read to her. They had been coworkers for a long time, and they’d been friendly before that, but they started getting a lot closer because he brought his books to read and share with her.”

“And then he took her out for ice cream,” I said, smiling as his voice trailed off.

“And then he took her out for ice cream,” Mattias repeated, nodding with a sheepish chuckle. “And now she wants to live with him.”

“Sounds like he’s a good guy.” Maybe a lot like the man sitting next to me and staring at me like he never wanted to look anywhere else. My belly flipped at the unwavering look in his eyes.

“He is. He’s a very good man.”

“Does it ease your mind at all to know that?” I asked. “I mean, she could have fallen for someone who would have been the worst sort of influence on her, and then what?”

“Is your mind ever going to be at ease when it comes to your girls?”

“Good point. As boy crazy as they are…”

“But they know a good man when they see one,” Mattias said emphatically. Like he knew them well enough to know that.

I shook my head, my brows pinching together.

“501’s a good man,” he explained. “Way too old for them, but he’s a good man. I think they can sense it. They’ve got good instincts when it comes to their hormonal crushes.” He reached across the table. I thought he was going for the saltshaker, but he took my hand instead, and he winked. “Like their mom.”

My earlier belly flips couldn’t hold a candle to what was going on internally now. I was seriously melting. So were my panties. They were all,
poof
, gone. Just like that.

Or they would be if we weren’t sitting in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

AFTER A DINNER
filled with the most intoxicating mix of heady flirtation, banter, and soul-baring conversation, Mattias took me to a play at Portland Center Stage. It was over, and we were on our way back to my house, but I honestly didn’t know if the play had been any good or not. The whole time we’d been there, I’d been so caught up in the sensation of Mattias’s arm draped casually over my shoulders and the heat of his body warming me down to my toes that I couldn’t pay attention to anything happening up on stage.

In fact, even now as we made our way through Portland’s neighborhoods, I couldn’t make my brain cooperate. No matter how hard I tried to think like a rational adult, my recently acquired reverse-aging process was raging, and my hormones were in complete control. All I wanted to do was take him inside my house the second we got there and jump him. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been this out of control with lustful urges. Years. Maybe more than a decade.

I couldn’t do a damn thing about it while he was still driving, though.

My cell phone beeped with a text message. Probably Zoe. She was always good about checking in with me when the girls were with their father or otherwise not with me. I assumed it had something to do with her being the eldest.

I dug around in my purse for my phone. It beeped again, and then a couple more times before I finally pulled it free. As soon as I wrapped my fingers around it, I unlocked the screen as I drew it out.

Then I burst out snort-laughing at Zoe’s series of messages.

Are you having a good time with Beefy? Getting kissy-faced yet? You should totally take him inside and make out with him on the couch like you’re a teenager. We promise we won’t walk in on you and ruin the fun, like you would do to us. We’re cooler than that.

OMG. Beefy! Beefy. BEEFY.

Stupid phone.

B E R G Y. I meant Beefy.

Gah! Autocorrect is killing me.

Just make out with him, ’kay? You deserve a good make-out session. And pretend you never saw this. I’m going to go crawl under a rock and die now.

Mattias angled his head toward me, attempting to hold back a laugh of his own. “That good? Do I want to know?”

I shook my head and tried to stop laughing, but it was no use.
Beefy
. Every time I read it, my mind changed it to
Beefcake
, which was way too appropriate. Not to mention inappropriate. That wasn’t something anyone needed to know other than me, not even my girls. If I let it slip to one of them? They’d be chanting it every chance they got, and he would be bound to find out at some point. No chance I wanted him to see it because then I’d have to find a way to explain without putting my foot in my mouth, and that didn’t seem even remotely likely.

“If it’s that funny, I need to know. Fair’s fair.”

“Just a text from Zoe,” I forced out between snorts and guffaws.

“Mm-hmm.
Just
a text. Your phone went off at least five times, and now you’re laughing so hard you can hardly breathe.”

I needed to deflect him, and fast since he wasn’t giving up. “Autocorrect issues.”

“Those are the best. Now you
have
to tell me.” He smiled, and my pulse kicked up a notch or two.

“Just something that happened to her today at school,” I hedged, angling myself so he couldn’t accidentally read what was on my screen.

He came to a red light and stopped the car, turning more fully to face me. Based on experience, the light at this intersection would be a long one, too. Crap.

“If it’s something from school, why are
you
blushing so hard?”

“I’m probably purple from laughing until I was out of breath.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I think it’s about me.”

“It’s not about you,” I lied, even though I knew I was a horrible liar. Always had been. I should have taken acting classes in school or something. Anything to help me put on a mask and convince him I was telling the truth.

Not that I wanted to make a habit of lying, but it would be a good skill to have on occasion.

“So it is about me, then.” He grinned, that sexy, panty-melting one again. It made me want to crawl back into his lap, and I didn’t want to stop with just a kiss this time. He looked like he knew exactly what I was thinking. In fact, he looked like he would be completely on board with doing exactly that if we weren’t sitting in the middle of an intersection. “I swear, I won’t let on that I know, whatever it is. I won’t ask you to take a screenshot so we can post it all over the Internet. I wouldn’t embarrass you or your girls like that…”

“She would
die
if I let you see it. And then she’d murder me.”

“If she was already dead, she couldn’t do anything to you,” he pointed out, invoking reason—something that had escaped me the second he’d walked into my life.

“Then her sisters would kill me.”

He shook his head, clearly fighting back another laugh. “What did she say? You can’t keep it from me.”

I was reaching for my purse to hide the evidence when he made a grab for my phone. He was lightning fast, snatching it out of my grip before I could rip it away from him.

“Beefy? That’s…”

“Awful,” I finished for him.

“I was thinking more along the lines of hilarious, but we can go with awful if you want.”

I pressed my eyes closed, sinking down in my seat. “If she finds out you’ve seen this…”

“Our secret.” He tossed the phone back to me just as the light changed.

I punched in a quick response for her and hit Send before shoving the phone back in my purse.

“So what did you tell her about the whole getting kissy-faced on the sofa idea?” he asked, not even attempting to make the question casual. His words were heated. Needy. Somehow, there was still a hint of humor in it but not enough to outweigh the sensual quality it had taken on. The deep tone of his voice rumbled through my body, jump-starting my sex drive like nobody’s business.

I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. For once in my life, I didn’t mind that I couldn’t. I nibbled on my lower lip. “I told her she needed to worry about herself and her sisters and leave me alone.”