I, too, move forward in my chair, mimicking his position with my arms on the table. My arm is perilously close to my plate, which has a bit of red sauce on the edge, but I ignore it. “I’m not sure if it was his own celebrity that made him such an asshole, or maybe it just contributed to it. It’s a good question. All I know is I wouldn’t have been such a viral joke without his power or fame.”
Aaron’s eyes search mine, wondering if there’s more to it than that. But I think I’ve boiled it down as best I can about where the source of my mistrust lies.
“You’re a conundrum, Clarke Webber,” Aaron finally announces, his tone mischievous.
I laugh, nabbing my wineglass for another long sip. Looking over the edge, I ask, “Is that a good or a bad thing?”
“It’s an intriguing thing,” he admits.
“You know I’m not intentionally trying to be intriguing to get your attention, right?”
“Oh, I know that very well,” he murmurs, his tone low and seductive, and makes me wish, just a tiny bit, that I’d shaved my legs.
“I’m going to tell you a secret about me,” he says, reaching across the table and removing my glass from my hold. He sets it down, immediately placing his hand over the top of mine.
The touch is so intimate, yet mysterious at the same time, and my breath stalls in my lungs. Still, I manage to whisper, “What’s that?”
“I’ve never done this before,” he states boldly, waving around the restaurant with his other hand. “A quiet, romantic dinner. Not a single intention within me other than to have some great conversation with you. No ulterior motives.”
This revelation shocks me. It’s a vulnerability, really. It’s so profound I immediately try to make light of it, merely so he can have an out if he wants it. “Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t shave my legs, because I came out tonight thinking you might have ulterior motives.”
Aaron tips his head back, letting out a laugh that seems to fill the space around us. It’s a beautiful sound and I’m mesmerized by his carefree joy at what I just said.
He points a finger. “You see… that right there is why I’m doing something I wouldn’t ordinarily do.”
“And what’s that?” I ask, curious beyond imagination. Because damn if he isn’t just as intriguing.
“I think…” he says thoughtfully, eyes sparkling with challenge and excitement. “I think I’m trying to court you.”CHAPTER 11Wylde“That’s the last of it,” Tacker announces as he pulls one last stick off the back of the trailer, then tosses it onto the pile we’d just unloaded.
“Awesome,” I reply, taking off the work gloves he’d given me three hours ago when we started this project. “It sounds like that means it’s beer o’clock.”
“Definitely,” he replies and we both hop into the Gator to head back up to the ranch house.
I’d gladly come out to Shërim Ranch—where Tacker lives with his lady love, Nora—to help with clean up after a storm took down several trees a few months ago. There was simply no time for him to tackle the project during the playoffs, but I’d told him when he was ready to give me a call.
That’s what best friends do.
Tacker and I haven’t been friends our entire lives, but we’re as close to that deep bond as one can get. We first met while playing on the Dallas Mustangs together and through a shared love of working out, badly dubbed martial arts movies, and hockey, we became very close.
That’s why it hurt so deeply when he stopped being my friend for a while. But he had reasons.
Good reasons at that.
Tacker went through a loss no man should ever have to endure. He’d been piloting a small aircraft with his fiancée, MJ, aboard and due to an instrument malfunction in bad weather, the plane crashed. MJ died a brutal and slow death in front of him while they were trapped in the wreckage.
Tacker might as well have died in that plane, for the man who returned from that remote slice of land was not the man I’d known. He withdrew from all relationships. Stopped communicating with me, closed himself off to other friends, and generally became a bit of a liability to our hockey team in Dallas. I tried everything—from giving him space to railing at him for letting himself slip away. None of it worked. Nothing mattered to him because he was dead inside.
His saving grace ended up being his transfer to the new expansion team, the Arizona Vengeance. He was traded in the expansion draft, and I’d missed him sorely when he was gone. I’d still tried to maintain contact, but he only sporadically responded. Even when he had, he’d never offered up anything of substance. The few times our teams played against each other, I’d tried to get him to meet up with me after, but he’d declined. While I’d never let him know exactly how deeply that had cut me, I had my own period of grief and mourning over losing my friend in that plane crash.