Dean’s head tilted to the side. “Huh? Sneakers?”
“It’s her replacement word for s-h-i-t,” Georgia explained on a whisper.
“You realize the baby can’t spell yet, right?” I asked with amusement.
“Considering your kid is doing advanced calculus at the age of six, I think you might be wrong. My baby could be figuring out a way to cure cancer inside the womb right now for all we know.”
Georgia burst into laughter. “Yeah. That’s not what a baby made by Cassie and Thatcher is doing right now, I know that with certainty.”
Cassie glared, but Georgia held up a finger and went on. “Scheming? For sure. Plotting? Yep. But finding a cure for cancer? Nope. Not happening.”
Cassie’s ice-cold stare melted into a grin.
Dean downed the rest of his drink in one swig and signaled for the waitress to bring another.
“What’s your deal?” Georgia asked, twirling a finger in the direction of his glass.
“I’m in fucking New Jersey,” he whispered like the words tasted foul.
“Oh, come on!” Georgia said with a laugh. “You took the day off. My husband is essentially paying you to be here.”
“Well, of course, you like it,” he dismissed. “You live here now. You didn’t have to sit next to a shirtless man on the train who smelled like a decaying rabbit.”
Cassie covered her mouth, mumbling from behind her hand, “Well, that’s graphic.”
“Trust me,” Dean said with a sigh. “The commute is that awful.”
Cassie must have noticed the look on my face. “You do it every day. Is it really as bad as the drama queen says, Win?”
I looked from her face to the others’ and back again, admitting, “I don’t know about the dead rabbit, but it’s not great.”
Georgia’s eyes softened sympathetically.
“I’m actually thinking about moving over here.”
“Oh my God!” Georgia bounced in her seat as Dean made a face of disgust. “You could get a house close to Kline and me! We’d be able to help out with Lex if you needed too!”
Cassie rolled her eyes at Georgia’s enthusiasm.
I reached for Georgia’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Thanks. I’m not sure if I could afford a house near you guys, though.”
“It’s not—”
“It’s a fudging mansion,” Cassie cut her off.
I started to go on, but I stopped talking when the waitress set down our plates. Before I could manage the first bite of my chicken salad, my phone pinged on the table with a text notification. Wes’s name flashing across the screen with the words, Wanna do a late night in the office tonight?
Cassie snatched the phone from the table before I could stop her.
“‘Do a late night in the office’?” she asked with a sly grin. “Hmm… A late night… in the office…with Wes? What does that mean exactly? I’m probably going out on a limb here, but is do a late night code for getting fucked on Wes’s desk?”
I rolled my eyes and grabbed my phone from her.
“Holy s-h-i-t!” Georgia exclaimed. “Are you and Wes having s-e-x?”
I took the largest bite of my chicken salad that I could manage and then proceeded to gesture toward my mouth and shrugged.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Dean announced. “You are boning the delicious, mysterious, hotter-than-the-sun Wes Lancaster? I’m literally eating lunch with the three biggest bitches in the tri-state area right now.”
We all three giggled at that.
“Seriously. Why are you taking all of the hot ones off the market?”
“Kline, Thatch, and Wes like pussy,” Cassie teased. “You like cock, remember?”
Dean grinned. “I do like cock. Love it, actually.”
The woman at the table across from us put her hands over her daughter’s ears. I tried my best to give a nonverbal apology, but she was probably going to want to keep them covered.
Cassie pointed toward me. “So, how is Wes’s cock?”
The burn of the hot seat upon me, I forgot all about that lady and her daughter and engaged in cock talk of my own. Though, to be fair, I was using it to say I wouldn’t talk about the cock. “I’m not talking about Wes’s cock over lunch.”
“But you’ve seen it?” Georgia continued the interrogation.
I just stared back at her as I took a sip of my water.
Cassie’s smile nearly consumed her face. “And you’ve licked it? Sucked it? Fucked it? Rode that—”
“Yeah. Okay,” Georgia said with a hand in Cassie’s face. “The baby doesn’t need to hear these kinds of things.”
I blushed. Neither did I.
Cassie slapped her hand away. “But I do. Tell me. Are you having sex with Wes?”
I shrugged and did my best to square my shoulders. “Maybe. A little bit.”
“I knew it!” Cassie exclaimed. “I fluffing knew it!”
“Are you guys dating?” Georgia asked.
I shrugged again. “Uhh…well…no. I don’t know… We’re just sort of….”
“So, you’re fuck buddies,” Cassie answered for me. “That’s fantastic. Good for you, Win. Good. For. You.”
“Do you want to date him?” Georgia questioned. “Like, do you want a relationship with him, or is it just about the sex?”
I honestly didn’t know the answer to that.
“What’s he think about your downgrade to Jersey?” Dean asked with a raise of his perfectly coiffed brow.
“He doesn’t think anything,” I countered. “We’re not in a relationship.”
Eyes turned wild and suspicious all around, and I couldn’t really blame them. There was a certain amount of want in my voice despite my efforts to conceal it.
Do I really want a relationship with Wes?
That seemed like a huge risk with a man like him. A man who had a mile-long history of never settling down and always perusing the pussy buffet.
I honestly wasn’t sure he was capable of a relationship, especially with a woman who had a child.
But he’s different with Lex…
Which was true. But that was right now. What would happen six months down the road? Would he still enjoy being in a relationship with a woman who would always make her daughter top priority?
“Winnie?” Georgia called softly with a gently knowing look in her eyes.
With a quick shake to clear my head, I pointed to Dean and decided the only thing I could at that moment.
“When the waitress comes back to bring you another round, I’m going to need one too.”
Another week and a couple of degrees Fahrenheit gone, November was officially in full swing. I glanced at the date on the lock screen of my phone and cringed.
The 20th. Jesus. November is almost over. Where the hell is the time going?
We were headed straight toward the fucking awful part of living in New York with below-zero wind tunnels thanks to tall buildings and physics, and old, garbage-contaminated snow, but, thankfully, other things were heating up.
Our season was on fire with a nine and zero record, and Winnie and I burned even hotter than the team. With sex and banter whenever we could manage, I was the happiest I’d been in…as long as I could remember. And when I thought about all the friction we used to build the flames—against walls, bent over desks, in the fucking locker room showers—the need to complain about winter in New York just up and disappeared.
I glanced up from fiddling on my phone straight into the clear blue eyes of Winnie Winslow herself. With her hair pulled back from her face and a lavender sweater covering some of the sweetest inches of her skin, she looked beautiful. Confident and poised and so goddamn irresistible I had to force my eyes away from her when another person spoke.
“You need to up your social media game, sir,” Sean Phillips said with an easy, slightly antagonistic smile. His eyes popped against his darker skin, mischief flickering in the light green depths. It was times like these that I could see his relation to Cassie so clearly it was startling.
“I don’t need to have any social media game,” I told him, Winnie, and the three other players crowding the not-all-that-small space of the training room with their sheer size and bulk.
Professional football players had a way of looking small on the field, but they dwarfed any normal-sized man. I was comfortable with my height at six foot two, but according to Thatch, being six two in a room full of football players was like being five foot seven on America’s Next Top Model—you were the runt of the professional litter.
Plus, I wasn’t carrying seventy extra pounds of muscle like these guys.
“He’s right,” Jeremy Rollins, one of our star wide receivers, agreed. He had a vertical jump fucking cats would envy, but right then, as he agreed with Sean and started an epidemic of pushing me into the social media foray that I knew wouldn’t end with him, I considered taking out both of his kneecaps. “I saw the Bruins owner tweeting all kinds of updates and shit. Really got the fans into it.”
Winnie’s eyes flared with her agreement.
Fuck. Maybe I could make Georgia do it.
Winnie laughed like she knew what I was thinking, and with the amount of time we’d been spending together, she probably did. “Not someone else. You. You should tweet,” she asserted.