The Husband Game

“You, about a minute ago,” he responds with a smirk. “Come on. You must have something you like to know about other people when you first meet them. Something you’re too scared to ask, maybe.”

My face flares. The first thing that leaps to mind is not appropriate to ask in a public coffee shop. Because I want to know what he’s like in the bedroom—alpha, dom, bossy and assertive? Or communicative, slow and sweet… Or some mix?

I refuse to ask that though. I’m way too sober to go there. So I just clear my throat and rack my brain for something real. Something on the level of what he just asked me. What would tell me more about who this guy really is? “Okay. What’s your scariest childhood memory?”

“Ooh.” He leans back in his chair—although he keeps his leg still pressed against mine, for which I’m grateful. The warmth seeps through my body, makes me feel hotter than even the fire burning just feet from our table. “That’s a good one.” He flashes me a grin, and that, too, warms me all the way down to my toes. “Probably the time at my family’s winter cabin up in Canada, when my younger brother and I went skating.”

“Ice skating?” I ask, then immediately feel like a dolt. Winter cabin? Canada? Duh, Lila.

But to his credit, he doesn’t laugh or make fun of me. He just nods. “It was the first winter my dad decided to teach us. He’d learned how to skate when he was only three years old—my grandparents are Canadian. Runs in the family, I guess you could say.”

I smile, and tilt closer to him to catch his words better.

He leans in, too, and my breath catches all over again at his nearness. At the scent I catch this time, like spearmint and pine woods, all undercut by a hint of heat and spice. God, he smells amazing. “Dad always worried that he’d waited too long to teach us. When we finally learned that winter, on the frozen lake out behind our cabin, I was terrible. I kept tripping over my own feet.” He laughs at the memory.

I try but struggle to associate the confident, muscular man before me with a clumsy boyhood.

“So I was determined to get better. I spent every day of our vacation out there, with my little brother trailing after me, practicing. But we’d gone up late in the season that year, and I didn’t think about how warm the days were starting to get…”

My eyes widened. “Oh no.”

He catches my gaze and bows his head. “I think you can see where this is going. I was warming up one morning, and the ice broke underneath me. I fell straight through the hole, into the lake.”

My eyes go wide. “That’s terrifying!”

“It was.” He smiles, though, making reliving such a scary memory look easy. “I couldn’t breathe—I’m a pretty decent swimmer, but my skates and all my winter clothes weighed me down. And the cold…” He shakes his head. “It’s hard to describe it unless you’ve experience it yourself. It’s more than just cold, at that point. It’s a weight, crushing your whole body, your lungs… Everything wants to contract. So it makes holding your breath against it even harder.”

“What happened?” I ask, bending close, forgetting all about keeping a respectable distance now. My wide eyes hover just inches from his, unable to pull away. All I can think about is the young boy this handsome man used to be, trapped under the weight of all that ice and cold water. How terrified he must have been.

“I saw this glove appear. Bright red. It was my brother’s hand. And I knew…” He sucks in a slow breath. “I knew if I didn’t reach for it, I was a goner. And in that moment, it would have been so easy. To give up, to just let the cold win. But that was the moment when I learned I’m a fighter. Because everything in me just shouted, No.” For a moment, he goes quiet. I study his gaze, the deep, gray pools of his eyes, almost like ice floes themselves. His mouth quirks at the corner, a wry little smile. “It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, just swimming that eight or nine feet back to where my brother was holding out his hand. But I made it, weights and all. He pulled me back through the hole, just as my dad came running from the house. Together they managed to haul me out of the ice.”

“God.” A shudder runs through me. “I can’t even imagine. How long did it take you to recover from that?” My whole body tenses, trying to imagine it.

Charlie’s hand comes to rest on my knee, as if in sympathy. Funny, how he’s the one comforting me. “I spent the whole day and night alternating between warm baths and a heap of blankets beside a roaring fire. There was a bad storm, too, so the roads into town were unpassable to take me to the hospital until the next day…” He laughs again, and I reach down to rest my hand over his.