What scared me was the idea that she was putting her trust, her faith, hell, her entire life in my hands.
She didn’t have anyone else.
No backup plan.
No way out.
This was it for her.
And I hadn’t married her because I’d wanted to help her. Not really, even if that was what I’d told myself in order to paint it in a better light, so I could live with myself and get to sleep at night.
I’d married her as an act of revenge.
My decision hadn’t had a single fucking thing to do with this sweet, innocent, entirely-too-trusting woman. Not really, even if I’d tried to convince myself otherwise. It’d had everything to do with Amanda and Colby.
I was an ass.
And now I had to take her to live with me and my enormous dogs when she was apparently scared of dogs, and I had to find a way to make it right.
Fuck, this was not going how I’d imagined it. I shouldn’t ever be allowed to make decisions while under the influence of tequila.
Only one thing was certain: it would never happen again.
THE DOGS’ BARKING, even from the other side of the closed door, was deep and loud enough to have my knees shaking out of control. My pulse had never been more erratic, and I didn’t think I could remember how to breathe. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make my lungs fill with oxygen. My chest felt tight, like too many rubber bands were squeezing the very life out of me.
With the key in his hand, Riley looked back over his shoulder and winked at me. “It’s fine. Promise.”
I nodded, and I might have mumbled something like “mm hmm,” but it sounded a lot more like a whimper to me. Fine was not a word I could associate with my present situation.
But then the door was open, and two gigantic furry monsters were jumping all over Riley, and I couldn’t stop myself. I dropped my grip on the suitcase and ran for it, heading straight back to the Escalade and tugging on the door, but it wouldn’t open because Riley had already locked it.
“Wait! Don’t run, they’ll only chase you because they think it’s a game,” Riley called after me, but there wasn’t any point in him saying anything at all because my brain had gone straight into panic mode and there was no making it stop now.
I jerked on the handle, but it wouldn’t budge, so I moved to the next door and tried that one, almost frantic because the enormous dogs were jumping up and putting their huge paws on the side of the vehicle next to me, and they each had to be easily three times my size, and they were barking in my ears and one of them had its gargantuan paws on my back and was surely about to bite my head off, and I couldn’t breathe at all and I thought I might pass out at any second, and then one of them, the one behind me, licked my neck and drooled on me.
They were about to eat me. No doubt about it. They were salivating over their tasty meal, and I was set to be the main course.
And then I really did stop breathing.
WHEN I CAME to again, the first thing I saw was the face of an unfamiliar woman leaning over me, her dark brows drawn together in a line as she placed a cool, wet cloth on my forehead.
Then I heard the dogs barking again, but even though the sound was slightly muffled because they were on the other side of the door, I still jumped so high I nearly came up off the bed they’d laid me in.
“It’s all right. RJ’s got them downstairs.”
“They’re that loud and they’re downstairs?” I squeaked, still so anxious that I couldn’t help but drag the covers higher, as if they might provide me with some protection from the beasts.
“They’re big dogs with big barks, but that’s all.”
I blinked up into her almost-black eyes, so scared I was sure the fear was making me even more confused than I ought to be. “Who are you?” I asked bluntly. “And who’s this RJ you mentioned? And where’s Riley?”
She didn’t seem to be offended by my rapid-fire series of questions, at least. She dipped the cloth into a bowl of water and wrung it out again before returning it to my forehead. “I’m Anne Golston, a friend of Riley’s. I’m married to Nate. You might know him as Ghost, since that’s what everyone calls him. And RJ is Riley—that’s just what all the other guys on the team call him, like they call my husband Ghost. They all have nicknames, and I spend so much time around all of them that they’ve started to rub off on me, too. Anyway, Riley’s downstairs with Nate, and they’re trying to get the dogs to calm down. Max and Lola are just excited because he’s home, and because you’re new. That’s all.”
“They’re as big as bears.” And as terrifying as bears, too. At least I assumed they were, since I’d never actually encountered a bear. After this, it wasn’t high on list of life experiences I couldn’t wait to have, either. Bears were probably even scarier than dogs. Certainly deadlier, at the very least. I didn’t think a trip to the zoo would be on my to-do list anytime soon.
“Size isn’t everything,” Anne said, winking like it was some sort of inside joke. But since I wasn’t on the inside, I didn’t get the joke.
Besides, in this case, I would have to argue that size mattered an awful lot, thank you very much. The bigger a dog was, the more damage it could cause me.
“You feeling okay?” she asked after wiping down my face one more time. “We were pretty sure you were just surprised by the dogs and weren’t actually sick. RJ didn’t think you were, at any rate. Nate thought we should call an ambulance, and for a minute there, I was with him.”
“I don’t need an ambulance,” I said, pushing myself upright in the bed and shaking my head. But then I wished I hadn’t done either of those things, because I felt dizzy again.
Anne raised a dubious brow. “You sure about that? You’re looking kind of green.” She gently nudged me back against the pillows and reached for my wrist to check my pulse. “Just keep breathing for me, okay? I won’t let him get an ambulance as long as you keep breathing.”
I had to fight the urge to tug my arm away, and it was an even more difficult struggle to keep forcing oxygen into my lungs. I wasn’t used to people touching me. Didn’t like it. It was one thing for Riley to touch me, because he was my husband, but something else entirely when it was this woman, someone I didn’t know at all.
“I’m sure,” I forced myself to say between labored, shaky breaths. “I’m just terrified of dogs.”
“But surely you knew…” Anne’s voice trailed off when she met my eyes. Must have been my expression.
“We didn’t know anything about each other,” I admitted, the words barely more than a whisper. “Nothing at all. Or at least nothing important. It was such a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive decision.”
Impulsive pretty much summed me up, at least.
On his part, maybe it was more that he’d been drunk rather than impulsive. But now that he knew I was terrified of his dogs—so scared I’d gotten to the point of fainting, something I’d never done before—he was definitely going to see if he could undo our marriage. He was bound to want out. This would be the final nail in my coffin. In no time, I would be back at square one, trying to figure out what I could do to survive. But at least he’d brought me back into the U.S. first, and hadn’t ditched me in Mexico like Paul had. Small blessings, right? I had to focus on those and not the big, scary things I was facing.
But Anne didn’t look at me with pity, thank goodness. I didn’t think I could have handled her feeling sorry for me just now. The pity I felt for myself was hard enough to bear.
A soft knock sounded at the door, and when I glanced over, Riley came through it looking as white as the sheets I was surrounded by.
“Hey,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed and brushing my damp hair away from my face. “Don’t scare me like that again, okay?”
Scare him like that? I was the one who’d been terrified out of my mind.
I tried to laugh it off. “No promises as long as there are dogs around.”
“I know you said you weren’t really a dog person,
but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
I forced a grin that probably came out looking like a grimace. “Now you know?”
“Now I know. So now we have to figure out a plan.”
“A plan?” I didn’t follow.
What sort of plan would he need for divorcing me and sending me packing? He might even be able to get the marriage annulled instead of needing a divorce, due to our not knowing enough about each other before getting married or something. He could pay his lawyer to draw up some paperwork and send me on my way, and then he and his monster dogs could be perfectly happy without me.
“For getting you unscared of them,” Riley said emphatically. And he winked. And it was his sexy wink, the kind he gave me when he wanted to get naked and do all sorts of delicious things with me when we were all alone.
But Anne was still sitting on the other side of the bed, and those enormous dogs were still somewhere in the house waiting for their chance to eat me for dinner, and my lungs started to get tight again.
“Remember what I said about you needing to keep breathing?” Anne put in. There was a laugh in her eyes even if it didn’t come out of her mouth.
I nodded and forced some air into my lungs. It was the most painful breath I’d ever taken, but I did start to feel better after I slowly exhaled. A bit, at least. Not a lot, because one of those dogs barked from somewhere downstairs, and I jumped all over again, nearly coming off the bed in my fear.
I looked over at Riley and almost burst into tears. “I don’t think that’s possible. Not for me. I’ve always been—”
“I used to be scared of heights,” Riley cut in before I could work up another head of steam. “Not just scared—terrified. My knees would shake when I had to climb a flight of stairs at school. I would never step foot in an elevator that had glass doors. And airplanes? No chance in hell. I wasn’t getting on one, no matter how much you paid me. Wasn’t going to happen. The same kind of thing would happen to me. I’d get shaky and my lungs would seize up, and I’d just full-tilt panic. Doctors tried to prescribe some pills for me to deal with the panic, but I didn’t like taking them. I just refused to do anything that involved heights.”
“It’s not the s—”
“It is the same thing,” he cut in before I could finish. “Different fear but essentially the same reaction. And I conquered it instead of letting it conquer me.”
“But a flight of stairs never took a chunk out of your leg,” I countered.
“Maybe not, but it took a hell of a lot of courage for me to climb up all those stairs at Mont Royal to get to the top and look down over the city. And it took even more for me to get into a perfectly good airplane and not only not shut the window, but jump out of it. But I did it.”
“You went skydiving?” I asked, half in awe, half sure he was just pulling my leg. Maybe he wasn’t even scared of heights at all and was just coming up with a story to make me feel better about the fact that he had dogs and was going to keep them instead of keeping me if I couldn’t make myself face my fears.
“Ghost took me and just about forced me to do it. Said I’d never be able to make it in the NHL if I couldn’t even get on a plane, and there was no better way to get over my fear of flying than jumping out of one.”
“He made you jump out of a plane when you were scared of heights? And he’s still your friend?”
“My best friend. Because of shit like that, to be honest.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I could be friends with someone who treated me like that.”
“Someone who pushed you to get past your fears?” He quirked up a brow, but I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me or genuinely curious about my response.
“Pushing someone out of a plane is kind of sadistic, isn’t it?” And if he pushed me to be around his dogs…
This wasn’t going to work out. I’d been an idiot to ever think it could. But I had finally, definitely learned that my life was never going to be like a fairy tale. I wasn’t living in a romance novel. I needed to get my head out of the clouds and back on solid ground before I did something else as epically stupid as marrying a complete stranger I’d met in a Mexican cantina. I couldn’t afford to make a mistake like that ever again. I doubted I’d survive it.
“So you’re not willing to at least try?” he asked. And he sounded kind of…defeated, I supposed would be the right way to describe it. He brushed a curl of my hair away from my face in a sweet, tender move that sent shivers up and down my spine. “This is a hard line for you? You can’t learn to be around dogs?”
Out of nowhere, a fresh wave of tears welled up in my eyes, and I asked, “What’ll happen if I can’t get past my fears?”
I expected him to say something like We’ll just have to go our separate ways. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything like that at all.
He said, “We’ll just have to find a way to compromise, then, won’t we? Just like with everything else. Neither of us really knew what we were getting into with this, so we’re figuring it out as we go. But it would mean a lot to me if you’d be willing to at least give this a try.”
“Compromise,” I repeated softly, trying the word out on my tongue. I knew what it meant, in theory, of course. But I couldn’t think of too many times I’d been given the opportunity to see it in action.
Not in anything pertaining to me, at least.
When the courts had taken me from my parents, no one had asked for my opinion. When they’d placed me with one foster family or another, I wasn’t given any say. I just did what I’d been told to do, hoping that this time, everything would work out in the end, that this time, I’d be part of a family for real.
Compromise was an entirely foreign concept when it came to my life.
“We’ll all be there to make sure you’re fine,” Anne said, reminding me that she was still sitting on the other side of the bed. “I’ll hold your hand or whatever you need. Nate and RJ’ll keep the dogs under control. We won’t let anything bad happen.”
“Will they be on leashes?” I asked, staring deep into Riley’s eyes, hoping for reassurance or peace, or something other than the intense fear that had clawed me from the inside not too very long ago.
“Already harnessed up,” he said. “They won’t hurt you. Even if they wanted to, we wouldn’t let them. But honestly, they’ll just want to love you into submission. They’re big puppies, enormous lovebugs. That’s all.”
It didn’t appear I would be getting out of at least trying to be around his dogs without having an utter and complete panic attack. “Submission?” I said, popping up an eyebrow so he’d know I was joking.
He grinned in response and then headed out the door. “Give me thirty seconds before coming down.”
Thirty seconds. That wouldn’t be anywhere near enough time for me to remember how to breathe again.
This was bound to be a disaster.
I HELD ON to Anne’s hand with a death grip, my entire body shaking with each and every step I took down the stairs, which suddenly seemed to have twice the height and depth of normal stairs.
“You’re not breathing again,” she said, keeping her voice quiet enough that the guys and dogs wouldn’t hear her words but loud enough that it would break through the steady ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk of my pulse. “You’ve got to start breathing or the whole deal’s off and I’m taking you back upstairs and putting you to bed. And we might go ahead and call an ambulance, too, if it comes to that.”
I nodded, but it still took me about two more steps before I was able to fully exhale the pent-up air from my lungs. “No ambulance,” I insisted. I didn’t have any health insurance and I couldn’t afford to pay for any trips to the emergency room, so I just had to keep breathing. And even if Riley could put me on his insurance plan now that we were married, he hadn’t done it yet, and I had no intention of becoming a burden for him and his bank account.
He’d already done more than enough for me; I couldn’t become a financial liability for him on t
op of everything else.
Three more steps to go, and then we’d be on the ground floor. Where the dogs were. Max and Lola, I silently reminded myself, not to be collectively known as the dogs, although in my mind, it was far more likely for them to become the hell-beasts. They were dogs, and they had names, and I needed to think of them by their names because they were essentially the only family that Riley had now.
Other than me.
But he’d had his pets a lot longer than he’d had me. I couldn’t let myself forget that fact. They might as well be his children. And what man wouldn’t choose his own children over some woman he’d met in a Mexican cantina and had only known for less than a week?
Married or not, I had a feeling that he’d choose Max and Lola if it came down to having to make that sort of decision.
Not the best line of thought for me to be having at the moment. I gave myself a mental shake and tried to think positive thoughts.
He had married me.
He’d brought me back to Portland with him instead of leaving me in Mexico to fend for myself through whatever means I came up with.
He had the sexiest smile on the face of the planet, especially when he smiled at me.
He was a good guy. One of the truly good guys out there. I knew it, deep down inside in my soul. More than that, I actually believed it. I had to believe it, because I’d entrusted my entire life into his hands.
So that had to mean he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me, right? He wouldn’t let his monster dogs eat me for dinner?
That shouldn’t have gone through my mind as a question, but it was certainly formulating as a question in my erratic thought process.
But then I saw one of the dogs. It was enormous, somehow even bigger than I remembered from the brief moments of panic before I’d fainted. And it barked, which triggered the other dog to bark, too, which made me just about jump out of my skin.
Their barks were as big and terrifying as their bodies. And I could imagine how big their teeth must be. More than big enough to rip me to shreds should they choose to do so. No doubt, their jaws were perfectly strong enough to clamp down and shake the life right out of me.
Power Play (Portland Storm Book 16) Page 8
