Girl Least Likely to Marry

by Amy Andrews

  He had a busy day ahead of him. He needed breakfast and a plan.

  Two hours later he was sitting in the very posh offices of a property rental agency, talking to a very attractive woman about finding him an upmarket serviced apartment in Ithica for him to move into immediately.

  Of course he could have done it himself—got a phone book and rung around. But in his experience it was best to outsource these things to an expert who knew the local market and had an eye for class.

  The brassy blonde called Abigail fitted the docket perfectly. It helped that she knew who he was, although she was careful not to fawn, which told him she was used to dealing with the higher end of the market. Even so he was more than aware from her subtle body language that she’d be first in line to volunteer should he need company in his bed whilst in Ithica.

  The problem was she just didn’t do it for him. She should have. She was exactly his type—blonde, well put together, and a cougar to boot. Tuck liked cougars. They weren’t usually out for anything other than a good time and a few hours of action between the sheets. If they could bag a celebrity that was just the cherry on the cake for them.

  But, surprisingly, over the course of a week his type had changed.

  Her eyes were artfully made up, with perfectly arched brows, but they didn’t glitter with intelligence or hold the secrets of the universe. Her hair fell in a fluffy cloud around her head and shoulders and reeked of a posh salon, but he’d bet his last dime she couldn’t go three hours without brushing it, let alone three whole days full of head-banging, style-destroying sex.

  And then there were her…assets. They were nicely on display and, hell, Tuck had always appreciated a nice rack—but he realised there was a certain degree of titillation in having to check things out thoroughly to find the good stuff.

  And he knew just the woman who fitted the bill. His new type. And it wasn’t Abigail.

  She was, however, exceedingly efficient, and within an hour she had located the perfect place for him in a quiet tree-lined neighbourhood a ten-minute walk from campus. Tuck took a taxi to the posh low-rise and spent all afternoon making phone calls to set himself up for the next three months.

  Even if Cassie was resistant to moving in with him—and he had to admit it seemed kind of crazy after only a week—he’d slept his last night in that god-awful dorm bed. She could stay on campus if she really wanted, but if she called in the middle of the night again, wanting him, he’d be sending a car for her.

  From now on any and all naked action would be taking place on the cloud-like comfort of a pillow-top mattress.

  At six o’clock his wardrobe and his home office, which his PA had packed up and put on an Ithica-bound chopper, arrived, and he spent the next hour setting up. He unpacked the suitcases of clothes and set up his office in the spare bedroom, leaving the desk area in the master bedroom for Cassie’s stuff.

  Relocating his life was no big deal when the constraints of the everyday—like a job and a budget—were non-existent, and for that Tuck was grateful. It didn’t matter where he was—he could do what he did anywhere. As long as he had access to Cassie.

  It was just after seven when he was done. He knew Cassie often didn’t get back to the dorm until after eight, so he jumped in the car he’d rented and bought enough groceries to fill the fridge. Lucky for Cassie he was an awesome cook, and he whipped up a quick pasta meal for them both before girding his loins and

  heading back to the dorm.

  Cassie recognised Tuck’s voice as soon as she entered the dorm, holding court as he was in the lounge area to a group of rapt teenagers. No big surprise, really. She was beginning to think she would recognise his voice underwater amidst a pod of whales.

  Her pulse skipped a little. Hadn’t he got her note? She couldn’t decide whether the feeling in the pit of her stomach was anger or relief. Whether she was mad at him or likely to tear all his clothes off in front of impressionable teenagers.

  God knew, she’d thought about nothing else all day.

  She shook her head. Just over a week ago she hadn’t had any indecision about her emotions. Her life, her feelings—should she have had any—had been completely cut and dry. And then along came Tuck. And her brain had gone into hiding!

  She felt a momentary quiver of something that felt a lot like anxiety. She recognised it from those troubled teen years, before medication had helped her control a brain that sped constantly ahead.

  She pushed it away on a hard swallow.

  ‘Cassie.’ Tuck stood as he spotted her. ‘Okay, guys.’ He apologised as he prepared to leave, despite the protests. ‘Gotta go now.’

  He caught up with Cassie outside her door, searching through her bag for her key. ‘Evening, ma’am,’ he murmured near her ear, low and drawn-out, just as he knew she liked. The falter in her brisk activity was satisfying.

  ‘I left you a note,’ Cassie said as his pheromones embraced her and she shut her eyes to resist them. She

  fitted her key in the lock and opened the door.

  Tuck followed her into her room. ‘I got it,’ he said.

  Cassie folded her arms, because they were aching for him and she just didn’t trust her body when she no longer understood it. She glared at him. ‘This is not cold turkey.’

  Tuck smiled at her cranky face. Her eyebrows were drawn together and she was looking at him like mould under a microscope. But he could see the telltale signs giving her away. The flutter of the pulse in the hollow of her throat, the slight flare of her nostrils, the beading of her nipples which, thanks to her folded arms, he could see clearly.

  ‘I had a better idea.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it from where I’m standing,’ she said.

  ‘I rented an apartment. It’s ten minutes’ walk from here and I think you should move in with me.’

  Cassie blinked. Had she heard right or had he finally dumbed her down enough that she’d surpassed stupid and slipped right on to crazy?

  ‘Just think about it,’ Tuck said, jumping into the silence, holding up his hands as if he was expecting her to attack at any minute. ‘It’s logical, really.’

  Yeah, he knew that was a low blow, considering the plan was three-quarters insane. But he knew he had to make a logical argument.

  ‘You said in your note that you couldn’t concentrate. And that all you could think about was me. I’m proposing that living with me will give you the best of both worlds. No need for cold turkey. If I was here all the time, if you had access to me all the time, you wouldn’t have to spend all day thinking about not having access to me. You’d know I was here to come home to.’

  Cassie, who had been girding her loins to throw him out—preferably without ravishing him first—considered what he was saying.

  ‘Part of the problem the last week has been that you’ve been deny ing your urges until they’ve built up and up and your libido is at screaming point. If I was here all the time they wouldn’t have to build. Your libido could calm down.’

  Cassie remembered the days when her libido had been non-existent. The good old days. ‘I was hoping that my libido might have…had its fill by now.’

  ‘Well, libidos can be tricky things. Sometimes these things can take a while to burn out.’

  Wasn’t that just what Gina had said? ‘How long’s a while?’ she demanded. ‘Define it.’

  Tuck shook his head solemnly. ‘Well, that’s not easily definable—there are too many variables.’ Tuck wasn’t abo
ve a bit of geek-talk to sway her his way. ‘It could be a week. It could be your entire three months at Cornell. That’s a long time with shot concentration.’ Tuck shoved his hands into the pockets of his track pants. ‘Very unproductive.’

  Cassie didn’t like the sound of that. Maybe a ‘calm’ libido was the best she could hope for while this thing burnt itself out, as Tuck had put it. It certainly wasn’t showing any sign of abating yet if the very powerful urge to kiss him currently playing havoc with her willpower was anything to go by.

  ‘Why not give it a trial run?’ he suggested. ‘I think you’ll find it beneficial to your concentration, but if you don’t…’ Tuck shrugged. ‘You can always come back here.’

  Cassie had to admit it did sound logical. A trial. Another experiment. She had no doubt that he was manipulating her lifelong obsession with logic, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t right. And, more than ever, she needed logic in her life.

  Cassie nodded. ‘Okay. Agreed. Can you get my suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe?’

  It was Tuck’s turn to blink. He’d thought it was going to be much more difficult than that. He had arguments stacked up that he’d been rehearsing for hours.

  ‘Well?’ Cassie said as she looked at a stationary Tuck. ‘Are we going or not?’

  Tuck grinned. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  And it worked brilliantly. Tuck had been right. Knowing he was there to come home to freed up all her head space and she was finally able to get into her work. Sure, she got a little spacey towards the end of the day, when her libido was obviously starting to run a little low on its Tuck hit, but Cassie was so productive she was almost delirious with it.

  Having a constant supply of sex also meant more sleep, which Cassie knew was a major requirement of her overactive brain. Instead of days of famine which had kept her awake and hungry, followed by a night of feasting which had kept her awake and sated, she had a constant source of fuel and something more potent than sleeping tablets to get her off to sleep.

  Not that she would ever stop taking them. She might be on top, but the memories of a time when she hadn’t been still burned brightly and she relied on the pills to help her maintain her mental balance.

  Still, things were good. Way better than Cassie would have ever thought possible. And if every now and then the thought that she was living with a man confused her logic she put it in the ‘too hard’ basket along with her libido and concentrated on her work.

  Their first Sunday morning together threw up the first potential hurdle, and it came from out of the blue. Tuck had been out after an early round of sex and bought every paper he could lay his hands on. It was a bit of a Sunday morning ritual for him, and Cassie was content to sit with him, eating the omelette he’d made, and work her way through the papers too.

  ‘Why’d you get this one?’ she asked, holding up a tabloid well known for bizarre stories on alien life and other things belonging in the realm of the wild and whacky.

  Tuck looked up from a sports section. ‘Force of habit. It’s amazing how much you find out about yourself in the pages of a tabloid.’

  Cassie raised an eyebrow. ‘I think that’s called narcissism,’ she said as she flicked to the second page.

  Tuck grinned. ‘No. It’s called protecting my reputation.’ He turned his attention back to the college ball scores as he said, ‘Plus I know who to sic my lawyer on.’

  Cassie shook her head, her gaze falling on a particularly startling headline. ‘Do you mean like this?’ she asked, holding it up for him to see. ‘“Tuck is my Baby Daddy”’.

  Tuck’s head snapped up as the blazing bold headline jumped out at him. His NFL official photograph was there, along with a picture of a vaguely familiar busty blonde woman with a toddler on her hip. ‘What the…?’ he said as he stood and headed to her side of the table.

  ‘Do you know someone called Jenny Jones?’ Cassie asked as she scanned the article.

  Tuck leaned on Cassie’s chair, rage building inside him as he read over her shoulder. Sure, he remembered Jenny. He’d spent two nights with her in Vegas just after his divorce was final.

  ‘Yeah.’ Tuck’s jaw clenched. ‘I know her.’ He reached for his phone and stalked to the bay windows that looked down onto the street.

  ‘Who are you ringing?’ she asked.

  ‘My lawyer.’

  It went to voicemail and Tuck left a terse message about the amount of money he was paying him and how he expected to hear from him in the next ten minutes.

  ‘It’s a lie,’ he said, turning to face Cassie. He couldn’t believe the bare-faced audacity of the paper to print such a wild, unsubstantiated claim. Generally his management would have been asked for comment, given a heads-up, but sometimes rags like this didn’t bother with clarification.

  He was going to sue their goddamned asses off. They were going to be sorry they’d ever screwed with him.

  Cassie blinked at Tuck’s vehemence. He started to pace, his fists curled, his face stony. ‘So you don’t know her?’ she said, tracking his restless prowl. ‘You didn’t sleep with her?’

  ‘Oh, I know her,’ Tuck said, abruptly halting his pacing. ‘And I slept with her. Exactly as she claims in the article.’

  ‘So…you could be the father?’ Cassie said. It seemed logical to her.

  Tuck shook his head emphatically. ‘No.’

  Cassie frowned. ‘You used condoms?’

  ‘Yes, we did. I always use condoms.’

  ‘You know they only have a ninety-nine percent accuracy, right? Statistically it is still possible—’

  ‘It’s not possible,’ Tuck interrupted.

  ‘Well, there is a one percent—’

  ‘No,’ Tuck interrupted again. ‘It’s not possible.’ He shoved his hand through his hair. ‘I’m infertile. Probably have been most of my life. “Idiopathic”, they call it. Which just means they don’t know what the hell’s caused it. But they suspect it was a virus that laid me low when I was eighteen…totally screwed up my season too. Trust me—I can tell you, for sure that I couldn’t get a woman pregnant if she was the most fertile female on the planet. Which is kind of ironic, considering the number of paternity tests I’ve faced over the years.’

  ‘How long have you known?’ she asked.

  ‘I found out when April and I tried to get pregnant.’

  It had been a particularly nasty whammy, on top of the recurrent knee injury screwing with his career. Nothing like being a dud at everything—quarterback, husband, man.

  Cassie didn’t know what to say. With absolutely no desire to have children herself, she didn’t understand the drive. But she could see that Tuck was gutted by it. ‘I’m…sorry,’ she said.

  The phone rang then, and Tuck answered immediately. Cassie listened to the one-sided conversation. Although perhaps rant was a better word. Tuck was steamed, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard that many four-letter words.

  Tuck ended the call and threw the phone on the table in disgust.

  ‘I take it this happens a lot?’

  He nodded. ‘This will be the eighth paternity claim against me.’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘Sorry, you probably don’t need this. But I can assure you it’s not true.’

  Cassie frowned. ‘No need to apologise. Nothing to do with me.’

  Tuck blinked. He’d been with women in the past when these accusations had come at him and they’d been spitting mad. Cassie just sat there, looking at him all nonplussed, an
d he couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You’re the only woman I know that wouldn’t have a hissy fit over this.’

  ‘It’s not really my business, is it?’ She shrugged.

  ‘Well, most women in your position would think it was their business.’

  ‘They would?’

  Tuck nodded. ‘They’d be kind of pissed.’

  ‘Because of the jealousy thing?’ Cassie asked.

  Tuck laughed again. ‘Ahh…yup. Most women want me to marry them and give them lots of little quarterbacks. They’d be more than annoyed that someone else was trying to claim that place in my life.’

  Cassie thought about that for a moment. She supposed human jealousy and other less evolved emotions might come into play here—but not with her.

  ‘But I don’t want to marry you,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to have your babies. I’m here for three months, then I’m going back to Australia, and next year I’m going to Antarctica. And all of the years after that are going to be dedicated to my career which, as my mother could tell you, is not family-friendly. This is just a libido thing, remember?’

  Bloody hell—she was hard on a man’s ego. An ego that had already suffered a few hard years with the triple blow of a tanking career, a crumbling marriage and infertility. And just when he was on the up Jenny came along to sink in the boot.

  The fact that Cassie wanted nothing from him other than a little libido-taming sounded damn good to him. And most of all it was honest. She was the only woman who had ever been straight with him about what she wanted—not even April had been honest about that.

  And damn if that didn’t feel good.

  EIGHT

  The following week Reese called as Cassie walked to the apartment after a full day at the Earth Sciences building. The campus was a virtual ghost town, with most of the summer students heading home for the looming Fourth of July celebrations. Cassie understood the importance of the holiday to Americans, but it was annoying to be losing a day at the university when she was finally back on track with her studies.