by Amy Andrews
After some preliminary chit-chat about Cornell and the PhD, and Reese and Mason’s state of bliss, Reese said, ‘So, Mason and I are having a big Fourth thing here, and we were hoping you could hop on a bus tomorrow and come join us.’
Ordinarily Cassie would have said yes. She’d missed Reese, and although she had kept in touch over the years it was a novelty for them to be in the same country!
‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘Tuck has plans for me.’
‘Tuck?’
‘Yes,’ Cassie said. ‘Some big surprise he’s arranged.’
‘My Tuck?’ Reese clarified. ‘You’re…still seeing each other?’
‘Uh-huh.’ There was silence at the end of the line for a moment, and Cassie realised maybe this news was the type of thing that gal pals shared with each other. ‘Sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘Well, it’s not like that. I mean, it is…but… It’s just a libido thing. It’s just…sex. I only moved in with him for the sex.’
‘You moved in with him?’
Cassie held the phone away from her ear as Reese’s squeak reverberated loudly around her ear canal.
‘Okay,’ Reese said. ‘Whoever this is, stop goofing around and put my friend Cassie on. My friend Cassie with a mega-brain, who lives and breathes astronomy and does not shack up with a man she met not even a month ago. Who doesn’t shack up period!’
‘Funny,’ Cassie murmured, holding the phone slightly away from her ear as Reese’s voice became more and more shrill.
‘Cassie…honey…this is completely out of character for you…’
‘I know that,’ Cassie said. ‘But my work was suffering. All I could do was think about him…it was so…dumb! Then Tuck got a place at Ithica and suggested how logical it was that I move in—’
Reese snorted. ‘I bet he did.’
Cassie shook her head vehemently. ‘No, he was right. This way I get to satisfy my brain and my libido.’
‘Win-win,’ Reese said.
‘Exactly,’ Cassie agreed.
There was some more silence before Reese spoke again. ‘Honey…Tuck’s my cousin, and I love him, but…he can be a bit of a…hound dog. Just look at this latest news about that woman in Vegas.’
‘It’s not his baby, Reese.’
‘Oh…are the paternity results in already?’
‘He doesn’t need them,’ Cassie said. ‘He’s infertile. He found out when he and April were trying to get pregnant.’
‘Oh, no,’ Reese gasped. ‘Poor Tuck. I didn’t know that. I knew he was going through a hard time a few years back, but I didn’t realise…’
Cassie stopped and waited at a pedestrian light. ‘He’s fine,’ she dismissed.
‘Are you sure? Tuck’s always had a pretty big ego, and most men’s identities are wrapped up in things like their jobs and their virility. To have someone popping up and throwing his inabilities in his face… I don’t know. It has to be a blow…’
The light changed and Cassie crossed the road. ‘Well, he sicced his lawyer on to it with great delight and hasn’t mentioned it since, so…’
‘Men don’t, though…they brood and bury it. Just look at how screwed up Mason was. It’s not very healthy. Have you asked him about it?’
‘No.’ Cassie felt a pang. Was Reese right? Was Tuck bothered by this more than he was letting on? ‘Should I have?’
Was she supposed to do something about it?
This was why she preferred science. It made sense. She knew what do with it.
‘No, no…’ Reese assured her. ‘Anyway, I have to go, but maybe Mason and I could come to Ithica next weekend for a visit? I’ll have probably wrapped my head around the whole Cassie-living-with-a-man thing by then. Maybe we can all get together? I’ll see what Gina and Marnie are doing.’
Cassie hung up a minute later, the apartment in her sights. But for the first time in three weeks the spring in her step was missing.
‘You’re quiet,’ Tuck said an hour later as he picked up their plates and headed for the kitchen.
Normally Cassie was full of the day’s developments, where she was at with the project, or the latest thing of beauty a telescope had captured somewhere in outer space. But tonight she’d eaten and let him do most of the talking.
Cassie opened her mouth to deny it, but then she realised he was right. She’d been preoccupied with what Reese had said and trying to puzzle out what was expected of her. If this whole thing with Jenny had suddenly brought Tuck’s infertility to the fore and he was feeling somehow less…masculine, was it her role to restore his sense of worth?
Was she supposed to get him talking about it? Give him an avenue for discussion? Did he need his hand held? His ego stroked?
Should she have asked him about it?
Argh! She’d never felt this inept in her life. Where was Gina when she needed her?
‘Reese thinks that this paternity thing may be magnifying a sense of injured masculinity stemming from your infertility and that you may be brooding and burying your feelings in an unhealthy way,’ she blurted out.
Tuck blinked. ‘You told Reese about my infertility?’
Cassie shrugged. ‘I assumed she already knew,’ she said matter-of-factly. She missed the tightening at the angle of his jaw as she ploughed on. ‘Is she right?’
Tuck turned to face the sink and flicked the hot water tap on. ‘Reese should mind her own damn business.’
Cassie stared at Tuck’s back. Right, then. That seemed a fairly definitive stay-out-of-it to her. Except she knew enough about social interaction to know that words and actions could often contradict.
She stood and headed towards him. ‘If she is, I was thinking maybe I could…help you through it.’ Somehow… ‘Like the way you’re helping me with my libido issues.’
Tuck turned back and smiled at her, a gleam in his eyes. ‘Oh, you’re helping.’
‘I am?’
‘Sure—nothing like a steady supply of great sex to soothe a man’s ego.’
So his ego was bent out of shape? She pulled up at the other side of the bench. ‘I think that might be the unhealthy part.’
Tuck leaned his butt against the sink. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt more healthy.’
Cassie had to admit, as every cell in her body purred beneath the blast of sexual energy arcing between them, that the man made a good point. But this hadn’t exactly been the easiest thing for her to do, and she wouldn’t let him, or her libido, derail her from her objective.
‘Tuck. I’m trying to…to be sensitive to your…issues…’
Tuck was momentarily stunned, and then he laughed. ‘Well, look at you,’ he teased. ‘Going all Dr Feelgood on me.’
‘Tuck.’
He sobered. ‘I’m fine.’ He turned back to the sink. ‘I was married, my career tanked, we couldn’t have a baby and then I wasn’t married any more.’
‘Two years isn’t very long,’ she said to his beautiful broad back. Even her parents, who lived in a strange kind of separate togetherness, had managed thirty years.
Tuck shrugged. ‘I doubt anyone was surprised. We’d only known each other for a few months before we got hitched.’
Cassie tried to absorb the enormity of such an impulsive act. It seemed as crazy as Reese falling for Mason in a week all those years ago. Or Gina sleeping with the betrothed Carter.
And just as unfathomable.
‘That seems a little rash,’ she said.
Tuck stared at the suds covering his hands. It had been rash, but at the time it had seemed so damn right. He turned again, shoving one soapy hand on his hip. Cassie was looking at him cluelessly, her eyebrows scrunched together in a frown, a pencil behind her ear. He doubted she’d understand his state of absolute desperation in her world of crystal-clear logic.
But he suddenly wanted her to.
‘She was a nurse where I was having my physical therapy. I’d been through several operations and my career was stalled, she was young and sweet and adorable, and I felt old and clapped-out and impotent. She believed in me in a way that wasn’t fake like so many others around me and I needed that. Football was all I had. It was all I knew.’
He raked a hand through his hair, angry at himself still for taking all her youth and sweetness and sucking it out of her as his career spiralled downwards.
‘When she wanted a baby it seemed like the one thing I could give her—because the glamorous life of an athlete’s wife hadn’t exactly been rainbows and unicorns. And, even though part of me knew that bringing a kid into the crumbling mix of our marriage would be stupid, she loved me and I was trying to hold on to that. To have one part of my life going right. It seemed like a way to hold us together.’
Cassie frowned. ‘For a smart man that was a really dumb move.’
Tuck gave a short, sharp laugh. Trust Cassie to tell it like it was. ‘I don’t know… It might have been okay if I’d loved her like she’d loved me, if we’d got pregnant. But we couldn’t…and when we found out that it was me…it was my fault…it hit me worse than the tackle that gave me a concussion during my first Super Bowl. I mean, I was the QB, I was the man…and then I wasn’t. I couldn’t be a father and I couldn’t play football either, so what was I?’
Cassie could hear the anguish twisting his words and knew it was her turn to say something. Her role to make it better. Her social awkwardness closed in around her. ‘I don’t think your…ability to father a child defines you any more than your ability to kick a football around.’
Tuck crossed his arms. ‘It sure didn’t feel like it at the time. I think I spent a lot of time defining myself as a right SOB for a while there.’
‘And now? With football and babies off the table?’ she asked.
‘Not much point wanting something you can’t have, is there? Football is over, and I’ve come to terms with that. And to be honest I’m not really sure I want a kid anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve moved on.’
‘For what it’s worth, I don’t much care about having kids either.’
Tuck chuckled. ‘And that’s what I like about you. So you can assure Reese I’m just fine. That my masculinity…’ he dropped his gaze to her breasts ‘…is just fine.’
Cassie swallowed. Oh, yes, indeed it was.
Tuck’s mobile rang later that night, just as he finished Skyping with a software engineer about the app. If it had been anyone else other than Dylan he wouldn’t have answered. The shower had just been turned on and a wet, naked Cassie was exactly what he needed after a day of dealing with lawyer crap—and their conversation earlier had roused old hurts.
But he’d spoken so little to his best friend since Reese had jilted him a month ago he knew he had to take the call. They chatted for a while about the wash-up from the wedding-that-wasn’t, and Tuck was satisfied that Dylan really seemed okay, and they chatted about the most recent paternity allegations against Tuck.
‘So…’ Dylan said. ‘Reese called me earlier.’
‘Ah,’ Tuck said. His meddling cousin had been a busy little beaver, hadn’t she? ‘Don’t you think it’s odd to be taking phone calls from the woman who so recently jilted you?’
‘Nice try at deflection, buddy. But you know Reese is worried that Cassie will get hurt.’
Tuck frowned. So this wasn’t about him and his masculinity. It was about Cassie. And Reese was sending her ex-fiancé to do her dirty work. ‘Reese should know that Cassie is not the kind to emotionally invest. She’s just having fun. Blowing off some steam. We both are.’
‘Right…but maybe you want to think about not getting involved for a while? Let the dust settle from this Jenny thing? Trust me, you don’t die from celibacy.’
‘It’s fine, Dylan,’ Tuck assured him. ‘It’s the perfect relationship. She’s not some groupie. She doesn’t want to marry me or have my babies. Which is just as well, considering…’
Tuck had tried not to make that sound bitter, but Dylan was the only person other than April, a couple of doctors and apparently now Reese who knew the truth, and this week in particular his infertility had come back to haunt him.
‘She’s here for three months, bro, and I’m her drug of choice,’ he hastened to add. ‘It’s a temporary thing. It’s…symbiotic.’
Dylan laughed. ‘Symbiotic? She turning you into a scientist too?’
Tuck laughed too. ‘Just getting my geek on.’
‘She doesn’t really strike me as your…type.’
Tuck shrugged. ‘I think I’m getting myself a new type.’
‘Okay…’
‘No, I mean it,’ Tuck said. ‘She’s amazing, you know. She has all this serious geek thing going on, and she walks around with this pencil behind her ear all the time, and it’s so damn cute. But underneath it all she’s incredibly passionate. And she doesn’t do any of that clingy, needy stuff—’
‘I thought,’ Dylan butted in, ‘you liked them clingy?’
Tuck had to admit that up until now that had been true. He’d liked being the big man, squiring around his women, treating them like princesses no matter how brief their acquaintance. But that had been the role his celebrity, a string of eager women and examples from his peers had forced him into early in his dating career, setting up an unhealthy pattern.
Cassie’s independence had been a breath of fresh air.
Tuck grinned. ‘Apparently not.’
There was silence for a moment or two, then Dylan said, ‘Are you…are you serious about her?’
‘Nah.’ Tuck laughed, pushing the feeling that Cassie was already under his skin aside. ‘It’s just fun, Dylan. She’s using me. I’m letting her. Win-win.’
‘Just…be careful, okay? And by that I mean look out for you too.’
‘Aww, buddy, are we going to hug now?’
‘Okay. I’m going to hang up.’
‘Good, I have a naked woman in a shower waiting for me.’
Dylan snorted. ‘Celibacy rocks. You should try it.’
Tuck laughed. ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’
One minute later he’d shed his clothes, stepped into the cubicle, and his hands were sliding onto Cassie’s wet hips and heading north.
Celibacy rocks, his ass.
Cassie looked down at the arid landscape far below. Tuck’s Gulf Stream had been flying since six a.m. and it was now midday.
‘When are you going to tell me where we’re going?’ she asked Tuck as he placed a tray with a selection of gourmet subs cut into small portions on the table between them.
Tuck sat opposite her and grinned. ‘You’ll know when we get there.’
Cassie didn’t like surprises. There was no logic to them at all. ‘Fine,’ she said as she selected the closest portion. ‘Can you tell me how much longer we’ll be flying?’
‘Another hour or so,’ he said, then bit into his sub.
As Cassie had no idea in which direction they were flying—although it was obviously some
kind of west—the ETA didn’t really help to ascertain their whereabouts, but at least she had a timeframe in her head. She liked to know things. When she set out every day for work she already knew in her head what the day would be like. It didn’t mean she couldn’t be flexible, should something crop up out of the blue, it was just logical and time-effective to have a systematic plan.
They ate quietly for a few minutes, with Tuck’s gaze never leaving her face. His eyes kept dropping to her mouth, and it was disconcerting that something so mundane could kick her libido into overdrive.
She was beginning to think this thing would never burn itself out!
‘So,’ she said, looking around the plane’s interior, desperate for some conversation to divert the blood pooling between her thighs back to her brain. ‘I guess this means you’re seriously rich, huh?’
Tuck stopped chewing for a moment at her bald statement. Then he laughed, and then coughed as he almost inhaled his lunch. Most women had that sized up within a few minutes and then spent the entire time trying to spend as much of his money as possible. It was a novelty to be with someone who didn’t seem to care. In fact, by the look on her face, it would seem this was the first time his wealth had actually sunk in.
‘I’ve done all right for myself,’ he said, after she’d passed him a bottle of water and he’d gulped down a couple of mouthfuls.
Tuck waited for her to ask him to clarify how well he’d done, or to ask how much the plane had cost. Instead she said, ‘I’ve never been in a plane this small.’
Tuck shook his head and chuckled.
Cassie frowned. ‘What?’
‘Nothing…I’ve just never met a woman like you.’
‘I’d be surprised if you had,’ she said. ‘Female astronomers with a genius IQ are pretty thin on the ground.’
