Decidedly With Love

by Stina Lindenblatt

  I mean, hello, who wouldn’t want to see a bunch of hockey players go Magic Mike?

  After dinner, I turned on my laptop. I was due at the center soon but wanted to work on next week’s column before I left.

  Dear Dr. Lovejoy, I typed, but instead of contemplating next week’s question, my thoughts drifted to the one place they shouldn’t have gone—to the kiss in my office.

  I could have strangled Lisa when she walked into the room—or hugged her. I wasn’t sure yet which was better. The kiss had been nothing more than a teaser of what I could expect if I’d let things go further.

  Did I wish for them to go further? The correct answer was no…except that would be a lie. The way my body reacted to the tease of a kiss meant I was in deep trouble. Yes, I had kissed a lot of guys before. Okay, maybe not a lot, but enough to recognize the difference between those kisses and the one with Travis. His were in a whole other universe.

  The problem? I hungered for more than that kiss. A whole lot more than Travis Hamilton was capable of giving. I longed to fall in love with a guy and for him to return the sentiment. That wasn’t asking too much, right? I also longed for a guy who would prove to me that he would never give up on me—the opposite of everyone else in my life.

  But maybe this deal with Travis wouldn’t be so bad. I wasn’t just talking about the fundraiser and the chance to keep my store where it was. If he was amenable to it, maybe the deal would include us kissing.

  With all those perks rolled into one tidy package, what could go wrong?

  Right—back to my column.

  I’ve been seeing a guy for a few weeks and really like him. But now I have to do the unthinkable…introduce him to my friends. My past boyfriends were jerks and because of that, my friends are insanely overly protective of me. What should I do?

  Sincerely,

  Finally Found A Good Guy

  I mean, who hadn’t dealt with overly protective friends when it came to boyfriends?

  Had Hannah ever been that way? You’d better believe it. But that probably had more to do with the abuse I’d suffered in foster care than anything else. She never wanted to see me get hurt again. Which meant a guy had a better chance of surviving a face-to-face meeting with a Siberian tiger than if he pissed Hannah off.

  Dear Finally Found A Good Guy,

  The first thing you need to ask yourself is if this boyfriend is everything you think he is. Given your track record, there is a chance you’ve fallen into your regular pattern of being attracted to the wrong guy. If you are positive this guy is different, then you’ll need to give it time before you introduce him to your friends. Make sure he is ready to stand by your side no matter what. A guy who is strong enough to survive whatever your friends throw at him is more likely to stick around for the long haul. In time, he will win your friends’ trust. But if you throw him to the tigers too quickly, your relationship might not have a chance.

  At least I didn’t have a pattern. I mean, sure, most guys didn’t make it to date #3, but some had. Hannah had a pattern—a pattern of not giving guys a chance beyond the first date.

  Yes, the two of us were quite the pair.

  “Will you play foosball with me?” was the first thing Nikki said when I entered the game room at the youth center. The foosball, ping-pong, and hockey tables awaited eagerly to witness my defeat.

  I sucked at them all—but at least I was slightly better at foosball.

  Nikki and I got into position. “How was school today?” I asked her. Nikki was seven years old and lived with her single mother.

  “It was okay. We had a spelling test.” She made a face, her eyes crossing comically.

  I laughed. “Went that well, huh?”

  “I hate spelling tests. They’re sooo boring.”

  “I’ll agree with you there.” Fortunately, God created a life-changing invention called spell check that saved my ass more times than I cared to admit.

  I pushed the ball through the hole in the table and the game began. It was only a minute before Nikki scored on me. As much as I would’ve liked to pretend I had let the ball slip past my goalie, it just wasn’t the case.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Nikki asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I’m single.”

  She contemplated that for a moment. “Do you want a boyfriend?”

  “You don’t need one to be happy.” How was that for a non-answer?

  Those early Disney animated princess movies had it all wrong. They had little girls believing you could only be happy if Prince Charming came along and swept you off your feet. But who needed Prince Charming when you were a smart and independent woman? And it was my generation’s job to teach girls that.

  Yes, I took my responsibility very seriously.

  “What about a girlfriend? Would that make you happy?”

  The corners of my mouth twitched up. “No, I’m definitely into guys. But what I mean is that I run a successful store. That makes me happy.”

  “Momma’s got a new boyfriend.”

  “Does he make her happy?”

  Nikki and I could have almost been sisters. Only difference was that while her father wasn’t part of her life, her mother loved Nikki. She willingly sacrificed everything to ensure her daughter felt loved.

  Nikki grinned. “Very happy. Maybe he has a brother for you.”

  I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing out loud. “Don’t worry, I’m doing fine without you checking if he has a brother.” Or a cousin.

  “You sure? Because I really don’t mind.” She said it so seriously, I couldn’t help the laugh that burst free.

  “I’m sure.” Of course the memory of Travis kissing me picked that moment to flash in my brain.

  He’s probably not even that good a kisser, the reasonable voice in my head said. My lips sighed dreamily—or maybe that was me—and I asked the voice how it enjoyed living in delusional land. The kiss in my office might have been brief, but it had been knock-my-socks-off amazing.

  Which left the one burning question I was afraid to ask: would a deeper, fuller kiss be the equivalent of rip-off-my-panties earth-shattering?

  I guess I’d be finding out soon enough.

  Only I would keep my panties firmly in place.

  Which wouldn’t be too hard—I just had to remember the humiliation I’d experienced back in high school.

  What happened?

  It was Travis’s and my junior year. Our teacher had paired us together for our history project. Yes—there was a good chance I’d been slightly crushing on Travis since transferring to the school two months before that. He had been dating one of the popular girls until their recent breakup.

  I was positive he wouldn’t be interested in me. Unlike his ex-girlfriend, my clothes weren’t fashionable or trendy. According to her, I wasn’t good enough to walk the same planet she inhabited.

  Nice, huh?

  Another awesome lesson I had learned back then was that I was pretty much an open book. She had seen me staring at her ex-boyfriend and decided I was nothing but a creepy stalker. She even threatened to tell the school if I didn’t keep away from him.

  Anyway, back to the history project. The day I showed up to work on the project with Travis, my heart was beating something fierce—thanks to Kendra’s threat and my crush on him.

  And then I got the update. Travis wasn’t going to be my partner. I had to do the project myself. How did I find this out? His ex-girlfriend had been more than delighted to share that with me. She always was a generous person. She also told me that Travis hadn’t been interested in working with a reject like me. A reject who was part of the foster-care system.

  The good news in all of this? I got top marks on the project.

  The second piece of good news? I whipped his ex-girlfriend’s ass on it. Of course, she took this like the spoiled brat that she was and accused me of cheating. The teacher ignored her. Apparently he wasn’t her #1 fan, either.

  So there you had it—the reason for
why I shouldn’t have liked Travis. Or at least why teenage me had been destroyed by Kendra’s comments. But after spending time with him during the past few days, I was starting to question the truth of what she had told me.

  Now that I thought about it, I didn’t remember seeing Travis much during that final month of school. He had been there, but not as much as before. He’d barely been in our history class. But because of my teenage insecurities, I had been easy prey for Kendra and her cruelty.

  Now satisfied that she didn’t have to help me find a boyfriend, Nikki got down to business—which involved beating my ass for the next two games.

  And while this was happening, I tried not to think about pretending to be Travis’s girlfriend, tried not to think about the kiss he and I had shared. And I also tried not to think about how much I craved kissing him again.

  Right—I would’ve had better success swimming across the Atlantic…to England.

  13

  Travis

  “Have you seen the movie Magic Mike?” I asked Mark Milone and Sean Burrows, two forwards from the Rock, along with Josh. We were in the gym where we trained during the off-season.

  “Isn’t that the stripper movie?” Josh asked.

  “That’s the one.” I removed the clip from the bench press bar.

  His mouth quirked up to one side. “Then that would be a definite no. Not my scene.”

  “Bridget dragged me to see it when we started dating,” Mark said, his voice low, as though admitting this would be a major blow to his manhood.

  Had I seen the movie? I might have watched a clip from it on YouTube. I might have also seen the climactic dance scene from The Full Monty.

  Completely for research purposes, mind you.

  “Never seen it,” Mark said as I slid the twenty-pound metal plate onto the end of the bar. “Fortunately, Becca went to see it with her friends.”

  After securing the clip at the end of the bar, I lay on the bench and positioned my hands shoulder-width apart. I had already loaded the other side of the bar with another twenty-pound plate.

  “Why do you want to know?” Josh asked from behind my head.

  “Because I thought we could do something like that to raise money for the James Bell Youth Center.” I glanced up at Josh. It had nothing to do with him being the one who was spotting for me. It was because Josh and I were similar when it came to our grandparents raising us—or grandmother in my case. Except instead of Josh’s parents dying in a car accident, his asshole father had played in the NHL and had been more interested in puck bunnies than his own wife and son. He abandoned them when Josh was a kid. A few years later, his mother did the same thing.

  So if there was one thing Josh could appreciate, it was what a lot of those kids at the youth center were dealing with.

  How did I know what they were dealing with? I had done research on the center after I made the agreement with Emma. It helped kids who were at risk because of their home environments.

  “We?” Josh asked, amusement in his tone and the quirk of his mouth. “You expect us—as in you and me—to dance around onstage in our skivvies?”

  Still lying down, I said, “No, not just you and me. Us—as in the four of us, and anyone else from the team who wants in.”

  Sean laughed. “You’ve got to be shitting us, right?”

  “Do I look like I’m shitting you?”

  “Not exactly,” Mark said, looking like he was doing his best to not laugh, “but where the hell did you get the idea? I mean, what did you do—wake up this morning and think that stripping in front of a bunch of horny women would be a brilliant idea?”

  “Trust me,” I told him, “you don’t want to know.”

  Mark glanced at both Josh and Sean. “What do you say, guys? Do we want to know where he got the idea from?”

  Both guys nodded. “Yep, I’d be interested in finding out,” Sean said.

  “Me too,” Josh added.

  I sat up. This conversation wasn’t one I wished to have while lying on the bench. “Well, if you have to know, it was my grandmother.”

  All three guys stared at me for a second, then burst out laughing.

  “Are you seriously telling us your eighty-year-old grandmother said she wants to see members of the team dance onstage in our underwear?” Mark said, the first one to get his laughter under control—if you could call it under control.

  “Technically, she said shirtless, but I figured if we did something like on Magic Mike, we would raise more money for the center. Women go nuts for crap like that.”

  “And you think the team won’t have an issue with us showing off our junk to a group of screaming women?” Sean asked, eyebrow raised.

  “Well, Becca definitely will have an issue with it,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, I can’t see Holly being too impressed, either,” Josh piped in.

  “We’re not completely stripping,” I said. “Our underwear stays on.”

  Sean frowned. “You’re not making us wear a thong though, right? Those things look damn uncomfortable.”

  “Yet I bet you have no issue if your woman wears one.”

  The corner of Sean’s mouth tugged up to one side. “Damn straight.”

  “No thongs.” Because as hot as they looked on women, there was no way I was wearing anything stuck between my ass cheeks.

  “All right, so we’ve cleared that up,” Josh said. “Except what do you know about choreographing a stripper act? Or do you have other skills beyond playing hockey and painting murals we’re not aware of?”

  Sean and Mark both looked at Josh. “He paints murals?” Sean asked.

  Josh nodded. “He painted one in Lily’s bedroom when Holly was pregnant. But painting and dancing aren’t the same thing.”

  No shit.

  “How hard can it be?” I asked.

  Right—I didn’t believe it was all that easy either. But it wasn’t like we needed to dance like professionals. I mean, have you seen The Full Monty? Those guys definitely weren’t professional dancers.

  Of course they had something I didn’t have—a choreographer. But I didn’t mean the old guy in the movie who supposedly came up with the dance routine. They had someone behind the scenes. Someone who knew what the fuck they were doing.

  “I don’t suppose any of your wives have ever taken dance?” I looked at all three men.

  Mark and Sean both gave a hell-if-I-know shrug. Josh looked like he would be more than happy to hightail it from the gym.

  “Holly can dance?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “She took lessons when she was a kid.”

  “Do you think she’d be interested in helping us? For charity?”

  If Holly helped, how could Josh say no?

  He shrugged, but unlike with the other two guys, I wasn’t letting him off the hook. Not that I was letting any of them off the hook for long. “Can you call her and ask?”

  A few minutes later, I had my answer.

  “You owe me big-time for this,” Josh said after getting off the phone with his wife.

  “Does this mean she’s in?”

  “Yes, she’s in. I believe her exact words once she stopped laughing were, ‘I can’t wait.’ So I guess that means I’m in too?”

  The grin on my face? I hadn’t expected it to be so easy to find someone who could help with the actual dance.

  But while that might have been the easy part, I knew the rest wouldn’t be.

  Christ, my plan to get Granny off my case about having a girlfriend had better work after all of this.

  I looked at Mark and Sean. “So what do you say? Are you two in?”

  They exchanged glances. “Yeah, I guess I’m in,” Mark said at the same time as Sean’s “Looks like it.”

  “So it’s only going to be the four of us?” Josh asked.

  “I’m hoping to convince a few more guys on the team to join us,” I said.

  Several hours and a bunch of phone calls later, I had recruited a total of eight teammates—inclu
ding Josh—willing to join me onstage for the fundraiser. Unfortunately, not everyone on the team lived in San Francisco during the off-season, or else I might have gotten a few more yeses.

  Now I just had to figure out the other details…like when and where we would be rehearsing.

  At the thought of the planning involved in the event, a shudder rolled through me.

  It was late afternoon by the time I returned to Emma’s store. She was at the back, where the boner-inducing, sexy underwear was kept.

  “Are you planning to wear that on our first date?” I asked as she hung the black lacy number on the rack. The black lacy number that left nothing to the imagination—other than me visualizing what she looked like in it.

  She rolled her eyes. “Since we’re not actually dating, that would be a no.”

  Too bad. Although I guess it didn’t matter—not unless I could convince her that a good fuck or two while we were “dating” would be worthwhile…for the sake of appearing authentic.

  Would Granny find out about it? Hell no. And I was sure she wouldn’t want to know all the details—unless it meant she would be getting a great-grandchild.

  Did I see kids in my future one day? It wasn’t on the agenda—nor was a wife. I just wanted to focus on what was important: my career.

  But that didn’t mean I wasn’t a fan of kids. Far from it.

  A woman walked to the fountain. Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then she tossed money into the water. Plop. Plop.

  She turned away from the fountain and walked over to the shelf containing mugs.

  “People actually believe their wishes will come true just by throwing coins in the fountain?” I asked Emma. If only it was that easy. I’d do that in a heartbeat if it meant winning the Stanley Cup.

  “It’s not about wishing for something. It’s about the possibility of finding love. Most people realize it’s not as easy as simply tossing the coins into the water—but it’s nice that they want to believe it. And thanks to them, I’ve raised enough money to buy paints for a mural at the youth center. Now I’m working on raising money to pay for an artist who can paint it. I would do it myself, but a monkey can draw a better stick man than me—which doesn’t bode well when it comes to creating a mural.”