I let the silence drag on for a few moments, and then tried for the most casual possible opening. “Didn’t you have a date tonight?”
“She texted me that she got home safely, yeah,” Finn said idly.
“A guy like you must go out a lot,” I suggested, after waiting a moment.
“More than some, less than others,” Finn replied. “It’s really starting to come down, isn’t it?”
“I’ve driven through worse,” I said, but Finn wasn’t wrong—the light snow had deepened into something heavier, and it was starting to accumulate, blanketing the road in front of me with a thin, lacy coating, that thickened more and more as the flakes started falling faster.
“So, how did you meet the lady you were with tonight?”
“The way I usually do,” Finn said.
I fought down my mounting sense of frustration; I could get that he would be pretty guarded talking to a stranger, but I wasn’t even asking anything probing. I went silent, trying to focus on keeping us from getting killed as the snow came down harder, and trying to think of a way to get Finn to open up to me, at least a little bit. What point would there have been in risking arrest if I couldn’t get anything out of it?
“Okay, this is getting kind of scary,” I said, more to myself than to Finn.
“We should get off the road,” he said.
“No, I’ll get you back to your place,” I told him, not wanting to blow my cover.
“There’s a motel up at the next intersection,” Finn said. “I’ve stayed there before—it’s decent. They’ll give us a room, and we can wait this out.”
I looked in the rearview mirror, thinking quickly. It would make an even better opening for what I needed to accomplish, and maybe—just maybe—Finn would be more willing to be candid, if we were in close quarters.
Peering out over the road in front of me, I could see where the snow was not just covering the street but had, maybe two blocks down, reached a height that the snow tires wouldn’t be able to handle.
I turned off at the motel and pulled into the parking structure next to it.
“Roll down the back window,” Finn told me.
I did, and an attendant—braver than me, given the current frigid temperatures—came out from a little booth inside of the entrance.
Finn spoke to the man then turned to me. “He’ll park the car for us,” he told me.
I got out, hoping against hope that Finn wouldn’t notice that, apart from the jacket, I wasn’t at all in the approved uniform. Thankfully he didn’t mention anything, gesturing for me to follow him into the building as the valet took the car off to park it.
***
Within minutes, Finn and I were alone, in the biggest suite the motel boasted. It was the Presidential, with one huge, California king bed, a bathroom that was probably the size of my bedroom at home, and a seating area that was cordoned off from the sleeping space by a half-wall. It wasn’t the best of any hotel I’d ever been in, but it was more than nice enough as a place to hole up while the snow fell outside.
“I don’t think this is going to end by morning,” I said, looking out through the window. Part of me was elated—I didn’t think it would be all that easy for Finn to kick me out of the room, the way the snow was coming down.
“Those are some interesting shoes for a driver,” Finn observed, and I turned to look at him on the couch. Up close—and not in the weird light of the club or the dimness of the car—he looked a lot more like a regular person, but at the same time, there was that enigmatic charisma to him, something that made him even more attractive than the sum of his features.
“I have a confession to make,” I said, smiling at him nervously. “I’m actually not a driver. I’m a journalist with the Inquisitor.”
“I figured something like that,” Finn chuckled. “I saw you inside, trying to get my attention.”
My cheeks warmed up at that, and I kicked off my shoes, wiggling my toes in the fine, soft texture of the carpet, and sitting down on one of the chairs opposite the couch.
“So, if you knew, why didn’t you get me arrested or something? Why let me stay in a hotel room with you?”
Finn raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. “If you’d insisted on continuing to drive through the snow, I probably would have called the cops,” he said. “And I thought you were kind of enterprising. I assume you have a piece to write about me, right?”
I nodded. “In-depth, as much information as possible,” I said. “If you didn’t kick me out of your car, then…”
“I’m not interested in satisfying your reporter’s curiosity,” Finn said. “Let’s order some room service, and call it a night.”
He picked up the phone and I listened as he rattled off a list of snacks from the limited menu the motel provided: cheese fries, chicken fingers, apple pie, and a carafe of hot chocolate.
“Anything else you want to add to that?” He looked at me.
“Coffee?”
Finn made a face as if he had expected exactly that answer, and told the person on the other end of the line to add a coffee to the order.
“It’ll be fifteen minutes,” he told me when he finished the call.
“So you won’t satisfy my reporter’s curiosity, but I assume you don’t intend to spend the rest of the evening in silence,” I said.
Finn crossed his arms over his broad chest and looked at me for a moment. “That probably wouldn’t be much fun,” he said finally. “How about we turn the tables a bit? Instead of you asking me questions, I’ll ask you.”
I thought about it; if that was what it would take to get on his good side, enough to get him to open up to me so that I had even a fighting chance at getting my assignment done, I would have to do it. I figured he’d ask a few questions, and then I could use that as an excuse for getting him to answer a few of mine.
“Go ahead,” I told him. “I’m an open book.”
“What made you want to become a journalist?”
I shrugged. “It’s kind of a funny story, actually,” I said, casting my mind back. “I was in high school, and I’d wanted to join the drama club, but when they made the announcements about when and where the clubs were going to be meeting for the first time, I wrote down the one for the school newspaper instead.”
I chuckled at the memory. “I went to the first meeting and didn’t realize what I’d done until after the room was full. And the editor made it sound so interesting: time out of classes to get our work done, being part of a group of interesting, switched-on kids. The next week I figured out the right place to go for drama, but little by little, I ended up spending more time on newspaper stuff than on theater stuff.”
“You fell in love with it,” Finn suggested, and I nodded.
“Before I knew it, I’d gotten a scholarship based on my portfolio, and then I was majoring in journalism, running the campus alternative paper, and then…” I shrugged again. “I got the internship at the Inquisitor and finally a job there.”
“Do you think you’ll be there the rest of your career?”
I shook my head. “I sure as hell hope not,” I said. “It’s kind of an old boys’ club, and I’ll probably only go so far no matter how long I stay.”
“So, what’s your goal, then?”
I thought about it for a moment.
“I was hoping that I could get some experience and then maybe move on to a larger paper. Or at least one that’s got a little more prestige attached to it.”
“Like the New York Times?”
I laughed. “I don’t know if I could ever reach that high,” I said. “But maybe one day… the Tribune, or something like that. Right now, though, I’m just interested in becoming a full staff writer. I’ve only written filler so far, and it’s getting old.”
“So you got this assignment out of the blue?”
I felt a little irritated at that comment, but I had to admit to myself that I’d invaded Finn’s life; he was entitled to ask some pointed questions about my moti
ves.
“I’ve been working hard to prove myself with the small-time stuff,” I said. “Doing the best I can with some lukewarm material.”
A knock at the door interrupted us, and Finn got up to answer it. I waited in my chair as he exchanged some small talk with the room service guy, and paid for the food he’d ordered. He also gave a generous tip on top of it, and told the guy he hoped could get home safely or that the motel would give him somewhere warm to wait out the storm.
He wheeled the cart into the room and for a few minutes, both of us were too involved in eating and drinking to talk. I watched Finn eat; I was sure, being a professional athlete, that he probably had a micromanaged diet during the season.
“This is probably a treat for you—the food I mean,” I said, and Finn smiled slightly.
“I told you I’m not interested in feeding info to a reporter.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not allowed to ask out of normal, human curiosity?”
“I eat mostly what I want to eat,” Finn said. “I have a training diet, but it’s more of a guideline than anything.”
“See? That wasn’t so hard,” I said playfully.
“You’re supposed to be telling me about you, though,” Finn said, waving a chicken finger in my direction.
“So what else do you want to know?”
“Are you into sports at all?”
I smiled and snagged a cheese fry from the pile that Finn had ordered. “I used to follow football a bit,” I said. “I got into it in college—all over some boy who, it turned out, just wanted to date my roommate.” I shook my head at the memory. “I follow hockey a little. I watch some games, but until the assignment came up, I didn’t really pay much attention to individual players.”
“That’s honest at least,” Finn said. He finished off another chicken finger and sat back. “So you weren’t the sports type in school, I take it.”
“I was pretty good at lacrosse, actually,” I told him. “Every other sport, though, wasn’t for me.”
“Lacrosse is hard; you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“There was something about it that just sort of connected for me,” I explained. I was actually surprised at how easy it was for me to talk to him—not as a celebrity, not as a hockey star, just chatting with another person over junk food.
“I sucked at flag football; I couldn’t hit a softball to save my life; I ended up spraining my ankle when my gym class did soccer.” I thought for a moment. “I was almost okay at hockey, but I wasn’t quick enough to really score any points. And to top it off, I was completely useless as a goalie.”
Finn laughed. “Goalie’s harder than a lot of people think,” he said, nodding. “You have to have quick hands, and a sharp eye. You almost have to be psychic.”
We kept talking for a while, and Finn avoided any questions from me that he deemed to be “reporter’s curiosity” while somehow managing to get me to tell him things that I hadn’t even told Jen: about my dreams, my goals, whether I was dating anyone at the moment. As the night wore on, though, and the warmth from the coffee and hot chocolate we’d ordered started to disperse, we both noticed that the heating in the motel wasn’t exactly roaring.
“What temperature is it in here, anyway?”
I stood up, feeling the slight trembling shiver in my arms and legs, and walked over to the thermostat. It was set to “MAX HEAT” and showed a temperature of fifty degrees.
“Oof. Fifty. That’s not exactly warm.”
“I think it’s getting colder outside, too,” Finn said, pointing to the window. It was iced over from the snow blowing against it, and the ice was starting to get pretty thick, forming cobweb-like crystals that were almost as frightening as they were beautiful.
I looked around the room; there was a thick throw folded over the couch, and selfishly I claimed it, wrapping it around my shoulders and sitting down on the couch next to Finn.
“There are some more blankets in here,” Finn said. “I think there’s even a pair or two of slippers in the closet, if I remember right from the last time I was here.”
“I’m guessing you have a really nice apartment,” I pointed out. “Why would you stay here?”
“I have my reasons,” Finn said, sticking his tongue out at me.
Impulsively, I reached out and poked his nose, raising an eyebrow to dare him to do something about it. He grabbed my hand and I felt a little tingle at the contact, but snatched my hand back from him instead of letting him hold onto it.
Our hope that the heat would hold out slowly began to die out in the early hours of the morning. It was maybe 4 a.m., and we were both shivering.
“I’m not trying to make a pass or anything,” Finn said, “but we’d probably be warmer if we got under a blanket together.”
I thought about it; I was freezing, and it wasn’t going to get any warmer. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Finn would be true to his word; he might have been shivering less than I was, but he was still shivering.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s stay on the couch, though.” Somehow, moving to the bed seemed dangerously tempting—I couldn’t ignore my growing attraction to him; he was handsome, likeable, and easy to talk to.
“Sounds fair,” Finn said. He rose from the couch, walked over to the bed, and began pulling and tugging the blankets off of it. There were three layers: a duvet, a thermal blanket, and a flannel top sheet. He folded the whole mess over his arms and came back to the couch. “Want to grab the slippers for us?”
I got up and walked over to the closet, finding two pairs inside. Thankfully, the slippers were closer to socks than shoes; I grabbed both pairs and turned back to watch Finn arranging the blankets on the couch. He laid down the flannel sheet, then the thermal blanket and the duvet, folding them over for us to climb in.
I took advantage of the moment to carefully slip off my bra underneath my dress, not wanting to be uncomfortable when I lay down. I tucked it into my purse and walked back towards the couch with the slippers in hand. I was shivering almost violently, and I realized that as cold as it was, it might have been a mistake to take off my bra. But Finn had turned down the lights, and looked at me with nothing more than a friendly gaze. He said he isn’t trying to make a pass at me, I reminded myself.
I handed a pair of slippers to Finn and put my own on. My feet still ached from the heels, but the slippers at least took care of the chill.
I glanced at the couch and then at Finn. “Which one of us gets to be the big spoon?”
“Get comfy and I’ll take up whatever is left over,” he suggested.
I climbed onto the couch and smoothed my dress against my legs as I laid down, edging towards the back of the seat. Finn sat down and brought his legs up, then pulled the blankets over both of us, draping his arm over me.
I stiffened a little, but once I started warming up, with Finn’s muscly body close to mine and the blankets trapping in the heat we generated, I began to relax, especially when I realized that Finn was true to his word: he didn’t make a single move.
We talked for a while longer, watching the snow through the window, but we were both exhausted. I couldn’t remember, later, what we’d talked about as we started to doze off, wrapped up in blankets and each other—just that talking to him was soothing enough to send me into a peaceful, contented sleep.
FIVE
Amy
When we woke up, I could tell almost immediately that it had warmed up outside—at least a little bit—by the fact that I felt not just comfortably warm but actually toasty under the layers of blankets, next to Finn. I realized that he must have been awake for a while, just holding me, letting me sleep.
“I think the snow let up a while ago,” he said, freeing one of his arms from the blankets to point at the window.
I looked; the ice had partially melted away, and I could see outside more clearly. The snow had definitely stopped falling, and the slice of sky that I could see at the top of the window showed it was probably
mid-morning.
“I wonder if it warmed up enough to clear some of the snow out.”
Finn threw back the blankets and we got up off of the couch, walking over to the window. I felt weird, standing next to him there, both of us in slippers, and me braless under my dress and borrowed blazer. It was like the old “walk of shame,” except that we hadn’t had sex. Of course, it would be difficult to persuade anyone else of that, if someone saw us leaving a motel in the clothes from the night before.
Stop thinking like that, I told myself firmly. You need to be thinking about how you’re going to get this assignment done.
I could tell my job was going to be much more difficult than I’d imagined when Kent had pitched the assignment to me. Even though I now had access to Finn—the most direct access any journalist could wish for—he wasn’t cooperative with my questions unless they seemed like simple, innocent conversation, and he genuinely didn’t seem to have anything going on that I could try to exploit.
Baby Maker - A Secret Baby Sports Star Romance Page 3
