“Have I ever?” Usually he could take her baiting, but gah! Tonight he’d felt wanted. Was that it? After two and a half years of dealing with someone who hated his guts, someone had literally stopped him dead, grinned at him, and said, “I want you.” Or, well, something along those lines. Tenner had been wanted. Someone had put hands all over his body and tried to please him.
And Ten had to admit—even in the midst of all that adrenaline and testosterone, Ross McTierney had worked hard to please him.
Tenner wouldn’t mind taking his turn, actually, but… but hookups like that didn’t happen twice, did they? Was there like a call-back process for a hot angry screw against a wall?
“There’s always a first time,” she said. “I mean, you pretended to be straight once.”
God. This. “I tried to be straight because this really fun girl I knew in college wanted to hang out with me. And then we were having a baby, and I didn’t want to leave her alone. Nina, I’m sorry. I am, but some of this was on you. And now we both have a great kid and an obligation to at least be civil to each other. I mean, you’re going out on a date, and you look fantastic. Go, have a good time. I’m planning to play with the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Have a nice weekend, okay?”
She looked away. “You too,” she muttered. “Email me your schedule. I… you know I hate last-minute stuff.”
It was true, and while it wasn’t “I’m sorry for being a bitch,” it was as close as she’d come in almost three years.
“I do.” He grinned. “But hey, if nothing else, this guarantees her Sunday in the park while we practice.”
“Better you than me,” Nina said in complete sincerity. “She does love to play.” Nina had loved sitting in the stands, with a beer and vendors who would sell her water and frozen ices, but actually being out in a field had never been her thing.
“You know it. Have a good weekend.” He took the win then and turned toward where Piper was waiting for him in the car.
Piper chattered on the way to his house like she’d been let off a leash. He heard everything—from what she’d learned in school to how much she liked doing summersaults in gymnastics, to how much she really wanted an I-Spy toy so she could look at bugs.
Especially that last one.
He got her to his three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house in Empire Hills in Folsom, loving it more as he pulled in. Nina had chosen something larger—but then, her job paid better—in a more upscale neighborhood, but Tenner’s place had… well, Tenner.
It had rich furniture with hardwood floors and deeply colored area rugs and a giant floor-to-ceiling condominium for the cat he’d adopted pretty much the minute the ink was dry on the sale.
He’d loved pets, had grown up with several of them, and while Nina was very frank about hating the cleaning and the mess that came with them, Tenner had vowed he wasn’t going to deprive himself of a creature that would love him, just because he had to clean a litter box. The result was Joe, the big long-haired black cat with one white sock, who ran up to Piper as soon as she walked in, rubbing his face against her legs hard enough to knock her off balance. After they said their hellos, he shooed her upstairs to take her bath while he fed the big furry food vacuum on the enclosed porch that overlooked the backyard. He listened to her singing in the bathtub wistfully—she was almost too old for baths now, she told him, and someday she’d take a shower like Mom. In another twenty minutes, she came downstairs in her cartoon-themed pajamas, and he sat her down for dessert.
As she ate her two-cookie allotment with a glass of almond milk, because it made her tummy feel better, she began to wind down, her eyes going half-mast, her chatter stalling.
“How come you were late, Daddy?”
“I got to play softball,” he said, and the happiness radiating on her face almost undid him.
“Like the pictures you used to have over the fire?”
Nina had put up their wedding picture, Piper’s most current picture, and one picture of Tenner, a candid one of him crouching at first base and looking young and fit and happy.
“Yeah,” Tenner told her. He didn’t tell her that Nina had thrown the picture across the room so the frame shattered on the wall the day he’d told her he wanted a divorce, but he did miss that picture.
“I liked that picture,” Piper said, yawning. “You look like a hero in it.”
Tenner laughed softly. “I sure did love to play,” he conceded. Then he booped her nose. “But not as much as I love you. You ready to go to bed, champ?”
She yawned. “I need a story.”
She really didn’t. She was reading chapter books already. She’d told him so. But he loved to read to her. “Go brush your teeth, and I will be up in a minute.”
While she was in the bathroom, he ran into his bedroom to change. It wasn’t until he was pulling the blue shirt over his head that that entire interlude—that eight-minute breathless fuck in the dark—rushed back behind his eyes.
He paused, taking a deep breath, and assessed.
His ass was a little sore, a little used, but that was almost pleasant. He went into the other bathroom to splash some water on his face and groaned. Oh, wow. It’s a good thing he’d hung out on Nina’s porch, because in the brighter light of her foyer, nobody could have missed the beard burn on his neck, his cheeks, even his temple.
Or maybe some of those scrapes were from having his face mashed up against the cinderblock.
Ross’s hand on his forehead, cushioning him from the roughness. His lips on Tenner’s temple, turning this blatantly carnal act into something more.
He swallowed. Wow. It would be great—great—if he could blame that entire interlude on the irritating asshole who’d been yanking his chain during the entire game. But what had happened in that alcove had been between two consenting adults, and one of them had been… considerate. Tender. Mindful of sex and the fragile humans having it.
As much as Tenner would love to hate the guy for making him face— He flailed his arms at the mirror. This. Making him face this sex-blossomed, relaxed, fairly satisfied version of himself, the fact was, Ross “Blows Like a God” McTierney hadn’t been the bad guy here.
And Tenner hadn’t either, really. Besides being late to pick Piper up—and he’d communicated as much as he could—he’d been… well, at the very least, a guy having a good time.
“Daddy!” Piper called, and Tenner forsook any thoughts of taking a shower before he read to her and trotted to her bedroom.
He’d seen Piper’s room at Nina’s house, but even when they’d lived together, he’d understood the importance of canopy beds and stencils on pink walls. He and Piper had decorated her room. She’d picked furniture of pale wood, without the canopy, so she could look out the second-story window and see the people on the street. She’d asked for her walls to be done in simple cream colors, with little rainbow appliques of ponies and butterflies and caterpillars all over, and a shelf that she kept her two soccer medals on, as well as her certificates for mastering units in school. She saved those throughout the week, because that side of the wall was papered with them, and he wanted her to be proud.