The Hockey Captain’s Unwanted Wife (Blair and Grayson) novel Chapter 274

Chapter 274

~MARCO~

The house came up on the left and I slowed more than I usually did, as if the tires needed warning too.

She had gone quiet after the vineyard topic. Quiet meant she was thinking, and I did not trust what she was thinking about.

The coat I had put around her was still bunched at her throat. Her bare feet were pulled up on the seat. I could see the arch of one of them against the door panel and I made myself look at the road.

This was pretend. That had been the agreement before either of us knew the surnames involved. A marriage on paper, a performance where it mattered, and nothing where it did not.

A year. Separate rooms. No one in either family needed to know how little of it was real, and no one in either family was ever going to forgive how much of it was a lie.

I had been taught to hate anyone with the last name Bellandi.

Bellandi was the family that called my great-aunt a thief. I had heard it at Christmas. I had heard it at every event. I had nodded through all of it. Not paying enough attention, clearly.

The story had been simple when I was younger. You did not let one of them into your house, and you did not let one of them near you.

I stopped under the porch.

“Stay there,” I said.

“I can open a door.”

“I know.”

I got out, came around, and opened hers.

She looked at the hand I offered and did not take it. She got out on her own, coat held shut with one fist, and followed me up the step.

“The contract says separate rooms,” I said as we entered the house. It sounded like I was reading it off a page. I wanted it to sound like that. “We don’t have to pretend in here. It’s just us. The maids aren’t back until morning. No one is going to walk in and need a performance.”

She stopped just inside the door. The coat was too big on her. Her cheeks went red, and I told myself it was the cold.

‘Just us, she said.

“Until seven. Maybe eight. They come in through the kitchen.”

She nodded. She looked at the stairs, then at me, then at the coat. She took it off carefully and held it out.

I took it. It was warm from her.

Then she pulled the sweater over her head.

I stopped breathing the higher it went.

Under it was a nightdress. Short. Thin. The kind meant for a bedroom with the door shut and the lamp off, not for a lit hall and a man who had just told her the maids were gone until morning.

It sat high on her thighs. The fabric caught on her chest when she lowered her arms, and I could see her nipples through it, peaked from the cold outside or from the drive or from the fact that she had just realized what she was standing in.

Fuck.

Heat went up my neck. I felt it in my ears. I looked at the coat in my hands because looking at her was a bad decision, and then I looked at her anyway, because my body had already decided it was going to be disloyal about this.

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Skin showed through it at the stomach, at the dip between her breasts, at the place where the hem had ridden up when she lifted her arms.

I could see the shape of her. I could see too much of the shape of her. My cock stirred so fast it was almost insulting, and I shifted my weight like that was going to fix it.

She saw it. My eyes on her. I watched the realization hit, the small freeze, the way her arms came in against her sides a second too late to matter.

I’m going to my room,” she said, already turning.

She went up the stairs fast. The nightdress moved when she did. The hem lifted at the back of her thighs and I stayed at the bottom with the coat and did not follow, because if I followed I was going to put my hand on her and then I was going to have to explain to myself, in the morning, why a Bellandi was in my bed and why I had put her there.

Her door opened. Then it shut.

I put my hand on the wall and dropped my head.

My cock was still fucking responding to her and she was not even in front of me anymore.

I could hear her moving up there.

What was wrong with me?

She had come to the hospital after the crash. She had not liked me. She had checked on me anyway, and for some reason, that mattered.

Bellandi.

I said it in my head the way my father said it. The family that would take a marriage like this and turn it into a story they could use, a weakness they could price, a son who could not keep his hands off the enemy’s daughter and therefore could not be trusted with anything else.

A year was survivable. Wanting her was not. Wanting her meant dinners that became arguments and arguments that became lawyers and lawyers that became the kind of headlines both houses had spent years avoiding.

It meant my mother on the phone. It meant her father in my driveway. It meant the contract becoming the least expensive part of the mess.

I hung the coat on the hook. It still smelled like her.

I left my hand on it longer than I meant to, then took it off like it had burned me.

The kitchen was too quiet. I ran the cold tap, filled a glass, and drank until my teeth hurt. It did not help.

I was hard enough that the waistband was a problem, a mean, insistent pressure I could not drink away, and every time I tried to put my mind on something else, I got her in that nightdress instead.

I braced my hand on the counter and bowed my head over the sink.

She was a Bellandi in my house, in a nightdress I could see through, and I had thoughts I could not seem to

outrun.

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