“There’s a strong Scottish tradition in Hamilton. I think it’s supposed to walk the line of honouring that and also being cute.”
“Go Boars Go,” she murmured.
He nodded solemnly. “Exactly.”
They finished their meal, then Josh pointed Monica to the couch while he cleared the table and quickly did the dishes. She curled up on the couch, snuggling into the blanket that had appeared while she was asleep in the afternoon.
The commentators chirped from Josh’s phone, a steady hum of hockey lingo that Monica could definitely doze off to, in a good way.
Then, just as it sounded like the game started again, Josh appeared next to her juggling two steaming mugs, and his phone precariously pinched against the bottom of one of the mugs in a long-fingers-only kind of move.
She knew that delicious scent. “Hot chocolate?”
He’d read her mind.
“Gotta keep you warm,” he said, carefully sitting down beside her, their bodies barely touching.
She gratefully took one of the mugs, and he flipped the phone around so they could both see the screen.
As she sipped her hot chocolate, she tried to follow the puck, but that quickly proved impossible. Then she picked a Highlander at random to follow around the screen until he went to the bench. That worked better, and she happily them skate and crash into the other team and sometimes shoot the puck, until her cocoa was almost all gone and her eyelids grew heavy again.
Josh took her mug, and she stretched out, sleeping tugging her under. The last thing she felt before she drifted off was his hand curling around her calf, a reassuring pressure followed by a muted grunt of enthusiasm for something that happened in the game.
20
Josh wasn’tsure how he’d earned the last two hours with Monica. No tension, no fighting. Something that would feel like a friendship, if it weren’t for the ever-present hum of an attraction that—isolated from everything else—didn’t feel nearly as inconvenient as it should.
Like Monica had noted, it felt like the whole world had stopped, if only for a few hours, and he’d latched on to that opportunity for his internal turmoil to stop, too.
Fuck it.
Life was short and he liked his wife way too much to not just soak up her joy.
And take care of her a little.
Stew. A walk. Hot chocolate.
And now her feet were in his lap, and his hockey team was about to win. If he could bottle this feeling and never let it go…
He tightened his hold on her ankle.
She squirmed into the blanket.
She was wearing thick socks, pulled up over the bottom hem of her jeans. When the game went to a commercial break, he dropped his attention to the layers of fabric there.
He had an overwhelming urge to slide his thumb into her sock and find her bare ankle—which was some fucking Puritan level horny thinking, how much he’d love to stroke herfoot. Inside hersock.
But there was his cock, thickening at the image.
You cannot molest your sleeping wife’s ankle, Kincaid.
And then to prove that it was a moment worthy of disrupting, the streetlight outside flickered back to life. The power was back. The world was no longer on pause.
His pulse thudded in his neck as he watched the last three minutes of the game on his phone, not bothering to turn on the TV.
Then he carefully extricated himself from under Monica’s legs. He thought about leaving her on the couch, and taking the bed, but if she woke up in the middle of the night, he wanted her to be in the more comfortable spot.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” he murmured. “Time to go to bed.”
