I snorted into my beer.
“Not a fan of football?” he asked.
Instead of turning fully to see if his face was as hot as his voice and hands and forearms, I kept my eyes forward, just like he seemed to be doing.
“Football, yes,” I said. “The real one.”
He whistled at the jab. I tried to hide my grin by taking another sip of my beer.
When he replied, his voice was dry, mild amusement hanging off every deliciously spoken syllable. “Hate to break it to you, love, but that sport you Americans call football is not the real one.”
Now I did turn, because Mr. Hot Voice and Muscley Forearms didn’t want to go down that road. And when I did, I froze.
The face matched everything else. It matched, surpassed, blew the voice and muscles out of the water.
And when I smiled at him, he did some turning of his own.
His gaze studied my face carefully for something. Whatever he saw caused him to relax. “What?” he asked.
I pointed at the TV. “I don’t think this is an argument you want to get in with me.”
He licked his bottom lip, and reflexively, I felt my thighs clench together. His eyes, an indecipherable color in the dim light of the bar, never strayed from mine. “Carl, put another drink for the lady on my tab, if you please.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Who said I wanted another one?”
His thumb tapped the surface of the bar. His lips curved into a devious smile that made my toes curl inside my shoes. “Because I’m about to give you an education, love.”
Keep reading after the Faked bonus epilogue for Lia and her mystery Brit’s sexy sports romance.
Faked Bonus Epilogue
FAKED BONUS EPILOGUE
A few years after The End
Claire
His shoulders were rock hard. The groan pulled from his chest as I dug my thumbs in had me smiling.
“You’re very tense,” I said lightly.
Bauer grunted in response, dropping his chin to his chest as I moved my hands to the muscles along his neck.
“You know everything is going to be okay, right?”
My husband took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Knowing him, after all the years we’d been together, he was working very hard to measure his response. When I first met him, that was not something Bauer Davis was good at.
Shifting from the massage, I let my hands run up along the back of his scalp, the short dark hair tickling my palms. His frame relaxed at the soft touch.
“I don’t know that,” he said quietly. “What if something happens while we’re gone?”
I smiled again, sliding my fingers along the slope of his shoulder, heavy with muscle—still holding all that tension I tried unsuccessfully to release. “Then we’ll get a phone call, and we’ll come back.”
His head tilted, nuzzling into my arm where I’d wrapped it around his chest so I could press a soft kiss to his temple. Bauer so rarely worried like this, it was a new side to him, something I hadn’t seen in him in our dating life, or when we were engaged, and then married. My fearless husband, who hurtled down mountains at breakneck speeds, was doing his very, very best to worm his way out of date night because he was scared.
“I think I have a headache,” he mumbled, nibbling along my wrist with soft, sweet kisses.
“You do not.”
“Calling me a liar, Mrs. Davis?”
“Yes.”
I moved to face him, settling onto his lap while he kept his eyes focused on the other side of the room. The chair we’d chosen for the corner of the bedroom was big and comfortable, and the rocking motion made it an easy place to spend hours of a long night. Bauer’s arm anchored around my waist, and he sighed as I tucked my head against the side of his neck.
“You had a headache last week when we tried to do this.” I kissed the edge of his jaw. “Be careful using that excuse twice, or I’ll think you’re avoiding alone time with me.”
His mouth finally cracked into a wry grin, and he dipped his gaze to lock with mine. The spark I saw in those depths lit a pleasant swirling sensation in the pit of my belly. “I always like being alone with you,” he growled. “But can’t we be alone in our room while he’s sleeping safely down the hall?”
I smiled softly, my heart squeezing warm and soft and gooey in my chest at how hard this was for my big, fearless, tattooed husband to leave our baby for the first time.
“He will be fine for a couple hours,” I promised.
Bauer’s eyes closed, and when I slid my hand up the side of his face, he pressed a fierce kiss against my palm. “What if he misses us?”
I exhaled a soft laugh. “At two months old, as long as someone is here to feed him and change him and hold him, Cooper will be perfectly content.”
The two-month-old in question stirred in his crib, emitting the soft, grunting noises that he often did as he started to wake from his nap. Bauer’s face transformed from worry to unrelenting love in an instant, and I clutched his face to mine, because I couldn’t not kiss him when he looked that happy at the mere thought of our child waking up from a nap.
Bauer hummed happily into the kiss, breaking away with a laugh when Cooper made a squawking noise. Based on that noise, we had a few minutes before he became seriously unhappy at not being picked up.
My husband’s hands slid up my back, his tongue sliding leisurely over mine.
The sounds from the crib intensified, a slight wail breaking apart our kiss. I smiled against Bauer’s lips.
“Our son is a cock block,” he whispered.
I kissed him again, short and sweet. “Hence the date night,” I whispered back.
Bauer nuzzled his face into me, dropping featherlight kisses along my collarbone. “Up. He misses me.”
With a laugh, I stood from his lap and settled back in the nursery chair while he picked Cooper up out of the crib.
My heart, warm and gooey earlier, lit with a straight jolt of pure happiness at the way Bauer cradled our son in his big, tattooed arms. He was so gentle, his massive hands holding Cooper close to his chest while he kissed the top of Cooper’s head. His shock of black hair wasn’t a surprise to anyone, and it stood straight out, like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.
Bauer liked to run his fingers over it, tell Cooper that if he kept it up, he’d have the greatest mohawk that the pacific northwest had ever seen.
He was, without a doubt, the most natural dad I’d ever met. There was no hesitation in changing diapers, in giving him baths (though the sink was still the location of choice), in feeding him during the middle of the night so I could sleep. He sang lullabies and told him about all the adventures they’d go on some day together.
“You keep looking at me like that, princess, and we may not make it to our date night before I get my hands on you,” he said lightly.
I laughed. “So we are going out to dinner tonight?”
“Fine,” he sighed. “You checked that they’re CPR certified yet?”
I gave him a patient look. “I did not ask Paige that, no.”
His jaw clenched briefly. “What if he starts choking on his formula?” Bauer stared down at Cooper. “Or he spits up really bad and he’s not in an elevated position?”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.