The Bromance Book Club Page 11

  No. Oh, hell no. Gavin was using her shower? It was bad enough that he was essentially blackmailing her into kissing him every night. But the shower? That was so not going to happen every day.

  The water suddenly turned off, and Thea sprang out of bed. She stumbled on her morning legs like a newborn colt learning to stand for the first time, and caught herself on the bedside table. She was not going to be in there when he got out, because there was no way she would give him that satisfaction. She heard the glass shower door open. Time to run. But just as she stepped forward to bolt, her pinkie toe collided with the same table that had saved her moments earlier.

  “Motherfu—” She bit off the curse and hopped on one foot. But she was still in newborn-colt mode, and she toppled backward onto the bed. Dammit! She had to get out of there before—

  The bathroom door swung open wide. And out walked her husband wearing nothing but a towel tied loosely around his hips. Another hung around his neck.

  Sweet Jesus. His torso glistened with droplets of water that he’d missed in his hasty swipe with the towel. Gavin never dried off completely after a shower, and at this moment, she hated him for it. A line of water dripped between his massive, toned pec muscles, before getting lost in the tangle of dark hair that spanned his rock-hard abs.

  His hair was wet. His chest was wet. She was suddenly wet.

  Dammit! Why, dear God, WHY did she have to be married to a man whose job literally depended on him being in peak physical shape?

  “Hey.” He smiled, dazzling white teeth sparkling, or actually not, but that’s how it seemed because he looked like a fucking TV commercial. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  Thea shot back to her feet, pinkie toe still throbbing. She welcomed it, though. It fueled her rage. “You’re cheating!”

  “Um, what?”

  “You’re using my shower. That’s cheating.”

  “What are you talking about?” He laughed.

  Where did he get off laughing about anything? “You using my shower was not part of our deal.”

  “We never specified which shower I’d use, Thea. But I can use the girls’ shower, if that’s another one of your conditions.”

  “Oh, stop with the innocent act. You did this on purpose.”

  “Yes, I purposely took a shower. I don’t normally accidentally take one.”

  “You know what I mean! You’re doing this”—she waved in the general direction of his chest and abs and, dear God, the towel was starting to loosen—“on purpose.”

  He raised his eyebrows and glanced down at himself. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re walking around half naked just to tempt me!”

  “I swear that wasn’t my intention, but if that’s the outcome, I’ll take it.” He waggled his eyebrows and turned away from her. He used his strong, thick forearm to clear a circle in the cloudy mirror. She watched as he picked up his electric razor and began to trim the edges of his beard. He tilted his head to the side and tackled the soft whiskers below his jawline.

  Oh, that was—that was just plain dirty. He wasn’t even trying to play fair.

  Gavin had called this little proposition a competition.

  No. This wasn’t competition.

  This was war.

  And she could play dirty too. Without thinking it through, because impulsivity seemed to be her worst enemy, Thea grabbed the hem of her sleep tank and whipped it over her head.

  Gavin stilled. The razor hovered just above the skin of his throat. His eyes darted from his mirror image to hers. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he stared at her outraged half-nakedness. Meeting his eyes in the mirror, she smiled and yanked down her sleep shorts and panties.

  Gavin’s eyes darkened, and he did that slow-swallow thing again. His eyes did a long walk down her naked body and then meandered back up a different path, stopping on parts of her that reacted to his perusal with hot and heavy immediacy.

  She planted her hands on her hips. “There. How do you like it?”

  “Remind me,” he said, his gaze settling on her breasts. “Which part of seeing you naked is supposed to be punishment?”

  Then he winked, and boom, her nipples hardened. What the . . . ? Thea looked down at her round, pink areolas, now tight and pebbled. Jesus. Her tits were like Pavlov’s dog around him.

  And he knew it too. His lips curled up at the corners. “If you think I mind this game, you’re wrong. Because I definitely just won this round.”

  Thea jerked the shower on, yelped when scalding water beat down on her skin, and skidded backward. “Why do you take such hot showers?” she grumbled, yanking the faucet handle in the other direction.

  He returned to his beard trimming. “I had no idea my shower habits would be the cause of our first argument.”

  Thea grabbed the bottle of body wash. She was going to make him pay for this. She was going to soap herself up head to toe and make him watch. “It’s not our first argument,” she said casually, squeezing a large dollop of pink scented goo into her hand. “We argued last night.”

  “That wasn’t an argument.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “A negotiation.”

  “And what do you call this?” Thea spread the body wash on her stomach in a slow circle. She was rewarded with a strangled noise from the other side of the shower door.

  Thea looked up and met his gaze in the mirror once again. She tilted her head innocently as she slid her hands higher to lather her breasts. “You were saying?”

  His eyes no longer held hers. His gaze was firmly on her hands as she twirled suds around her nipples. “I missed that last thing you said,” she mused, pinching her nipples.

  Gavin’s jaw popped and clenched with a deep swallow. He lowered the razor again and turned around. Through the steam on the glass, she could see him just enough to watch his eyes once again travel the length of her. Her hands moved with him, sliding down to the underswell of her breasts, to the indentation of her belly button, and lower.

  The door suddenly swung open, and Gavin walked into the shower, towel and all. He backed her against the shower wall and planted his hands on opposite sides of her. His chest rose and fell as if he’d just finished a round of push-ups. “How far you going to take this, Thea?” he rasped.

  “Take what? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He clenched his jaw again. “Give me one w-w-word, and I will replace your hands with mine.”

  Thea didn’t bother to hide her smugness as she pushed his arms aside and leaned into the water to rinse the suds away. “Sorry, that’s not on the table.” She leveled a glance at Gavin over her shoulder. There was a muscle jumping in his tight jaw, and it made her smirk. “But don’t worry. I’m a big girl. I know how to take care of myself.”

  Gavin’s eyebrow twitched, and the desire in his eyes dissipated into something else. Something that looked a lot like the same flash of hurt she’d seen the night when she admitted that she’d been faking it in bed.

  He turned and stormed out, not even bothering to shut the shower door.

  Thea sank back against the slick, wet wall. This didn’t feel like a victory.

  Thea stood under the water until her skin chilled. Then she dressed quickly and opened her bedroom door to listen for the girls. Their giggles combined with Liv’s voice assured her that at least one Thanksgiving tradition would not be destroyed today. Liv was sneaking them an early piece of pumpkin pie. She heard nothing that indicated Gavin had gone downstairs to join them, and the guest room door was closed.

  Thea went back into her room and entered her closet to stare at her clothes. Last year, when they went to Del’s, Thea had dressed up because that’s what WAGs did. They wore their best clothes and showed off to one another. And dammit, she did not have the energy for that this y
ear.

  She finally settled on a pair of leggings and a long tunic sweater. Her hair was going up in a messy bun, and she was not going to spend more than a couple of minutes on makeup. For the first time in a long time, she didn’t care what they thought of her. She had only a few weeks left as a WAG, anyway.

  When she came out of her closet, she found Gavin sitting on the bed. He was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt that tugged impatiently over his biceps as she leaned on his knees.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  He looked up. “What did you mean by that? What you said in the shower.”

  Thea moved to her dresser, her bare feet silent on the plush carpet. “Nothing. I just was trying to be coy.”

  “OK, but just because I feel like torturing myself, and, trust me, this question has tortured me every night since you-know-what, do you?”

  She had a hard time following his sentence. “Do I what?”

  “Take care of yourself wh-when we’re done? Sneak off into the bathroom and finish yourself off when I finally roll off you?”

  “Are you seriously asking me if I masturbate?”

  “No. I’m asking if you ever masturbate after sex with me.”

  Thea opened a drawer and thought again about lying. But once again, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Lying. Faking it. Pretending everything was perfect. None of those things had done either of them any good. She withdrew a pair of socks and turned around. “Yes, sometimes I do.”

  Gavin’s face fell and flushed red.

  “If you didn’t want to know the answer, why did you ask?”

  “Just because I wanted to know doesn’t mean the answer doesn’t hurt.”

  “Why should it hurt? Everyone masturbates. You going to tell me you’ve never masturbated?”

  He shot to his feet and surged forward. “Hell yes, I masturbate. Every time I’m on the road, I lie in that hotel bed and think of you, fantasizing about coming home and getting the real thing.” His face twisted into a pained sneer. “Except even that wasn’t the real thing, was it, Thea?”

  Thea drew herself tall, even as the slap of his words stung. “Yet you’re so eager to go back to when things were perfect.”

  The hard edges of his face softened with an apology she didn’t want to hear. “Thea—”

  “Get out of my room, Gavin.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Thea wouldn’t look at him when Gavin walked into the kitchen a few minutes later. He couldn’t blame her. He’d damn near strangled himself after he said what he did, but he was humiliated, and humiliation was his own personal Kryptonite. Always had been. Beastly things came out of his mouth when his pride was on the line. And holy shit, knowing his wife had to take matters into her own hands because he routinely left her unsatisfied in bed was almost more than his fragile ego could handle. So he lashed out and threatened to destroy whatever tiny amount of progress they’d made last night.

  Thea stood at the island, covering pies they would take to Del’s with tinfoil. His ugly words hung in the air between them.

  He settled on something safe to break the taut silence. “Where are Ava and Amelia?”

  “Doing yoga in the basement with Liv.”

  The smell of coffee lured him to the counter by the stove. He filled a mug, dumped some shit in it—he’d never understand people who could drink it black—and turned around to lean against the counter. Minutes passed in silence. Gavin finally set his cup down. “I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t even look up. “For what?”

  Gavin crossed the kitchen to stand next to her. Her hair had fallen across one cheek as she looked down. He brushed it back over her shoulder. “I w-w-was an asshole. I’m sorry.”

  “You should never be sorry for speakin’ your truth.” She said it in a strange, Southern drawl, the one she used when quoting her Gran Gran. For as long as Gavin had known Thea, she’d had an endless well of her grandmother’s sage wisdom to draw upon.

  Thea moved away from him and pointed in the general direction of all six pies. “These pies need to go out to the car.”

  Gavin reached for her hand.

  She yanked it from him. “There’s no point, Gavin. This will all be over after Christmas, anyway.”

  She stormed away before he could answer. He heard her padded footsteps carrying her back upstairs. Gavin plunked his elbows on the counter and lowered his head into his hands.

  “Rough night in the guest room?”

  Gavin jumped and looked up. Liv had materialized out of nowhere. She’d worked so late last night that this was his first run-in with her since coming home. “What are the girls doing?”

  “Running with scissors.”

  His expression must have been thunderous because she backed down. “God, chill. They’re watching TV with the dog. I just ran up to get them some orange juice.”

  She filled two small sippy cups, gave him a quizzical look, and returned the juice to the fridge. She started to leave but he stopped her.

  “Liv.”

  She turned around.

  “Thank you for being here for Thea and the girls. I know you’ve been a big help.”

  She snorted. “I didn’t do it for you, asshole.”

  “I know. All the same . . .”

  She rolled her eyes and headed toward the basement, but she stopped at the last minute and turned back around.

  “Hey, Gavin?”

  He looked up once more. She smiled in a dangerous way. “If you do anything to hurt my sister again, I will poison your protein powder. Happy Thanksgiving!”

  Then she disappeared into the basement.

  He busied himself for the next several minutes carrying all six pies out to the car and then wandered to the living room to call his parents just to get it over with. They still had a landline, and an unexpected voice answered the phone.

  “You owe me for this,” his younger brother, Sebastian, hissed by way of saying hello.

  “What’re you doing there?”

  “Filling in for you. Mom was crying about how she wasn’t going to have any family with her this year for Thanksgiving, and the next thing I knew, I was packing my duffel bag. I’ve been up since five, since Mom has to get the turkey in early enough for us to eat by two.”

  Gavin pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’ll survive. Let me talk to Dad.”

  “He’s in the shower. Talk to Mom.”

  He tried to protest because there had to be a rule of some kind about the amount of time one had to wait between a conversation about jerking off and a phone call with one’s mother. But Sebastian had pulled the phone away from his ear.

  A moment later, his mother got on the line. “Hey, honey! Happy Thanksgiving!”

  “Hey, Mom. How big is the turkey this year?”

  It was a running family joke that his mom always bought a turkey three times the size of what they actually needed. His mother lived in fear of people starving to death in her presence.

  “Almost eighteen pounds,” she said. “He’s a big ’un.”

  Gavin could picture her instantly. She was probably wearing her ruffled apron, the one she only wore on holidays. And she’d have her hair twisted on top of her head so it didn’t get in the way while she cooked. Pretty soon, she’d pour herself a mug of hot spiced cider from the slow cooker and she’d turn on Christmas music, because in the Scott household, Thanksgiving Day was officially the start of the Christmas season.

  “I sure wish you guys were here,” she said. “I miss you and the girls. And Thea. Gosh, I’ve tried to call her several times for the past couple of weeks but keep getting her voicemail. Oh— did she get my email?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Oh, well, she probably just didn’t tell you. I asked what the girls want for Christmas this year.”

  “You could just ask
me.”

  She made a psh noise with her lips.

  “You think I don’t know what my daughters want for Christmas? Geez, thanks.”

  “I think Thea probably already has a color-coded spreadsheet with links of where to buy everything and what’s already on sale.”

  Despite his mood, Gavin smiled. Yes, that sounded exactly like Thea.

  “Hey, maybe you guys can come here for Christmas!” his mom said. “You could spend Christmas Eve here, and the girls could open their stockings here. Oh, Gavin, it would be so fun.”

  An ache bloomed in his chest at the picture she painted. It would be fun, but there was no way Thea, who had just appeared at the bottom of the stairs, would agree to it.

  “Hey, Thea’s standing right here. Do you want to talk to her and see if she got the email?” Gavin held out the phone. “It’s my mom.”

  Thea gave him a look that could extinguish a fire. But she sucked in a breath and put on her best voice. “Hey, Susan. Happy Thanksgiving.”

  Gavin listened to Thea’s half of the conversation, and the ache spread. His parents adored Thea. They said she was the daughter they always wanted and joked that Sebastian was going to have to work extra hard to even come close to finding a wife as perfect as Gavin’s.

  That was the main reason he hadn’t yet told them that he and Thea were having trouble. It would devastate them. But that wasn’t the only reason. His parents had the perfect marriage, and they’d be so disappointed to know that Gavin couldn’t live up to their model.

  Thea said goodbye, ended the call, and handed Gavin his phone. “You need to tell them, Gavin.”

  “Tell them what?” he countered, bitter at her constant reminder that this was a temporary thing for her. “You gave me until Christmas to win you back. Until then, there’s nothing to tell.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Del and Nessa lived outside Nashville in a mansion-filled subdivision that was home to several of Music City’s rich and famous. The twenty-mile drive took only a half hour in the sparse holiday traffic, and if it weren’t for the girls in the back seat, it would have been a silent trip.