Page 59 of Dirty Puck

My eyes bugged. “You can’t say that—yourmother.”

“Is asleep now.” He pointed to her. “And she’d wonder what the hell was going on if I didn’t mention how sexy you are,” he said, dropping the keys into my hand. “You want me to go instead?”

“You’re who she needs to see when she wakes up.” No matter how happy my presence here and in Reece’s life made her, I felt firm on that point. “What are you in the mood for?”

He smirked, dropping his eyes to my crotch.

“Not on the lunch menu.” I tipped his chin up to look at my face instead.

“But not off the dinner menu?” He raised an eyebrow, challenging me. The man was trying to take back some control in this crappy situation, trying to prove he was the same Baker Reece he’d been before this news. I saw right through him. More though, I didn’t care. If poorly timed sexual innuendos helped him feel even a little bit better, good.

Good.

I bent in to kiss him, dragging my finger along his hairlineuntil reaching his ear. Then I dropped my hand, but he caught it, linking his fingers with mine. “Whatever you want is fine.”

That sounded genuinely okay. Like he was dealing and we’d get through this. I liked that. I liked the idea that we’d get through this together.

He reached for the remote to her television as I left the room. I found a voicemail from Claudia and, surprisingly, Jaycee Bishop. I waited to get off the elevator on the first floor to start returning calls.

Claudia first. As my family, she deserved the lowdown. As the woman watching my son, she needed to know how long we’d be gone.

Then, after I hung up with her, I pressed the return call button to see what Jaycee wanted. She picked up on the fourth ring.

“I hope it’s not weird I called you,” she said.

“That depends on what you want, I suppose.”

She laughed softly. “Grant told me about Baker’s mom. How is she? How is he? Can I do anything?” If a kind gene existed, it manifested boldly in the woman.

“She’s stable,” I replied, “but I’ll let R—I mean Baker answer the rest of the questions. I don’t want to overstep.”

“I get it.” She laughed again. I started to get a little irritated, mixed with a bit of self-consciousness, because I thought I’d given a perfectly acceptable answer. Actually, the more I thought about it… “You do that a lot.” Jaycee cut off the attitude I prepared to unleash on her.

“Do… what?”

“Start to call him Reece.”

I sighed, hating that she caught that. “He was Reece for so long. That comfortable yet professional boundary between us. When I started working the locker rooms, I called him Mr. Reece.”

Jaycee went from simply laughing to what equated to ahysteric roll-on-the-floor vocal spasm by the sound of it. Glad to entertain her.

“Yeah, it didn’t go past that first meeting to drop the mister.”

“I can believe it. Mister seems far too… too…”

“Proper?” I offered. “I mean, knowing the team the way I do now. All good men, but pretty far from proper.”

“Exactly!” She laughed harder. “How’d Grant take you calling him Mr. Bishop the first time?”

“He was pretty classy. He said, ‘Please call me Grant.’ But when I said I wasn’t allowed to be that familiar with the team, he told me to just call him Bishop, like his teammates do.”

“Yeah, that sounds like my Grant.”

“But we’ll be here a few days, and then his mom will be coming back to Charleston with us.”

“Grant has that list of in-home nurses waiting. He gave me that chore so we could get your furniture inside his living room. It’s done.”

“Already?”

---