“Mine was the same, but he also liked to push me around while he did it.”
Taking his eyes off the road for a moment, he asked incredulously, “Your ex hit you?”
“Not hit, per se. Just pushed when he wasn’t getting his own way.”
“Does Hayden know?”
“No,” I snorted. “He’d lose it and beat the shit out of him. I wouldn’t give Cam the satisfaction of Hayden losing his Sounders contract. It was bad enough when he found out he’d cheated on me and then followed me here.”
There was a tense silence, then he asked, “Did they ever get along?”
“Nope, which was why Cam would be ecstatic to get the chance to mess his career up.”
We were just pulling up in front of his gates when he stopped altogether. “Wait, are we talking about Cam LaValle? The guy who tried to sue the Sounders for not signing him?”
“One and the same,” I sighed. “That was after we’d broken up, obviously. I wasn’t meant to find out he’d cheated on me, and when I did and moved here, he followed and set his sights on the Sounders. He thought being linked to Hayden would give him an automatic in, but when that didn’t happen, he got his lawyer to sue them for discrimination.”
“Didn’t he try to sue his ex for ruining his career?”
Yes, yes, he had.
“Neither legal cases lasted long. Basically, his lawyer sent the letters to us, and then told him he didn’t stand a chance and to give up or ruin his career forever, so he gave up.”
“Douche,” he muttered as he resumed driving through his gates, pressing the button on the black box attached to his visor to close them behind us.
When we got to the garage, he came around to pick me up and carried me inside. “Make a list of what you need from your place, and I’ll go get it.”
To an outsider, it might look like he’d dropped the subject of my ex, but the tense set of his jaw and gleam in his eye as he tapped on the screen of his phone made me suspicious. Still, when he saw that I wasn’t making the damn list, he raised his brows and nodded at me to get on with it.
I’d still blame the shock from my injury and the fact I’d needed needles inserted into my body to fix the damage for the fact that I didn’t argue with him about going through my stuff to get what I needed. The truth was, I was still recovering from being in his arms and how kind he was being.
Shit, I totally liked the footballer.Chapter 5KipBiting my lip to stop myself laughing, I passed her the bag I’d packed and unclipped the little dog who’d been asleep on her bed from its leash. Apparently while I’d been away, she’d realized what sort of stuff I was going to find at hers, and she was now sitting with her hands over her eyes.
Before I could say anything, she squeaked, “Say nothing.”
I tried. I really tried not to, but on my next breath out I started laughing so hard that I almost dropped to the floor.
“Your panties say Ministry of Magic on the back of them,” I wheezed.
“It was a printing mistake. They were meant to put it on the front,” she snapped back, making me laugh even harder.
“And the glittery pig dressed up like Harry Potter with Hairy Porker ones?” I needed to know how and why they existed.
“They were a gift.”
“The Little Hairmaid?”
“I get a lot of gag gifts,” she mumbled.
She had at least nine pairs of panties like that, and then there were the t-shirts. When she got ready for bed tonight, she’d be sleeping in one that said: Not a basic witch, just a total bitch.
And then there was the other thing…
Seeing that I was still laughing, she sighed. “You found it, didn’t you?”
“I know not of which you speak,” I choked out this time, lying badly.
Yes, in fact I had found what she was talking about, and it was that bad that I knew exactly what she was talking about.
She also knew that I was lying.
Under her panties had been a Tickle Me Elmo vibrator. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was, but I’d knocked the switch on the bottom of it and it’d started moving violently in my hand scaring the shit out of me. It wasn’t until I’d found the box that went with it that it’d all clicked for me. Apparently, the vibrator had five speeds and it claimed it would ‘tickle the hell out of your tickle spot’. Who came up with that, I didn’t know, but as someone who’d loved the character as a kid… it’d been hilarious, but traumatic.
“I’ve never used it,” she whispered, still hiding behind her hands. “I took it out of the box and felt like I’d violated the poor guy.”