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"A lot of men supposedly do-not the exam, but the finger thing during sex."
"Emma, it's not an area of my anatomy that I wish to explore in a sexual way. The reasons why don't matter. That part of my body is off limits, permanently."
She shrugged and peeled off the gloves, careful to turn them inside out as she did so. She was a little hurt that he wasn't willing to give it a try. It seemed that she was the one who had been taking the bigger risk, and it would have been nice if he'd met her halfway. "Okay. I thought you wanted new things, is all. You said you wanted me to be creative."
"Come here," he said, opening his arms.
She crawled back into place beside him, lying on her side against his torso, her arm over his chest. "I only wanted to please you," she said, playing with his nipple, tugging lightly at the hairs around it. She found it a little easier to talk if she didn't look at his face. "If this didn't please you, then tell me what would."
Russ put his arm around Emma's shoulders; she was obviously upset. There was nothing more embarrassing for him than a detailed analysis of his sexual behaviors and preferences, yet that was what she was asking for.
"You don't need to be quite so, er, theater-oriented about the sex," he managed. "I don't need costumes and a script, or choreographed dance sequences." He felt her flinch, and grimaced at his social clumsiness. But how else was he supposed to say it? "The costumes have been fun," he said, trying to soften the criticism. "You've looked wonderful in them, and I especially like the, er, garter belt bit."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. It's very nice. But beyond a bit of sexy lingerie, my tastes are pretty tame. Vanilla. White bread. Even bland."
"What about all that creativity you asked for?"
The creativity that he'd meant to describe his di
"So, what do you want? Do you want the missionary position each time?"
What I want is to have sex with you-Emma Mayson. Not a harem girl or Betty Crocker with a bowl of pudding. But it wasn't part of their arrangement that he ask for access to her i
"I'm open to other positions. Let's just stay away from the accessories and the scripts and, er, the advanced sexual techniques. We don't have to work our way through The Joy of Sex."
He felt her sigh, her breath warm on his skin. "I didn't really want to put my finger in there," she said softly.
Relief went through him. He'd been afraid she must think him a conservative old prude. "Then why'd you do it?"
"Because I let the book tell me what to do."
"Emma, I'm not going to enjoy something if you don't she didn't let it. Caution and common sense and flat practicality were the laws of her life, and the terror of making an error was the guiding principle behind it all.
What a relief it would be to mess up and not care; to shrug her shoulders, say "Whoops!" and move on.
The need to make no wrong step kept her from taking any steps at all.
Emma chewed her lip. She did want to see Russ skate; she wanted to catch a glimpse of him in his normal life, at ease among friends. "We can go-"
Daphne shrieked. "Yes! Shall I drive? Do you want to drive?"
"We can go," Emma repeated, trying to scowl, but a smile tugging at her lips, "but we're not going to let him know we're there."
"What fun is that?" Daphne asked.
"Yeah, that's no good," Beth said.
"Hey, it's enough that I agreed to go! And it'll be fun; think of it as playing spy."
Daphne grumbled. "Fine. We'll be sneaky. He'll never know we were there."
"He better not. I don't want him to think I'm a psycho stalker."
"Don't worry," Daphne said, but there was something in her grin that Emma didn't trust.
She glanced at Beth. She wore the exact same grin.
Oh God.
Chapter Twelve
Russ lay on the bench in the locker room, dressed only in his black Puck Skins, and pulled his knee up to his chest, stretching. He'd arrived at the arena half an hour earlier than he usually did, hoping to ease the coiled tension of the day out of his muscles. Hoping as well to clear out distracting thoughts of Kevin and Emma.
He changed position, wishing he could stretch on the floor like you could in the Canadian ice rink locker rooms, where they washed the floors between each game. No one in their right mind would lie down on the locker room floor of the Aurora Ice Arena: it looked as if it hadn't been washed since the Cretaceous period, and the freestanding, stall-less toilet inexplicably plumbed into the center of the room was a reminder of just how filthy a hockey locker-room floor could get.
Still, this was home. The locker room might be a sty, the ice might be soft and rutted, but this was where his surrogate family lived and he had a perverse affection for it. It was his haven. His sanctuary from the world. The place where he was not Russ Carrick, multimillionaire entrepreneur, but was simply Buffy.
One of his teammates came in and bobbed his chin in greeting. Russ grunted a reply and stood for a different stretch.
Unbidden, memories of his conversation with Kevin earlier in the day came back to mind.
"I think she's starting to like me," Kevin had said.
Russ had feigned disinterest, but his heart had thunked sickly in his chest. "How so?"
"Just a feeling I get, when I call her."
"Didn't you say she was seeing someone?"
Kevin's face had been impassive but strangely alert, as if watching for Russ's reaction. "She doesn't talk about him. It must not mean much to her if she doesn't talk about him."
Russ had shrugged, but the words had festered all day. Reason said that she was too cautious to talk about him to Kevin, even under cover of her mythical "boyfriend," but it gnawed at him that there was nothing she said to Kevin, not even a generic comment on their getting along well or liking some of the same things. It made him wonder whether she talked about him to her friends or pretended that he didn't exist.
Was he just a thrice weekly sex partner who ate the food figure-skating lesson earlier. The bleachers were outside the lobby, rising up in a bank above the boxes where the players would sit.
"How tall is he?"
"Midrange."
"That rules out stumpy over there, and those two lumberjacks. I guess that's something."
"And he's not a goalie. Wait, is that-"
"You see him? Which one?"
"Shoot. I can't tell. I thought I saw him, but…"
"C'mon. We've got to go out there." Daphne headed for the glass door to the rink area.
"Daphne, wait! I can't go out there! He'll see me!"
"Pish. He will not."
"Daphne, there's no one else in the freakin' stands! Of course he'll notice!"
Daphne sat back down, a pout on her face. "Fine. We'll wait till the game starts. Then he'U be concentrating on it and won't look up."
Emma visored her hand over her forehead, half-hiding her face. "I knew I shouldn't have agreed to this."
"Look, we'll go up in the stands, we'll spot him, we'll watch the game, and then we'll tear out of here before it ends. Even if he thinks he sees you-which he won't-he won't be sure. You can always deny it if he asks."
"Lie to him? Yeah, great, that's what I want to do."
"Oh, stop making such a big deal out of this. There's no crime in watching him play hockey. He’ll probably be flattered. No one else has a hot babe in the stands."
Emma groaned.
A few minutes later, the players collected the extra pucks, and those on the first string took their positions. A puck was dropped between two players and a quick, furious battle of slapping blades knocked it away, with skaters in hot pursuit.