Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,149

the steady? How about if he feels steady, but he tells you he isn’t steady? Maya Angelou had said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” and Harlan had told her who he was. Loud and clear.

And yet here she was, wearing her pale-green dress again, because it was one of the only pretty things she had that still fit, and because Harlan had taken her across the long bridge to Thirty-three South. They were sitting outside on a stone terrace strung with fairy lights, watching the setting sun turn the lake, nearly glass-calm in the stillness, to glowing turquoise as the mountains reflected the pale pink of the sky. Harlan was drinking Tennessee whiskey, and she was sipping a spiced pina colada mocktail after a dinner of steelhead trout cooked to flaky perfection, roasted asparagus that she’d all but inhaled, and an absolutely sinful warm bourbon-soaked bread pudding with whipped cream that she’d shared with him. Dipping the spoon into all that rich, creamy goodness, licking it slowly clean, and watching him watch her do it. The smile in his eyes. The breadth of his shoulders in the white button-down shirt. The scruff of beard that would give you so much delicious friction as he kissed his way down your body, letting you know that he was a man, and he was here to stay. His hard hands that could touch you so gently.

Dyma was right. No alcohol, and no drugs. Just a slow, delicious, cool swim after a long, hard, hot day, and the memory of Harlan’s eyes when he’d looked at her in her bikini. Not to mention the way he’d kissed her back in the lobby before that swim. His big hand behind her head, cradling it. He made her feel wanted. He made her feel beautiful. And that was such a dangerous way to feel.

Tonight, they’d talked about Dyma, and they’d talked about Annabelle. Now, they sat, lazy in the deepening twilight, as the server lit the candles and the colors deepened around them, and she said, “Tell me about football. You said you’d been working for twenty-five years. Is that really how it is? That much pressure?”

He didn’t brush her off, and he didn’t make a joke. He got quiet instead and said, “Yes. And no.” When she didn’t say anything, just waited, he went on. “It’s pressure, but every job has pressure. With football, you’re more aware of the pressure, that’s all, and you could say that the consequences are more immediate. Although I guess if you’re a surgeon or something, or a pilot, the consequences of screwing up are pretty immediate, too. So, yeah, football’s always pressure to perform, but it’s good. It’s always been good, for me. Besides the money and all that. Having the team, for one thing. Teammates. Coaches.”

“When it was bad at home,” she guessed. “That thing you said about your coach at the Super Bowl party.”

“Coach Gunderson. He taught me how to be a man, I guess. How to own up when you screwed up. That there were no excuses, but you didn’t have to marinate in your mistakes, either, not if you learned from them and did better. My dad was big on punishment.” His face twisted. “I guess you’ve figured that out. Coach didn’t do blame. You owned up, you fixed it, and you moved on. He had this word he used. Excellence. You were always going for excellence. You might not be able to achieve perfect every time, he’d say, but you could always be excellent.” He took a sip of his bourbon. “Which is true in anything you do, right? That’s the secret of any great high-school coach, though. He’s not just building football players. He’s building men.”

“He did a great job building you.” She’d resisted touching him all evening. Now, she reached out and touched his hand. The lightest brush of fingertips, but he turned that big, scarred, sure hand over and took hers, running his thumb over her knuckles like he wanted to memorize them. Like they mattered.

His hands could pluck a spinning missile of a ball out of the air like it was a butterfly. They could shove off a charging defender, and they could tackle, too, when they had to. She’d watched him do it on TV. She’d watched obsessively, in fact. Everything she could find online, in the weeks and months since that last day on the tarmac in Wild Horse, as if