The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride (11 page)

“Actually, it made me crowbar-shy,” he said wryly but with an ominous undertone.

Shannon was curious about why a man who looked like Dag did, who was as charming and funny and nice and fun to be with, was without a girlfriend or fiancée or wife. It hadn't occurred to her that by prying a little into the subject she might be opening a can of worms. But she was too curious not to lift the lid anyway.

“I told you about my fiasco with Wes—even though I wasn't supposed to,” she said. “You can trust me with yours…”

“Mine was a fiasco but it was no secret—it made a splash, remember?”

“I remember you saying that the end of your hockey career made a splash. What does that have to do with your last relationship?”

“Everything. And it all made the news. But there
was
a sports element to it, so if you came across anything about it you probably didn't pay any attention to it.”

“Sorry,” she said unapologetically. “But your love life made the sports page? You must have
really
gotten around!”

Dag's laugh this time was wry as he shook his head in denial. “My
love life
was not a sporting event. It made the sports page because I was a name in hockey at the time and so was the jerk who blindsided me.”

“That doesn't sound good,” Shannon said more seriously.

“Yeah, you could say it wasn't good,” he said with enough of an edge to let her know this subject was even more sobering than she'd imagined.

“If you don't want to talk about it, you don't have to,” she said, feeling obligated to offer him the option even though her curiosity was growing by the minute.

“Nah, I can talk about it,” he said. “I told you, mine
isn't
a secret, it's just not for the faint of heart.”

“I'm not faint of heart,” she assured.

“Okay, but don't say you weren't warned….” Dag took a drink of his wine. Then he said, “A little short of three years ago I got involved with a woman named Sandra Pierce.”

“A hockey groupie?”

“A hockey wife.”

Shannon was midsip of her own wine when he said that and her eyes widened over the rim of her glass. She stared at him in shock. “You were involved with someone else's wife?” she said when she'd swallowed her wine.

“No,” he answered instantly and firmly. “I would never get involved with anyone else's wife. I'm not even completely comfortable being here drinking wine with you knowing that you're as fresh out of a relationship as you are.”

Shannon opted not to address that in favor of hearing his story. “So how was this Sandra person a hockey wife?”

“She was a former hockey wife. I actually met her the night she was out with friends celebrating that her divorce had become final that day.”

“Her divorce from another hockey player,” Shannon guessed.

“Exactly. She hadn't been married to anyone on my team, she'd divorced a defenseman on the team we had come into town to play the night before. We'd won our game and were out clubbing to celebrate, too.”

“And one celebration overlapped the other?”

“A bunch of rowdy hockey players out on the town, a bunch of already-tipsy women cutting loose—paths crossed, we were buying drinks, you know how it goes.”

Shannon's social life had always leaned toward moderation, but there had been a few evenings out with friends when she'd witnessed what he was talking about even if she'd shied away from it herself. So she said, “Sure.”

“As the night wore on, I sort of paired up with Sandra. I liked her—she was kind of wild and brash, but she was beautiful and smart, too, and we hit it off. The game we'd played and won the night before had been an exhibition game in Canada but Sandra was from Detroit and she was moving back. We arranged to have dinner when she got there.”

“Which you did,” Shannon said.

“Which we did. And I still liked her even when she was sober, so we started dating.”

“Because you were a free agent then, too, and since she was divorced, so was she.”

“That's what I thought. Divorce seems pretty final to me. But I didn't factor in that while things might be over on paper, that doesn't necessarily mean they're
over-over.
…”

“Oh-oh…”

“She kept
saying
it was over. But he still called her and she still called him. She'd always tell me whenever they talked so I thought that proved she didn't have
anything to hide. I figured it was just an amiable divorce. I didn't think they were talking because they weren't really done with each other—”

“But they weren't.”

“I learned later that the calls were mostly about how her ex wanted her back. And that she was torn and actually thinking about it. I was six months into things when she let that slip. If I'd had any brains I would have said goodbye on the spot.”

“But you didn't?”

“I didn't,” he answered with self-disgust. “I had feelings for her by then. And much to my regret, my competitive streak came right to the surface. Instead of bowing out, I did everything I could think of to win. To get her to pick me over the ex.”

The low, disgusted tone of his voice, the way his brows almost met in a frown, let Shannon see how much he damned that choice.

“It didn't work? She picked the ex anyway?” she asked gently.

He shook his head again. He let out a mirthless laugh. He took a drink of his wine and stared at the fire for a moment before he looked Shannon in the eye again and said, “Yeah, she picked the ex anyway, but not until after he and four of his teammates jumped me one night.”

Shannon hadn't realized until that moment just how literal he'd meant his comment about crowbars and being blindsided. “Were you alone? Against five other hockey players?”

“I was alone. Coming home after a game, figuring to shower and go over to Sandra's place. Then out of the shadows came these guys…” He shook his head again and he looked more angry than anything as he went on. “I can take a beating with the best of them, and I've
dished out plenty of my own on the ice—I played hockey, after all. But these guys took me by surprise—”

“And you were
alone
against
five
of them? With
crowbars?
”

“Sandra's ex-husband was the only one with a crowbar. His four friends held me down while he broke my knee and my leg in three places.”

Shannon felt her own eyes widen and the color drain from her face, and she wondered if she might be more fainthearted than she'd thought. “Oh, my god…”

“Luckily a neighbor heard the attack and called the cops—they were there before Sandra's ex got started on the other leg. The cops arrested him and got an ambulance there right away—”

“But the damage he'd already done—”

“Ended my career.”

“And hurt you!”

“Five surgeries to put pins in bones and rebuild my knee almost from the ground up. In and out of the hospital, then in and out of rehab each time to make sure the leg would go back to working. I got hit on Christmas Eve the Christmas before last, so I was in the hospital for that one, and I was in rehab after a surgery last Christmas—he definitely did damage.”

“No wonder you're so happy to be here this year!”

“And walking.”

“But that was it for hockey,” Shannon said, referring to his end-of-his-career comment.

“I worked like crazy in rehab every time, thinking I could get back to where I was if I did it with the same intensity I used to train for hockey. But all the doctors, the physical therapists, and then the coaches and trainers and the team doc agreed—there was no way the leg or
the knee wouldn't crumble with a good hard hit on the ice. So I had to retire.”

He seemed determined not to make it sound like a tragedy, but Shannon knew it had to have been devastating. Still, his refusal to feel sorry for himself reminded her of her parents and all the times she'd watched them put a happy face on their failing health, and she couldn't help being impressed by that in Dag, too.

“What about the creep who did it?” she asked.

“He got eighteen months in jail for assault, his cohorts did a few months each. There was also a civil lawsuit that I filed against them. And won.”

“And Sandra?”

“She took the whole thing as some kind of grand romantic gesture,” Dag said with disbelief. “It was actually the other guy's winning goal—they remarried the week he was released from jail.”

“And you thought that woman was smart?” Shannon said, her own outrage sounding.

“Apparently not when it came to relationships,” he admitted.

Shannon glanced at his legs—one of them bent at the knee, his foot on the floor, the other stretched out to the coffee table. She'd never seen him so much as limp and had no idea which leg had ever been hurt.

“It's that one,” he said as if he knew what she was thinking, pointing to the leg stretched onto the coffee table.

“How about now—are you okay?”

“For everything but hockey, I'm fine. So I've moved on to the next stage of my life—back to Northbridge and new things here.”

And he sounded as if he'd genuinely accepted that without bitterness.

“You're kind of something, you know that?” she heard herself say as she gazed at the face that hockey playing hadn't scarred, as she saw more of the depth of the man and admired his inner strength as much as his outer, his spirit and his ability to take something awful that had happened to him and make the best of it. “
Kind of something
what?” he asked with a dash of devilry to his voice and to the one eyebrow he raised rakishly at her.

It made Shannon smile. “Just kind of something,” she hedged, setting her glass on the coffee table.

Dag did the same with his as he persisted, “Kind of something wonderful? Kind of something brave and heroic? Kind of something too hot to resist?”

All of the above,
Shannon thought.

But she didn't say it. She just laughed at him because it was obvious he was joking. “I'll give you brave—because even after that you're still here with me when I'm as fresh out of a relationship as I am,” she said, reiterating his earlier words.

“Well, yeah, that
is
brave,” he deadpanned. “Facing down five hockey thugs is one thing, but a politician? I could end up with my taxes raised or an IRS audit—that's
really
terrifying!”

Shannon laughed again, also appreciating his sense of humor.

Then he said, “You're not going to offer to kiss it and make it better?”

“Your knee? No. Have you had a lot of offers to do that?”

“One or two—nurses can be hockey fans, too, you know.”

“Then you don't need me to do it, do you?”

“Need? Maybe not…” he said, bringing his hand up from the sofa back to cup the side of her face. “But want? That's another subject…”

“Even under threat of higher taxes and audits?” she asked, her voice somehow just barely above an inviting whisper as she lost herself a little in black eyes that were delving into hers.

“Even then…” he said, coming forward enough to kiss her—but so lightly it was more like the kiss he'd pressed to her hand than the one they'd shared the night before and she wondered if he was a little leery after all.

If he was, it didn't last, though, because after a moment he deepened the kiss, parting his lips and hers, and slipping his hand to the back of her head, into her hair while his other hand came to the other side of her neck, inside the collar of the blouse she wore under a V-necked sweater.

He had the warmest hands. And a touch that only hinted at the power they contained as his lips parted wider still and his tongue came to meet hers.

Shannon's own hands rose to his solid chest, once again encased in a plaid flannel shirt over a thermal T-shirt. She wished there were fewer layers between them as their kiss rapidly escalated, mouths opening wider and tongues courting and cavorting.

Dag's arms came around her then, pulling her so close she was nearly lying across his lap, held by those massive arms as he took that kiss to yet another level. A level that was so thoroughly intimate it was almost an act of love all on its own.

It most definitely awakened things in Shannon that no mere kiss ever had. She was suddenly aware of every inch of her skin, of a craving to be set free of her shirt,
her sweater, her jeans. Her breasts seemed to swell, testing the confines of her bra, begging for the touch of more than lace. Her knees pressed together to contain the desires that sprang to life in places that should have been sleeping. And until they were already there, she didn't even realize that her arms had gone around Dag's broad shoulders or that her fingers were digging into his back.

And that ravaging kiss just fed it all like fuel. She gave as good as she got—plundering his mouth as surely as he plundered hers, with an abandon that would have shocked the politician even after years together. An abandon that the hockey player took in stride.

But it was that abandon that actually gave Shannon pause, that gave her the sense that she was somehow not herself, that warned her to slow down, to think, to stop before things went too far…

She slid her hands from Dag's back to his muscle-wrapped rib cage, then to his chest again. But instead of pushing him away, she continued caressing those perfect pectorals for a while, almost forgetting herself all over again. Until she realized what was about to happen and then she put some effort into taming the kiss, finally managing to begin a retreat.

Dag got the message, although he showed no eagerness to end anything and even after tongues had parted ways, he still kissed her and kissed her again. And kissed her once more on the side of her neck where he flicked the tip of his tongue just a little.