Caged (Gold Hockey Book 11) by Elise Faber (romantic love story reading TXT) 📕

former princesses being badass warrior queens).

They kept talking as they pulled their respective supplies out—laptop for her, pens, notebooks, and reference materials for him—and then, somehow, effortlessly they fell into silence, working side-by-side without a weird transition of quiet. The conversation just stilled, they both worked until they got drowsy—or at least, she did, closing her laptop after a few hours because planes always made her sleepy.

And then Ethan did an amazing thing.

Without a word, or even seeming to look at her, he lifted the armrest, wrapped an arm around her, and then coaxed her to lie down in his lap, her head on his thigh, her shoulder pressed to his leg, his fingers stroking lightly through her hair.

Her eyes slid closed.

The rumble of the engines coaxed her under.

She was out in moments.

Chapter Sixteen

Ethan

“Hey,” he murmured.

For once, Dani didn’t jump.

She just spun in her chair and stood, crossing over to him with a smile that made him feel as though he could lasso the sun. “That was some move tonight, Korhonen.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist. “Want to come somewhere with me?”

They were off the next day and would fly out the following evening. Tonight, however, they were in Denver, it was beautiful, and he had the need to take Dani on their first official date.

She smiled. “Yeah, I do.” She spun, packed up her equipment and shoved it into her backpack, which she swung up onto her shoulder.

Which he promptly snagged back down her shoulder and then lifted up onto his.

“You just played,” she began. “You’re tired—”

“I’m a man.”

Her brows lifted. “And that means what exactly? That I can’t carry my own bags?”

“Sass.” He tapped her nose. “No,” he said. “It just means that you don’t need to, whether they’re filled with rocks and paint or computer equipment.”

“And what can I do with my womanly, delicate arms?”

God, that arch tone brought forth his naughty librarian fantasies.

“Wait,” she said, interrupting him before he could answer that, which was probably for the best because he didn’t have a good answer for her question anyway.

However, when she continued talking, he realized he was in even more trouble.

“Why are you blushing?” She snagged his hand when he tried to turn for the door. “What’s with the red cheeks, Korhonen?”

Dani in a short skirt and knee-highs, telling him she’d check the reference stack for him, that was the cause for his red cheeks.

Also because in his fantasy, that reference stack would be on the bottom shelf.

Bending over, a glimpse of a lush ass. He’d hop the counter, lift her skirt, and—he cursed under his breath when his cock went hard.

Romance, not fucking.

Romance.

Not fucking.

He swallowed hard. “Just a post-game flush,” he said.

Her brows went up, and he knew she didn’t buy that for one second.

Which was why he slid his arm around her waist, tugged her against him, and kissed her. It wasn’t gentle or careful. It was a touch borne of need and fantasy, of that moment of dreaming about something for so long, thinking it would never come, even while wishing so fucking desperately that it would.

Sensation roiling through his skin, sparking down from lips to toes. She tasted sweet and spicy, as though she’d just had a stick of cinnamon gum but coated her lips in frosting.

Strawberry frosting.

Her tongue dipped into his mouth, fanning the flames of that spice, draping it across his taste buds, boiling the cytoplasm in his cells, heating his DNA and changing it, transforming it, morphing it into something that didn’t just exist to perpetuate his own survival, not any longer. Instead, it existed for her, for Dani, for this intoxicating, lovely woman who was quiet, but not with him. Who held her painful memories tight, but shared so he could understand. Who didn’t let very many people in, but had let him in.

Her nape was soft against his palm, her curls bouncing when she came closer, when she tilted her head back, tickling the skin of his hand, and the quiet moan, the rasp of his name transmitting from her mouth to his had him fighting the urge to strip her naked and kiss every inch of her.

Work.

They were at work.

Slowly, he wrestled with his control, first finding a slender thread buried deep, gradually drawing it forth, coiling it as he struggled to find another, and then another. Until he had a good-sized chunk of it, until he was able to slow the kiss, to lift his mouth.

His hands . . . he hadn’t yet found the control to remove them from her body.

But she didn’t seem to mind, not with every lush inch of her pressed to his front—which wasn’t exactly helping him in his quest to remove his hands. Still, the way she stared up at him, pupils dilated, lips swollen, and he wasn’t in any hurry to summon up any more control.

Dani, however, seemed to have held on to more brain function than he had.

Because the first thing out of those kissable lips was, “Why were you blushing, baby?”

Maybe it was the baby.

Perhaps it was that he’d suddenly become a living, breathing bag of blood existing only for this woman.

Or possibly his filter had been erased at the same time that the spice of cinnamon had hit his tongue.

But whatever the reason, Ethan found himself telling her the truth.

“I have a library fantasy.”

Her chin jerked, eyes going wide. “Care to elaborate?”

His brain started working, right about the time she rose on tiptoe and her mouth came to his, searing him with a blazing kiss that made his legs tremble as though Fanny had just put his ass through the worst sort of drills on the ice.

“Ethan?” she asked when she dropped back down.

“Yeah?”

“What’s the fantasy?”

And hell, if it got her close to him, had her body flush to his, her mouth on his then he’d tell her every last fantasy he’d harbored over the months and years.

“You in a short skirt and knee-highs, bending over the reference stack while I fuck you