Light the Lamp by Catherine Gayle Read Free Book Online Page B

him; I’m worried about you. I don’t like anyone else seeing you like this.”
    Anyone else , he’d said. Meaning he liked seeing me like this, himself. A warm flutter raced through my body to settle in my stomach.
    “ I’m sorry,” I said, crossing my legs at the ankles as though that could do anything to cover me. I hadn’t thought about how little I was wearing until now, which seemed stupid of me. Just because Liam felt like he was harmless to me didn’t mean he actually was harmless. I had no way of knowing. “I wasn’t thinking.”
    That seemed to be a problem for me more often than not. I just reacted to things instinctively and let the chips fall where they may. I took a sip from my cup and nearly choked on it because of the heated look Liam sent in my direction. It seemed like the more time I spent in his company, the more he was flirting.
    And I liked it.
    A fleeting smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Go see if any of it fits so I don’t have to hurt Babs for looking at you too hard. I’ll have breakfast ready soon.”
    “ Okay.” I set my mug down. He met my eyes for the briefest of moments, causing goose bumps to break out all over my body and a shiver to race up my spine. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at him. “Liam?”
    “ Yeah?”
    I bit down on my lower lip, and his eye fell right on that spot. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
    “ I hope you don’t stop flirting with me. It feels too good.”
    He let out a groan that sounded pained, and I raced back into his bedroom and closed the door before I could think better of saying something like that.

 
     
     
     
     
    I’d slept like shit last night, but the lack of rest hadn’t really affected me as much at practice as it should have. I’d even scored three times in our shootout drill, which almost never happened for me these days. I couldn’t seem to score anywhere, whether it was in a game situation or not.
    I really needed to avoid sleeping on the couch again, though, whether the lack of sleep had affected my play or not. A couch like that wasn’t really designed for anyone to sleep on it, and when you consider that I was six foot one and weighed 210 pounds, give or take, it wasn’t a good long-term solution.
    Lucky for me, Babs didn’t seem to mind that Noelle was going to be sticking around for a while. When I’d shown up in Portland at the trade deadline, Babs had offered to let me stay with him, in the room Soupy had vacated, through the end of the season. Then I could deal with finding something more permanent in the off-season.
    Even though there was a pretty wide gap in age between us, I’d taken him up on the offer. Having a place to go home to was always preferable to going back to a hotel room. As professional hockey players, we lived in hotels more than enough when we were on the road.
    I’d been living alone on Long Island since Liv’s death, so it was nice to have someone else around, too. Someone to talk to. And now, having Noelle around would only help that more. Her presence was all it took to put me in a better frame of mind, to lighten my mood. So no matter how badly I’d slept last night, I wasn’t going to let Noelle sleep on the couch instead of me. She’d been sleeping in a car, for God’s sake, and I didn’t have a clue how long that had been going on. Weeks? Months? However long she’d been homeless, she deserved to be pampered, and sleeping in a real bed didn’t even come close to what I would call pampering.
    Although, I sure as fuck had no intention of trying to convince her to share my bed with me. She was the first woman I’d felt such a strong attraction to since Liv—or really any attraction at all—and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Even though Liv would want me to move on with my life, to love again and be loved, I didn’t know if I could. It felt like I was being unfaithful just flirting with Noelle the way I had been so far, which was ridiculous.