Bishop Read online

  “Bullshit,” my dad says, stabbing his fork in the air first at me, then at Bishop. “Both of you must know I am not happy you hid this from me, or that I got slapped in the face with it today. But I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Now that it’s in the open, I expect you do this the right way.”

  His gaze turns to Bishop and he stabs his fork in the air again, right at him. “That means you do this the right way for my daughter.”

  “Understood,” Bishop replies in a clipped voice, and my guilt over this whole fiasco intensifies.

  Chapter 5

  Bishop

  I hate holding her hand, and yet I feel I’d like it way too much under different circumstances.

  We walk out to her car with our fingers laced together and her father probably watching us out the window. I had prepared to go in there and lie through my teeth with made-up facts to dispel Coach Perron’s suspicions, but he turned the fucking tables on us and seems pretty gung ho about a wedding.

  “I am so sorry,” Brooke murmurs as we reach her driver’s side door.

  “You’ve said that enough,” I tell her as I release her hand.

  “Not enough,” she mutters as her head drops and she stares at her shoes. It causes a pang of sympathy to hit behind my breastbone, and I slide my fingers up her neck, pushing my thumb under her chin and forcing her to look at me. I bend in closer to her. “It’s done. Stop apologizing and let’s just figure out where to go from here, okay?”

  She nods, a tremulous smile forming on her face.

  “I mean it,” I tell her gently. I’d heard the tone in her dad’s voice when he was talking about his wife, and given everything that’s happened in that family, coupled with the fact that Brooke got us into this mess because she was altruistically trying to protect me from her father, I decided to just accept what’s happened. No sense in bemoaning it now that it’s done, and we just have to concentrate on finding a way out of this.

  And until we do, I’m going to take advantage of a few things.

  I lean into her, my hand now wrapping around the back of her neck. Slanting my head, I bring my mouth down onto hers for a softly lingering kiss. Brooke gasps with surprise into my mouth.

  When I pull back, her expression is guarded. She brings a hand up, placing her fingers against her lips as if to hold on to the feeling. “Why did you do that?” she murmurs.

  “Because your dad’s probably watching us right now.”

  “Oh,” she says, her eyes dropping from mine.

  Releasing her, I open her car door. Nodding my head to her seat, I say, “I’ll follow you to your house.”

  “What?” She jerks with surprise.

  “I’m coming to your house tonight.”

  “Why?” A deep line of confusion etches in her forehead.

  “Because you and I are practically engaged,” I tell her as I put a hand to her lower back and gently push her to get in. “We have a ruse to perpetuate not only to your dad, but to an entire professional hockey team.”

  “We don’t have to sleep together to do that,” she points out.

  I grin at her. “I don’t intend on getting much sleep tonight.”

  “We don’t have to have sex to make people think we’re engaged,” she snaps at me, fire leaping in her eyes.

  “Yeah, that’s where you’re wrong,” I tell her as I snag her from behind the neck again and pull her into me. Her lips part slightly and her hands brace against my chest. If her dad is watching, I suppose it looks like an intimate move. I tilt my head and bring my lips to her ear. “You see, Brooke, I’m still just a little pissed that my life is going to be disrupted for probably weeks over this. And if I’m supposed to act madly but stupidly in love with you, well…you’re just going to have to give me something to help me past that anger so I look like I’m crazy head over heels for you and don’t actually want to strangle you.”

  She tries to push away from me, but I hold her with sheer strength. She tips her head back to look at me, eyes all frosted over with indignation. Brooke’s lips peel back in a snarl. “So you’re blackmailing me for sex? Or are you punishing me?”

  Chuckling, I give her neck a squeeze. In a low voice, I tell her, “Baby…you know damn well it’s no punishment having my tongue pushed deep in your pussy.”

  The coolness in her eyes melts into pure heat. She swallows hard and places a hand back to my chest.

  I give a half shrug. “My cock in your ass, though? That could be punishment, but we’ll work up to it so it doesn’t hurt that much.”

  I expect her to slap me, but I just couldn’t help myself. Instead, the heat in her eyes goes nuclear as she’s clearly moved by my dirty words.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” My voice is taunting, but also curious.

  Brooke definitely liked my finger in her ass. It’s what pushed her over the edge last night, but she still seems like she’d be pretty vanilla past much more than that. It’s why when she finally answers me, it knocks all the wind out of my sails.

  “I’ve always been a little curious about it,” she admits softly before digging her teeth down into her lower lip. “You’re pretty big, though. Not sure I could handle it.”

  Swallowing down a groan and ignoring the twitch in my dick, I tell her, “You could handle it.”

  I know she could.

  And while I think my anger toward her is justified and I’m okay with taking advantage of it a bit, I also have to be honest. “It’s not just about giving me something to make up for this, Brooke. Before your dad ever walked in on us, you and I reconnected for a reason. Had your dad not walked into your office, you and I both fucking know I’d be at your house tonight. Am I right?”

  She nods, but then again…she’d be lying if she didn’t.

  “We do need to talk, though,” Brooke says, and the coolness in her tone tells me we’re done talking about the possibility of me tapping her ass. “We’ve got to figure out some type of game plan. I can’t figure out why my dad’s suddenly okay with all of this.”

  “He’s not,” I tell her as I once again release my hold on her and point to her car seat. After she gets in, I place one hand on the roof, the other on the doorframe, and lean in. “I think he’s calling our bluff.”

  Her eyes bug out. “You do?”

  “I do,” I reply confidently. No way in fuck that guy buys our story, and now he’s fucking with us. “Unfortunately, that means we’re going to have to do a damn good job selling this relationship to him before we break it off.”

  “I’m so—” she starts to say, but I glare at her. Her mouth slaps shut.

  “No more apologies,” I remind her sternly. “I’ll be at your house in a little bit.”

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “Store,” I say tersely as I stand up straight. I look down at her with a lecherous smile. “Going to buy a big box of condoms.”

  Her mouth drops open, but I shut the door before she can reply.

  * * *

  —

  My mouth opens wide to come down on Brooke’s pussy. I give it a full, wet kiss before giving her what I promised, and that’s my tongue shoved in as deeply as I can.

  She grips my hair tightly and pulls so hard my nose mashes into her. Inhaling deeply, I groan, because she smells amazing and tastes even better. I lift my head easily against her grip—shoot her a quick smile but her eyes are rolled back—so I can peel her apart and expose what I really want.

  That clit.

  Swollen and begging for me.

  “Bishop,” she cries out as I start to lick at her oh so very gently. I slide two fingers inside of her and scissor them, moving my thumb to press up just on the underside of her clit.

  I lift my head again to look up at her, all naked and splayed out over her bed. Legs wantonly spread wide with her feet planted h
ard so she can rotate her hips to create more friction with my mouth. Her nipples are hard and her eyes are now squeezed shut.

  My gaze travels back down to where my fingers are lodged in deep and I rub her clit with my thumb. She groans and bucks. I stare at her pussy a moment, loving she’s mostly bare except for a tight-cropped strip of hair down the center. She clearly waxes, as her ass was just as beautifully bare too.

  I give her my mouth again, starting with gentle whorls that gradually get faster and a little rougher. She takes three of my fingers, and it only takes one hard pursing of my lips and a sharp suck on her clit, and she’s splintering for me, screaming my name, and I like that a lot.

  It takes but a moment to get the condom on. Brooke lifts her head to watch as I put my hands to the back of her thighs and splay her open even wider.

  “Guide me in,” I order her through gritted teeth. My dick is fucking hard as a rock, which usually isn’t the case after I take my time going down on a woman. I generally need a little bit of extra stimulus to get it fully ready to punch home, but everything about my eating Brooke’s pussy turned me way the fuck on. I needed nothing but the condom and I was ready.

  Her hand curls around my shaft and she squeezes me hard.

  “Mmmm,” I involuntarily groan.

  She rubs the tip of my dick through her wetness before planting me dead center and I give a tiny push. Christ…so tight, and despite the condom covering me, I can feel the fiery heat of her flesh permeating and coating me.

  I rotate my hips and work my way in slowly. Despite that orgasm and finger fucking, she’s still incredibly tight. I definitely don’t want to hurt her, even though my baser instincts are driving me to plunge in deep and hard.

  Staring mesmerized at my cock disappearing inside of her, I realize that there’s some small part of me that’s actually a tiny bit grateful this all happened. Granted, it’s the part that’s controlled by my dick, but still…if I have to spend a few weeks in a fake engagement, it just doesn’t get any better than Brooke Perron.

  “Bishop?” Brooke whispers, and I let my gaze slowly glide up her body until she has my attention. I slide in the last inch and bottom out. Her eyelashes flutter briefly before she focuses on me again.

  Her expression puts me slightly on edge. It’s almost wistful, but perhaps it’s just guilt I’m seeing.

  Regardless, I’m not prepared when she says, “In this moment…right now…not sorry at all for how this has all gone down.”

  Never in my life have I had such a laugh-out-loud sort of moment while fucking a woman, but my head tips back and I’m all flashing teeth and barking laughter. When I look back at her, she’s grinning right back at me.

  A shared understanding that perhaps this just isn’t going to be that bad passes between us. If super fucking amazing sex is the burden we have to carry, so be it.

  “You can fuck me now,” she says with amusement. “And don’t be gentle, okay?”

  Now she’s talking my language. I bring my body down onto hers and give her just what she asked for.

  Chapter 6

  Bishop

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Dax says as we sit at our kitchen table. He’s downing a five-egg omelet he cooked up and I’m halfway through a strawberry whey protein shake. Dax likes to eat big first thing the morning, but at least one hour before his workout. I don’t get hungry until midmorning, so I start off with a shake, but by the time I’m done working out, I could eat a moose.

  Dax had been my roommate in New York for the last three years, and over that time living and working together, he’s become the closest friend I’ve ever had.

  “What’s that?” I prompt him before he can take another bite of his food.

  “How did she not know who you were that first night when you met?” he asks, his tone appropriately inflected with sarcasm and a healthy dose of skepticism. He’s past the laughing stage and is now actually kind of worried for me. I’d just finished filling him in on how dinner went with her father.

  This was something I’d wondered too, and to be honest, I thought perhaps she set me up. But that thought was fleeting, and for two reasons. The first was that I don’t get any type of vibe off Brooke other than she’s a genuinely nice woman. She uprooted herself and moved to Phoenix because she was concerned about her dad and the obvious depression he’d been suffering since his wife died. Brooke told me a lot more about that last night.

  In between the times we were fucking.

  Second, I straight-out asked Brooke about it. “You seriously didn’t know who I was when I introduced myself to you?”

  “I swear I didn’t,” she said, then dragged the tip of her index finger in an X pattern across her chest. That got my eyes sidetracked on her tits and I had to play around with her nipples a bit. When I finally left her alone, she explained. “I love hockey. I follow my dad’s team, which was the Phantoms and now it’s the Vengeance. I go to a lot of the games. But that’s about as involved as I am with the sport. It’s just not all consuming to me.”

  It was plausible. I mean, there’s over five hundred players in the league, and even though I play against them, I don’t know all of them. I watch the leading point scorers and the division rankings, so I know quite a bit, but why would Brooke do that unless she was just really into the sport as a superfan?

  “She didn’t know who I was,” I tell Dax with surety. “She’s a big fan of her dad, but not of the sport as a whole.”

  He doesn’t seem convinced and just stares at me while he chews another big bite of his omelet. When he swallows, he asks, “So what in the hell are you going to do?”

  While I’d told him about the dinner last night and how it went, I did not mention the details of what happened after at Brooke’s, but he knew I stayed there all night. Dax had been cooking an omelet when I walked in this morning feeling very loose and very sated despite the lack of sleep I’d had last night.

  “For a few weeks, we’re going to pretend to be together,” I tell him nonchalantly. “Then we’ll sort of institute a break-up. We’ll figure it out as we go along so Coach isn’t too pissed at me. Brooke will probably be the one to dump me so she takes the heat.”

  “This is about the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard,” he mutters, then shovels the last forkful into his mouth.

  “She was just trying to protect me.” I find myself defending her, for it was her actions alone that got us into this mess. “She didn’t want my relationship with her dad to start off badly.”

  “No, it’s just starting off as a lie,” Dax points out after he swallows and pushes up out of his chair to take his plate to the sink.

  “That it is, brother.” I lift my glass and throw back the rest of my shake.

  “So what’s this chick like?” Dax says as he places his plate in the sink and turns to face me. He leans back against the counter and crosses his arms over his chest.

  “Her name’s Brooke,” I mutter as I stand up, my intention to rinse my glass out and put it in the dishwasher.

  “Sorry,” Dax says with a snort and moves to the side so I can access the sink. “What is Brooke like? I’m guessing great in the sack if the smile on your face when you walked in this morning is any indication.”

  The shrug I give him is supposed to convey a casualness about Brooke that I most definitely don’t feel. “She’s cool.”

  “Cool?”

  “Yeah…cool,” I tell him before turning to the dishwasher to open it. I pull the top rack out, place my glass in it, and shut the door.

  “How many condoms did you use last night?” Dax asks, slyly using a roundabout way of getting what he wants.

  “Three,” I admit. I’ve certainly used more over the course of a long night, but I don’t bother to tell Dax that we did plenty of stuff without a condom too. After all, he didn’t ask how many orgasms I’d had.
/>
  Dax laughs and claps me on the back. “At least you’re getting something good out of all this.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” I say with a laugh.

  “So what’s her deal?” Dax turns from me to put his plate in the dishwasher. One thing I’m glad of is that we’re both sort of neat freaks.

  I move back to the table and sit down. We don’t have to be at the arena for practice until 2 P.M., although Dax and I had planned to go work out this morning. Still, we’re not on a tight schedule. “She used to work for a fashion magazine in New York. Has a degree in fashion merchandising. But she lost her mom in February and her dad is really taking it hard, so she moved to Phoenix to be near him. I didn’t ask her, but I suspect that job in team services might have been created for her.”

  Dax nods as he turns from putting his plate in the dishwasher. He nabs a bottled water from the fridge and comes to sit back down at the table. “Hard to believe that crusty son of a bitch has a soft side, huh?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine part of his coaching demeanor is just put on to set the tone with us. He seemed a lot more laid back at dinner last night. After he got through will all his bluster and threats. I didn’t tell you that part…He sort of demanded I put a ring on Brooke’s finger.”

  Dax’s eyebrows shoot up. “Are you?”

  “Fuck no,” I tell him, appalled he’d even ask. “Why would I buy a thirty-thousand-dollar piece of jewelry for a sham?”

  “Rings cost that fucking much?” he asks, eyebrows completely disappearing…perhaps rolling off the back of his head.

  “I don’t know,” I say sarcastically. “Maybe. The point being the only way I’m ever shelling out money for a diamond or putting it on a woman’s hand is if I love her, and I don’t have any plans to be doing that anytime soon.”

  Dax’s eyebrows reappear and he nods in understanding. “How are you going to play this with the team? There’s going to be all kinds of get-togethers this week, and she’ll probably be traveling with us.”