He patted the spot next to him on the sofa. “Come on.”
She came over and sat, pulling her legs up on the sofa.
He handed her the remote. “Pick something to watch.”
“What if I want to watch a girl movie?”
He arched a brow. “What’s a girl movie?”
“Something romantic.”
“You think guys don’t like romance?”
She shrugged, staring at the TV as she flipped through channels. “Right now I don’t think I know anything about men.”
“I don’t know about other guys, but I can tell you about me. I like sports, of course. Hot women, like you. Good food, good conversation and honesty.”
“Oh, you like honesty?”
“Okay, you really want to get into this thing with Drake tonight?”
“No. I don’t. I already told you I get why you don’t want to tell him about us. My brother is an overprotective pain in my ass. And the fact that he’s your best friend just makes what you and I have together . . .”
She didn’t finish. She couldn’t.
“Complicated?”
She let out a huff, still scrolling through channels without even looking at them. “Understatement.”
He took the remote from her hands and muted the sound. “Look at me.”
She did.
“I know what we have is complicated. It’s complicated as hell and I’m sorry about that. I wish it could be easy for us, but right now it isn’t. Your brother is a hothead and he’s protective about you. In some ways that’s a good thing. I’ll talk to him about us.”
This was new. “You will?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Soon. Let’s get through training camp and I’ll . . . find the right moment. You need to trust me to know when that right moment will be.”
“Okay.”
There was a knock on the door.
“I’ll get that,” Barrett said.
The room service waiter came in bearing a tray filled with all kinds of ice creams and toppings, not to mention the hot fudge sundaes and the champagne. When he left, Barrett slid a look in her direction.
She shrugged. “I might have gotten carried away. The ice cream mind is a dangerous thing.”
One side of his mouth pulled up in a half smile. “So it seems. Let’s dig in and see what kind of damage we can do.”
She went for the hot fudge sundae first, while Barrett mixed scoops of chocolate and vanilla ice cream in a bowl, then sprinkled in some M&M’s.
Harmony picked up the remote and found something they might both like—an action movie mixed in with a little romance.
Barrett leaned back with his bowl. “This looks like a good one.”
They ate and watched the movie. After Barrett finished his ice cream, he popped open the champagne and poured it into two glasses. Harmony was cold after eating the ice cream, so she grabbed a blanket from the bedroom and laid it over both of them.
They sipped champagne and argued about the movie.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “She has to know he’s only using her to get the information he needs.”
“But you can tell he cares about her and he feels really guilty about it.”
“Oh, and that makes it okay?”
“In the movie world, yes. Plus, you know she’ll make him pay for it in the end. They’ll end up married and he’ll spend the next forty years apologizing for lying to her about being a spy and not coming clean about who he was in the first place.”
She laughed. “Probably.”
At the end, there was a happily ever after—with a twist. It turned out the heroine was also a spy, and she’d been playing the hero as well.
“Okay, that surprised me,” Barrett said. “Did you pick up on her being a spy?”
Harmony shook her head. “Not at all. So maybe she’ll be the one continuing to apologize for the next forty years.”
He laughed. “Or maybe they’ll end up even.”
“Could be.”
Barrett gathered up their bowls and laid them on the tray, then wheeled it out to the hallway and called room service to pick it up.
“Tired yet?” he asked as he refilled her glass.
“Not yet. I think I’m still riding that sugar high from the ice cream.”
“We could get dressed and take a walk.”
She picked up her phone. “It’s after midnight. How about we step out on the balcony instead?”
“Sure.”
He opened the slider and they walked outside. It was warm, but that breeze she’d felt earlier at the club was still present. There were two chairs out here, but all she wanted to do was stand, lean against the railing and look at the lights of the city.
“Beautiful out here.”
Barrett came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her. “Yeah.”
She leaned against him and put her hands on his forearms. “Nothing like your ranch, though. It must have been amazing to grow up with all that space.”
“We didn’t spend all our growing-up years there, but the time we had sure was fun. Lots of space to run around and get dirty.”
She laughed. “I imagine that for boys it was a great deal of fun. Plus riding horses, driving the trucks around all that land.”
“Mucking out stalls, working cattle . . . it wasn’t exactly all play all the time. Dad made us work, too. Nothing fun comes without hard work attached.”