Read Online Final Play (Matchplay Series) by Dakota Madison - Free Book Online

seemed to expand and contract at the same time.
    “Are you okay?” she asked.
    I wasn’t sure how to respond. I didn’t feel okay. I felt like a ship that had been set out to sea without a map and without an anchor. I had set sail in the unpredictable depths of Ella Warner.
    I placed a soft kiss on Ella’s lips and the contact was so charged, I took in a quick breath.
    Ella’s expression turned serious.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “It’s not wrong. It’s too right.”
    That made me wonder if she was just as scared and confused and excited about what was going on between us as I was.
    When my stomach rumbled, she laughed. “We’d better get to the grocery story. I don’t want your stomach to get mad at me.”
    I guess I should have suspected when she said grocery store what Ella really meant was an organic health food market. It wasn’t the type of place that I normally frequented. I was more of a big box store kind of guy. Mainly because I didn’t have a lot of time to worry about shopping and I liked to stock up for as long as possible. The market she took me to was the kind of place you’d have to frequent on a daily basis in order to get fresh items.
    “What do you feel like having?” Ella asked as we headed down the produce aisle. “We could make a salad. Maybe some pasta?”
    “Sounds good,” I agreed.
    Ella filled our basket with all kinds of vegetables, some of which I had never actually eaten (like artichokes and kale). But she seemed to have something very specific in mind.
    She also selected fresh angel hair pasta and told me she was going to make a pesto sauce.
    “So, you don’t keep food in the house and you don’t eat very much but it sounds like you know how to cook...”
    She glanced down at her sandals averting my gaze. “I do.”
    “Did you do some cooking in your past?” As soon as the question escaped my lips, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. I had a feeling it probably had to do with the fifty-eight men in her past.
    “Just a guy I hung out with for a while,” she said. “Nothing serious. He was a chef and he taught me a few things.”
    We were stopped in front of the fresh baked breads. I wasn’t sure if she wanted to include a loaf as part of the meal of not. “Was it not serious because you didn’t want to get serious or he didn’t want to get serious?”
    She shook her head then grabbed a French baguette. “I don’t know. We just spent some time together when I lived in New York. I thought maybe he had a girlfriend. We never really discussed it.”
    I grabbed the thin loaf from her hands and placed it in the cart.
    “That bread is exceptional with an olive oil and garlic dip,” she commented. “I could make some.”
    She was quite skilled at finding ways to change the subject when she didn’t want to talk about something. “So did the chef just crash at your place like Steel?” I knew the words sounded colder and more possessive than I had intended.
    When she looked at me, her eyes were narrowed, “Yeah, he did.”
    “I just want you to know right now that I’m not someone who is just going to crash at your place. I’m very serious about everything in my life and that now includes you.”
    She swallowed. I waited for her to say something but no words came out of her mouth. Had I rendered her speechless?
    “Are you okay with that?” I prodded.
    She started towards the checkout and I followed. It would have been nice to have an answer to my question but I didn’t push. She obviously needed some time.
    “This is going to be a spectacular meal,” she commented as we placed the items on the conveyor to be scanned.
    Once we were back in my car and headed back to her place, I decided to bring up the subject of our relationship again, even though I wasn’t sure if relationship was the proper term for whatever we had going on between us.
    “You didn’t answer my question when we were in the market.”
    She inhaled a deep