Page 58 of Cross Checked
I didn’t.
Because she hadn’t offered it to me.
Because I was not going to be another man who decided wanting access meant taking it.
So, I stayed still and let her choose what happened next. For a few seconds, she only looked at me. Then her gazedropped, not to the floor, but to the space between us, like she was measuring it. Like she understood exactly why I hadn’t crossed it.
When she spoke, her voice was barely there. “It’s not your problem.”
Every violent thing in me rejected that sentence, but I made my face stay calm. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Her breath caught, and I stepped back before she had to.
The noise from upstairs crashed through the ceiling again, somebody yelling Briggs’s name like a warning or a prayer. Bliss blinked at the sound, then exhaled a shaky laugh.
“Your house is feral.”
“Accurate.”
“Do they always scream like they’re being murdered?”
“Only when Briggs is losing something.”
“So, yes.”
“Usually.”
That got me a real smile this time. Small, but real. I took it like a win.
9
Bliss
The gym suddenly felt too warm after that conversation.
Or maybe it was just him.
The treadmill hummed steadily beneath my feet while Cade moved back toward the weight bench, one hand hooking beneath the collar of his black sleeveless KFU Hockey shirt before dragging it over his head in one smooth motion. The fabric caught briefly against his stomach, exposing hard lines of muscle and warm tan skin before he tossed the shirt carelessly onto the bench beside him like removing clothing in front of women wasn’t basically an act of terrorism.
And honestly?
It should’ve been illegal.
I tried not to stare. Honest, I really did.
But the man looked unfair. Like somebody genetically engineered the perfect hockey player in a lab fueled entirely by violence, arrogance, and protein powder. His broad shoulders flexed every time he reached for another dumbbell while sweat still glistened faintly across his chest and collarbones from practice earlier. Veins shifted visibly beneath his forearms when he lifted, silver chain sliding against warm skin while dark curls kept falling messily across his forehead.
The worst part was that Cade wasn’t even trying.
He moved through workouts the same way he moved through hockey games. Focused. Controlled. Intense enough to make everything around him feel quieter somehow.
The clank of weights echoed softly through the room while music vibrated low through the speakers overhead, bass humming beneath the steady rhythm of the treadmill.
And somehow, the problem wasn’t even that he was attractive anymore.
It was that I liked him. Actually liked him because somewhere between the coffee runs, late-night phone calls that drifted way past project discussions, study sessions where he pretended not to notice when I stole food off his plate, and the Sunday dinners he kept surviving like a man determined to earn hazard pay, Cade Mercer had stopped feeling like an assignment.
He had become routine. One of my favorite parts of the day.
