Page 150 of Off Limits: The Firsts

“Been busy.” My tone is clipped and my feet shift with impatience.

“I just . . . I wanted to apologize for the other night. I didn’t mean to push you. I—”

“Done and fucking over with.” I offer a tight smile and hate that seeing her makes me feel so damn rattled. Hating her presence and not wanting her to leave. Frustrated, because it feels like a burden has been lifted that someone else knows and unsettling that she does. That she can see me.

She worries her bottom lip between her teeth and shakes her head, her eyes loaded with concern I don’t want to see. “Got it. Done and over with. Discussion never happened. Night never happened. No need to repeat it.”

But it did. The laughter. The Kings hat. The tennis balls. The beer. The comfortable silence. The solidarity.

“Did you need something else?”

“Just know I’m here for you. If there’s anything I can do to help—”

“Do you know what would help? If people stopped fucking telling me that. I’m not a cancer patient. I’m not dying. I’m fine.”

She stares at me, her jaw clenching and eyes firing with anger.

I’m reminded immediately of three years ago when she stood in that hotel room, her chin quivering but held high as she fought the emotion in her eyes. As she told me our fling had run its course and that it was best we didn’t meet again. As she saved me from having to break her heart that was starting to grow a bit too attached to mine.

Because mine was already fucking there too.

The memory is the last thing I need. To be reminded of what it felt like to be cared for by her. To remember how I had spent too much time convincing myself I didn’t deserve someone like her—the feelings, the comfort, the simplicity of it all—only for her to save me by doing it for me.

Only to prove to me just how much of an asshole I am. I never chased her, told her she was wrong . . . because I let her walk away.

She struggles momentarily with her emotions before the businesswoman façade slides back into place and she takes a step back.

“It makes sense now.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“You don’t want to hear what I said the other night, but you want to play the victim. News flash,” she says, mocking what I said to her. “You—”

“Christ, Hunter.” I look up to see Sanderson over Dekker’s left shoulder, disbelief and disgust etched in the lines of his face. “You told me you were leaving to get your head in the game. Yet here you are, trying to score a cheap fuck like a desperate john.”

Before I can respond with the fury that streaks through me, Dekker spins to face him.

“A cheap fuck?” she asks, and Sanderson’s face pales when he sees who I’m speaking with. “I’m sure your clients get great publicity when their agent talks to their fans like that.” She takes a few steps toward him, a tsk on her tongue. “For the record, Finn, I’m nowhere close to being a cheap fuck, but you’d never know because I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

With that, Dekker Kincade saunters down the hotel hallway without looking back. I chuckle quietly. And then I wonder why she’s the only person who can put a smile on my face these days.

Dekker

Skates carve up the freshly resurfaced ice. The sound is like a symphony of skills and maneuvers you can hear just as easily as you can see.

I watch the LumberJacks go through their warm-ups as the diehard fans arrive early to make sure they catch every second of hockey they can.

A few times I catch Hunter glancing up to where I’m standing in the visiting team’s suite. While a small part of me hopes it’s because he feels bad for being an ass to me earlier, the rest of me knows he doesn’t care.

Hell, the only time Hunter Maddox cared about how I felt was when it came to sensations to get me off.

But I think about his press conference today. About the disconnect I saw him have in his answers and the way he acted when I ran into him afterward.

Guess nothing much has changed about him in that aspect either . . . Even now, I can’t figure him out.

“Such a surprise to see you in Boston.”

I glance in my periphery to see Finn Sanderson step up beside me, arms folded, the suit he’s wearing ridiculously expensive.