Page 21 of Ash and his Dragon

He got up slowly, and I could see him shake it off, but there was a slight favoring of his left side that hadn’t been there before.

By the third period, we were down three-one, and Max had picked up another penalty for a slash that was clearly intentional. Kinkaid benched him for it, and I watched the captain sit there with his head in his hands.

In that moment, I understood exactly what I’d done.

By avoiding him, I’d destroyed him.

Not physically, not obviously, but in all the ways that mattered. I’d gotten inside his carefully constructed armor, and now that armor was failing at exactly the moment he needed it most.

We lost five-two.

The announcers were careful not to blame Max directly, but the implication was there in every sentence. The captain had played poorly. The distractions off the ice had affected his performance.

Questions would be asked.

The locker room afterward was silent in a way that made the silence during the morning meeting seem like a celebration. Guys stripped out of their gear mechanically, not looking at each other, not saying a word. The loss felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.

I sat in my stall and didn’t look at Max.

I couldn’t.

Because if I did, if I saw the guilt in his face or the anger or the despair, I might actually break apart right here in front of everyone, and that wasn’t something I could afford to do.

Cole sat down next to me eventually and leaned over so only I could hear him.

“Whatever that was about, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Yeah, it was,” I said quietly, because it was.

It absolutely was.

And we both knew it.

Chapter six

Cycle - An offensive strategy in which players move and pass the puck along the boards to maintain possession and create a scoring opportunity.

Max

Melanie wasn't the first.

That was the part nobody outside my family understood, and the part I could never explain without revealing something far more dangerous than a woman breaking into my apartment and manufacturing a story about what she'd found there.

She wasn't even particularly unusual.

There had been women who'd waited outside hotels for hours because I'd smiled at them after a game, women who'd found private phone numbers I hadn't given them, and women who'd convinced themselves a photograph or a five-minute conversation meant we had some kind of connection. One had flown across the country after meeting me once at a charity event, while another had sent letters to my parents' house for nearly a year despite being told repeatedly that I wasn't interested.

Men too, occasionally, although attraction didn't always have to be sexual. Sometimes it was friendship that became too intense, admiration that tipped into fixation, or the simple conviction that they deserved a place in my life because I'd made them feel important for a few minutes.

Most eventually went away when I gave them nothing to hold on to.

Melanie would too.

At least, that was what I kept telling myself.

I sat in the hotel suite and knew exactly how badly I'd fucked up. Not the part with Ash—that was the only thing that had felt right in weeks—but the part after it, on the ice, where I'd let a tabloid scandal and a woman's manufactured outrage affect my play in a way that hadn't happened since I was twenty years old and still learning how to compartmentalize.

If it had only been Melanie, I should've been able to handle it. I'd skated through betting scandals and team implosions, trades, injuries, and the endless circus that came with being captain of an NHL team. I knew how to separate the noise from what mattered.