Dirty Player_A Hockey Romance Read online

  “How’s it been back in Chicago—aside from hockey?”

  His eyes crinkle at the corners, and he pulls me closer to give me a squeeze.

  “The first non-league related question I’ve gotten all night, and it comes from the sports reporter.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  “You always do.” He pulls out my chair and we sit, just smiling as we look at each other for a moment. Then he answers, “It’s good. I like living downtown, and while the bulk of my time is spent with the team, it’s nice to be close enough to see Natalie… just whenever.”

  Thinking about Greg’s little sister puts a smile on my face. He used to call her Goon, like she was a little enforcer on the ice. “She still play?”

  “Nah, she did through college. You know she graduated from Wisconsin, right? But now all her ice time is coaching a 12U girls team. Loves it.”

  We talk about his parents, who moved back when he got traded to the Slayers, and me having my sister Cammy and my four-year-old nephew as roommates. About having Jack Hastings as a landlord, and how our former schoolmate thinks the guy who moved into Hank Wagner’s old place is a douche. He asks me about my mom, and I’m trying to figure out how to change the subject so I don’t have to explain about Florida and what her latest mistake, Chuck, is costing me, when the music cuts off and Tabby Jennison takes the stage at the front of the gym. Greg smirks, and I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts he’s thinking of the time she drank too much at Tucker Lawry’s party and I had to hold her hair out of the toilet for half an hour before helping him drive her home. It was one of maybe three parties Greg got to attend through all of high school, and he spent it driving a drunk girl home when her own boyfriend wouldn’t.

  Greg’s big hand reaches across the table and pushes my cosmo back, and I know I was right. Like always, I find myself quietly laughing at the unspoken jokes we share, smiling a bit wider because that’s what this guy does to me. Always has. I haven’t been paying attention to what Tabby’s been saying, but suddenly the gym lights go dim, and the spotlights start swirling through the crowd until they land on us and stop.

  There’s an introduction, and I wave along with Greg, expecting the spot to move on to someone else. Only it doesn’t. Tabby’s eyes gleam as they meet mine.

  “So, about a week ago, I got this text from Julia’s little sister, Cammy, with a picture of an IOU written in the back of Greg Baxter’s yearbook.”

  3

  Greg

  JULIA CHOKES ON her drink, and my spine goes ramrod straight. Shit.

  Yeah, I’ve been working her over about the kiss she owes me, but I know better than to make it public. Privacy is hard enough to come by when our livelihoods are made in the public eye, but hell, I didn’t even tell anyone about it ten years ago.

  Tabby explains the IOU, looking every kind of delighted as the gym erupts in laughter and cheers around us.

  There’s only one way to handle something like this. Head-on.

  I lean in to Julia, who’s pulled it together in a blink and is laughing like the good sport she is. Only I know that inside she’s probably freaking the fuck out. She doesn’t date athletes or anyone with ties to the networks. She’s careful to protect her credibility in ways guys never have to think about. And this, this thing from back when we were just kids, isn’t something she’s going to want taking over the internet.

  “Trust me?” I ask, close enough for her to hear over the crowd.

  The nod I get back is so small I barely catch it, but it hits me right in the chest.

  Trust is a big deal for me.

  I stand, signaling the crowd to give me a second. Then, flashing my most troublemaking grin, I take Julia’s hand and pull her from her seat.

  She’s all laughs, but the look in her eyes says she’s going to feed me my own balls if I fuck this up.

  Not a chance.

  I tug her closer, making a show of it, and closer still. Not up against me, though I’m damn certain it would feel amazing. Then I pull this Fred Astaire move on her, quick enough so the only thing she can do is go with it and give up some more of that laughter as I dip her back over my arm.

  She’s clutching my lapel in a death grip, and those warm honey eyes of hers are wide with shock, but in the next second, she relaxes just enough to let me know she knows I’ve got her.

  All around us the grown-up versions of the kids we went to school with are laughing and hooting, waiting for me to make my move, and I’m about to when I catch the flicker of Julia’s eyes to my mouth and the slight catch of her breath. It’s over almost before it starts, but I saw it.

  And that look is like lightning through my nervous system, because it wasn’t some please, no, anything but those lips on mine kind of look. It was, ever so briefly, a hot look. Curious, even.

  Fortunately for Julia, I’ve made my career taking hits that shake me to the core and keeping my senses about me when they happen. So even though my gut and too many other body parts to count have fixated on that single hot second, goading me to take her mouth the way I’ve always wanted to, I keep my shit together and grin at the crowd.

  “Kiss her already,” a guy who looks like he might have swallowed the kid who sat beside me in chem cheers.

  “Should I?” Turning back to Julia, I look into her eyes and quietly ask for that much more of her trust. “Should I?”

  Firmly back in the moment, she huffs a bored breath and gives me what I’m asking for.

  “Knock yourself out, stud.”

  Stud. Only Julia.

  I dip her back even farther, just to feel the clutch of her hand at my jacket and see the widening of her eyes. Then I pop a puckered-up squeaky kiss on her cheek, close enough to her ear that I’ve got no doubt the only thing the cameras are catching is her face screwed into some kind of grimace.

  The boos and laughter are in full force as I offer my cheek for the requisite peck in return and then we’re done. Both of us are laughing as I pull her back up and put a couple of feet between us.

  Her eyes dart to mine, and I can see the relief in them.

  No one is going to read anything into what just happened. I want to talk to her some more, but that ship has sailed. When the crowd pushes between us and twenty different conversations start at once, we go with it.

  Julia

  I am not disappointed. No way.

  That kiss was exactly what I needed it to be—fun, light, nothing that says anything more than Greg and I are old friends. Sure, there was that single crazy second when I got a little drunk looking up into Greg’s eyes, but it passed as quickly as it came. And so long as no one knows about it, I’ve got no worries.

  We take the teasing that is our due, laughing with our old classmates, both familiar and not so familiar. Just having a good time.

  Greg catches my eye from across the thickening crowd. “Hey, see you later?”

  “Absolutely.”

  After an hour, I’ve reconnected with several more friends and am still grinning about Missy Evers’s shenanigans as I step out of the ladies’ room.

  “Hey, Jules, hold up.”

  I startle, finding Greg pushing off the opposite wall where he’d been waiting for me.

  I smile. “Thought I might not get another chance to see you tonight.”

  It’s happened before. We’ve been to corporate events where we haven’t been able to clock more than five minutes together the whole night.

  He shakes his head, stepping closer. “Didn’t think you’d get off that easy, did you?”

  “Easy?”

  I glance down the locker-lined hall and find it deserted. The music from the gym is muted, and aside from a shriek and giggle echoing from another hall, we’re alone.

  Our eyes meet, and again that tiny flare of awareness runs through me. But before I can think about it, Greg’s caught my hand in his and is firmly pulling me away from the reunion and toward the doors that lead to the track and field complex behind the school.

  �
�Greg!” I half whisper, half laugh, not resisting. I want to see what he’s got up his sleeve.

  He pushes the exit door open and scans the area. “No one out here. Security blocked off access to the back of the school.”

  Then he’s tugging me out into the cool September night. The sky is a dark purple; the fields and turning trees beyond the spotlit track and parking lot look like black cutouts against the fading light.

  “Greg! What are you doing?”

  He stops and turns to me, towering close, his eyes in shadow. “You know what I’m doing.”

  My heart skips a beat. Okay, now I do. I’m just not quite sure how I feel about it. “We kissed. In front of a room full of witnesses.” I swallow. “My debt is paid.”

  “Please,” he barks out. “That wasn’t even close to a real kiss. And even if it was, that was for them. I want the one you promised me.” One thick brow arches up. “Come on, Jules. Don’t you want to know what it would be like, just once?”

  My belly does one of those little roller coaster dips, because this is Greg. My friend.

  My incredibly hot and talented friend, who’s pressing for the kind of crazy foolishness I’d never even consider outside these all-too-easy-to-write-off circumstances. But if I ever wanted to know, I suppose this is my chance. The free pass I may never have again.

  And I mean, I did promise, right?

  Smile hitching higher, he nods. “You do want to know! Knew it.”

  Towing me the rest of the way, he takes a last look around before pulling me under the bleachers.

  It’s quiet beneath the stands, cool, and darker than in the open, but not so much we can’t see. This isn’t a place where Greg and I have been before. At least not together. It feels intimate and isolated within the shelter. It feels like I’m back in high school, and all the reasons I usually avoid situations like this don’t exist. It feels like for once, I can give in to the moment and just have some fun.

  We’re standing close. Closer than I ever stand to guys off camera, and I’m hyperaware of the space between us. Of how it shrinks when Greg touches my hair, rubbing it between his fingers and thumb before tucking it behind my ear. He hasn’t even touched my skin, but chills skate down my neck and arms, and the air begins to feel thin.

  “This is weird,” I whisper, looking anywhere but at him.

  “You backing out on me?”

  “I’m no welcher.” I’m aiming to convey how utterly unaffected I am by this whole thing, how not seriously I’m taking it—but the crack in my voice betrays me.

  Greg smiles. “Nervous?”

  I shouldn’t be.

  This is a joke.

  A lark. A dare.

  A laugh we’ll pass back and forth through the years to come.

  So that’s what I make it.

  I meet Greg’s eyes. “Yeah, it’s my first time. Be gentle.”

  Greg scoffs, muttering my name.

  I blatantly let my eyes wander down his body. “So. Ten years later… Is it still so hard?”

  He knows exactly what I’m referring to, and this time his laughter is rich and deep, putting us back on the familiar ground I was searching for.

  When he doesn’t answer, I poke again. “Getting soft in your old age?”

  Ducking his head, Greg looks at me through his thick lashes. “You’re not getting off the hook for this kiss. But if you want, I’ll let you feel it first.”

  I bite my lip and he pulls his shirt from his trousers, raising the expensive fabric high enough to reveal the washboard abs he let me feel up after losing a bet on a Bulls game our senior year.

  Maybe it’s the night shadows playing tricks on me, but I don’t think so. The bands of muscles wrapped tight across his abdomen look even bigger than they did when he was eighteen.

  He takes my hand and presses it against the warm skin, and I yelp, pulling my hand back.

  Eyes wide with disbelief, I look up into his amused face and then back to that rock-hard stomach, where my fingers have returned and are tentatively following the divides between the layers of muscle.

  “Good lord, Greg, do you do crunches in your sleep?”

  I start to crouch down, fascinated the same way I was in high school, because—

  Big hands grip me beneath my arms, pulling me up again. “Show’s over, Jules.”

  “Wait, just another—”

  “Nope.” He pushes me back against the support where I was leaning before and holds me there like he wants me to stay. “Enough putzing around.”

  At the lift of my brow, he rolls out his shoulders.

  “Prepare to have your world rocked, to be ruined for all other dudes, or to fake all of the above for the sake of my fragile ego.”

  This time I’m the one who snorts. Greg’s ego could shoulder the Sears Tower.

  His hands come up to my face. It’s a gentle touch, but more businesslike than seductive as he tilts my head just so. I was so nervous before, but now… this just feels like us.

  “Can I keep touching your abs?”

  A furrow digs between his brows. “No.”

  Dang it.

  He gives me one last look, and for a split second, I’m not sure he’s going to go through with it.

  But then the corner of his mouth hitches the smallest degree, and he leans close. “Brace yourself, Jules.”

  4

  Greg

  I DON’T KNOW what I’m doing, acting like such a cocky fuck.

  Brace yourself.

  Right. Like one kiss from me, and Julia is going to need to reevaluate her whole life. Not likely.

  But maybe the bravado is enough to distract her from the fact that I’m practically vibrating with the need to get my mouth on her. To taste her. Just once.

  It was all fun and games until the moment I dipped her back and her eyes went soft and warm, sliding down to my mouth.

  One glance, barely a second, and suddenly getting this kiss has become a critical thing.

  I’m close enough to Julia that if our breathing syncs up, our chests will touch. Don’t get me wrong—that would be fucking nice. But I’m not sure having all those lace-covered swells rub against my chest would be the best idea, so instead of closing the distance, I hold my ground, leaving that precarious inch of space between us.

  I cup the sides of her face and look down at her mouth the way she’d looked at mine in the gym. Only instead of the fraction of a second it took for her to clear her eyes, I look my fill.

  Ten years I’ve been waiting for this kiss, and something tells me that even if I wait another ten or ten after that, I’ll never be this close again.

  “Greg,” she whispers, and those nerves I keep hearing in her voice just before she says something outrageous are back.

  But I don’t want another joke. I don’t want to lighten the mood.

  I want to know what this kiss that’s been flirting with me for the past ten years tastes like. So I take it.

  Our kiss is sweet and soft and, because I don’t want to rush past a single part, slow. Julia’s mouth lives up to the hype. A closed-mouth kiss with that damned inch of space left between us ought to feel like a G-rated movie, but it’s not. The supple give and gentle rub of her mouth against mine is up there with the dirtiest fantasies I’ve ever had.

  Jesus, it feels like electricity is running through my veins.

  Like my skin is on fire.

  Like I want more.

  I shouldn’t push, because fuck, I don’t want this to end. We didn’t talk about boundaries. We didn’t set a time limit or clarify where the lines are drawn. But if this is the only kiss I’m ever going to have from Julia… I want it to be a kiss. No holds barred. One for the books.

  I sink in. Her lips part beneath mine on this startled little puff of breath that hits me harder than two hundred pounds coming across the ice at twenty miles an hour.

  The hands I’d been so careful to keep gentle, firm. One slides deeper into her hair, the other cups the back of her neck.


  I touch the pout of her bottom lip with my tongue and then slip into her mouth, taking that taste I’ve been so hungry for.

  Christ, she’s sweet and warm and soft, and when her tongue meets mine in a soft rub, I’m gone.

  But then maybe so is she, because her hands aren’t at her sides where I put them. They’re tickling up my stomach, pressing flat against the abs that pure survival dictated I stop her from touching. That inch of space is gone, and I can’t even remember why I thought keeping it was such a good idea.

  Julia’s curves and valleys pressed against me from thigh to chest are about the most perfect fucking thing in the world. Except now that I’ve had it, it isn’t nearly enough. The hand in her hair tightens, and she moans, her fingers balling against my shirt as I urge her head back, opening her to more of my kiss.

  Somewhere in the back of my brain there’s a warning bell clanging, but by the time it filters through the taste of her tongue sliding against mine and the press of her hips, it might as well be one of those jingle bells our cat used to wear on his collar.

  I’m no virgin, and when it comes to women, things have gotten hot and heavy more times than they haven’t. But kissing Julia—it’s different. I can’t remember the last time I kissed like this. Hell, I can’t remember ever kissing like this.

  My mouth moves over her neck, and she angles her head to give me better access. That little moan of hers beside my ear has me trying to wrestle back the possessive-as-fuck high-school kid still residing deep inside me from sucking hard, putting my mark on her. That would be so hot—until she eviscerated me for it.

  It might be worth the slow death.

  We’re burning out of control, and it’s fucking amazing. Her arms are wrapped tight around my neck, her hands are in my hair, then moving over my shoulders and down to my abs and—Christ—she’s got her fingers wrapped around my belt.

  I freeze. It’s only for a second, not even. Just long enough for my conscience to flash, “IS SHE GOING TO REGRET THIS?” on the Jumbotron in my brain. But before I have a chance to ask, her hands fly off my belt like it burned her, and I have my answer.