“I wantmystar player working at full strength,” he says.
“You’re not even sure you want to keep me,” I say.
His gaze heats, and he peruses me from head to toe. “Oh, I definitely want to keep you. I just need to make sure you’re good for me.”
“You’ve got some sweatpants I can borrow?” His double meaning feels both clear and impossible. It’s easier to change the subject than wade into any attraction I’m positive I don’t want to face, even if it’s palpable in the room this morning.
My brain is scrambled, and I’m not making good decisions. Maybe he’s right that I need an official assessment and diagnosis.
Logan comes to the doorway of the primary suite with a pair of gray sweatpants in his hand. “They’ll probably be too big, but better than the dress.”
“Whereismy dress?”
“I sent it off with my stuff to the cleaning service last night after you passed out.” He goes to the front door and opens it. Hanging next to the door on a hook I’ve never noticed before is a dry-cleaning bag. “And voila—it’s already done.”
“You’ve hardly been here long enough to know this perk exists,” I say.
“The first things I learn in any place are the tools that make my life easier and more organized. Laundry is always at the top of that list. I fucking hate it.”
“That was a very passionate proclamation,” I say with a little laugh. “What did laundry ever do to you?”
“It never ends. You never get a break from it. The minute I take these shorts off, I’ve got laundry.” He plucks at them with his fingertips, and I’m suddenly very aware of his chiseled, bare chest.
To distract myself, I grab the hanger with my dress from the hook, and his jersey rides up the back of my legs before I’m able to get the hanger down. When I glance at him over my shoulder, he’s tracking the rise and fall of my hemline like he does a puck. If he was anyone else, I’d ask him if he likes what he sees, but we are one hundred percentnotgoing there.
This job as his trainer and physiotherapist is a fresh start for me, and I’m not screwing it up by developing an unhealthy attraction to my client. Because that’s what he is—a client, and I’ve never had trouble keeping that line bold and bright in the past.
His phone beeps, and he drags it out of his pocket. “The driver’s here.”
“I’ll just be a minute.” I slip past him back into the apartment and to the spare bedroom. I shut the door tight, and I lean against it, the dress and his sweatpants in one hand.
Somehow, I need to reestablish firm boundaries. Right after this doctor’s appointment—where I will be literally wearing his clothes—I’m taking a giant step back from whatever is brewing and bubbling between us.
Chapter Eleven
Logan
Part of me regrets insisting that Sawyer be seen by Doctor Bennett almost three weeks ago after she got drunker than a skunk, although it did confirm she was healing from a low-grade concussion.
Since then, without directly saying it, she’s been reestablishing that we’re in a service provider and client relationship. Not frosty, but her demeanor is sure as shit not friendly.
Which would normally suit me just fine. I don’t need any more friends, and I don’t want the complication of anyothertype of relationship. She’s with me to do a job, and my job is the only thing I care about.
Except, it kind of pisses me off that she can brush off the immediate connection we had as though it was nothing more than an inconvenience.
It annoys me that I want to know her.
Even with Doctor Bennett, she was so vague about how she hit her head that it definitely felt like she was hiding something. I can only assume the way she hurt herself embarrassed her, since she told me about the fall off the horse readily enough.
Her childhood fall is the last confession she’s given me, and I’m starting to wonder if it’ll be theonlyone I ever get.
If she wasn’t absolutely pushing my physical skills into beast mode, I’d be a lot madder about her indifference to me personally.
At least professionally, she’s been more focused, more confident in herself since her drunken night out. When she plans a session, schedules my body maintenance like ice baths and massages, or suggests I increase some aspect of my training, she goes through her thinking in detail with charts and graphs and other players’ stats and what she knows about other training philosophies as comparisons.
With Joe, he trained me, but he didn’t teach me. I did what he wanted me to do, and I never pushed back unless my on-ice performance suffered. Before Sawyer, I didn’t realize that I was missing the “why” a lot of the time and the sense of the bigger picture.
“You’re coming to the game tonight?” I ask from the huge ice bath that’s in a glassed-off room next to her front desk. I can see her, but I have to speak loudly to be heard. Normally, we train at the Tucker-Summerset Center, but with our first preseason game tonight, Sawyer thought it might be easier to focus here.
