What if she stabs them?
“She won’t. They’re fast and so much bigger and stronger than her. They’ll take her down before she can hurt anyone.”
I hope.
“Last chance to come out and face me, Blair. Woman-to-woman.” The knob rattles again, and I let go of Reed to position myself in front of him.
“Fuck you, you crazy bitch. This is your last chance to leave before the guys get here and you wind up in jail for the next ten years.”
Her unhinged laughter floats through the door and our makeshift barricade. “You really shouldn’t have said that.”
fifty-four
LOGAN
Drivingto Blair’s has never taken so long.
“Dude, you’re rocking the whole SUV,” Ryder teases from the passenger seat as we idle at a red light. “It won’t get us there any faster.”
“Whatever.” I roll my eyes but grin a moment later when the light turns green.
“Is this nervous energy, or are you just that excited?”
“Both? I don’t know, man. I’m scared shitless, but I also can’t wait for them to spend their first official night in my place. Our place. You know?”
Ryder nods. “I do. That’s how I felt when Lex moved in.”
The rookie and I have more in common than I would have thought. We’ve both found family in the Rogues, both fallen in love with badass, intelligent women, and we’ve both moved those women in because of some perceived threat that makes the idea of them living apart from us unbearable. For Ryder and Lexi, it was the overwhelming amount of press that came along with the public spectacle her dad made of her, which led to him being fired as our head coach. She was being approached by fansand journalists alike often enough that her apartment no longer felt safe.
“How do you do it?”
“What?” he asks, turning to give me his full attention.
“Not fuck it up.”
Ryder chuckles at that. “Oh, I fuck up sometimes. It’s not about never fucking up, it’s about how you deal with things when you do.”
“What if I don’t deal well with things?” It’s not like I have any good role models in that department. Except for my teammates.
“You do the best you can. You talk to each other. Youlisten. Listening is the key, man. You admit when you fuck up and when you don’t know how to make it better.” He reaches over and gives my shoulder a squeeze as I turn onto Blair’s street. “You put in the time and the effort like you do on the ice. And you remember that she could do better than you and act accordingly.”
That makes me laugh. “Is that what you tell yourself about Lexi?”
“Hell, yeah. I’m not dumb. I know that woman could do better than me, but for some reason, I’m the one she chose. I just need to make sure I don’t give her reasons to stop choosing me.”
“Pretty wise for a rookie.”
“Not a rookie anymore.”
Grinning, I pull into Blair’s parking lot and find a spot. “I guess not.”
Hopping out of the SUV, Ryder and I start walking to the front of Blair’s building as Griffin and Maddox pull in. We give them a nod, and normally I’d wait for them, but I’m so anxious to get to my girl, I keep walking. Ryder’s at my side when we come upon a crowd at the side of the building. A group of eight to ten people form a semicircle around something on the sidewalk.There’s shouting and people talk over each other as a handful of bystanders crouch around something.
“What’s going on?” Ryder wonders aloud.
I want to tell him it doesn’t matter, because Blair and Reed are waiting for us, but something tugs me toward the crowd. Some insistent curiosity has me pushing through the outer edge of bystanders. I turn to a man in a puffy blue coat. “What’s going on?”
“Someone hit the poor bastard over the head with a baseball bat,” the man says, pointing to a wooden bat a few feet away.
