“Hey, bud. Have a good rest? Looks like you needed it.” I forced out a chuckle, keeping the riot going on inside me hidden.
“Shit!” His eyes went wide as he looked out the window at our surroundings and then back at me. “You drove the whole way? I slept the whole time! God, just kill me now. This is so humiliating.”
He was so goddamn adorable in his freakout, I couldn’t help but smile for real. I wanted to gobble him up.
“Nah, don’t worry.” I waved away the idea that he had anything to be embarrassed about. “It was an easy drive. And seriously, you have nothing to feel bad about. With hockey, I barely get to leave Toronto and drive myself anywhere except to Niagara to see my parents. This was the first car I bought for myself when I started out in the NHL, so it’s got the whole nostalgia thing working for it. It’s all good.”
I left it unsaid that this kind of drive would have actually been enjoyable on a full night’s sleep and in the daytime. But the pink tint along Cade’s cheeks started to fade, so hopefully that meant he took my reassurance at face value.
“Okay. Thank you. I really am sorry about all this.” He raised his hands off his lap, making a circular motion in a gesture of “everything” about us sitting here in this moment.
I shifted in my seat so my body was turned toward him, my back protesting the move along with my injured shoulder, which now felt so stiff it might as well have been an iceberg.
“You have nothing to be sorry about, okay?” I tilted my chin down and lifted an eyebrow in my best stern look.
I paused, waiting for him to acknowledge my words.
Cade swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat before offering an almost imperceptible nod. His big, thick curls hardly shifted on his head with the movement.
Watching him, I tried not to notice how sexy his throat looked as he swallowed. And how many places on it I’d like to nibble until he squirmed with pleasure.
“Ha,” he said humorlessly. “I feel the exact opposite of not needing to apologize.”
He closed his eyes for several seconds, visibly taking another deep breath, as if the refill of oxygen to his lungs would force whatever words he wanted to say out of his mouth.
“It’s like every second my brain comes up with another thing to apologize for,” he continued, lifting a hand from his lap and counting off reasons on his fingers. “Waking you up in the middle of the night, letting you drive me here and not handling this whole thing by myself like an adult would,sleepingthe whole goddamn trip and not taking a turn driving when you must be exhausted. . .” He trailed off as if his mind needed a second to catch up to his mouth. “Oh God!” He blinked. “Your shoulder! It must be bothering you after being locked in one position for hours. Shit, I’m sorry.”
“Hey, hey, Cade,” I cut him off, having heard enough self-criticisms that he didn’t need to be thinking about right now. “If you’re feeling as guilty as you sound right now, you need to listen to what I’m about to say, okay?”
I waited until he made eye contact and offered me a soft, “Okay,” in reply.
I wanted to be able to put my hands on his shoulders, to gently press down against the stress that had them tensing up toward his ears. But it wasn’t appropriate. I’d already touched his face back at the hotel when I shouldn’t have, and his knee a few minutes ago.
I reined in the urge to physically comfort him, needing to make my words enough on their own.
“Cade, I never do anything I don’t want to do, okay? You know as well as I do that hockey takes as much from a player’s life as it gives, eh?”
He nodded, his lips turning into a grim line.
“That means I’m very careful with my choices about what I do with the part of myself that doesn’t belong to the NHL. So, when I say that Iwantto be here, withyou, helping you get to your mom when she needs you and you need her, I mean every word. If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t, bud. This is not just lip service to stop you from feeling bad. I learned early in my career that I couldn’t doeverything, so I’d better make what I do mean the most. It’s as simple as that.”
“I’m pretty stressed right now, so I’m not sure if I can let myself believe you, but I want to, okay, Ash?”
The innocence and hurt Cade carried around under his skin shone through in his gaze. No one had a right to be this compelling and adorable at the same damn time.
It was an honest response, even if my stomach sank with the disappointment that I couldn’t remove Cade’s belief that I was only here out of obligation.
But my reaction was more about me wanting to fix everything than Cade sitting with his feelings.
We were both trying here, so that would have to be enough. It wouldn’t help him at all if I kept him in the car, trying to convince him otherwise.
“Good. Let’s get you in there to see your mom. Do you need to message anyone to let them know you’re here?”
“Shit! Right. I need to send Kait a message since I promised her an update on my ETA, but then I went and slept the whole way up.”
Swallowing shattered glass would have gone down more comfortably than the question I was about to ask him.
“Uh, Kait—the one who told you about your mom, right? Is she your girlfriend? Do you want me to give you some time alone? I can wait here in the parking lot.”
