It was everything.
It was him seeing me for exactly who I was, for exactly where I came from, for exactly the baggage I held — and staying, anyway.
It didn’t scare him.
It didn’t seem to faze him at all.
We somehow survived dinner. Jay passed out not long after, and the rest of us had a peaceful evening playing board games.
And later that night, when I crawled into bed with Shane, he pulled me into his chest and let me cry. He held me through every shake of my shoulders, and then he wiped the tears away and swept my hair from my face, his hands framing my cheeks, eyes locked on mine.
“I am so in love with you,” he whispered.
And then he showed me it was true until I forgot about everything else from that day.
Without Looking Back
Shane
Present
The first time I ever had a gut feeling about something, I was seven years old.
It was the night my parents died.
I was with my grandparents. Mom and Dad had been on a trip together celebrating their anniversary. They ended up flying home one day early to try to beat the snowstorm barreling toward the south — a region of the States ill equipped to handle what was coming.
I remember leaning over the back of Grandma’s couch and staring out the window as the snow fell down. I thought it was so pretty, but it also made my stomach turn.
“I don’t like the snow,” I’d said to Grandma.
“That’s silly. Every kid likes snow.”
“It’s dangerous.”
She’d frowned at that, ruffling my hair. “What an odd thing to say about snow.”
I think sometimes the universe tips us off. It gives us that little wriggle in our stomachs or tightening of our chest for a reason. I’d listened to that gut feeling ever since that night, no matter how ridiculous it felt, because I trusted my body. I trusted my instinct.
And now I had a gut feeling that Nathan Black was doing something to compromise the integrity of our game.
It started as nothing more than a flicker in the back of my mind, and I’d convinced myself I was being ludicrous because Ariana being back in my life had scrambled my brain. I didn’t like the man because he was with her, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t a good relationship.
But over the last two weeks, that flicker had grown teeth.
Nathan’s sudden trips to Vegas were easy enough to write off as work-related, but now I wondered whatexactlyhe was doing there. The way he strutted around the facility like he owned not just the team, but the men on it, only added to my suspicion. The way some of my players had been acting was heavy on my mind, too — jokes dying the second I walked into the locker room, eyes cutting away, tension where there’d never been any.
None of it proved anything. But it all struck the same nerve.
I had a very slimy feeling that something gambling-adjacent was happening.
I didn’t tell anyone. I’d considered confiding in my assistant, Kozak, but the truth was I knew I had to be absolutely certain before I breathed a word of it to anyone.
And part of me hoped I was wrong.
Because if I was right, then it meant the mess went deeper than any of us wanted to consider — that the boys might be involved, that they may be being pressured or promised something behind closed doors.
It also meant I could lose Ariana before I’d even truly had her back.
