Fuck.
I rake a hand through my hair with the need to do something, anything, to keep myself from losing my fucking mind. Logically, of course I realized she’s younger than me, but I’ve been so fixated on the fact that she’s a damn student, I didn’t even give myself a moment to consider just howmuchyounger she probably is.
“It’s not like either of us knew, Wilder,” she says quietly, her voice low as our eyes meet.
“Coach,” I snap. “Coach Hawthorne. You can’t call me by anything other than what another student would call me.”
After a brief moment, she nods before lifting her chin and squaring her shoulders back as if she’s on the defense, like she’s preparing for a battle.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty. Almost… twenty-one.” Each of her quietly whispered words is like a physical blow to my gut.
Jesus Christ, she’s not even fucking old enough to have been in that bar in the first place.
“Goddamnit,” I blanche. “How’d you even getintothe bar that night?”
Her shoulders lift in a shrug, my question remaining unanswered.
I don’t think she truly understands what’s at stake here. The amount of destruction this type of scandal would bring down on the both of us. If a whisper of this gets around, the entire campus will pick it up.
Gossip spreads like wildfire.
And just like that, ending up here, taking this damn job, all of it will be for nothing. Gone as quickly as the end of my career.
The only chance at showing the league that I’m willing to clean up my image and play nice, turn it all around… gone.
She steps forward, clutching that pink folder against her chest. “Look, I’m not going to tell anyone, okay? I swear. I wouldn’t do anything to get you into trouble. Or anyoneinto trouble.”
“It never leaves this office… because it never fucking happened.”
Her throat bobs in a swallow, and she nods, rolling her pretty pink lips together.
Shit, I can’t be thinking about her lips. About her in any capacity.
“Okay. Well, we’re going to have to work together on this project because it doesn’t seem like there’s another option. Coach Taylor said you’re the one leading this for the team, and I’m not going to let the kids suffer or someone else take my place, because this is really important to me. I won’t jeopardizethe program or my role in it because of a stupid, thoughtless mistake.” Her chin lifts higher, and she blows out a breath. “So we’ll pretend that it never happened. End of story.”
I open my mouth to respond, but she keeps rambling. “I mean, honestly, we don’t even know each other. Um…” Her cheeks burn bright red; she’s obviously thinking about the details from the night that we spent together. “You know what I mean. We’re two strangers that have just met.”
Sounds easy, but two strangers who have just met don’t know what the other sounds like as they come. The little whimpers and breathy sounds that she makes as her pussy is gripping my cock, fingers yanking roughly at the hair at my nape.
But she’s right.
There’s no other option than to act as if that night never happened. So I push it down, shut it off. Stop thinking of what she looked like or sounded like when she came.
Stop replaying that night in my head over and over like a broken record.
Maisie Delacroix is completely, wholly untouchable.
And nothing is going to change that.
CHAPTER
FOUR
MAISIE
It feelslike the universe is playing the world’s biggest joke on me.
