Page 10 of Hard to Handle

And hell if I’d complain about getting lost in her again for a few hours.

I try to focus on what Frankie is bullshitting about, but my mind and eyes keep going back to her. Back to what we left unfinished and to my sudden need to see her again, talk to her again . . . to see if she’s feeling that same damn attraction still.

“Right?” Frankie asks, pulling my attention back to him. Fuck I’m being a prick to him.

“Yes. Right. I—uh . . . I see someone I need to talk to.”

Without waiting for a response, I make my way across the bar. It’s packed tonight with an abundance of puck bunnies wanting attention and lots of guys buying us drinks to celebrate the victory.

It should be sad the visiting town is excited when we beat the hometown team, but our run has been insane lately, and fans always like bandwagons to jump on.

“Hell of a game, Maddox,” is yelled to my right, and I lift my beer in acknowledgment but keep my course.

“Withers.” Callum looks up when I call my teammate’s name and lifts his chin in greeting before continuing whatever it is he’s telling Dekker. “Maysen needs you,” I say when he finishes.

“About?” He meets my eyes, but I don’t give Dekker a glance.

“Hell, if I know, but he’s looking for you,” I lie.

Impatiently, I wait a few seconds for him to wrap shit up with Dekker, all small talk, and then slide onto the barstool beside her after he vacates it.

Lifting my finger to Donnie, the bartender, I motion for another beer and then tip the bottle toward Dekker’s glass to ask for a refill for her too.

“You’re a long way from home it seems,” I murmur as her subtle perfume—summer and sunshine—fills my nose.

“Just doing my job.” Her voice, Christ, it’s soft with a hint of a rasp and feels like fingernails faintly scraping over my skin.

“What? No, go to hell? No, drop dead, Maddox? No, what hotel room can we find so we can use every surface?” I turn to look at her now. Those dark brown eyes a little too big for her face but in all the right ways. Her soft lips and straight nose with a row of freckles dotting across the top of it. But I know better than to be fooled by those freckles. I know Dekker Kincade is a straight-up sex goddess that may have on occasion made me want to beg for more. I’m not ashamed to admit it. “You feeling all right?”

“Funny,” she says with a roll of her eyes.

“I try.” I hit the side of her knee with mine. “You’re here for work and not pleasure, then?”

She lifts a lone eyebrow and a ghost of a smile paints those lips of hers. “It’s always about work.”

“Not when it came to us, it wasn’t.”

“There was no us,” Dekker asserts, and I snort in response.

My chuckle is low and knowing and the way she adjusts her shoulders tells me she knows what a lie that is. “You’re right. There was no incredible sex. No nail marks down my back. No bite marks on my collarbone.” I shrug. “I don’t know about you, Dekk, but I think we did pretty good in the pleasure department.”

“Too bad we couldn’t seem to master the playing nice part when it came to everything else.”

“Maybe volatility is our thing,” I say, the adjective the only way to describe us in the bedroom. Volatile in desire. Volatile in need. Volatile in temper. “Remember that rooftop bar in Los Angeles?” I ask, knowing she does. “It was a hot summer night. You were in that little sundress and we stowed away to the corner of the patio. I had to put my hand over your mouth to muffle your moans so we didn’t get caught.” I hum in appreciation of the memory. “God, that was hot.”

She averts her eyes and shakes her head ever so slightly, but she doesn’t refute me. She remembers how incredible that night was—the sex on the rooftop, the thrill of not getting caught, the sex at the hotel that followed. It was the only time we had met someplace other than a hotel room, and it left me wondering why we didn’t do it more often.

She ended things the next time we met up.

“You played well tonight.”

Her voice draws me back to the present. I smirk at her attempt to change the topic and lean down so my lips are near her ear. “You can sit here looking all prim and proper and professional, but I know your panties are getting wet and the ache is burning a little brighter, because you remember just how damn good it was and how damn good we were.”

She clears her throat and shifts in her chair to unsuccessfully gain some distance from me and turns to look at me without an ounce of fluster in her expression.

“You played well tonight,” she repeats.

My grin widens. That’s how she wants to play this? She wants to act like seeing each other doesn’t cause old embers to spark? She wants to act like a tiny part of her doesn’t want to revisit that? Then again, she’s the one who walked out and ended things, not me. And yet . . . the fact that she’s acting like there was nothing between us bugs the shit out of me. I’ve never forgotten her.