Page 24 of Her Coach

Lay back.

Stared at the ceiling.

Don't.

I did anyway.

Brynn was exactly the kind of woman that lost me my career. Young. Agile. Thick in all the right places. Independent, with a killer smile and excess around her thighs that I wanted to sink my teeth into.

The glasses. Christ.

She had no idea what she was doing wearing those things. I wanted her to keep them on. Wanted to see them on her face looking up at me. Wanted to see that look she had, the one where she was still trying to figure me out, and find out what it turned into when I gave her something better to think about.

I wanted to get my hands on those thighs. I had been thinking about them since I watched her walk away at the arena and I got the full picture and my self-control took a significant hit. I wanted to run my hands down her body and pull her into me and find out exactly how she fit.

Fuck.

The sounds I wanted to pull out of her.

That was the thought that had me staring at the ceiling at two in the morning. Her in this bed, in this light, the Strip bleeding gold through the floor-to-ceiling glass, those glasses still on her face, looking up at me while I took her completely apart.

Over and over.

Until she knew nothing but my name on her tongue.

Owner's daughter. First day. Career you cannot blow up again.

I knew all of it. I had known all of it before I crossed that street and I crossed it anyway and stayed three hours anyway and now I was lying here having thoughts that were not going to help me with any of the fourteen things I needed to focus on tomorrow.

I was going to do exactly none of it. I had the wreckage of my career sitting behind me as evidence of what happened when I let this kind of thing get traction.

So stay the hell away from her.

I lay there and told myself that for another twenty minutes.

I closed my eyes.

I have blown up my career over a woman I barely even cared about. Lydia Hargrove was funny and sharp and I had liked her well enough, but I hadn’t lost sleep over her. Hadn’t stayed three hours anywhere because of her. Hadn’t lain awake at two in the morning thinking about the way she laughed.

If I could lose everything over someone I didn’t give a damn about, what the hell was going to happen with someone I did?

Fuck.

10

BRYNN

I didn’t have a reason to be at the arena on a Saturday morning.

That was the honest answer. I had community relations emails I could answer from home. I had a manuscript sitting on my laptop that wasn’t going to write itself. I had a fridge that needed restocking and a storage unit in Portland I kept paying sixty dollars a month on that I needed to figure out what the hell to do with.

I went to the arena anyway.

The cold hit me the second I stepped inside, that particular arena chill I’d grown up with, the kind that settled into your bones in the best possible way. I told myself I was just going to check on a few things. Drop off the signage proofs for the season opener. Make sure the sponsorship display cases hadn’t been moved again by the cleaning crew.

The ice was already being used.

I could hear them before I saw them. Skates cutting, pucks cracking off sticks, Jett saying something inadvisable that made someone else laugh. I should have gone straight to my office and done what I came to do.