Page 43 of Dirty Fighter

I try to shake it off. Try to tell my unruly cock to settle down, because the switches this SNAFU has flipped are ones I swore I was over.

Rowan isn’t for me. She never has been.

And even if there is some small reciprocal attraction from her end, it doesn’t matter. She’s not staying. The minute I give her the documentation to prove this place is mine, her reasons for being here blink out of existence. There won’t be anything she needs to protect or preserve for my father, just an evolving awkwardness when I start legal action against her mom.

I know all this.

So what the hell is wrong with me? Because five minutes ago, none of it mattered. If Rowan had moved so much as a breath in my direction instead of backing off me, if she so much as hinted that she wanted the same kind of bad decision that has been intermittently running through my mind since I was sixteen, I would have grabbed her by the back of her neck and dragged her beneath me in a blink.

My tongue would have been in her mouth, my hands pulling her up and into me as I ground down, giving her a taste of what was coming next.

She could have told me she was bored and just killing time. But so long as she whispered it with her lips against my ear or neck or mouth— anywhere —I wouldn’t have been able to stop.

I would have kissed her harder, devoured the taste of her. The sounds she made.

Aww, hell. And now I’m thinking about what she would sound like when I sank into her.

My palm smacks the wall. “Snap out of it, asshole.”

My body is screaming for relief, my mind rapid-firing ways to get it faster than I can defend against.

But no way am I taking this situation in hand.

I might not be able to stop myself from thinking about Rowan, but I can sure as hell keep myself from acting.

My life is built on discipline. It’s how I’ve gotten to the top of my game. How I’ve gotten to one of the top teams in the league. And it’s how I’m going to get through the next two days without making some epically stupid decisions.

15

Rowan

Waking up with the unfairly hot hockey god I shared a bed with is screwing with my head. Or maybe it wasn’t so much the waking-up part as the feel of his arm around me, the way our bodies found that perfect fit in the night… the barely banked heat in his eyes before reality set in.

How his low laughter in the darkness rubbed and rumbled against all the places inside me I never meant to let him near.

Ugh!

I pull on my jeans, T-shirt, and a zip-up hoodie while said man finishes in the bathroom.

I’m rusty, is all. Out of practice.

And it’s just been a lot of years since I had to defend against his special brand of appeal. But I have to. Because as amazing as it was to joke and tease and pretend that maybe we could actually be real friends… Jason isn’t going to be okay with this island belonging to my mother. And even though he understands that my motives aren’t hers… in the end, it won’t matter.

We meet in the kitchen where our mugs are on the drying rack. Our foray into the spiked hot chocolate seems like it was weeks ago instead of hours. But maybe that’s because in real life, it would have taken me weeks, if not months, to talk to someone as much as I talked with Jason last night.

The sky is still gray, and no matter which window I look out, signs of the storm are everywhere. The rain and wind haven’t let up, but the only thunder is distant rumbling. Hopefully the worst is behind us.

Jason braces his hands on the counter to my right, his shirt pulling around the bulk of his biceps and shoulders. “Not sure we can chalk this up to Mother Nature’s chaos. Looks more like she decided to reclaim her island.”

I nod, trying not to study the lines of his face or give in to that new little pull asking me to lean a bit closer to his arm. “Still no power either. How long does it usually take to get back up?”

“Honestly, I’ve only seen it out twice. The first time, it was on within a few hours. The second?” Shrug. “We left before it was going again, and Bruce had to help close up.”

“So like… a couple days?”

He grimaces. “More like a week. But out here you just never know. It depends on what caused the outage.”

“And without phones, we won’t know…”