Page 105 of Revenge Puck

I nod. That sounds like a great plan. “Yes.”

“I hate to break it to you, Pres, but love doesn’t work like that. It’s not something you can turn on or off whenever you want.”

“I don’t…” I start to say that I don’t love Elle, but that would be a lie. “How the hell would you know?” I ask my sister instead of lying or confessing how I feel about Elle. “You’ve never loved anyone before.”

“Yes, I have.”

“What? When?”

“I was young and naïve to think he felt the same about me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I loved him.”

“Hold on. Are you talking aboutRiley?”

“Who else would it be? You’re not the only one who hasn’t had a date in five years!”

Jesus. Shelovedthat fucker? “I didn’t know you felt that way about him.”

At the time everything happened, Maya cried a bunch. Like every day and night. I thought it was the pregnancy hormones, not that she was missing the man she thought she loved. Or she did love him, but I was too blind to see it.

“Would it have mattered?” she asks.

“Maybe.” Thinking about what Elle said yesterday, I ask her, “Do you regret, you know, ever being with him?”

“No, of course not,” she says faster than I was expecting. “It wasn’t easy to give up on my college degree, to know Mom and Dad couldn’t accept me ‘living in sin’, but I don’t regret one second of having Finley in my life. You gave me the strength and stability I needed to get through those first few months when I had a screaming newborn and no clue how to be a mother.”

“You were a great mother to him even before he was born.”

“I loved him before he was born, but that doesn’t mean I knew what I was doing once he came into the world. I felt so…lost. Alone. If you hadn’t been there to help, I’m not sure what I would’ve done.” I’m still wrapping my head around everything she’s just confessed when Maya says, “Enough about me. What are you going to do to fix things with Elle?”

“We may as well be planning a trip to the moon, since neither of those things are possible.”

“Sure, it is. Well, the Elle part. It could be a few years before we can get to the moon.”

Shaking my head, I tell her the truth. “Elle doesn’t want to be with me. If she felt something, she wouldn’t have told Christian that it wasn’t real and that we hadn’t slept together…”

Oh shit. How could he say it was all fake if he thought we hadn’t even had sex?

“You didn’t sleep with Elle? I find thatveryhard to believe. I was here during your disappearing act on the night of the party.”

“No, we did. I mean, Christian thought we hadn’t. He made it sound like Elle told him we hadn’t been together.”

“So, in other words, he was lying, or at best taking a shot in the dark?”

“I think so.”

“Then you screwed up big time with her, didn’t you, big brother?”

“It still doesn’t really matter. Whether or not we slept together doesn’t prove anything. She was using me to get back at Christian. Hell, maybe to get him back.”

“I don’t believe that for a second, Preston. You shouldn’t either. Elle loves you. So, what if it started out with her wanting to hurt Christian? That lasted like a day before you made her forget all about him. Don’t you remember how hurt she was when she came to D.C. and found out about Finley? She thought you were only with her to pay him back for getting me pregnant.”

“She was…I had never seen her so sad,” I say, hating even thinking about the look on her face when she opened her hotel door that night.

“Because she loves you, you big dummy! You have to fix this before it’s too late! Being with Elle doesn’t make you lose or win games or lose money for breaking your contract. That’s all on your team and you personally for having a temper and not being able to let shit go!”

I consider my sister’s perspective for several long minutes.

Our team did play awful. The guys put too much pressure on themselves tonight, me included. We fucking choked. The stakes were the highest they could get, so we played like we were scared of losing instead of playing to win the trophy.

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