Page 4 of Ruled Out

Generally, I wear my heart on my sleeve. But I’m not especially keen to show this part of it. Jessie Callaghan is a distant memory I’ll bury deep in my mind. He’s gone, and the last time I saw him, he treated me like he didn’t even know me. Like I was dead to him.

Few people know we had a thing back when he was playing for the Destroyers and when I was my dad’s assistant. Dad made sure any evidence was buried, and the press never got word of thereal reasonswhy Jessie had been traded. Sure, there were rumors of a love affair gone wrong, but nothing more and no details about me.

It’s easy to trade a player under the guise that they don’t work on the team or that they’re just not meshing well.

“Are you okay?” Leo hasn’t moved since I declined the drink.

I look up at him and offer a weak smile. He’s hot—I can’t deny he is. The classic kind of hot—tall, dark, handsome, blue eyes. He’s also a defenseman on our college hockey team—and a good one, if I believe his own hype. But I’m not interested, although I think he assumed his fake ID to buy drinks would impress me.

Negative.

Interest from guys is just—I don’t know—not reallythatinteresting to me. Not that Dad allowed them within twenty feet of me anyway.

And the one guy who did get close—aka Jessie—I honestly thought my dad was going to castrate him there and then when he caught us making out on my bed. Turned out, he had only played nine holes of golf that afternoon, not eighteen.

Seeing his starting winger’s tongue down his teenage princess’s throat was not how he’d envisaged his Sunday afternoon playing out. And neither did Jessie envisage being put on the trade list immediately afterward.

“I’m fine,” I finally answer my classmate. Thumbing over my shoulder at the screen, I wince. “Just engrossed in the game; it’s a close one.”

Leo smirks in response, and I swear I see flirtation in his eyes, but I choose to ignore it. “I thought you’d be a Destroyers’ girl. I didn’t think you’d be rooting for the Scorpions.”

I wince again. “Gotta support the local side.”

“Holy hell, is he hot though,” Tara coos from beside me.

Leo rolls his eyes in her direction and walks over to the bar.

I turn to Tara, assuming she wasn’t talking about Leo. “Who?”

With her tongue practically hanging out of her mouth, she watches him move across the ice. “Jessie Callaghan. Who else?”

I can’t lie. He is undeniably hot.

When my dad picked him up in his academy, something he established during his NHL career for young, gifted hockey players, I remember him telling my mom, Jayne, over dinner that he’d stumbled across this insanely talented kid from a rough area. He needed a lot of support, but my dad had never seen skating like it. His speed and precision. He basically danced on the ice.

“He’s okay, I guess,” I reply with a casual shrug. “Not really my type.”

She quirks a brow. “Oh really? Is the rugged and tattooed Scorpions defenseman Zach Evans more your style?”

One thing I have learned about Tara is that she knows her hockey boys. Raised in Seattle, she knows the team well, mostly what they look like underneath their pads—if her wall calendars in the dorm we share are anything to go by.

I stare down into my empty wineglass and shake my head. “Not really. Plus, Zach’s engaged, and rumor has it, he and his fiancée have a second child on the way.”

“Lucky bitch,” Tara drawls.

“He’s, like, mid-thirties, and you’re not even twenty yet.” I laugh.

“True, but it’s not like it would be an issue. Jessie though, he’s, like, twenty-six, right?” She wiggles her brows at me in jest.

I’d laugh if it was funny and she wasn’t talking about hooking up with my ex-boyfriend.

No, wait. You’d have to have actually been dating to qualify as an ex, and we definitely didn’t have a label.

“I still can’t believe you’ve never hooked up with a hockey player before. You could use your dad’s connections.” She waggles her brows at me again. “You’re definitely missing out.”

I pick up her empty cocktail glass and wave it in front of her. “How many of these have you had?”

She shrugs. “Enough.”

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