Page 49 of Anatomy of a Player

“You know, maybe you and I could…?” He tilted his head toward the back rooms, where people went to hook up. “For old time’s sake.”

The insult was going to happen, it was—I just needed to pick whether to call him an assface or asshole or basically anything involving the word ass.

Then an arm wrapped around my waist, and I was curled into a rock-solid chest. “Hey, baby. Sorry I’m late.”

I stared up into Hudson’s face, wondering how he was here and why he’d swooped in to help, and then I realized that I didn’t really care about the whys right now. I put my hand on his chest. “No worries. I’m just glad that you made it.”

Trevor became the frozen one, and finally I found my voice. “Oh, about your earlier question? You probably want to find a girl who doesn’t already know that you’re an asshole.”

His jaw clenched, and I fully expected to be called a bitch, but Hudson stepped partway in front of me, his posture radiating menace, and Trevor threw up his hands and walked away.

For a moment I thought I’d imagined the entire thing, but I still had my hand curled around Hudson’s arm. He slowly turned to face me. “I was worried that I might be overstepping, but you looked like you could use a bit of help.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Seriously. I was finally able to say what I’ve wanted to say to him for weeks.”

“Good.” Hudson’s gaze dipped, and a shock of awareness rippled through my body. While he was busy with his perusal, I did a little checking out of my own. He had a hockey mask, but instead of covering his face it was pushed up, just the end protruding over his forehead. A beat-up wooden hockey stick with lots of white tape was somehow attached to his back, and yet, my eyes returned to the arms that his red sleeveless T-shirt showed off.

I’d seen Hudson in various states of undress in the locker room, but I’d never allowed myself to fully take in his sleeves—especially all the ink covering his jacked shoulders. For all the showing off Trevor did, he had nothing on Hudson Decker.

“A hockey player? That’s your big costume?” Not that it didn’t work for him, but I couldn’t help but tease him about it.

“Casey Jones,” he said.

“Who does he play for again?”

Hudson’s mouth kicked up one side. “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I guess. Mostly he uses his stick for vigilante justice, though.” He shrugged, all unabashed about it. “I wasn’t planning on coming, so I had to go with a last minute option, and I’ve been Casey Jones before.”

He reached out and skimmed his fingers along the edge of my skirt. His fingertips barely brushed my thigh, but my skin hummed under the attention, craving more. “What about you, Katy Perry? I’d like a song and dance.”

“Well, quid pro quo.”

“You’ve seen my dance out on the ice plenty. Or is it vigilante justice that you want me to dole out?”

“I think you already did that, actually.”

“Then it looks like you’re the one who owes me the quid,” he said. “Get dancing, girl.”

I stuck out my lips in my best pout and added some eye batting. “All alone?”

He grinned. I leaned in. If I let them, I was pretty sure lines would be crossed, and right now, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be strong anymore.

Chapter Thirty

Hudson

God, this girl was killing me. I was almost tempted to take her onto that floor and show her every dance move I had. My ankle throbbed like it knew what I was planning and wanted to warn me it’d be a bitch about it.

I reached up and swiped strands of blue hair off Whitney’s face. “I’d love to take you out onto that floor right now, but I’m not really supposed to be walking, much less dancing. I sort of hurt my ankle.”

She glanced down, even though my pants covered the black and blue. Her worried gaze shot back up to my face. “Sort of? It had to be more than ‘sort of’ if you’re here instead of at the game.”

“It’s not really a big deal,” I said, surprised she was so concerned. “I told Coach I could play.” I would’ve, too, even though I probably would’ve played like shit. I’d tried to hide the limp—Dane noticed it, of course, and we’d exchanged words over it, with him saying it was better to sit out a game than wreck my ankle for a season.

Then he’d added, “Remember last year? When Cotter blew out his knee and he didn’t get his scholarship renewed for this year because he couldn’t play? If you don’t watch it, that could be you.”

Sometimes my best friend was an idiot, not to mention the guy who landed me in trouble, but sometimes he was the voice of reason. In the end, Coach noticed before I could decide if I wanted to come clean or not, I was sent for X-rays, and my team took off without me.

Luckily it was just a bad sprain, and I’d sat at home all day yesterday icing it and keeping it elevated. By this afternoon I’d been completely stir-crazy, and come nine o’clock, I’d been bored out of my mind. So I’d wrapped my ankle, thrown on a costume, and here I was.

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