Page 51 of Anatomy of a Player

“You really need me to go Black Eyed Peas on you?” The serious expression didn’t match the nonsense that’d come out of her mouth.

“I have no idea what that means. Do you have a Fergie costume in your back pocket?”

“It means, do I really have to spell it out? You know, like the Black Eyed Peas spell a word in almost every song? I’m convinced that Fergie once lost a spelling bee, and she’s determined to show the world that she totally knows how to spell now.”

I laughed. This version of Whitney was funnier than usual—a little bonkers, maybe—but in the best possible way. I wanted to kiss her. Just pull her close and get lost in those lips. She looked like she was waiting for me to say something, though.

“Right,” I said, running a hand over my jaw. “There was a question somewhere in there. Apparently, I do need you to go Black Eyed Peas on me.”

“I was trying not to care, and I do want to keep things patched up between us, but I think it’d still look bad for the sports reporter to leave with one of the hockey players.”

I looked into her pretty face and decided that I was sick of tiptoeing around. Time to jump and worry about later, well, later. “Then it’s a good thing that we’re not either of those people tonight.”

I closed the door of my apartment, locking it behind me, then spun to face the girl standing in the middle of my living room, looking around at the mess.

“Yeah. I’d like to say it’s only like this because I hurt myself, but it pretty much always looks like this.”

“You’re shattering my illusions here,” Whitney said, a smile flirting with her sexy mouth. She moved over to me to help me walk, and while my pride balked at it, again, it meant touching her. My ankle was pretty sore from what walking I’d done, but since it meant that Whitney had ended up at my place, I could deal with whatever pain resulted from the outing.

I lowered myself to the couch and patted the spot next to me.

She sat down, but she was a bit stiff, the ease that had been between us at the Quad different now. She put her elbow on the back of the couch and propped the side of her head against her palm. “So.”

“So.” I leaned in, but apparently I read her “so” wrong, because she blurted out, “What’s your favorite thing about hockey?”

“I thought we weren’t playing the journalist, hockey player roles tonight.”

“I’m not asking as the journalist. I’m asking as me, getting to know you better—and tonight’s all off the record.”

I propped my elbow against the cushions, mirroring her posture. “At the beginning, it was my escape, and then I got really good at it, and then it was all about the glory. Honestly, I was a bit of a show off, my main goal being how muchIcould score.”

“You’re saying you were a puck hog.”

I laughed, enjoying the fact that she told it like it was, even though that occasionally bit me in the butt. “Yeah. Well, I shared the glory with Dane—he and I were so used to playing together that when we first started playing for BC we’d get out there and do our own thing. Coach beat it out of us with about a hundred skating drills for not completing his plays. I also realized how good the rest of the guys were. We lose together, we win together.”

“No ‘I’ in hockey and all that—I get it.”

“Right.”

She bit her lip and then those big eyes lifted to my face—not that she didn’t look good with her glasses, but I resented them for dimming the intensity swimming in the blue. “What did you need to escape from?”

Of course, out of all the information I’d given her, she focused on that part, picking up clues I’d accidentally dropped, the way she’d done in the pool hall. I’d successfully kept the ugly parts of my past under lock and key since arriving in Boston, and yet I let too many pieces of it slip when I was with her.

“Next question,” I said, and she stuck out her lips in a pout. I tapped a finger to them. “I don’t want to get into that tonight.” I didn’t want to get into it ever, but saying that would only bring more questions from this one. “My turn…”

Ever since we’d sat down, she seemed nervous, and I wanted to get back the light, easy feel. I flipped through conversation starters, even though my first attempt to get her talking all those weeks ago in front of the Conte Forum building had crashed and burned. “What kind of music do you like? I assume you’re a fan of”—I gestured to her—“yourself.”

She laughed, and not only did it have the desired effect of getting her to relax, the happy sound made me feel lighter, too.

Whitney lifted a haughty eyebrow. “I am pretty awesome. My songs are happy, you can dance to them, and I’ve got the pipes to really sing—none of that relying on synthesizers.”

“Plus you’re super hot,” I said.

“Katy Perryissuper hot—she’d definitely be on my girl island.”

Holy shit, the girl was trying to kill me. My cock started to throb at the images that brought on. “I’m going to take a second to enjoy that visual…” I lifted a finger, exhaled a breath that did nothing to calm me down, and then looked her in the eye. “You know how sexyyouare, right?”

An adorable blush crept across her cheeks. I reached out and traced the ice cream scoop that adorned the top of her costume. “And this candy thing you’ve got going on makes me want to see if you taste as good as you look.”

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