Page 2 of Blitz
“Here he is,” Tom said, throwing me the same smile.
Fuck. My. Life. Happy to be with the Railers? I wish. After the reputation I had—the one I’d created to escape—no onereallywanted me here. Hell, I didn’t want to be in Pennsylvania—I’d wanted Vancouver or LA—anything to get as far away from Atlanta as possible.
I need to try and smile. I need to look unaffected. But I need to smile.
My head!
Tom leaned in. “You good, dude?”
Dude? Who the fuck said that anymore? And no, I wasn’t good. I hadn’t been good in years.
“Peachy,” I muttered, forcing a tight smile for the next shot. The camera clicked again, and I caught sight of my expression on the monitor. Yeah. Real sunshine and rainbows.
“Okay to post to my socials?” Sunshine asked.
The photographer nodded, and before I knew it I was being hugged super close, skin on skin, and Tom’s phone caught my automatic media smile before I extricated myself and made a show of wiping myself down.
“So, onto the interview,” the camera guy said, standing aside for the slip of a girl who couldn’t have been a day over eighteen. The questions were generic. Layton wanted us to banter about hockey vs. football, even after I pointed out that I was earning seven million a year, which was less than half of what Sunshine-Tom pulled in. Was that the banter he wanted me to focus on?
Tom was chatting about the many charities he was involved with, from dogs to kids to mental health. He was all over everything: fun runs, ultra marathons, kicking balls through holes.
“… charities?” the interviewer asked, looking at me expectantly.
“I prefer to keep my charitable endeavors private,” I threw out, rude as fuck, and pointedly raising an eyebrow. Why the hell did I do that? Oh yeah, because I didn’t do charity work. I gave half my freaking salary to my dad.
Silence. I could feel Layton’s gaze boring into the back of my neck. “Apart from the dogs,” I added after a pause. “I do a lot with dogs.” I wondered if anyone could tell I was lying. Again, no one would call me on it, and I resolved to donate to the closest dog rescue place.
“You do?” Tom asked, “That’s so cool. I love dogs! I have this cute pup… look!” He’d picked up his cell and was now waving it under my nose.
I was motion sick but managed to at least murmur something that got him to stop waving it at me.
When the interview was over, I was free to leave, but Tom wouldn’t let me. Oh no, he wanted to talk to me.
“Do you want to get a coffee?” he asked with a grin, as if we were old friends and not two strangers thrown together for a PR campaign no one had asked for.
Did I want to spend time with another man—a gorgeous, sexy, muscled, oiled man—where my urges might spill over and I did something stupid.
Nope.
Don’t look at his body. Mask down.
Scrappy miserable defensive shield up.
“Why? So, you can add rehabbing hockey player to your list of charity cases?”
He didn’t flinch, but he did frown. “Just an idea,” he said. “No biggie.”
Anyone would notice Tom the second he walked into a room. He was tall and had a lean, but powerful, football player’s build—one of the top defensive ends in the league. He was clean-cut American perfection, with hair cropped short and neat, blue eyes that probably melted cameras, and a jawline sharp enough to cut glass.
He turned slightly to talk to the photographer, and the view from the back didn’t disappoint. Broad shoulders tapered down to a narrow waist, and his ass—well, it was ridiculous in those Pumas shorts. That was some fine award-winning bubble butt he had going on there. His whole body looked as if it had been designed in a lab to torment me.
And those lips—Christ. Full, plush, shaped like sin and confidence. The kind of lips that made you think of things a man shouldn’t, especially in front of half a dozen cameras. I could imagine tracing them with my fingers, feeling them against my neck, and yeah… his lips would be gorgeous wrapped around my?—
My cell buzzing interrupted my thoughts—not my normal cell phone, but the tiny handset I kept tucked in a zipped pocket of my bag. It only had one number programmed into it. My father’s.
I didn’t want that man anywhere near the real life I was trying to build. He didn’t deserve even the ghost of a presence in it. Everything I’d clawed my way toward—every minute on the ice, every hard-earned scrap of control over my own goddamn story—I’d done in spite of him. Not because of him.
But I couldn’t make myself leave the phone behind. Not ever. Because I knew him. Knew the way he operated. He’d wait until the perfect moment—until I was almost happy, until I was steady—and then, he’d throw a curveball that’d knock me sideways. He’d done it before. Enough times that the idea of missing one of those calls, of not being ready, left a knot of barbed wire in my gut.
