Page 40 of No Rhyme or Roughing
“And if it doesn’t go viral, we’ll just have to do it again.”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “You’d do that? Dance in front of your team and your fans a second time?”
“Do you think this will help us get attention for the team?”
Her head bobbed into a slow nod.
I leaned in, dropping my voice. “Then, I trust you, Sydney Valentine.” At that moment, I’d have done anything she asked of me.
A slow smile spread across her lips, and I wanted nothing more than to taste it. But then, Teddy’s words echoed in my mind along with my own.
“You’ve always been like a sister to me.”
I hadn’t meant to say the words, but they had the desired effect. One I regretted immediately.
Sydney’s eyes dimmed, and she scooted back on the bed. “Trust isn’t always a given between siblings.”
I was such an ass. Her sisters had all but abandoned her, gone no contact. “I didn’t mean…”
“I’m kind of tired, Ry.”
It was a dismissal, and I couldn’t argue without being a total jackass. She wanted me gone, so I left. Despite my better judgment, despite every part of me wanting to take back any notion of her being like a sister, I walked out.
Only silence followed me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SYDNEY
Sometimes, when I really wanted to hate myself, I looked at pictures from the past. Four kids who were close—closer than most siblings. Me, Teddy, Stasia and Kristen. Two stable parents with nothing to hide.
A family.
And I blew it all up.
At least, that was what my sisters claimed, what my mom had told me on many occasions. They didn’t see a scared kid who was loyal to her mother. No, to them, Dad’s mistress wasn’t the homewrecker. It was me.
You’ve always been like a sister to me.
Bullshit.
Ryder didn’t treat me like theperson who ruined his life, unlike my own sisters. Teddy didn’t count. There was nothing anyone could do to make Teddy hate them. He was just that guy. He wanted to love people, to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Something told me the steady, stoic Ryder wasn’t much different. But that was the question, wasn’t it? Did he treat me like I mattered because he owed it to the little girl he’d grown up around? Or was there something else?
I closed out of my pathetic family photos on my phone and went back to social media, back to the video. He was bad. Like, bad bad. But there was something charming in how hard he tried, in the way he didn’t stop, even when it was apparent he was embarrassing himself.
That was what I wanted the world to see.
The video was now up to eight hundred views, still not nearly enough. He was right. We had to do it again.Hehad to do it again.
Teddy and Rowan came back late, crashing through the house with drunken curses until I heard their doors shut and the hall go quiet. Closing my eyes, I leaned into my pillows and tucked my phone under one of them. Sleep. That was all I needed to forget the feel of Ryder’s lips on mine, to stop thinking of the way he’d pressed me into the wall like I was nothing and everything.
Yet, in the darkness behind my lids, all I saw was him. Skating across the ice, lifting his arms awkwardly. Trying to shake his ass in his hockey gear. The video should have been a gold mine for the team. Who didn’t love a dancing fool?
I wasn’t sure how long I lay there, listening for any sounds drifting up from the living room. There was nothing.
“You are a ridiculous human, Sydney Valentine.” I rolled over, but that didn’t help. In the dark, I could see the picture hanging on the wall. I’d put it up right after arriving. In it, Teddy and Ryder tried to hold me still for the camera. I was maybe four.
