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The girl has priorities.
42
PETAL
“Fun group,”Rake says when I return.
I take the seat across from him. Not sure I want to get too close. I’m pissed and I don’t want his hotness to take away from the piece of my mind I’m about to give him. “They’re great girls. Been friends with them since forever. We’ve been through it all together.”
“I guess now that the secret’s out, they know everything?” he asks.
“Now that the secret is out, everyone knows everything. Including about your being traded.”
He frowns. “That’s what I came up to talk to you about. How’d you hear?”
I wave my hand likeno big deal. “I was walking out for coffee today, you know, enjoying a little break and some fresh air, and this reporter yells out to me, asking what I think about your being traded,” I say with exaggerated breeziness.
His eyebrows go up and little lines across his forehead become visible. “I see.”
I give him a sarcastic smile. “Yeah. That’s how I found out. I tried pretending I already knew, but the man saw right through me. There’ll probably be a new story all about it tomorrow. It will go like this—Rake Hanson’s marriage, which everyone thought was real and turned out to actually be fake, is to a woman he apparently doesn’t talk to because she had no idea there’s talk about him being traded to another team.”
He flinches. “Now hold on. It’s not like that?—”
“It’sjustlike that,” I snap. “I find out you may be leaving town from astranger. You couldn’t even be bothered to tell me.”
He looks up at the ceiling and cracks his neck.
Guess he’s a little irritated? Welcome to the club.
“I will explain, if you let me.” He pauses like he’s wondering if I’m going to keep interrupting or shut my mouth for a change.
I’m not an easy woman. Never claimed to be.
“If you arenotinterested, fine. Tell me, and I’ll leave,” he says.
I desperately try to hang on to the anger buzzing through me. It feels good. Satisfying, in a strange way.
And yet, I can feel it abandoning me, slipping away, all because Rake is so damned earnest.
Not to mention hot. I hate that he can do this to me, like he has some sort of evil magic power.
I roll my eyes, just to be a shit. “Go on.”
“Thank you.” He takes a deep breath. “Things haven’t been going too smoothly for me lately, as I think you know. One of the biggest problems is that I’ve not been doing well in practice. I’ve been inconsistent, as they love to say. Up some days, down on others. And we have a game in a couple days.”
“Things are affecting your game?”
Is there more here than meets the eye?
“Yeah. So, my agent brought up the possibility of a trade to see how I felt about it. He justbrought it up, that’s all. I’m sorryyou had to find out the way you did, but apparentlysomebodyin Aftershocks management leaked it to the press.”
One guess as to who that might be.
“Okay. Sorry to hear your game isn’t going well. But I would still like to know when you were planning on telling me that you might up and leave town?”
He grimaces. “It’s not like that, Petal. First of all, just because my agent brought it up, does not mean it’s going to happen. I’m not gonna lie, it could. But baby, if anything big like that is going down, you’ll be the first to know. Nobody else.”
He’s wearing me down, big time.
