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The man huffed a laugh as he finally moved around her, effectively blocking her from my view. A silent warning to stop eavesdropping on their conversation.
“And what about you? Don’t you want the gold too?” he asked, his voice muffled to my ears now.
There was a pause. “I do but I also want Ciara to have her moment, I’ve got my gold. I just wish that I could be on the sidelines with her this time. Stupid new Olympic rules that only allow one athlete out at a time.”
“She’ll be on the TV, sweetness, in fact I think she’s going on right now.”
My head swiveled to one of the nearby televisions that was up on the wall and I sucked in a sharp, surprised breath as I watched a familiar face step onto the ice.
My phone began to buzz—no doubt with calls from my teammates asking me where the fuck I was—but my eyes were glued to the screen as the skater’s name flashed on the screen.
Ciara Callaghan. A face and a name that was seared into my brain in ways that I would never admit out loud.
I watched with a slack jaw as she smiled pretty for the cameras and skated into the center of the arena, her flouncy lavender colored outfit swishing around creamy brown thighs as she posed and waited for her music to start.
Four years. It had been four years since we’d met and had fallen into bed together, but I could still taste her cinnamon scent on my tongue as I watched the first few movements of her routine.
With a shake of my head, I turned and hurried out of the hall, a storm raging in my chest as every single one of the emotions that I’d buried deep down inside of me came bubbling to the surface.
Chapter four
My nerves were a tangled mass in my stomach as I wiped my sweaty hands on my too-soft outfit.
“You’re nervous? You?” Eli French asked incredulously as we waited for the officials to signal that it was my time to step onto the ice.
Eli was the Olympics level coach that was employed at the Seattle Sports Complex. I’d worked closely with him for the past year when Brynn and I made it through the Olympic trials.
He was a brawny, bushy haired man who looked more like a football coach than a women’s figure skating aficionado. But he was probably one of the best American coaches in the business.
He was a strict, often-times bullish man. A very different experience from getting coached by Maxim or Alexei. We’d spent the last month butting heads over everything from my routine to my outfit, but now as we stood together I wanted to cling to him the way I would have done with the dads.
Instead, I just squared my shoulders and shook my head. “No, of course not.”
I wasn’t nervous. I never got nervous.
Even at the last Olympics I’d stepped onto the ice with little fuss. Hell, I hadn’t even been upset when the gold had gone to Brynn. She’d been the better skater then. That was easy enough to admit.
But sometime during the night I’d awoken with a jolt, my heart thudding in my chest and my stomach twisted into knots.
Several cups of calming tea and no sleep later, I was antsy and jittery as I watched them smooth the ice out in between events.
Going over my routine in my head once again, I picked at the soft skirt of my outfit as it hung just past the tops of my thighs.
“I look like a bloody fairy princess,” I grumbled, staring down at the soft lilac material. I’d petitioned hard for black, red, blue… any color other than pink or purple.
But Eli hadn’t listened.
“You look approachable,” the other alpha said without missing a beat. “The purple softens the constant resting bitch face you’ve got going on and that’ll go a long way to endear you to the judges.”
Alpha women had a harder time in the figure skating industry than most. At nearly six feet, I towered over most of the omega and beta skaters, and alpha females got a bad reputation for being aggressive and hard to work with.
I was one of a handful of successful alpha skaters at the moment and one of only four that made it through to the Olympics in women’s singles.
“I still think blue would have been approachable,” I muttered.
Eli scoffed. “It would have been a powder blue, are you all right with that?”
I thought about it for a moment and shuddered.
