“Please.” My voice is thick, a knocking pain wandering around in my head with a sledgehammer as that tear glides over the apple of her cheek. “You tell me what’s wrong, right now. I can’t fucking breathe.”
I snap my teeth together, fighting for a breath that won’t come as she looks to the ceiling and I give her shoulders a soft shake, drawing her eyes to mine.
They are red-rimmed, and I hate it. I hate whatever is distressing her and I need to fucking fix it.
“I—” She bites into her bottom lip, trying to stop the tears, which roll out one after the other as her chin quivers. “I’m sorry, this is so unprofessional. All my clients canceled again. For tomorrow now. Except for you, so it’s not a glitch. No calls, they just canceled from the scheduling app we use. I’m sorry, I’m trying to forget about it and focus on your session—”
I’m bombarded from all sides by cannonballs of guilt, and I nearly forget what my plan was when I got her alone today.
The gift I brought was a hockey stick. One of mine, from last year when I scored the winning goal in the final game that sent us to the championship. Which, we ended up losing in the fifth game by one goal.
I was so hell-bent on her giving up control to me, my stupid, selfish, impulsive, alpha-male bullshit act of canceling all her appointments because I couldn’t stand the idea of another man touching her is going to ruin everything before it gets started.
“Since I walked into that bar the other night, it’s like everything is just so out of control,” she mumbles, the words thick with emotion.
I clear my throat, the pain in my chest nearly putting me on my knees.
If I’m going to take control and put her into my life as a permanent fixture, then fuck. I have to fix this. Right now.
Leading her toward the sofa, my heart is thudding against my ribs, the broken coffee table lying there mocking me as I sit, pulling her onto my lap.
“Look,” I start, hugging her tight with one arm and pinching her chin with my other hand, so her eyes don’t leave mine. “Maybe they heard about the fire.”
The deception hollows out my chest where my heart should be, and the disbelieving expression on her face reminds me I’m not dealing with some dim-bulb puck bunny who only cares about getting another notch on her stick.
I have a fuck-ton of faults, but letting a misunderstanding and a lie hinder things between us is unacceptable.
The pain on her face is fucking wrecking me. The feelings I have for this firecracker of a girl I’ve only known a few days are dismantling me like a trailer park in a tornado.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but if my business fails…it’s like how you talked about hockey. It’s my life. I built this.” The crack in her voice cracks open my chest. “I grew up poor with no opportunities. I made them for myself, with hard work and a refusal to sink into the same life I lived as a kid. You had hockey, I had my brain. My schoolwork, my tenacity, then this special skill I had at helping people. It’s who I am and yeah, it’s the money too. If my business fails, it will ruin me and the people that helped me get where I am.”
Fuck. Me.
The pain on her face hollows out my heart with a jagged knife.
“You love touching all those people?” I want to saythose other filthy fucking men,but the hurt on her face is about to rip my heart out.
She tugs a shoulder to her ear as I ease her knees on either side of my hips. I want to see her eyes and feel everything she’s feeling.
“When I was little, I felt helpless. My parents weren’t there for me or my brother. I had no skills, but at like five years old, I was expected to cook and do laundry and take care of him and avoid the wrath of my father and try to please my mother.”
Her hands come to rest on my shoulders as I set her on her hips, already feeling the heat from her pussy warming my cock, making it hard to see straight. She’s giving me that glimpse into what makes her tick, and I’m here for it all.
“I wish I could take all that away. You need someone that puts you first, firecracker. Above their own needs.” My words are a kick to the balls, making me come to terms with the fact that what I’ve been doing for her may be more for me.
“It’s okay.” Some of the light in her eyes dims. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I shouldn’t be doing a lot of the things I’m doing with you. Because, if anyone found out, like I said, I could lose my license and there would be no coming back from that.”
“No one is going to know.” I brush her tears away with the backs of my fingers. “All the more reason for you to write up a report that gets me back on the ice. Then our littlesessionscan be unofficial.”
I wink, digging my fingers into her hip, moving her back and forth on my stone-hard length.
Instead of a smile, her expression falls, and that hurt I see on her face guts me.
“I want to help you,” she says. “That’s why I’m successful. I actually care and believe I can help. I didn’t just walk the streets with a sign that said, ‘who wants a hug?’. I studied hard. I explored and did my research and found something that means something to me. Like you and hockey. If I lose all my clients, I lose not only money and the respect of people that stuck their necks out to help me, but I lose a part of me.”
She collapses into my shoulder on a sob.
A fucking sob.
