Page 117 of Double Puck

I hate the way he spits my name back at me. Like I haven't had to put up with enough of that throughout my life.

"That's not fair."

"Fair?" He steps closer, and his voice drops. "Okay. Then tell me this. When were you going to tell me the deadline got cut short?"

Everything in me goes still.

I have nothing. Not a deflection, not a statistic, not one single word.

He nods like I just confirmed his entire life philosophy.

"Right. Exactly what I thought." He turns away, grabbing his travel bag off the rack and rummaging through it. "You should go. I've got somewhere to be."

"No."

He stops.

"No," I say again, louder, and my voice cracks right down the middle. "You don't get to do the thing where you walk away and make a joke about it later. Not with me."

"Oh, I don't get to walk away?" He spins around. "That's incredible, coming from the woman who's had my career in a spreadsheet since the day we met. You want to know what my whole life has been, Darcy? People deciding things about me. My parents. My brothers. Coach." He looks me up and down, his nose crinkling like I'm some insect on the soul of his shoe. "And now you. The one person I thought—" He stops again, looking at me. "You watched me fall for you, knowing you were holding the axe the entire time."

My lungs forget how to work.

Because he's right.

Beck Morrison has never been subtle about anything in his life, least of all me. I knew that first morning, jogging beside him while he shamelessly flirted and I pretended my pulse was elevated from the cardio. I knew it every time he appeared in my office, every time he called me Spreadsheet, every time those ridiculous blue eyes found me across a room.

Somewhere along the way, flirting became wanting.

Wanting became us.

And I watched every second of it happen while keeping the one thing from him that could tear us apart.

"You think I wanted this?"

Now I'm yelling, actually yelling, in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, and I don't recognize my own voice.

"I rewrote that report eleven times last night, Beck. I sat in that room trying to make numbers say something they don't say, because the truth is I couldn't tell you about the deadline, because telling you made it real, and I couldn't—" My breath catches. "I have never been allowed to be wrong. Not once. Not ever. My mother called me on the way here to remind me that if I'm wrong about you, it doesn't just end my career, it embarrasses the family name. Do you understand what that's like?"

"Yes!" he shouts. "I'm the family name that embarrasses people!"

He spins on the spot with his arms raised.

"I've been the punchline my whole life, Darcy! And you—" He points at me, hand shaking. "You were the first person who looked at me and didn't see the Morrison they got in the bundle deal. Turns out, you were just taking better notes."

The silence afterward is enormous.

Down on the Strip, the fountains are probably dancing. Somewhere even further, the Bears are no doubt losing by even more.

"It doesn't matter anyway," Beck says finally, growing tired. "None of it. I met with my agent last night. And tomorrow morning I'm meeting with another team."

The floor disappears from beneath me.

"You're—" My throat closes over the words. "You're meeting with another team? You'd leave Beachside? Even if I change my recommendation?"

He shrugs, and it's the saddest shrug I've ever seen.

"I want to be somewhere I'm valued. Somewhere I'm not just an experiment that can be cut or traded when it suits everyone else."