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He rolls his eyes, letting out a low laugh. “Nice? Not a lot of people would have said that.”
“I saw it, Vaughn. More often than not. And my crush kind of grew from there.”
“It’s weird to think that I could have met you back then.”
I smile. “You actually did. Once.” I lean in and drop my voice to a whisper. “You told me I had a killer slap shot.”
This time he barks out his laugh and looks at me like he’s searching for the memory. “So what happened then?”
“We moved to Dallas.”
“Ahh.”
“When we ran into each other in Vancouver…” Even now I feel that same skip in my heart. “I just wanted to talk to you. For a little bit. Find out who my high school crush turned out to be. And it seemed easier to be someone who wasn’t Greg Baxter’s sister.”
Our eyes meet. “And?”
I swallow. “And then you turned out to be pretty great. And I thought, why not? Why not take this one night and forget about all the reasons I couldn’t have you. Take one night to be the girl who could.”
“You’re killing me, Allie.” Vaughn’s focus drops to my mouth as he brushes his thumb across my lower lip. His eyes come up to meet mine, and the look in them has me forgetting about rules andwhys andwhynots completely. Time turns elastic, seeming to stretch and slow, pulling me closer with every breath. His. Mine. Then snapping back at the bark of a dog down the street.
Vaughn rubs his palm over his mouth and looks out over the street in front of us. “Come on, let’s get you inside.”
Chapter 7
Vaughn
Waking up this morning was a bitch, but by the time I pull into the lot for morning skate, I’m ready to go. Physically, anyway. Mentally, I’m distracted as fuck.
It was a mistake following Natalie into her place last night. I told myself I wouldn’t. The whole drive from the rink, the plan was to drop her and go. But for as much as I’m busting my ass to follow the rules, this girl has me breaking them on the regular.
Only to a point, though.
I mean, hell, I didn’t pin her to her door the second I got inside. I didn’t touch her at all. I didn’t kiss her or fuck her or finger her or eat her or do any of the thousand-and-one dirty things that were firing through my mind from about the first minute I saw her standing there at the rink looking like every fantasy I’ve ever had rolled into one.
No, I was a model citizen. For two hours, I sat on the couch while she sat in her chair. She watched hockey highlights and I tried not to watch her. I tried not to think about how sexy she was in that old jersey or how hot it is that she was a player. And I tried even harder not to imagine what it would be like to have her in my lap instead of that chair…with neither one of us paying attention to the highlights as I teased my finger beneath her panties. In my mind, they’re white cotton, like the hot-as-fuck pair she wore that night in Vancouver.
The ones I think about when I’ve got my hand wrapped around my dick, replaying the breathy, desperate sounds she made when she came.
Shit.
Yeah, I tried. But in the end, I just suffered through, talking my dick down every time he started getting ahead of me. And when I finally left, it was with a kiss on her forehead while she looked up at me with those big, blue, uncertain eyes. Because really, what was she going to say?
That she had fun hanging out and she hoped to do it again? We both knew I shouldn’t have been there at all, and it definitely shouldn’t happen again. Which sucks, because she’s cool as hell and about the only thing in this city that makes me forget how much I wish I was somewhere else.
I shoulder through the doors into the locker room and half the guys are already here, joking around and giving each other the kind of shit Garcia used to give to me. There are a few nods as I walk through, but mostly they’re watching Ruxton Meyers—
I stop and stare.
“What the hell is he doing?” I ask nobody in particular, watching his big fucking body springing into some invisible action, feet moving in place, arms out like he’s barely maintaining his balance.
O’Brian walks past, nodding at the action with a grin. “Double-dutch.”
“What?” But then I see it. Popov and Shore are at either end, arms moving like they’re swinging jump ropes.
“Gotta give it to him, Rux has the moves.”
Rux is crazy. And fine, the guy is all right. Or he would be if he wasn’t hair-braiding besties with Baxter.
