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ChapterTwenty
RIVER
Toons was goingto bench me, and I wouldn’t blame him. I was so fucking distracted out there, because every time I tried to get my head in the game, all I could see was Rigby fucking Engman tongue-fucking Nova on my kitchen benchtop. The place where I made my meals, he’d eaten her like a feast.
Skating with a fucking hard-on was torture.
Muss came up behind me, bumping me with his shoulder. “Get your head in the goddamn game, Cooper.”
Shaking off the lust that was settling around me, I skated harder. Unfortunately for the other team, I harnessed all that sexual frustration into aggression. I hit so hard that the rookie from Washington went flying across the ice and their defense got all up in my face.
Good. I could use a fucking fight.
But Rigby was skating between me and the big defenseman. I couldn’t hear what the guy was saying over the hollering of the crowd, but whatever it was, he glared at me and slid away.
“You’re gonna get yourself thrown out of the game and penalized if you keep hitting dirty,” my former best friend grunted.
“Fuck off,” I growled, and he frowned at me but skated away. I wasn’t actually mad at him. I loved Rigby. I was man enough to admit that I was a jealous bastard, though. I’d wanted it to be me.
Nova was in the crowd somewhere with Julieta, who looked equally as hungover. I’d seen Nova after Rigby had debauched her on the Italian marble, and she’d looked better, but I’d still told her she didn’t need to come to the game if she didn’t want to. She’d just shaken her head, looking so fucking happy, and said she was rarely baby-free so she wanted to. I wanted her to as well. We had a week of away games coming up, and I wanted to get in as much Nova and Huey time as possible.
Dev had messaged to say that he was taking Huey straight home, after sending me several photos of Huey in his car seat at the head of the boardroom table for the weekly departmental meeting. It was probably unprofessional, but everyone was shit scared of Dev so no one would say anything.
She was out there wearing Rigby’s number on her back, and that made the jealousy rear its head again. I bodychecked one of the Washington forwards into the boards, skating away before he could start something.
I played hard and dirty, but in the end, we won 7-3, so when Coach Toons gave me the stink eye in the locker rooms, I knew he wouldn’t say anything. It was a messy defense strategy but it was still effective.
I showered for six hundred years in the locker room, hoping that I’d be able to skip the bullshit press box, though I doubted it. I was an old face in the IceCaps now, and the press always wanted to talk to me, no matter how badly I just wanted to flip them all off.
I scowled as I got redressed in my suit. Coach Toons waved a finger at me before I could storm into the conference room. “Not you tonight, Cooper. Engman, take his place. Cooper’s scowling mug will break the damn cameras.”
Rigby lifted his chin in agreement. “No worries, Coach.” He walked up to me and slapped me on the back. I resisted the urge to punch him in the face. “What’s wrong, Coop? You seem all pent up.”
I growled in the direction of my best friend, his shit-eating grin really getting on my nerves. First he got the girl, and now he got the fucking glory?
“Your bad mood doesn’t have anything to do with a pretty girl who may or may not live down the hall from you, and may or may not have been half-naked in your kitchen this morning, right?”
“You’re gonna want to get out of my faceright now.”
Rigby reached over with one arm and gave me a side hug, the disarming bastard. “We’ll talk about this at home, Riv. No need to be so grumpy about shit that you don’t need to be grumpy about.” With that, he strode out of the locker room and down the hall toward the conference room with Perrier, the goalie.
Ludo came up to me, his tie still undone around his neck. “Lover’s tiff?”
“Fuck off, Ludo.” I picked up my bag and strode down the tunnels beneath the stadium. I needed to find a bar. I needed to find a pretty little puck bunny who’d be happy to take the edge off this fucking horniness.
That’s what I’d do. Rigby or Julieta would get Nova home. I’d go down to Biscuits Bar and get fucking slammed until I could find a girl andnotimagine she was Nova as I fucked her.
“River!”
Shit.I’d thought about Nova too hard and she’d appeared. I seriously considered ignoring her. I thought about pretending I hadn’t heard her shout for me down this near-empty hallway. But I couldn’t. Because I wanted her so bad, my body was turning before I’d even made a conscious effort.
She bounded up to me with a grin. “Good game!”
It was deceptively easy in that moment to see her as just any other beautiful woman, in her jersey and her sneakers, a grin on her face from watching sixty minutes of a brutal sport. She wasn’t Huey’s mom. She wasn’t the woman raising my best friend's baby. She was a woman barely out of college, fresh-faced and happy.
And irresistible.
I grabbed her by the hips and spun her against the wall, my mouth landing on hers hard. She froze in shock, her lips still beneath mine, but only for a heartbeat. Then she was kissing me back. Her hands went up to my shoulders, gripping me tightly, like she was holding on so she wasn’t swept away.
