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He beams at me. “I knew I liked you, Graham.”
“Am I interrupting?”
I suddenly notice Ryder in the doorway.
My breath hitches, because…wow. He cleans up nice. He’s wearing black trousers and a gray suit jacket over a black dress shirt. No tie, top button undone. His face is clean shaven, but his dark hair still has that tousled bad-boy look to it.
I try to ignore how good he looks. “Your friends are trying to get me into bed,” I explain.
He shrugs. “Pick Shane. He just got dumped and needs the pity fuck.”
Shane flips up his middle finger. To me, he says, “I didn’t get dumped. Like I keep telling these assholes, it was a mutual breakup.”
“Oh, sweetie. There’s no such thing as a mutual breakup,” I say frankly. “Ever.”
Beckett snorts out a laugh. “See, mate? She gets it.”
“You ready to go?” Ryder asks me.
“Yeah, let’s do it.”
As I walk toward him, I don’t miss the way his sapphire-blue eyes drag slowly along the length of my body.
“What?” I say, self-conscious.
He shifts his gaze away. “Nothing. C’mon. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GIGI
Primed
RYDER AND I EXIT THE HOUSE IN SILENCE. I CHECK HIM OUT AGAIN, wanting to tell him he looks good, but he hasn’t complimented my appearance, so I say nothing.
“This is me,” I say, pointing to the white SUV parked at the curb.
I get in the driver’s seat. He gets in the passenger side. We buckle up. His silence drags on as I start the engine.
Finally, I glance over at him. “Look, I know you’re going to talk a mile a minute during the car ride, so I implore you, give my ears a bit of a rest sometimes, all right?”
He snorts.
“All right, Luke, off we go.”
“Don’t call me that,” he mutters.
“Isn’t it your name?” I roll my eyes.
“Never liked it, so I go by Ryder.”
I think the name Luke is kind of hot, but the hardness of his eyes tells me this isn’t a subject to tease him about. So I just shrug and put the car in drive.
“Did Jensen say why he picked you for this terrible gig?” I ask curiously.
“He didn’t pick me. The PR lady did.” He continues with a trace of sarcasm. “She thinks number one draft pick looks good on the resume when chatting up potential donors.”
“Does she understand you’re physically incapable of the chatting part?” I inquire politely. “Because you’d think someone would’ve warned her.”
“You’d think.”
Then, as if to prove my point, he doesn’t utter another word, while I do everything in my power to change that.
I try discussing the roster Jensen picked. I complain about how we’re stuck going to this thing. I tell him about my upcoming class schedule. Meanwhile, he communicates in grunts, sighs, and shrugs, and a short list of facial expressions ranging in emotion. One look conveys sheer boredom—that’s his go-to. The other is…not quite disdain, but sort of confusion-tinged disbelief, like, Are you still talking to me?
Eventually I give up. I scroll through my playlists and pick a track. Within seconds, a familiar, soothing voice washes over me.
“The call of the Canadian wilderness came to me when I was a young man, barely old enough to drink and yet plenty old to traverse a robust and often brutal landscape in hopes of self-discovery.”
Ryder’s head shifts toward the driver’s seat. I see it from the corner of my eye.
“An aural experience as diverse as it was evocative, I lost myself in the rush of a creek, the heavy crunch of a moose paw against a tangle of undergrowth, the sweet song of the golden-crowned kinglet in the distance. It was enough to rob me of breath. And now…let me take you there.”
The track begins, a flap of wings (I assume belonging to the golden-crowned kinglet) fluttering out of the speakers. Soon, the symphony of the wilderness fills the car.
We’re about ten minutes in before Ryder speaks.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Horizons with Dan Grebbs,” I tell him.
He stares at me. “You say that as if I’m supposed to know what or who that is.”
“Oh, Dan Grebbs is amazing. He’s a nature photographer from South Dakota who ran away from home at sixteen. He rode the railroads for a while, traveling the country and playing the guitar, taking pictures. Then one day he impulsively traded in his guitar for a field recorder and bought passage on a ship heading for South America. He caught the travel bug and has been all over the world ever since, working on his soundscapes. He’s recorded so many different albums. This is his wilderness series.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“What do you have against the wilderness? Is it too good for you?”
“Yes, the wilderness is too good for me. That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
I fight a smile and lower the volume. “I use these tracks for meditation. A way to quiet my head when it all gets too loud. Life,” I clarify, even though he hadn’t asked what I meant. “You must know what I’m talking about. The hockey world can be so loud. Sometimes you just need to quiet it. Try to ease some of that pressure, you know?”
