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CHAPTER 1
ALEX
After a brutal tussle with the relentless ice, the last thing I want is a massage. Picture this: my battered muscles, wrung out and contorted like a pretzel by a therapist who appears utterly indifferent to my pain.
Yet, you know what I secretly crave? The chance to challenge that same therapist. My favorite masseuse, Britney, is the sister of a teammate, and the daughter of the man who tolerated me squatting in his house for the better part of my childhood. She has this uncanny knack for unraveling my knots while concealing her emotions, turning it into a peculiarly delightful dance of torment and pleasure.
As I shroud my body with a white cotton towel and lie down on the massage table, she enters the room. I savor the moment her hands begin their work on my quadriceps, the muscles most desperate for her touch. Her golden curls are neatly secured in a bun, and she’s adorned in pink scrubs, far more appealing than her usual floor-length skirts. Though I try to resist, there’s a subtle longing in my center as my gaze lingers on her.
A fleeting, nearly annoyed expression flits across herheart-shaped face as she looks at me. Then her eyes shift elsewhere.
I can’t help but sport a smug grin. She doesn’t exactly savor the idea of being stuck with me as her client, and that’s precisely why I insist on having her.
With a voice that’s always just a whisper away from my ear, requiring my full attention to catch her words, Britney excels at blending into the shadows. It’s one of the reasons I relish her touch. I get to push her buttons until she finally snaps in irritation.
Our little game never seems to lose its allure.
She gracefully navigates around me, reaching for a bottle of oil on a nearby shelf. “You have time for a massage?” She spreads some liquid on my upper leg, pausing to look at me with her frosty blue eyes. “Don’t you have a fire to put out?”
I raise an eyebrow. It’s the very first time Britney has initiated a conversation without my prodding, and I can’t help but feel a flicker of intrigue despite my annoyance.
"I know this might be hard for you to remember, Brit, but hockey is played on ice." I grin at my own words. Britney's brother is in the league and her father is a team manager. Implying that she doesn't know what she's talking about will for sure get under her skin.
But she ignores my barb, pulling out my left leg and digging into the quad with surprising strength.
Britney doesn’t talk much, but she is skilled at punishing me for annoying her.
“You know what I mean.” Her words are even lower now.
I bite back a groan. “No, I really don’t. I’m sure you’ll enlighten me though.”
She raises her brows. “Really?” She’s evidently too surprised to even remember her usual vow of silence. “Your ex?”
A hint of distaste spreads on my tongue. Of course. Britney is talking about Janice Hatfield, a former ice girl for the New Jersey Devils, who’s been raising a stink on social media about getting dumped by me after she quit her job to, in her words, “be with me.” She’s been going on for two days, and TikTok has exploded with memes and lip-syncs. Two coaches asked me about it before we got on the ice this morning.
It’s mildly infuriating, but then again, this is not the first time a self-proclaimed ex would go on social media to let everyone know how heartless I was for dumping them.
“We were not dating.”
I need to set that straight with Brit. And hell, with anyone else who thinks of me as the asshole Janice is painting me to be.
“My bad,” Brit murmurs. Still, I can hear loathing in her voice, can even feel it as she kneads her hot hands even deeper into my upper leg.
A hint of unease spreads through my core. Half of the members of my team secretly hold the same revulsion for me as Brit.
“She was never my girlfriend,” I spit.
Britney shrugs as though it’s nothing to her, but her hands are kneading harder. Finally, she mumbles, “No. Just had your fun with her, then tossed her aside. A story as old as time itself.”
I ought to be irritated by the claim, but the fact that the usually reserved and quiet Britney is expressing her feelings so openly brings a smirk to my face. While I have the chance, I want to push her buttons a bit more.
“She probably had way more fun than I did,” I muse, thinking back to the lukewarm fucks I endured for six weeks.
Britney abruptly lets go of my leg, and when I look intoher face, she’s staring right back at me, glacier pale eyes sparkling with rage.
This surprises me. She usually wears a painted-on, polite smile. At times, I’ve witnessed flashes of anger, especially when a fellow player made a crude joke, or her father tried to boss her around. None of those came close to this.
“You let her quit her job for you.” Her voice is a decibel higher than usual.
