Page 28 of The Spice Play

His jaw ticked as he dragged his gaze up toward the ceiling, up to the little bulbs that dotted it and lit the room in gentle, low light. He pulled his hands from his pockets, absentmindedly running one up the length of his arm while his Adam’s apple moved, but not a single sound came out of him.

Bile churned over in my gut, thrusting up into my esophagus. I wanted to throw up. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words froze, and I had to push past it, had to stuff down that urge so I could get the fuck out of here and find privacy to feel shitty about myself. “Matty’s asleep,”I said, but the sound of my voice was wrong, croaky, and foreign. I pushed off from the counter and took a step to my right, toward the glass doors, toward freedom and Carl the House Goalie and the guesthouse. “I’ll take him to school in the morning. Get some rest?—”

He moved across the floor like it was ice, his hand wrapping around my wrist and catching mine before I’d even gotten another step in. “Nelly.”

“Please don’t,” I gulped.

“That’s not…” He let out a grunt of frustration as he released me, shoving that same hand that had held my wrist into his hair instead and pushing the wavy brown strands out of his face. “That’s not what I meant. Remember the name I gave you? Sebastian Anthony?”

Well, that just felt like another stab in my self-confidence. “Please don’t remind me that you gave me a fake name,” I faltered, taking a step back from him toward the glass doors. “The number thing is enough.”

“No, that’s not—fuck, okay, just let me start over,” he said, bloodshot eyes meeting mine in a flash. He looked flustered, stressed, anxious in a way that I hadn’t seen before, not even on the morning when he’d overslept and was nearly an hour late for practice. “You know who I am, now. You know what I do for a living. If you’ve googled me, you probably know a lot of half-accurate information about my life. And at the bar, you didn’t, or at least I was somewhat convinced you didn’t.”

I stared at him across the few feet between us. “I don’t under?—”

“The handful of times I’ve gotten involved withanyonesince my divorce, they’ve either known who I am or they’ve quickly learned who I am. And every fucking time, Nell, they didn’t care aboutmeorMattyor anything else,” hesaid, leaning just a little closer to me as he put one hand on the counter for stability. His brows lowered, his mouth formed a hard line, but then he was speaking again, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to run. I wasn’t sure what I wanted at all. “They cared about what I could do for them, what I could give them, how many season tickets they could get or how much of my money they could use, and how many images of their face next to mine would show up in the recaps the day after a game. None of them have ever been interested in me as a person.”

His jaw worked back and forth as he thought about the words he wanted to say, and I gave him that space. I wasn’t sure if it was my freeze response or a choice to stay at this point, but I wasn’t moving, wasn’t going anywhere.

“When that happens enough times, you start to expect it,” he continued. “I had no idea if you were just playing coy with me to try to weasel your way in. And then you showed up at fucking practice, and I sawredbecause that was all I could think. So yes, I took your number to be polite and didn’t call you because I’d made my peace with not seeing you again the moment I spoke to you. I gave you my middle name instead of my last. I’m sorry for all of those things. But I don’t know how to navigate being a regularpersonwith this kind of stuff anymore, not since I made NHL, not since Taryn.”

Taryn?I wanted to ask who that was, but I thought better of it before the question could leave my mouth. Instead, I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out through a tiny gap between my lips. I could understand what he was saying, could understand his reasoning, but that little flame in my mind that had sparked a wildfire of an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy was still burning, even with the worst parts doused and put out by his words.This made him more human, morereal, and I almost wished I could have just taken the hit-and-run instead of hearingthis.

This hit close to home on too many levels.

I’d had to watch Morris go through similar things. He was a music producer, and although he wasn’t anywhere as sought-after as Sebastian probably was, he was hounded by wannabe musicians and up-and-comers constantly. It made him not want to work with anyone he hadn’t reached out to personally, made him not want to allow talent to find him. They all wanted the things he could give them instead of wanting to work with him as a person.

But Morris was a piece of shit. And as much as I wanted to assume Sebastian was the same as Morris with everything else outside of the bedroom, it was looking more and more like he wasn’t.

And that was… unsettling.

Upsetting.

Attractive.

“It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy my night,” he added softly, throwing emphasis on almost every word as he stared directly at me, searching me, reading me.

Sebastian reached out again, almost hesitantly, as if I’d set him on fire, too, and slowly, gently wrapped his fingers around my forearm. Heat spread and consumed me from the point of contact, and my mind went blank, anything and everything I wanted to say lost and replaced with a black void.

He pulled, and my body moved, taking a step closer to him, and another, and another, until I was nearly as close to him as I’d been that night I’d met him at Smokey’s weeks ago. That scent of cedarwood and ocean salt invaded my senses, tempting me, testing me.Touch him.

“I wanted to call you,” he breathed, his hold on my armturning softer and softer until it was practically featherlight. I could break free if I wanted to. “I forced myself not to.”

I wanted to call you.

God, this was so much worse. I could have made myself forget it all and stuff it down into a nice, neat box that I buried in the recesses of my mind if he’d just simply not had a good time and didn’t like me. Yes, it would have stung, especially after Morris’s constant battering ofyou’re shitty in bed, but I could have been fine.

I could have made sense of it.

But that wasn’t the case. Seb enjoyed himself. Seb wanted to call me. And now I was working for him, nannying his son, standing in his goddamn kitchen at midnight with no one else but him around. Now, I was standing beneath the intensity and heat of his tipsy gaze, and he was touching me, barely.

“That doesn’t explain why you seem to have a problem with me now,” I croaked. It was the only thing I could think to say, the only thing that still didn’t make sense. I needed to know, desperately, because if he hadn’t enjoyed himself, it would have been easy to explain — no one wants to be stuck in close contact with someone they thought they’d never have to see again. But from what he was saying, that wasn’t the case.

He huffed out a barely audible chuckle, his jaw working and ticking, and slid that featherlight touch on my forearm up. Fingers brushed across my upper arm, my shoulder, my collarbone, and I caught my breath the moment they touched my neck. His eyes followed them with precision, his lips parting just slightly. He moved them slowly until they settled just beneath my chin, tipping it up, forcing me to stretch my neck enough to still see his face as he took another step closer. I couldfeelthe heat ripplingoff his body, could have put a single hand between us and touched him easily.

But his eyes didn’t find mine. They stared at my lips instead, light blue irises focusing in and making my mouth water.

“I don’t have a problem with you, Penelope,” he rasped.

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