Page 21 of Dream Girl Drama

“Me too,” she whispered, reaching up and threading her fingers through his hair, making him bury his face in the crook of her neck with a groan. His hip blades were pressed to the insidesof her knees now, her center aching for pressure, friction, even though she knew it wasn’t allowed. None of this was. Still... “If we’d run away, where would we have gone?”

“Sweden.”

Am I floating?“Sweden?”

“You could play in the royal philharmonic orchestra there.” He rubbed his lips up and down against the side of her neck. “I could play hockey.”

Her head fell back, neck unhinging. “You’ve thought about this?”

“Thought. Obsessed. Whatever you want to call it.” Sig rolled their foreheads together, looking down. Watching her breasts shake with increasingly labored breath. “You grew up pampered, but that’s not how I would have treated you in bed. I’d have fucked you like the world was ending.” He dropped his mouth to her breasts and licked each slope, before slowly dragging his tongue up the side of her neck and laving a circle beneath her ear. “It would have been ending, because another one would have been beginning. Ours.” He cursed beneath his breath. “I’m sorry.”

“You can’t be sorry,” she managed, her eyes still crossed from that lick. From his words. That night had been as meaningful to him as it was to her. The start of something undefinable. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Maybe not.” He dragged her an inch closer to the edge of the washer, but stopped, his jaw giving a tight pop. “But Christ, I better go before I do.”

Before she managed to focus, Sig had left the laundry room, his boots pounding up the stairs toward the building exit, leaving Chloe boneless and heartsick on the shaking washer.

Chapter Five

Two months later

Sig sat in the front row of the concert hall, thanking God it was dark.

Because he was pretty sure his jaw was in the vicinity of his knees.

Tonight was Chloe’s first student showcase with Berklee. It wasn’t the first time Sig had put on a tuxedo, but the only other times he’d worn a penguin suit, he’d been at the ESPY Awards, surrounded by other athletes roughly his size. Not tonight. He was by far and away the biggest motherfucker in attendance—and sitting in the first row with a bouquet of roses crushed in his lap, he was probably blocking everyone’s view of Chloe playing the harp onstage. There was no greater crime, because she was...

Eyes closed, she tilted her face and her cheek caught the light, her fingers moving fluidly over the strings, lips moving with the notes, verbalizing sound in a way no one else could interpret, playing what had to be the entrance music to heaven. This wasn’t normal. She was better than everyone else, right? Didn’t the audience realize that?

OhJesus.

His heart was going to rip a hole in his chest.

How had he managed to stop himself from touching her since that day in the laundry room? It was a daily struggle, due to thesheer amount of time they spent together, but Harvey’s voice always echoed back to him before his hunger could take over.Her mother would disown her before she weathered a scandal like that. Is that what you want?

No. God, no. Because Sig couldn’t match the life Sofia could provide for Chloe.

Not yet. Maybe not ever. With the contract deadline approaching in the next few months and rumblings of a change in ownership going around the locker room, he had no idea what the future held for his career.

No player ever really had a guarantee of a holy grail contract, right? He was no different.

None of this stopped him from falling for her. Deeper and deeper. Did it?

Every day—everysingleday—he swore he’d reached the pinnacle of his feelings for this woman and then he was proven wrong. Even last week when she had her period and answered the door sobbing in sweatpants and cradling a mug of soup, he’d been fucking mesmerized.

“Do you know that when birds fly into closed windows, they’re usually attacking their own reflection? It’s all just a big mistake and sometimes they die for it.”

He cataloged the situation the way he registered the positions of each defender on his way down the ice. “Did a bird fly into your window?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to go check if it’s okay?”

“Yes. I’m scared to do it myself.” She sighed down at her soup, stirred it, and seemed frustrated by the fact that it was soup in the first place. “I have my period.”

“Oh. Maybe you should go lie down.”

“I tried that,” she groaned, head falling back on her shoulders. “Still cursed.”

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