Page 102 of Skate the Line

I’ve never told anyone this. Not even the nurses when I went to the hospital.

“It might be good for me,” I whisper.

Rhodes reaches around and tips my chin backward slightly. I scoot farther against the couch, getting closer to him as he begins to intertwine the strands of my hair.

“I didn’t realize he’d pulled my hair until a few days later when some clumps fell out in the shower.” Rhodes’s fingers pause for a few secondsbefore he goes back to overlapping the strands. “I guess I blocked some of it out, but after I calmed down, I remembered waking up with his fingers woven throughout my hair.”

“You woke up like that?”

I swallow. “That’s how it started. I was asleep, and he took advantage of that. I freaked out, obviously, and?—”

Rhodes tenses. His breathing turns erratic. I follow the hockey players back and forth on the TV, attempting to think of anything other than that night.

Rhodes mutters under his breath. “He hurt you.”

I say nothing.

He did hurt me.

Both physically and emotionally.

“He did,” I say. “He refused to believe that I wasn’t in love with him, and he slowly became consumed with the idea of there being anus.”

My hair slips from Rhodes’s fingers, and it’s parted in three sections again. “Remember,” I say, “every other strand.”

I hear his teeth rub together with frustration.

“So he was obsessed with you.” He crisscrosses strands of my hair and scoots closer, likely trying to get more of a grip on them.

My pulse thrums. “I guess. I found a drawer full of photos of me beside his bed. A secret camera inside my bedroom…” I shrug, trying to play it off. “He hated that his son grew close to me, even though I was his nanny. He became jealous.”

“Jesus,” he mutters.

Silence fills the living room, except for the sound of the hockey game playing in front of us.

I relax farther onto the couch, unknowingly getting closer to him. My eyes start to droop the longer he works with my hair. The braid is loose, with strands of hair falling into my face, framing it, but progress is progress.

“There,” he says, sounding pleased with himself.

I lean forward and touch the back of my head. I faintly run my fingers over the braid, proud that it isn’tasmessy as I’ve seen him to do to Ellie’s.

Peering backward, I smile at him. “Not bad, Volkova.”

He leans backward onto the couch with his lip lifted on one side and puts his hands behind his head. It screams cocky, and the only thing I can think is that the way he’s sitting looks like an open invitation.

Which it absolutely isnot.

However, his muscular thighs are spread open, and his lap is there for the taking. The smirk on his face makes me do a double-take.

Jeez.

He’s too hot for his own good.

“You’re a good teacher,” he says, nodding to the couch cushion beside him.

I gingerly step to the right and sit down. There are seven minutes left in the game, and it’s tied.

A minute passes, and suddenly, a blanket appears in front of my face. Rhodes isn't even looking at me as he hands it out for me to take.

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