Page 22 of Pucking Obsessed

We had a fucking deal.

Heine isn’t meant to contact me.

Setting me up in order to publicly burn me fucking counts.

I tap my thigh in rhythms of three.

I narrow my eyes against the bright overhead lights in the large meeting room.

Flat screen monitors hang on the back walls. A white touchscreen, which is scrawled with red and blue lines of strategy, runs along the closest wall.

Coach leans with crossed arms against the wall, in front of an empty side of the table. His neck is flushed red with rage.

A large mahogany desk, which is emblazoned in the center with the Bay Rebels’ logo, stands in the center of the room.

Behind me, Shay stumbles at the sight of every member of the board ranged in the arctic blue chairs around it, including the wealthy and unscrupulous Lee, Kates, and Stansfield.

Also, the senior board member, William Bronwyn.

Bronwyn has silver hair and a beard like Santa, if Father Christmas was a thin, ruthless billionaire.

Bronwyn smiles at me, but it doesn’t meet his eyes.

Asshole.

Shay bumps into my back. I reach to steady him.

“Sorry, Sir,” Shay mutters.

I can hear the nerves in his voice.

I hate it.

He should only useSir, when he’s kneeling for me, and I’m sending him floating into pleasurable subspace.

Shay should only also sound breathy with excited anxiety because I’m playing predator to his prey and chasing him down, before pinning and biting him, until he’s teetering on the perfect edge ofpleasurepain.

He should never be made to feel like this by the team, which has adopted him and his brother in the same way that this town has.

For both of us, the Bay Rebels has become our family.

But then, at the beach house this morning, I realized that I also have a family in Robyn, Shay, and Eden, which isn’t related to hockey.

Family no longer is associated with the taste of blood in my mouth.

Family is not the flat look on Mom’s cold face, as I screamed for her tosave me— but she didn’t.

Family is not being abandoned by my parents in a discipline school for troubled teens because I dared to kiss a boy.

And family is not being rejected a second time last week by Dad, when he told me that I hadn’tchanged.

I haven’t.

I’m fucking proud of that.

Now, I’m loved by an incredible woman. I’m also accepted by men who I intend to give the world to because they’ve offered me a second chance at life.

Although, Eden would probably settle for a cat.

---