Page 69 of The Rebound Plan

“Yep.”

She disappears and I turn, sitting on the edge of the bed, my fingers twisting together.

I can’t exactly text Harper and say,hey if anyone asks, I gave you back a bikini that isn’t yours. And I can’t text Russ while he’s a hostage passenger with my husband on the way to golf and be like,hey your girlfriend found my bikini but phew, she thinks it’s Harper’s, so go along.

Fuck.

Fuck.

The only thing to do is hope nobody ever brings it up again.

A swim. A lay out in the sun. Then a long, awkward car ride home where my husband won’t have a room full of teammates to perform in front of. And on the other side of that?

I don’t know what comes next. But I know it won’t be anything like what my life has been up to this point for the last eight years. I blew that to smithereens last night, and the fallout will come as soon as we leave—or maybe it’s already begun, with Russ hostage in Max’s car.

CHAPTER 26

RUSS

As soon as I get in the car, Max peels out of my driveway, spraying gravel everywhere. Fucking idiot doesn’t realize that’s worse for his paint job than it is for my lane.

From the moment I woke up this morning, I knew I needed to smooth this over with Max. For Shannon’s sake, and for our team’s sake—and our own working relationship, which has never been close, but has always been professional.

So I wait until we’re on an actual paved road, but then I refuse to wait another second.

“I owe you and your wife an apology for last night,” I grind out.

He doesn’t look across the car at me. “I need you to forget that happened.”

I can’t do that. “I didn’t realize I was stumbling into the middle of an argument.”

“It wasn’t a real fight.”

Sure as fuck sounded real to me. “I’m just?—”

“Fuck off, Russ.” He says it as easily as everything else he’s said this morning, from the too casualgood morningwhen I found him running in the garage, to the way he sprawled in the kitchen, scrolling game video on his phone as I cooked, to the announcement that he’d be driving me to the golf course. “I’m telling you that was private. You probably misheard half of what we were saying, anyway.”

I frown.

Other than wanting to make sure Shannon's okay, I don’t really care about their fight. I mean, I know that married people do sometimes argue. I only used that as my entry into the conversation about what happened between the three of us. Max, though, seems fixated on me forgetting thefightmore than the threesome.

Like the subject of the fight is what matters most to him.

They started arguing about the podcast Shannon’s thinking of doing. Then they were talking about the Ice League, and Max was spinning some fantasy about it being a part of his legacy, spending the last few years of his career playing there instead of in the NHL. Bonkers dreamland bullshit.

“All right,” I say slowly. “There was a lot of wind last night. I couldn’t hear you, really.”

His grip tightens on the steering wheel. “Good.” He grimaces. “What has Marty said to you about Ice League?”

Fuck. Our agent. Of course, he doesn’t want me to know about whatever angle he was trying to work—because Marty hasn’t said shit-fuck-all to me about this opportunity, however real or not it may be.

Max and I might share an agent, but there's a code between players—we want to trust that our agent is doing the best they can for us, but also understanding that they might be able to do something different for another player. There is also almost an entire league between Max and me, and we’re at different points in our contract cycles. I have two more years left on my contract. He is in the final year of his, so he is actively looking for a new contract. And he is the type of player who could get one more big contract to get him to the end of his career.

He is a marquee player who would be very attractive to an investor for a new startup league, and also, being pursued in that way could, in turn, increase his value to an NHL owner.

I'm never going to be that kind of guy.

“Nothing,” I can admit easily, because it’s the truth. “I’m not the kind of player they’d be looking to snap up first.”

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