Page 35 of Off Limits PUCK

“The regular season ends in two months. How do you think your shoulder’s recovery will compare this year as opposed to last year when you sustained the injury?”

I force another smile. I hate answering this question. Every answer is a new way to tell the same lie: I’m fine. Not even Jones knows that I’m anything but fine.

“I guess my performance on the ice shows that I’m not the injured player I was last year.” I keep it brief, ready to wrap up.

“And what do you have to say about your former PT taking the forward for Charlotte’s WNBA team from injured to healed in a matter of six weeks? It was also a shoulder injury?” a different reporter asks me.

I clench my jaw. I don’t let myself think about Allie. It’s a totally off limits topic for me. It hurts in a way I hate to think about or admit. Allie did this to me—she abandoned me when I needed her the most. She bailed on me. According to Coach, she went to a better opportunity for her career. And she did it without one single backwards glance at me.

It fills me with equal parts anger and pain. The betrayal, the way that she did it, is what hurts so much. It has made me question every interaction I ever had with her. Was I being used the whole time? Was she sleeping with me for sport or so that she would manipulate something out of me? But she left before she could finish the job?

I feel disgusted by her. I look right into the reporter’s camera. “PTs come and go. Not one of them is memorable or special. I really don’t know which one you’re talking about. They’re all the same to me.” I can’t keep the coldness out of my tone.

Coach steps forward then, and I realize he’d been listening in to the interviews. He tells the reporters time is up and then he watches each one file out. Two of the younger females try to droptheir business cards discreetly to me, but he snatches up both cards as they leave.

I chuckle at him as the locker room door closes and the team is alone again. “I would never, Coach.” I give him a feigned hurt expression. “How dare you even think that a man of honor such as myself would take up any lady we work with on her offer of sex, pleasure, and everything else that comes with it?”

The whole room laughs. I am still a bad boy in their minds, albeit a reformed one just for this season.

Coach fixes one of his stern looks on me. “Mhmm, and why is that? Why is our team captain not chasing the ladies?”

I wink. “Because I don’t have to.” I stand up and head to the showers. “They come to me.”

“Jake!” he calls out. “I’m watching you.”

I wave him off. He has been on me like a hawk on its prey ever since Allie worked for us a few months ago. But that was August. We’re now in December. I haven’t seen or heard from her once. Kenzie is back to her constant flight schedule and without Allie as the glue between my sister and me, well, we sort of haven’t really been in touch much either.

I step into the shower stall of our game day locker room and my mind has a flashback to Allie helping me the night I got hit on the ice. I sigh. That shower was fully open. She was right there, watching me, helping me… touching me.

“God damn it,” I swear. I miss that woman. It’s stupid. It’s illogical. It might even be insane. She leftme! Not the other way around. I stand in the privacy of the stall, hearing the guys and coach still going at it with man jokes and ridicules out in the locker room. After I leave here, I’ll go home to my lonely house. I’ll sleep in that bed where Kenzie caught Allie and me all those months ago. And I’ll wake up thinking about her. Just like I always do.

She grabbed hold of me in ways she never should have, only to turn around and leave me. I let my mind wander to the good times. Like the first time we had sex. Like the way her body responded to me. I think of the many ways she was loving and kind to me. I lean against the shower wall. My hand grasps my cock and I stroke it, Allie’s blue eyes so real and vivid in my imagination it’s almost like she’s here with me.

“Allie,” I murmur. “Why did you fucking go? Why did you leave?”

I feel anger. It fuels me to stroke harder. I want to take her in my arms. I want to shout, to demand answers. But ultimately, I want to love her. I want to hold her so tight that there’s no way in this world she would ever be able to leave me again.

My cock explodes at the idea of it, of a future with her by my side. I let it all come out in my orgasm—all the longing, the confusion, the pain, the betrayal. Everything.

I breathe in and out in ragged gasps, worked up emotionally in ways I never have been before Allie came into my life. I am sofrustrated by the lack of answers that I want to slam my fist into something.

But I don’t. And I won’t.

I lather soap on my body, rinse off, and reach for a towel. The flashbacks I have of Allie reach deep into every part of my life. Was that part of her plan, too? To ingrain herself in my home, my work, my everything… only to abruptly and without a word up and leave me in my hour of need? I was in a hospital bed the night that she left me.

I wrap the towel around my waist, my heart hardening again. No. She will not control me like this. I will conquer these feelings. I will learn to live my life without her and be glad about it.

I stomp my way toward my gym bag and pull on some clothes. Thank the gods that no one is around to see me hiss and wince in agony as my shoulder flares up when I pull my shirt on. That is a lie worth telling. That is a secret worth keeping.

After all, I have a Stanley Cup Championship to win this season.

Chapter twenty-one

Allie

“You really are thebest,” Caitlin says to me. I just finished working on her shoulder after the last women’s basketball game before the winter holiday break. She’s come a long way over the past few weeks.

“A few of us are going out for a drink tonight. You should come,” another player asks me. Unlike the testosterone fueled crude environment of the Eagles’ locker room, the women on the basketball team are pretty low key.

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