Page 27 of Dirty Play

She doesn’t see it yet, but I’m chipping away at her walls. Every little crack, every flicker of doubt, is a win. And by the time she realizes it, it’ll be too late.

I glance over my shoulder just once to see the space left in her wake. I hear the gym doors shut behind her, and my lips stretch into a smile.

She’s angry, but more than that. She’s shaken. I grin to myself as I take a slow sip from the bottle.

Game fucking on.

Chapter nine

~LIVIA~

I kick my legs up onto the arm of the couch, phone pressed between my cheek and shoulder, while my best friend Hannah’s laughter crackles through the speaker.

“Wait, wait, wait,” she says, her voice nearly drowned out by her giggling. “You’re telling me this guy, this giant hockey player, literally pressed you into the air like some kind of gym weight?”

“Yes!” I groan, rubbing my forehead as the memory floods back. “He leg-pressed meand300 pounds of weight like it was nothing. Hannah. Do you know how mortifying that was?”

“Mortifying? Girl, that sounds like foreplay,” she teases, and I can hear the smirk in her voice.

“Shut up.” I throw a candy wrapper across the room, aiming at absolutely no one.

“Oh, come on,” she says, her tone dripping with mischief. “Tell me you didn’t enjoy even one second of it. A big, sexy hockey player manhandling you? Sounds like a dream.”

“Not a dream. A nightmare,” I shoot back, even though the heat creeping up my neck betrays me. “He’s infuriating, Hannah. Cocky, arrogant, smug—”

“Hot as sin,” she cuts in.

“Not the point!”

“Sounds exactly like the point.”

I roll my eyes and take a sip of my wine, the glass cool in my hand. “He’s impossible to deal with. And on top of all that, I felt his,” I lower my voice and glance around my empty apartment as if someone might overhear. “I felt him today. Down there.”

There’s a pause, and then her laugh bursts through the phone so loud I have to pull it away from my ear.

“Stop laughing!”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” she gasps, clearly not sorry at all. “How big is he?”

“I don’t know, Hannah.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. It's not like I’m experienced in that field.

“Oh, but I have a feeling you’re about to find out.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say weakly because evenIdon’t know how to describe what’s happening between Rowan and me. “The situation is complicated.”

The way he looks at me like he’s got the world’s dirtiest secret. The way his body moves, deliberately and confidently. And the way he whispers things that make me want to simultaneously slap him and…

“Complicated, huh?” Hannah’s voice snaps me back. “That’s code for ‘I want to climb him like a tree.’”

“Goodbye, Hannah,” I say, already reaching for the end-call button.

“Wait, wait, wait! Don’t hang up yet!” she says between snickers. “I’m just saying, you’ve been wound tighter than a barbed wire fence since you moved to L.A. Maybe this guy is just the…release you need.”

“I’m hanging up now.” My cheeks are burning.

“Fine, fine. But think about it, Liv. Sometimes, the thing that drives you the craziest,” her tone is teasing, “is exactly what you need most.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

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