Page 10 of The Bad Boy Rule

Figured that would probably happen, but whatever. People are always going to talk; who gives a shit if it’s about me or something else. What they waste their time on is not my concern.

If I cared what people thought about me, I wouldn’t have time to worry about anything else in my life.

So what… I like to fuck and blow off steam. Sometimes I walk down sorority row in my boxer briefs because a girl kicked me out when I reminded her that it was a one-night thing.

I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. And I don’t stick my dick in the same girl twice.

I’ve got it down to a science.

A few of our teammates begin to filter into the locker room ahead of practice, offering us a nod and not much more. They already know I’m not much for conversation off the ice. I might be an asshole, but I’m an asshole who’s damn good at hockey.

That’s all I’m here to do. I’m not here to make friends. I’m not here to do anything but pave my way to the NHL.

That’s it.

That’s all it boils down to.

The rest is just a distraction, and I can’tafforddistractions.

That’s why I signed up for extra ice time. Because I needed some extra time to work on improving my agility on the ice and conditioning, my stick-handling speed. Failure isn’t in my vocabulary, so that means that I have to push myself to the limit.

My position for the Hellcats is left winger, which means I spend a lot of time battling for pucks, intimidating the other team, causing them to fuck up so they draw a penalty and we can have an extra guy on the ice. Unofficially, my title is the enforcer, the one who pushes them to the limit and makes them snap.

But what a lot of people don’t understand is that unlike the NHL and a lot of minor leagues, there’s absolutely no fighting in college hockey. The NCAA does not fuck around with fighting on the ice, point-blank. You fight? You’re thrown out of the game, and then you’re not useful to your team at all. So as much as I like to get my aggression out on the ice, check the fuck out of guys, talk shit to them, back them into a corner, I do it without hitting anyone. But off the ice? That is a different story.

You’d think after all the fights that me and my old man have gotten into that I wouldn’t want anything to do with it, but maybe… I just like a little touch of violence sometimes. Call it daddy issues, call me depraved or whatever the fuck you want, but it doesn’t make it any less true. At least I’m self-aware.

I set my stick down beside me and work on lacing up my skates while Bennett is prattling off about his night on Bourbon when it hits me.

Who better to pump for information than the guy who knows everybody’s business on this entire campus?

Don’t ask me how, but he somehow manages to be more involved with the drama than half the girls I know.

Turning to look at him, I lift a brow. “What do you know about a Rousseau? Lennon?”

Legros blows out a whistle, shaking his head. “Oh,Lennon Rousseau. I’m surprised you don’t know who she is.”

I shrug. “Should I?”

At first, Ididn’trecognize who she was when I saw her stomping onto the ice, her face set in polite determination, words dripping with a saccharine sweetness that I could practically taste even from across the ice.

Even when she yelled her name as I was walking away, it still didn’t fully hit me.

Rousseau’s a fairly common last name in New Orleans, but then I realized where I knew her from. That article in theGazette. The one where I saw her standing, poised and proper, next to her piece-of-shit father, looking every bit the pet that I would expect her to be. The article painted her family as the perfect Stepford family, complete with a white picket fence, but I knew better. I knew there was more than what they wanted the world to see.

Because it didn’t divulge any of Rousseau’s transgressions, the ones I’m all too familiar with.

The realization slammed into me like a truck, causing me to replay our interaction over and over in my head. I suddenly hated that my very first thought about her was how hot she was and imagining that sassy little mouth in a hundred different ways involving my dick now that I knew who she was.

Yet the girl with the fiery red hair and a mouth to match plagued my thoughts the entire weekend, whether I wanted her to or not.

So yeah, I know who Lennon Rousseau is.But I’m not going to be telling Bennett that because I want to learn whatever I can about her. What the newspaper and social mediadidn’tsay. That’s the shit I need to know.

“Everyone knows who she is. She’s little miss perfect. On the dean’s list, the honor society, president of the Social Club bullshit. Volunteers at charities and shit. Doesn’t party or do anything remotely fun.” He leans closer as he says, “Dude, if you’re thinking about trying to hit that… think again. She’s off-limits even toyou, the mighty Saint Devereaux. “

That can’t be true because I’m fairly certain there’s not a single girl on this campus who’s insusceptible to my charm.

I arch my brow. “Off-limits?”

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