Page 3 of Second Draft

“I have to go.” Breaking the contact, I turn, and despite how ridiculous it seems – I run.

Chapter 2

Carter

The crowded bar throbs with house music, pulsating through me like the high I’m looking for. I need something. Anything to dull the constant ache that presses between my ribs.

The past four years have been a goddamn avalanche of heartbreak. Tonight, I just want to drown my pain with booze and maybe a nice pair of tits. Because tomorrow I hop on a plane to New York to start my new life as a sports journalist.

What a fucking joke.

The pay is shit. So is the magazine. But I’m not doing it for the money. That’s not why I took the damn job. I took it because it’s my only way to stay connected to my old life.

Hockey.

It’s the only thing I cared about for years. Until fate decided to screw not only with my family, but my career. Now that it’s gone, it’s like there’s a piece of me missing. An emptiness I can’t seem to fill. It’s stupid, I know. It’s only a goddamn sport. But it’s what defined me for so long, that sometimes I don’t really know who I am without it.

I snap open my prescription bottle and pop my last oxycontin, chasing it back with beer.

A shattered kneecap after being checked into the boards last spring ended my career in the NHL. Two surgeries and ten months of rehab, and my leg is still a mess. Chronic pain, and sideline view of the game are all I have to look forward to now.

People are dancing, grinding, as the lights flash and pulse to the rhythmic beat that thumps through the speakers.

It’s not my typical scene, but being my last night in town, I let my brother drag me here. But right now, I need a small break from Travis, who’s currently doing Jagerbombs on the far side of the room with some chick he picked up twenty minutes after we got here.

At twenty-one, the kid, if I can still call him that, is living every teenage boys’ dream – on my paycheck. Unemployed, living off the money I give him each month, screwing countless women in the house I bought for him. Travis’ only responsibility is not getting himself arrested –again– for disorderly conduct.

Sometimes the seven years that separate us feel more like twenty. But then, I was never as set on self-destruction as Travis is.

That’s not to say I haven’t done my share of drinking and screwing hot women, but in everything I do, there’s order and control.

Like now. My gaze scans the crowd, seeking the woman I’ll take home tonight. Blonde, brunette, redhead, I don’t care as long as she knows the rules – no strings attached. One night of pleasure. No phone numbers exchanged. Just sex.

Because it’s all I have room for right now.

Not that I plan to stay single for the rest of my life. One day, I’ll settle down, have a couple of kids, but that reality is so far from where I am right now that there’s no sense pretending I want anything more than a good screw.

Sitting down at the bar, I order another Heineken, and grin at the blonde on the stool next to me. She gives me the eyes, the ones that say fuck-me-please, and leans closer, practically shoving her ample cleavage in my face.

“Hi.” She bats her fake eyelashes at me. “Want to buy me a drink?”

It’s almost too easy. I like a bit of a challenge. And the way I’m reading her, it would only take a few flattering words to have her blowing me in the basement restroom.

Not what I’m looking for tonight.

I grunt and shake my head, causing her to pout, then turn back to the guy she was previously hitting on.

Paying for the beer, I’m about to walk away when my gaze lands on a figure, sitting in the shadows at the far end of the bar.Layla. The girl who’d practically run from me after I’d saved her life. The girl I hadn’t been able to get out of my head for the past two weeks.

Light brown hair hangs in waves over her shoulders, and her brows turned down intently as her gaze skims the pages of the book she’s reading. She’s fucking reading,in a bar. I almost chuckle at how out of place she looks, until she glances up and meets my gaze with those eyes.

It’s not just the color, which in this light look like a soft brown, the color of caramel–it’s what’s beneath them.

Innocence.

Warmth.

The complete opposite of everything I am.

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