Page 37 of Anatomy of a Player

After I faced forward again, she dropped her hands. A few seconds later, I shot her a sideways glance, trying to be subtle about it. Onscreen the cornrowed prisoner was crying about all the ways the dog had saved him, and Whitney was crying along with him.

Since I’d been relating too much to the unwanted dogs as it was, I might’ve experienced the tiniest pang myself at seeing how everything had worked out for the dog and the prisoner.

Whitney reached up and wiped away a tear, then her hand dropped back to her lap, only a few inches away.

I stretched out a finger and ran it down the back of her hand. I waited for her to yell at me about looking at her again, but instead I was rewarded with a sharp intake of breath. So I trailed my finger across the top of her knuckles and then folded her little hand into mine.

A slight twist of her wrist and our palms met. Something tugged in my chest—a sensation so foreign to me that I couldn’t quite place it. But I knew that I wanted to feel it a lot more.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Whitney

I’d tried so hard to hold back my tears, but when you see a guy in prison crying over the dog he’d rehabilitated… You’d have to have a heart made out of stone to not feel something!

Hudson wasn’t crying, but I’d like to think the way his forehead had creased here and there during the documentary, and the hard swallow at the end, meant he’d felt something, too.

Speaking of feeling things, I couldn’t deny that my nerve endings were firing on all cylinders. Tiny zips of heat darted out from our joined hands and traveled up my arm before settling in my chest.

Once I trusted my voice, I said, “Now you know my nerdy secret. I love documentaries.”

“I can’t really comment on the nerdiness, can I? Because there were conditions against mocking it, and I’m afraid of what you’ll do to me if I cross you.” The teasing tone made it clear how little I scared him.

Too bad I couldn’t exactly say the same about him. He scared me in ways I couldn’t understand, even as I told myself I was controlling this situation by making him part of a study. That I was…

He slipped his fingers between mine, tightening his grip on my hand, and my heart relocated to my throat.Control the situation. Do…something.

I licked my lips. “Everyone’s got at least one nerdy thing about them,” I said, echoing what Lyla had told me. “What’s yours?”

I waited for the denial, or the smirk accompanied by a flirty “Don’t you want to know,” but he said, “Dinosaurs. I know a ridiculous amount about dinosaurs.”

“Really?” I asked, and he nodded, a boyish grin playing on his lips.

“Tell me more.”

“What’s there to tell?” He shrugged a shoulder. “Do you want to know the fastest dinosaur—Ornithomimids. Or that the biggest—well, the one with the most convincing evidence of being the biggest—is the Argeninosaurus?”

A lightness entered my chest, the floaty sensation making it impossible not to be sucked further into Hudson’s magnetic pull. “I did want to know that. So, when did you get hooked on dinosaurs?”

“For Christmas one year, a lady I knew gave me a huge book on them—I was about six or seven. They were big and tough, and I read that book over and over, until I had it memorized. After that, any money I had went to collecting dinosaur books and figurines.”

“Aw, that’s so cute.”

His dark eyebrows drew low over his eyes. “It’s not cute—dinosaurs are not cute. If we were at my place, I’d show you how scary my dinosaurs are—there are sharp teeth involved.”

“Wait,” I said, twisting so I could see his face better but also keep holding his hand. “You’re saying you have dinosaur figurines in your room right now?”

“It’s not like… I didn’t… There’s just one or two on my desk. They’re badass.”

I bit back a smile and nodded. “Got it.”

He ran his hand along his jaw and exhaled. “I can’t believe I admitted that—you’re going to torture me with that information now, aren’t you?”

“It’ll probably come up in every interview.”

He turned his head, his nose coming dangerously close to my cheek. His warm breath skated over my neck and sent a pleasant chill tumbling down my spine. “You smell really good.”

My heart thumped, hard and fast. I knew I should move away—stand up and end this night. A little over an hour ago I’d had my notes out, and I’d been cursing athletes and their superiority complexes. Now here I was mere inches from one I knew had an ego the size of Texas, and I wanted to curl up next to him, talk about documentaries and dinosaurs, and just forget the rest of the world existed for a little while.

---