Page 17 of Second-Rate Superstar

“With the girl?”

My head whipped around to stare at him. “What girl?”

Jaxon shrugged. “Levi mentioned ‘your girl.’ Figured if you had plans for the evening, they were probably with her.”

I sighed. “It’s not like that.”

His eyes searched mine. “But you’d like it to be?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t seem too interested in me.”

A corner of his lips quirked up. “But you can’t stop thinking about her. Am I getting closer?”

Dropping my head back, I banged it against my stall, closing my eyes. “Yeah,” I groaned.

The smile in his voice was audible. “If your gut is telling you there’s something there, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. Take it from a guy who has some experience in that area. And you can choose whether that advice comes from your captain or your brother. Either way, I stand by it. You don’t want to look back on your life with regrets.”

I already regretted letting her get away the first time. Hopefully, when I got home, there was an address pinned to our fridge.

Dakota had left in such a rush when she found out who I was—or rather, what I did for a living—that I didn’t want to come off as a stalker, showing up on her front door the very next day. So, I would take my time and carefully craft a plan before approaching her.

Even without Jaxon’s advice, I wasn’t ready to let her slip away without discovering more about her. In particular, her aversion to athletes.

That intrigued me more than anything.

And there was something to be said about the thrill of the chase. It had been so long that I’d almost forgotten.

As a competitor, nothing got my blood pumping like a challenge.

Chapter 5

Dakota

Writer’s block was abitch.

Sure, it didn’t help that I was attempting to write something I had no clue about, and my last attempt at “research” had been an epic failure.

I still couldn’t believe I’d been chatting it up with a hockey player all night. The cocky way he took my notepad, demanding answers, then using his body to try and persuade me to confess should have been obvious clues. He was used to getting what—or whom—he wanted.

Two weeks later, I was still cursing myself for thinking he was hot, picturing his face and body when writing the spicy scenes in my book—skipping around the hockey parts because those definitely weren’t flowing.

Then, there were those words he’d said in my ear when our bodies were pressed flush.

“Why don’t you be a good girl and tell me why you were taking notes at a party instead of enjoying yourself?”

The deep timber of his voice when he’d said that would’ve been enough to haunt my dreams, but it was the “good girl” that made me weak.

I wrote romance for a living. I knew girls melted when they read about a guy calling them a good girl. A praise kink was not new. But realizing I had one? That sure as hell was.

Since I wasn’t writing, I spent most of my days reading. That’s where all this had started.

I had been a bookworm since I’d learned how to read. The way an author could create entire worlds with words captivated me. Their characters came alive in my mind, and I fell in love.

Books became my escape after the fallout with my dad leaving my mom. For a little while, I could forget my real life and get lost in a story. The library became my second home, where I went most days after school so I wouldn’t be alone while Mom worked.

The world was moving on from paper books at an alarming rate. E-readers and electronic versions of novels took over the market share as printing costs rose each year. But even as I sat with a thousand books on my own e-reader, there was nothing quite like the smell of a physical book. It gave me a comfort I couldn’t describe.

“Knock knock!” Bristol’s voice called from the hallway as she pushed her way into my room.

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