Page 3 of Ice Cold, Red Hot
“Yeah, and if you don’t move your over-sized, over-blinged, loser truck, I’ll call a tow truck and have it moved for you.” I stormed back around to the driver’s side of the Tahoe and honked twice for good measure.
I heard a few of the guys calling out and laughing. “Feisty!”
Nat hopped back in.
“So… Do you know Ren?” Nat asked me, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Who?”
“Shepherd Renshaw. Captain of the hockey team? Campus god? The guy you were just yelling at?”
Should I tell her? Or would she just feel sorry for me since it was clear I wasn’t worth acknowledging if you were a hot hockey god? For now, I decided not to tell her how I knew him.
“Nope, mixed him up with someone else. So many assholes look alike.”
She nodded, but it was clear she wasn’t buying it.
Finally, Shepherd got into the truck and it began to move forward. I pulled the Tahoe to the curb. Five minutes later, we had our apartment keys and I spent the rest of the afternoon lugging our stuff inside and pretending it was no big deal that I was going to be living in the same building as my hot summer fling, directly across the hall.
Not a big deal at all.
CHAPTER 2
SHEPHERD
Shit.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been expecting to see her at some point. She’d told me she was a grad student at Coldwater. That was why I’d snuck out like some kind of midnight thief that last night.
But I had definitely not been expecting to see her in my fucking apartment building. Directly across the fucking hall.
“Yo Ren. Catch!” I turned just as Griff threw a beer my way, glad I’d caught it before it smashed to the floor of the apartment we’d just finished moving all our shit into.
Griff and I shared an apartment, and our teammates had the apartments all around us—next door, down the hall, above us. This building was always the hockey team HQ for upperclassmen. I don’t know why I’d expected it to be any kind of sanctuary. Other students lived here too.
Other students including Celeste, the girl I’d met this summer at Miranda Lake. The girl I’d thought might bedifferent—might let me be someone different. Even just for a week.
But the second she told me she was coming to Coldwater, that she was a TA in the psych department…
Well, that was the end. It had to be.
She had been a dream. An escape. A woman so perfect there was no way she could hold up to the challenges of my real world. And she wasn’t supposed to.
Fuck, I still remembered what she felt like in my arms, breathing her in as she arched into me, the way she’d moaned my name like a prayer… And then she’d told me who she was. And it had ended everything because it had to, even though walking away from her felt something surprisingly like heartbreak.
She was a TA in my department, and I was captain of the hockey team. Anything between us would be seen as totally unethical, and I’d lose my season. And my future. And what little respect my father had left for me.
“Dude, what’s going on?” Griff was in my space. In my face.
I stepped back into the kitchen, twisting the top off the beer and downing half of it. “Nothing. What?”
“You’ve been acting weird since Nat and the hottie with the Tahoe pulled in and told you to move the truck.”
I shook my head at him, hoping he’d drop it.
“Careful with that.” Burns and Hashimoto were yelling down from the balcony at the other students moving their stuff in. “Looks expensive!”
I followed their raucous laughter out and leaned over the railing, glad to be away from Griff’s first degree. But it was no better out here.
