Page 8 of Troublemaker
I schooled my features into a concerned expression. “Hmm?”
“My sister Alison has been talking about you a lot lately. Said she gave you her number and you never called…” he rubbed his beard awkwardly, obviously not wanting to have this conversation with me.
“Yeah, sorry, I forgot. I’ve been too busy.”
He raised a brow. “You forgot? Or you’re just not interested?”
I wasn’t interested. Not in the least. My dick only got hard for one woman, and she was the one woman I couldn’t have.
“You never put yourself out there,” he added. “Practically a monk. You know that’s not good for you, right?”
“I’ll call her,” I said.
He nodded. “Good.”
“Oh, one more item before we finish up. Lucy Braverman is going to be assisting the team for the rest of the season.”
Trey’s eyes widened. “The kid Elijah left to you in the will? The trust fund brat? The one who comes sashaying in and out of your office like she doesn’t give two fucks about anything?”
My hands fisted underneath my desk. Lucy might be a brat, but no one could call her that but me. And yes, she had a trust fund, but she didn’t have access to it until she was twenty-one…making her reliant on me financially for the next three years. I hated how much I loved that, knowing I was her sole provider.
“She’s not a kid,” I said, instead, a little defensively, causing Trey’s eyes to go wider.
“Why are we bringing on someone who knows jack shit about hockey? Doesn’t she want to be a veterinarian or something?”
“How do you know that?” Annoyance shot through me. Why was Trey even talking to Lucy?
He shrugged. “I think she mentioned it at some point. So what’s going on?”
I sighed, rubbing a hand through my hair. “She’s about to get herself expelled. Doing unsafe shit. I need to keep a better eye on her.”
“And you think bringing her to practices with a lot of horny hockey players is the way to keep her in line?”
When he put it that way, no, I didn’t. What I wanted was to lock her up somewhere safe where she couldn’t do reckless bullshit anymore, like a tower where only I had the key, or my bedroom…but that was a fucked-up thought that led to other, much more fucked-up thoughts.
“She’ll stay busy, she’ll stay out of trouble, and we’ll make sure to make it clear to the entire team that it’s a hands-off situation,” I decided. “No looking, no touching, or you can say goodbye to playing for the rest of the season.”
Trey coughed.
“What?”
“Nothing, just…very protective of you. Very…fatherly.”
My stomach roiled. The very last goddamn thing in the world I felt toward the little troublemaker was fatherly. But that would have to remain a secret between me and my depraved cock.
One I’d take to the grave.
3
LUCY
“Ihate him, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him so much,” I said as I stomped into Mason and Leslie’s condo later that day.
“That’s a lot of ‘I hate him’s,” Leslie said with a laugh from where she sat on Mason’s lap.
Mason looked amused. But then Mason always looked amused when it came to me. I’d overheard him once tell Leslie that, even though he didn’t like that I was a bad—and sometimes dangerous—influence on her (i.e.,slightlyreckless gorge jumping), he also appreciated that I’d influenced her to accept her feelings for him. So I was allowed to remain in her life “with supervision.”
Leslie and I both said fuck it to supervision though. He might be a little bit of a stalker, but if Leslie wanted it, she got it—and she wanted to be friends with me.
