Page 77 of Dirty Pucking Player

I release her arm, and she disappears out the door, leaving me alone with my confusion and a strange pain in my chest.

20

GREER

When I played, I used to love traveling. Getting to see new cities, meet new people, experience new countries and different cultures, it all was so thrilling. I never minded being away from home. I missed Dad, but I knew he could take care of himself. He took care of me alone just fine for a long time after Mom died.

But this road trip is different.

I can’t pretend everything is all right. I can’t pretend what happened between Bash and me isn’t eating away at my insides, making my gut and my heart ache.

It’s made concentrating on these upcoming playoff games almost impossible. The games, this team should be my only focus right now.

They have to be. It’s what I’m paid for.

Everyone is expecting me to fail, and I have a duty to ensure that doesn’t happen. So, everything that is in my control needs to be. That means the men on the ice take top priority. Not just the one man who happens to have worked his way into my heart from that chilly place.

I scan the keycard and open the door to my hotel room. Just another in a long list of hotel rooms that become temporary homes while on the road. All I want right now is to be at my real home curled up on the couch with a bottle of wine and Webflix and maybe Jill to listen to my troubles.

There are days that having this job really gets to me, and this is one of them. Between the stress of the game tomorrow and what’s happening with Bash, I feel like things are about to reach the full-on breaking point. Where it’s too late to go back or to salvage anything. Where everyone gets hurt in some way.

Especially me.

Frankly, I’m surprised it took this long. The first time I hooked up with Bash, I wasn’t sure it would ever happen again. I wasn’t sure it should ever happen again, even if I wanted it to, and now…all I can think about is that it never will.

And that reality has come harder and harsher than he did inside me in my office.

I drop onto the bed and pull out my phone, unable to stomach spending the night completely alone in here.

Jill answers on the second ring. “Hey! I thought you were on the road tonight.”

I sigh and run a hand over my face. “Just got in. At the hotel now.”

She giggles. “And is Bash in the adjoining room again?”

I cringe at her question and shake my head. “No. I specifically requested to have a suite with no adjoining room and told them not to reveal what room was mine to any of the players.”

“Really?” Concern laces her voices. “Greer, what’s going on? I thought things were good between you two.”

“They are. Or…I guess they were.”

I haven’t had a chance to tell her about what happened in my office. I’ve been dreading the possible rebuke I might get or, even worse, confirmation that I did the right thing by basically ending things. “Bash and I kind of had it out.”

“What do you mean?”

I stare at the off-white wall of the room and replay everything that went down in my mind. “Well, Bob called us into his office, and I almost had a heart attack.”

“Oh, shit. Does he know?”

I shake my head. “No, thank God. He just wanted to tell us how happy he was that we were getting along.”

Her laughter trickles through the line. “I’d say you two are more than getting along.”

“Very funny.”

She and Bash share a fifth-grade sense of humor.

“Sorry, Greer, not trying to make a joke of the situation, but you sound so doom and gloom about it. He’s a smoking-hot guy who you have smoking-hot sex with. I’m not seeing the problem.”

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