Page 83 of Dirty Pucking Player

GREER

His words hit me in slow motion and knock me back with their sincerity and depth of their meaning. I never thought Bash capable of showing emotions other than arrogance and anger. Then lust. But it’s far more than that flickering in his bourbon eyes.

Fear. Resentment. Longing. Pain. It all lies there, starting back at me and begging me to understand.

I don’t doubt for a second that he does care for me, that this is eating away at him the same way it has been me. The way he touches me, the way he looks at me, the things he’s done for me to ensure I’m taken care of, even the way he reacted when I suggested I was just another woman in a long line of them that will continue after I’m gone prove he does care.

But that’s just not enough.

The revelations about his high school friend and his father explain so much about Bash, about how he’s lived his life and why he’s reluctant to get close enough to me to open up and let me in. Why he can’t just answer the damn question I asked with how he really feels and instead pushes me away and tries to ice me out.

Bash and the rest of his family have been hurt by the person who was supposed to love them the most. While Mike Fury was praised for his violence in the game, he brought it home in a way that damaged Bash in a way that may never heal. Between that and suffering the kind of loss he did at such a young age, it’s no wonder the man is emotionally frozen.

Telling me everything he just unloaded started a crack in that wall he’s built up.

He cares for me, and he’s finally willing to admit it out loud, but the sad, awful truth is…he just cares for himself more.

The bastard.

I push out of his arms and take a step back. “You’re so goddamn selfish, Bash.”

He raises a dark eyebrow and points to his chest. “Me? Why am I selfish?”

Can he really not see what’s happening here?

The man is so dense sometimes, I swear, it’s like talking to a child. He has the emotional depth of a five-year-old if he can’t see what I’m referring to.

I scoff and throw up my hands. “Are you kidding, Bash? You could probably ask around the league and find half a dozen teams to pick up your contract. They might not be ones with great records or playoff potential, but you’ll have a spot on a line somewhere. Whereas, I can’t just quit my job. Too many people are watching me. Too many little girls who want to be taken seriously in hockey. I can’t fail at this, Bash.”

He snorts and shakes his head. “For argument’s sake, Coach, let’s say I find a team willing to pick up my contract, what then?”

“What do you mean?”

He steps toward me, and I move back. One thing I know without a doubt, that the time I’ve spent with Bash has taught me is, when he’s close enough to touch me, I’m in serious danger of making bad decisions.

Only space can ensure a clear head.

Bash stops his advance. “I mean…what then? Let’s say I go to New York. I’m in New York, and you’re in Vegas. Maybe we see each other once a month, if that. What the hell kind of relationship would that be? How long would it be sustainable? How long would we really be happy with the situation?” He shakes his head. “I won’t do that to you or to me. It’s just setting us up for even bigger pain down the road.”

He doesn’t explain what he means by that, but I assume it’s a reference to how he grew up with his dad playing. Having a family and maintaining this type of career isn’t easy. What he went through was awful. There’s no denying or downplaying that. But not everyone who plays the game is a shitty father and spouse, and him making that leap is just fucking stupid.

“So, why even bother trying, Bash? That’s what you’re saying?” I release a little strangled laugh-sob. “You’re so afraid of opening up to anybody, of letting anybody in, that you won’t even give it a shot. You just assume that the worst is going to happen and assume the worst in people.”

His defeatist attitude is so opposite of the way he is on the ice. This isn’t the confident Bash who does what he wants and takes what he wants. This isn’t the Bash who lets his anger out on the ice and off it can be so caring and gentle. This Bash is scared.

The man before me is terrified of what will happen if we really give this a chance. If we take on the complications it presents and give ourselves the potential for that kind of joy…and pain.

He growls low and steps toward me again. “I’ve been through this, Greer. I’ve lived through it and seen it first-hand. This does not end in a happily ever after for us. It will be us unhappy and unfulfilled and with us rushing through short reunions, fucking like rabbits, or being too tired to even do that. It ends with you pregnant and me an absent father, who, when I am there, is so wiped out from playing that I don’t even have the energy to spend time with my kid. Or fucking worse, taking it out on him or her because I don’t know how to be a fucking father. It ends with us living in two different cities and me never even seeing my child if I haven’t destroyed my relationship with him or her to the point that they would even want to see me.” Anger vibrates his voice, and he clenches his fists at his sides. “I promised myself a long time ago that I would never do that.”

That was before me.

The words are on the tip of my tongue. But despite the burning anger in my chest, there’s something else there—the acknowledgment that he’s right.

We can never live in the same city as long as both of us are doing these jobs—except a few off months in the summer.

What kind of relationship would that be? What kind of future?

I don’t dare think about kids or the house with the white picket fence. It’s all stuff I never thought I would want, and now, this man I couldn’t even stand to be near—a man who elicits equal parts desire and rage in me, a man who is looking at me now with so much pain and so much determination—is capable of shattering my heart by denying me those very things.

---