Page 103 of Blindside Sinner

I can’t help but giggle giddily. “Right?”

He helps me dress again, holding out my skirt for me to step into. “I just thought, now that we’re together… you can be my pregame fuck.”

“Oh, wow,” I say sarcastically. “When you put it like that, how’s a girl supposed to refuse?”

“She isn’t.” He turns me around as I button my top and presses a kiss over the spot he bit. “Not if she knows what’s good for her.”

I roll my eyes as I face him. His hair is mussed, so I smooth it back into place. “There’s that famous Beckett Daniels charm.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks, baby.” His fingers run over a tender spot on my neck and he frowns. “You have a hickey.”

“You marked your territory?” Something about it is hot in ways I would’ve never guessed.

He nods solemnly. “Damned right I did.” I like the way he says it, too. “Come here. Let me do it again.”

I laugh and put a hand in his chest. “Down, boy. You have a game in a little while.”

“But I wanna play with younow.” There is something adorable about his smile when he comes at me again. “Feel this.” He takes my hand and guides it to his dick. “Look how hard you make me.”

“Beck…” I’m shaking my head and smiling because he’s good for my ego, but I’m not a hundred percent certain he’s teasing until he grins.

“Okay, fine. Hands to myself. But if I get cross-checked and fall on it and it breaks off, it’ll be all your fault.”

A woman who says she doesn’t want to be wanted is either crazy or a liar. I’m neither. But I’m dressed now and he has to get ready for the game. And the last thing I need is to be the reason he’s late when it’s my actual, literal job to make sure he gets everywhere work-related on time.

“You better get to the locker room before they send out a search party.” I smooth my hands over his chest.

He grins and jerks his chin down towards his crotch. “Go lower.”

“Go to the locker room, wiseass. I’ll see you after the game.”

Sighing, he walks out. I slip from the closet behind him into an empty hallway. I stand in place until he disappears around the corner. Then, with a sigh of my own, I make my way toward the arena.

I stop in a bathroom along the way to clean up and fix my sex hair before continuing to my seat. When I glance down the aisle, Viv is already seated. The place is filling up, because people like watching the warm-up skates, but there’s no one in our section yet except her and me.

“Well, I see you got Beck to the arena on time.”

“That is my job, yes.”

She frowns and takes my chin in her hand—and we aren’t friends like that, so it’s probably good I’m so at peace right this second—then tilts my head to the side. “A hickey? Are you in seventh grade?”

I jerk my head back from her reach and roll my eyes. “I burned myself with the curling iron.”

“Hm.”

She narrows her eyes and stares at me, but not even her angry glare is going to dampen my mood.

The team has excellent timing, though, because just then, they pour onto the ice to start game prep. The guys are a blur of blue as they skate, shoot, sprint, circle. Beck glides over to the bench, takes a drink of water, and winks at me before hopping back into the chaos of the warmup drills.

I can feel Viv’s eyes on me, but I don’t comment. There’s not much I can say without admitting that I’ve broken the contract and I’m not admitting anything.

Even if my body is screaming the truth from a mountaintop.

Sixty minutes of hockey with two eighteen-minute breaks between periods should, in theory, last eighty minutes. But it always takes a lot longer than that. There are TV timeouts, bench timeouts, breaks in the action for penalties, play review, stoppages for injury, pucks over the glass.

Tonight, presumably just because a cruel and capricious god wants to prolong the amount of time I have to sit by Viv and pretend I’m not dying to get back to Beck, there’s double helpings of everything.

But finally, after about two and a half hours, I’m waiting outside the locker room for him to come out.

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