Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
McCabe
I show up at AJ’s office the next morning with my metaphorical tail between my legs. I had a good amount of time last night—while Abby was up and fussing because her top front teeth are coming in—to think about my interaction with AJ in the hallway.
Once the infant acetaminophen kicked in, and I’d fed her a bottle and rocked her long enough, Abby fell back asleep. I wish I had as well, but my mind was spinning, wondering why I escalate every conversation with AJ into a fight. Especially after she’d done me such a big favor, and then acted so graciously about it in front of the press. She could have easily turned it back on me, about how I’d been unprepared to play or didn’t do a good enough job lining up childcare for my daughter. But she didn’t.
She’s the consummate professional, always level-headed, impossible to rile. She faces screaming ex-husbands and irate hockey players with the same cool indifference. Maybe I just want to see her have some fucking emotions?
“Come in.” Her voice has the same low, no-nonsense tone it always does. It makes me wonder if she’s ever squealed in joy with her girlfriends, or what it sounds like when she drops her voice even lower...I bet it sounds downright sensual.
Fuck me. It’s been years since I’ve thought about her this way. Seeing her with my kid, and her doing me one favor, shouldn’t have me feeling like this—like I can’t wait to see her, and don’t want to see her, all at once.
“Hey,” I say, pushing the door open. AJ’s sitting at her desk in a pale peach wrap sweater that almost blends in with her skin, her dark hair down in waves that fall past her shoulders.
“Where’s Abby?” she asks, clearly confused that I’ve shown up without my daughter after firing my nanny.
“She fell asleep in the car.”
AJ tilts her head like she’s trying to figure out if I left her there.
“Relax,” I say as I shut the door behind me. “I put her car seat in the stroller and she’s right outside the door, sitting next to Colleen.”
“Ahh,” she says with a knowing smile. “Good luck getting Abby back. Colleen has total baby fever right now.”
“Baby fever?”
“You know,” AJ says, sweeping her hand through the air, “like she really wants a baby. Pretty sure I’m going to lose her as soon as that happens, actually.”
I take a few steps toward her desk right as she stands and starts to move toward the chairs and couch next to the full glass wall that overlooks the practice facility.
We both glance over at the seating area, which I’ve always thought is far too feminine for a GM’s office. There’s a big off-white sofa with a coffee table in front of it, and two chairs flanking that, facing each other. There are throw pillows and decorations on the table, and it’s like something you’d see in a home magazine.
“I wanted to talk to you about—” AJ starts.
“I’m sorry about last night,” I say at the same time.
Her eyebrows dip and she looks like she’s sizing me up, trying to find the lie. “You are?”
“Yeah. I was out of line.”
“You were.” Her voice is firm, but then she drops it lower, and with a defeated-sounding sigh, says, “I don’t like doing this with you.”
I don’t know why I take a step closer. I should be keeping my distance, but somehow, I’m continually drawn to her. Like the other night on the plane, where it took everything I had to close my eyes and pretend to sleep when all I wanted to do was lean closer and ask if it was actually an accident that she moved across the hall from me. I know it had to be—she’d never have intentionally put herself in a situation where she was living next to one of her players. But my damn mind was getting the best of me, so I had to shut that down, quick.
Hating her is the only safe route.
“Doing what?” My voice is as low as hers, but whereas hers sounds downright sexy, I just sound gruff.
“Fighting with you. It’s like you try anything and everything to piss me off.”
“I’m not trying to piss you off. I can’t help it—you’re infuriating, and I just react.”
Eyes narrowing, she puts her hands on her hips. “Really? Because honestly, Ronan, everyone else likes me just fine. It’s only you who has a problem with me.”
I make sure not to speak any louder when I say, “Yeah, well, you didn’t trade anyone else as a punishment for doing the right thing, did you?”
Her voice is a little unsteady when she responds. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk about that again?”
“I don’t know what you mean by again. We never talked about it in the first place. In fact, the first thing you did when you got the GM job in Boston was call me into this office”—I glance around the space, thinking about how sterile it felt before she took over—“and tell me to get over the fact that you traded me two years earlier because we were never talking about it.”
“I—”
“But I’m not over it, and I’m probably never going to be.” Okay, now my voice is rising, but to be fair, this is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for eight years.
“Why? You’re playing a hundred times better for Charlie Wilcott here in Boston than you ever did back in St. Louis. You never made the All-Star team in St. Louis, and you certainly wouldn’t have been the team captain or won a Stanley Cup championship if you’d stayed there. You should be thanking me for trading you!”
It’s the way she drills her finger into my chest as she says this that has my blood boiling. That, and the fact that she has no idea what the actual fuck she’s talking about.
“I’m not pissed because of the hockey side of that trade!”
“Then what the hell are you pissed about?” she asks, dropping her hand when I step in a bit closer. She tries to take a step back, but finds herself trapped by her large desk behind her.
“I’d just put my grandma in a nursing home,” I tell her, and I watch the way her eyes widen and her lips part in surprise.
Everyone knows the story of my upbringing because it was one of those “feel good” sports stories that the media focused on when I was drafted. My parents died in a car crash while our next-door neighbor—an older woman who all the neighborhood kids called Grandma, even though she had no children of her own—was babysitting my sister and me.
We had no other family. Our parents had met as teenagers in foster care, and my sister and I would have ended up there too if Grandma hadn’t become our legal guardian. She didn’t have the means to raise us, and we barely scraped by for most of my life. She even sold her car to pay for my hockey expenses once I was a teenager, so we walked everywhere.
When I got my first endorsement deal in college, I bought her a new car. When I signed my contract with St. Louis, I bought her a new house. There’s nothing I could ever do to repay her for her kindness—the way she loved us, sacrificed for us, and gave us a better life when she didn’t have to.
“She was too old to take care of herself.” I continue after a moment of silence, our breaths the only sound filling the small space between us. “And my sister and I couldn’t be there all the time to make sure she was safe. The nursing home was the best option. But she hadn’t been there for two weeks when I got traded. And then she got pneumonia and died before I could even get back to see her. So yeah,” I say through a tight jaw, swallowing my emotions. “I’m still pissed off, AJ, because you made it so that I couldn’t spend Grandma’s dying days with her.”
Her eyes are watery, and she bites her lower lip before, “I didn’t know,” slips out in a voice so small and unsure that it doesn’t sound like her at all.
“Well, you made your choice. And now you know the implications of it.”
“I didn’t have a choice!” A flush creeps up her neck and across her cheeks as the words ring out.
“There’s always a choice.”
“The choice was either to trade you, or your career was over.”
“Because I defended you when Chet was berating you?”
Sure, he was my assistant coach, and I probably should have treated him with a bit more respect. But the way he was talking to her, telling her that not only was she a shit hockey manager, but an even worse wife...my temper flared so quickly I reacted without even thinking. Because she wasn’t any of those things.
As our assistant general manager, we all loved her. In fact, we liked her a hell of a lot better than we liked him, which is probably why he felt the need to belittle her. And she always bent over backward to do things for him, to make his life easier, to try to make him happy. We all saw it time and time again on the road.
He didn’t deserve her, and I’m glad she finally left his cheating ass.
“You didn’t defend me,” she says, squaring her shoulders. “You attacked him.”
“I saw red. Any man who disrespects a woman like that in front of me is going to be put in his place.” It’s the god’s honest truth, but still, I know she’s right.
It was like I was looking for a reason to pummel him before I even threw the first punch. And all the others that followed. I don’t think he ever got a single shot in before I was being pulled off him by AJ and security.
“You thought you were going to continue playing for him after that? You would have ridden the bench for the last two years of your contract. Career: over.”
“Nah, Coach Miller loved me.” Our head coach was always checking in on me when I first joined the team, making sure I was settling in, helping me learn the ropes. He had the hockey knowledge and skills—plus the desire to make his players feel welcome—that set him apart from someone like Chet, who was only in it for his own glory.
I take in the way she’s crossed her arms under her chest. It’s a defensive posture, but it’s pushing her tits up into the V-neck of her sweater in a way that’s disarming me completely. I look back at her face, but I can tell by the way she’s looking at me that she noticed me checking her out.
“Miller agreed to the trade.”
“Yeah, because you convinced him!” My voice carries the heavy notes of exasperation I feel. Miller told me himself that he didn’t want me to go, but that AJ and Chet were right...I couldn’t play for Chet after attacking him like that.
I’ll never admit how much it stung that the choice was to get rid of me, instead of Chet, who was actually the toxic one. His ego was hurting the organization.
“It was what was best,” she insists, pushing out a heavy breath. “For everyone involved.”
I inch closer to her. “For you ?”
My eyes focus on those full lips, and the way the tip of her tongue darts out to wet her lower lip before she pulls it between her teeth.
Goddamn. I’ve wanted this woman for eight fucking years, and I need to get over this. Now .
“Yes.” She glances up, meeting my gaze. Her look is one of steely determination, the same look she wears when she’s taking a player to task or negotiating a new contract, but her voice is devoid of emotion. “It was a necessary trade for me, too.”
“Why?” I’m genuinely curious. But also, marginally hopeful. Could she have needed me gone because she was starting to think about me the same way I was trying so hard not to think about her?
“Because I was married, McCabe. And you wouldn’t stop looking at me like I was your next meal. I could ignore that and make sure things stayed professional, but Chet was noticing. So was Miller. Your little crush was becoming a thing , and it had gone on long enough. It was getting in the way of my career, and yours.”
It wasn’t a fucking crush , I want to say. But I don’t, because she’s probably right. I didn’t know her well enough for it to be anything but a crush...an attraction to not only her beauty, but her brain.
No one knows hockey better than Alessandra Jones. I’d never met a woman who knew half as much about the sport as I did, so to have her recruit me when I was in college, and then have these high-level conversations about my career and hockey strategy when she was the assistant GM...it was a huge turn-on.
“So...” I drag the word out. “Instead, you created a situation where I would hate you?”
She rolls her eyes. “Why would I do that?” Her tone is flippant, but her expression tells me I’ve hit too close to home.
I inch even closer, fully invading her space to see if she’ll step aside to increase the distance between us. Instead, her arms move from her chest to grip the edges of her big wooden desk behind her. “I don’t know, AJ. Why would you want me to hate you?”
She turns then, like she’s going to step away, but the movement has her shoulder and arm brushing along the entire front of my body. And when her knuckles graze my dick, it has heat pooling there, then erupting into flames that lick through every nerve ending and light me up.
That’s the only reason I can think of to explain the way I reach out and grab her arm as she begins to step away, pulling her back to me.
And when my mouth crashes into hers, all logical thought ceases to exist. Because the way she wraps her hand around the back of my neck and threads her fingers into the hair at my nape, the way her lips part for me and she lets me invade her mouth, the way her entire body presses up against mine in response...it makes no sense.
Nothing that’s happening here—not the way my fingers toy with the edge of her sweater before sliding it ever-so-slowly down one shoulder, or how she snakes one of her legs around mine to anchor me to her—makes one lick of sense.
But I’m not thinking about what a terrible idea this is. I’m allowing my body to act on instinct. And my instinct has always told me that AJ and I together would burn hotter than the sun.
She hums her approval as my mouth travels from her lips, along her jawline, and down her throat. I lift her hips, setting her on the edge of her desk, as my mouth trails across her collarbone. And then I’m pulling her sweater aside, revealing the sheer lace of the bra she’s wearing. Her nipple is stiff and pressing right against the seam of the cup, and when I brush my thumb across it, she arches into my hand with another appreciative hum.
Holy shit. She’s going to be the death of me one way or another, so it might as well be through pleasure.
My eyes flick up to meet hers before I dip my head down to her breast, laving my tongue against her nipple through the fabric, and then sucking her between my lips. She moves her hands behind her back, pressing herself into my mouth as she slides both sleeves off her arms. When I lean back to look at her, chest heaving, I can’t stop myself from saying, “You’re so fucking beautiful. Too beautiful.”
And then I slide the straps of her bra off her shoulders, and she pulls her arm out as I slide it down to her waist with her sweater. Both my hands are on her breasts, thumbs sweeping across each nipple, as she reaches out and undoes the button on my jeans.
Her hand pauses on my zipper, and I glance back up at her to find her staring at me. There’s naked lust written across her face—the way her pupils have almost taken over those big brown eyes, her lips parted as her tongue darts out to lick them, her cheeks pink with an exhilaration I’ve never seen from her.
The thought that she’s actually feeling something here, and that I’m the one causing that, spurs me on. “Go ahead. I want you to see what you do to me. And I want to feel what I do to you,” I tell her as I reach down and smooth a hand up the inside of her thigh where her legs are spread for me. I keep my eyes locked on her, wanting to make sure I don’t see a single trace of doubt on her face, and she nods, giving me the go ahead. So I rub my thumb along the seam between her legs. “You’re fucking soaked.”
In response, she slides my zipper down and reaches into my pants to grip my quickly hardening dick. My hips shoot forward involuntarily, my entire length pressing along her palm.
“So this is what I do to you?” she asks, her voice a cross between teasing and curiosity.
“Yes.” It’s a groan as I pump my cock into her hand, wishing there wasn’t the fabric of my briefs between us. And then I lean forward to kiss her, our mouths meeting and our tongues clashing like we’re both trying to assert our dominance as I hold one of her tits, running my thumb over her nipple, and slipping my other thumb into her panties where I circle it over her slick clit.
“Fuck, yes.” She pulls back from the kiss and sighs the words out as she tilts her hips up to meet my thumb, over and over. “Don’t stop.”
She’s so wet for me, and I’ve never felt as needed or needy as I do right now.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I tell her. She slips her hand inside my boxers and the feel of her skin on mine as she grips my shaft has my mouth colliding with hers once more. There’s nothing gentle about this kiss, and my throat rattles in response as I let out a primal growl.
The need to claim this woman, to take control of her body and make it submit to me, outweighs everything else. I think this whole building could go up in flames and I’d stay right here, appreciating the way her body responds to mine.
And then, as if the universe wants to prove me wrong, the wail of a baby cuts through the sounds of pleasure, and we both freeze.
Fuck . Another loud wail, and I turn toward the door, determined to get there before Colleen opens the door to find our boss with her tits out, legs spread, and pussy on display.
I zip and button my pants on the way, then cast a quick glance at AJ over my shoulder as Abby really lets loose, one angry scream after another just as I reach the door. But AJ isn’t looking at me anymore; she’s too busy getting her bra straightened out and trying to pull her sweater back on.
Slipping out the door and shutting it behind me, my pulse pounding in my ears, I find Colleen bringing Abby up to her shoulder. “Pew, kiddo. I’d be crying too if I just did a stinky in my diaper like this,” she says, bouncing lightly on her feet as she pats Abby on the back.
“Sorry about that.” She spins in surprise, not even realizing I’d come out of the office behind her. “Here,” I say, reaching out my hands for my daughter, “I’ll take her.”
“You’re already done with your meeting?” she asks, eyebrows dipping in surprise.
“We’re done for now.”
And as I take Abby, holding her to me with one arm while I use the other to steer the stroller to the nearest bathroom, hoping there’s a changing table in there, I can’t stop the thought ringing in my head: Holy shit, what did we just do?
I kissed my boss. She definitely kissed me back. Clothes were shed. Her tits were in my hands, her nipple in my mouth, and her clit throbbing under my thumb. My cock was hot and hard in her hand.
How do we ever come back from that?