Cross-Checked (Boston Rebels #3)

Chapter 25

Chapter Twenty-Five

AJ

N icholas’s name pops up on my caller ID right as we’re driving back into Philly. I debate not answering it, but I don’t want him to think anything’s wrong.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I ask, pressing the phone to my ear so I can hear his response over the noise of the traffic and the wind whipping around us.

“Nothing. Abby’s down for a nap, and I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

I glance at McCabe, who’s focused on the road. With his aviator sunglasses on and his dark hair blowing in the wind, he’s relaxed in a way I rarely see. Is this just a side of him I haven’t seen because of our boss-employee relationship, or is he loosening up and showing me who he actually is?

“I’m doing great. Big win last night, which we really needed,” I say, and next to me, McCabe chuckles. He’s probably thinking about after the game because getting me to come with him inside me, after also giving me a mind-blowing orgasm with his mouth—that was a big win too. “And then I did some sightseeing today.”

“Oh yeah, where’d you go?”

“Valley Forge. There’s a national park there, so I walked around for a bit. And then I stopped at a huge mall near there and did a little dress shopping.” I still can’t quite get over the mental image of McCabe following me around, holding all the gowns I picked out to try on. He didn’t complain once, not even when I’d loaded him down with twenty different dresses. And then he humored me when I wanted to buy Abby some adorable pink high-top sneakers that we saw in a shop window, helping me find the right size so she could wear them now.

“You’re really going to go to the gala?” Nicholas asks. His voice is disapproving at best.

“I mean, I kind of have to.”

“No, you don’t. There’s no need to spend one second with those assholes, especially since you know Chet is going to be there.”

My childhood was far from perfect, but it was still much better than what Nicholas got.

“It’s more work to not go, you know? I can suck it up and show up for two hours since I’m going to be in St. Louis anyway?—”

“Oh, you’re that confident about this series?” Nicholas teases. Yeah, we’re down 2-1, but we plan to rectify that tomorrow night. We’re a better team, and I’m confident we can beat Philadelphia in the end. I’m equally confident that St. Louis is going to win their current series, given their current standings, which will put us in a position to be playing them two weeks from now.

“Pretty much. If I’m there anyway, what’s my excuse for not going?”

“Work. It’s your excuse for everything else.” There’s an edge to his tone that has the hair on the back of my neck standing up.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Next to me, McCabe reaches over and rests his hand on my thigh. I know he can only hear my side of the conversation, but I appreciate that he recognizes my defensiveness and the subtle way he tells me he’s here for me.

His palm presses into me, his fingers giving me a supportive squeeze along my inner thigh—right where we’d had to use my thong to wipe up his cum as it dripped out of me only an hour earlier. The memory has me letting out a sigh, forgetting I’m even on the phone.

“You don’t need the big sigh, AJ,” Nicholas says into my ear, jolting me out of my stupor.

That jerky movement has McCabe chuckling next to me again, like he knows exactly what his touch does to me.

God, this relaxed version of him—the way he takes things in stride, the smile he reserves only for me— he’s like an entirely different person, and it’s addicting. He could be addicting.

“I just meant,” Nicholas continues, “that you’ve used work as your excuse to get out of things you didn’t want to do plenty of times before.”

“Do you feel like I’ve used it to get out of doing things with you?” I ask, concerned about that edge I hear in his voice.

“No. You’ve always made time for me when I needed you.”

I hear what he’s saying, and previously that would have been enough for me.

“What about when you didn’t need me?”

Nicholas’s voice is softer, quieter, when he asks, “What’s going on with you? You don’t sound like yourself.”

“I don’t know...” I look up at the sky as we take the offramp from the freeway to head into the city. “I guess I’m just re-evaluating my priorities?”

What I’m really wondering is whether working this hard to get where I am—literally devoting every waking moment of almost every single day to hockey—was necessary to end up here? Or was it an excuse to get out of having an actual life? Was I singularly focused on taking professional risks so I didn’t have to take personal ones and risk getting hurt again?

“This feels like...a shift,” Nicholas says, and when I glance over at McCabe while we wait at a stoplight, he’s looking at me with the same curious gaze I imagine my brother is probably wearing right now.

“Nah, just the musings of a middle-aged woman,” I joke, swallowing roughly. “Anyway, I’ve got a few extra seats at my table. I’d offer them to you and Nicole, but you’ll be watching Abby.” Not like he’d want to come. Since he was still a kid when we lived in St. Louis, he’s never had to attend these kinds of events that make up a significant portion of my family’s social life.

“You bought a whole fucking table? For your own family’s charity event?” Nicholas’s full-bodied laugh makes me pull the phone away from my ear.

“Seemed like the safest way to avoid sitting with Mom and Dad.”

“Must be nice to have money to throw away like that.”

“Hey, you can’t put a price on sanity,” I say, chuckling. “And I’m bringing Frank Hartmann with me, so he can serve as a buffer.”

“Ah, Second Dad will be there? I love that guy!”

“He really is the best,” I say as we pull through the intersection. In front of us, there must be someone double-parked or something, because suddenly there are horns honking and people yelling out their windows.

“Where the hell are you?” Nicholas asks.

“In a car coming back from shopping. There’s something going on up ahead,” I say as a driver lays on his horn and doesn’t let up. “I better go.”

“Alright, see you tomorrow night when you get home.”

“See you then.”

I set my phone down in the cupholder, not missing how McCabe’s hand still rests on my thigh, his thumb still stroking the skin there. Closing my eyes, I lean back against my seat.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” I ask, not bothering to open my eyes.

“Whatever this gala is with your family, and why you need to bring Frank with you as a buffer?”

“It’s nothing, just an annual charity event . . .”

McCabe huffs a laugh and asks, “You go to a lot of those?”

“Not as many as I used to.” I think back to the years when I still lived in St. Louis and my social calendar was peppered with these types of events.

I had a charmed life growing up, from the outside anyway. But the mansion and the cars and the fancy vacations didn’t offset the emotional toll of being raised by parents who wanted me to be someone I wasn’t.

The constant pressure to be successful, combined with never living up to the socialite my mom wanted me to be and the son my dad wished I was, gave me a serious type-A personality and a work ethic that’s turned me into a perfectionist driven to succeed at any cost. And no amount of therapy to help me understand the root causes of my issues has allowed me to change these ingrained parts of my personality.

“You don’t want to go, though?” His concern is evident in the tone of his voice.

“Not particularly. Chet’s going to be there?—”

“Why the fuck is your ex-husband going to be at your family’s event?”

I love that he’s angry on my behalf, but my laugh lacks humor when I tell him, “He’s the one they kept in the divorce.”

McCabe takes a sharp turn onto a side street, brakes squealing as he slips into a parking spot, the quick action making my stomach flip. He turns toward me, his face all hard lines. But that look warms me, because he cares enough to be pissed.

“What the fuck do you mean, he’s the one they kept ?”

I shrug and look down at my lap. “Chet’s a family friend. His dad and mine have been golf partners my whole life. We grew up together...”

He reaches across the space and uses his fingertips to gently turn my face toward him. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“My parents wanted me to look past his cheating and stay married. In front of my parents, Chet was begging me to forgive him, promising to do anything to make it right. I knew there was no way I’d ever get past what he’d done, but my parents acted like this was just a part of marriage and I needed to get over it.”

It was enough to make me wonder if that was part of their marriage too—not that I’d ever ask. Those were not the type of things that were discussed in the Jones household.

“The fuck?”

I appreciate how taken aback he is, because it lets me know that I’m not crazy for refusing to give Chet a second chance. For a long time, my parents were big on gaslighting me—trying to convince me that I was the problem. It’s a relief to have an outsider confirm that I made the right decision in leaving.

“Yeah. So that kind of tarnished our relationship—you know, even more than it already had been because of Nicholas. When I threatened to sue for custody of my brother on the grounds of neglect, that was the nail in the coffin of our relationship.”

“You did what, now?” His brow pinches as he searches my face.

“When I started talking to Frank about the GM position in Boston, I realized I didn’t want to leave my brother in St. Louis without me. So I looked into boarding school options here. Initially, they didn’t want him to go—though I still have no idea why. It’s not like they ever spent time with him, unless it was to show him off at some social function.”

“So you brought him to Boston with you?”

“Yeah, I mean, he went to boarding school, but he was only like half an hour outside of the city. And he’s lived here ever since. St. Louis really isn’t home for either of us, anymore.”

His thumb slides along my cheekbone, and that’s when I realize he’s still holding my face. He’s eyeing me like I’m someone he needs to fix.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him, feeling uncommonly vulnerable.

His voice softens. “Like what?”

“Like I’m broken.”

“I don’t think you’re broken. If anything...I’m looking at you with admiration. It’s like the person I see in front of me now is completely different than the person I thought you were. And I really like who I see.”

“You’re just saying that because now, every time you look at me, you’re thinking about what I look like when I come.”

I don’t know why I feel the need to take this moment and make it into a joke. But there’s a heaviness to his words that has my belly flipping over. There’s a seriousness that terrifies me. I excel at holding people at a distance, and I don’t know how he keeps breaking through my barriers.

His fingers tighten on my jaw. “No, I’m saying that because you keep surprising me in the best ways. I’m kind of in awe of you.”

I try to gulp down my emotions, to hold my thoughts in, but somehow, he always disarms me. Maybe it’s that fiercely protective look in his eyes, or the way he keeps telling me how he feels. Maybe it’s that I’ve never had a truly healthy relationship with a guy, and the way McCabe validates me and supports me like a friend would, while worshiping me sexually, has me wanting to share parts of myself with him I’ve never shared with anyone else.

I don’t break eye contact when I tell him, “You keep surprising me in the best ways, too.”

He leans forward, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “At some point, we’re going to need to talk about what to do with this relationship. It’s getting harder to hide.”

“Harder to hide?” I laugh. “You mean since last night?”

He chuckles, shaking his head. “No. I mean since I kissed you in your office, and since you moved into my place, and since Walsh caught me coming out of your hotel room, and since the guys were ragging on me at the gym this morning, wondering why I looked like a lovesick fool.”

A lovesick fool?

“That’s...” I gulp, racking my brain for the right way to explain how I’m feeling, and coming up short. “...new information.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t stop thinking about you, and the guys are starting to notice. I get why we need to keep it a secret for now, but eventually, we’re going to need to talk about where this is going. Us together is a challenge . Us sneaking around and potentially getting caught is a problem .”

“Uhh...” What is he talking about? We flirted until the flames of sexual tension turned into an inferno...but that doesn’t mean this is...whatever he thinks it is? “I meant what I said last night. I don’t see how this could ever work.”

I at least halfway believe what I’m saying.

He clicks his tongue in disagreement. “And I don’t see how it could ever not. ”

“You really think that a relationship between a player and his GM is ever going to fly?” There’s no way. It’s a level of unprofessionalism that I can’t even fathom myself, much less expect anyone beyond the two of us to understand.

“I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks, AJ. And the sooner you can let go of maintaining this perfect image, the sooner we stop sneaking around. I want a shot at a real relationship with you.”

My mind races at his declaration. This is too fast. This is too sudden. How could this ever work?

“But . . . it’s been, like, two days . . .” I stumble over the words.

His eyes narrow, like he’s reading my mind and knows I’m wrong. “Have you ever in your life connected with someone like we’ve connected over the last few days?”

I close my eyes, hoping that if I can’t see him, I’ll be able to lie to him. To tell him, sure, all new relationships are like this . But it’s just not true.

“No.” There’s almost no sound as the word rolls off my lips, but I know he hears me, because when I open my eyes, he’s looking at me with the self-satisfied smirk of someone who thinks he’s won. “But that doesn’t mean this can work.”

“Of course it can. We just need to figure out how.”