Chapter 10
Carrie
Morning came faster than I expected.
One second I was lying on Matt's chest, listening to his heartbeat slow and steady beneath my ear, his hand tracing lazy patterns on my back while the rain finally quieted. The next, harsh sunlight was streaming through my windows and I was naked and alone.
He was gone.
His clothes, his phone, every trace of him, gone. The only evidence he'd been here at all were the candles burned down to nubs and a blanket draped over me that hadn't been there when I'd fallen asleep.
He'd covered me. Then left.
I pressed my face into the blanket and breathed, and there he was.
Rain and cologne and something underneath that was just him, the same scent I'd had my nose buried in when I'd fallen asleep, and my throat closed around a sound I refused to let out.
The tenderness of covering me, the cruelty of leaving.
I couldn't make those two things fit inside the same man, and the not-fitting hurt worse than either one alone.
I sat up too fast and my ankle filed a formal complaint. Sharp pain, immediate, reminding me that I'd done things last night that were not on any doctor's approved list for a sprained ankle. Worth it, though. Completely and catastrophically worth it.
The dog strolled over from the kitchen, tail going, golden fur against my bare legs, completely unbothered by my emotional situation. He rubbed his head into my thigh and whined softly, and the pure uncomplicated fact of him wanting to be near me landed on something tender.
"He left," I told the dog. "Just so you know. Your favorite person. Gone before sunrise."
The dog wagged harder, because dogs are immune to dramatic irony.
I didn't have time to process this. Didn't have time to sit on my couch and build a case study around why a man would have the best sex of both our lives and then vanish like a rough draft someone decided not to publish.
I had to get to work. First week. New job.
The kind of job that didn't care about my feelings or my ankle or the fact that I'd just been abandoned by a man whose last name I'd had to learn from a company file.
Except my body wasn't interested in the schedule.
My body was still running last night's programming, still warm in places he'd touched, still aching between my legs in a way that felt like a souvenir I hadn't asked for and wasn't returning.
The shower didn't help. The hot water hit my skin and all I could think about was his mouth on my neck, his hands pulling me closer, the way he'd said my name like it was a word he'd just learned and couldn't stop practicing.
I turned the water cold and stood in it until my teeth chattered.
I fed the dog. Got dressed. Figured out how to walk without limping too obviously, which was its own performance.
When I left, he started crying. High, panicked whines through the door, scratching at the wood, the sound of an animal who'd already been abandoned once and was now watching it happen again.
I stood in the hallway and listened to it and felt my chest crack along a line I hadn't known was there.
He deserved someone who'd be around. Someone who didn't work twelve-hour days trying to prove herself at a job she'd had for less than a week. Someone who had time for walks and vet visits and all the small daily acts of showing up that a dog needs and that I was currently failing at.
I left anyway. Because I had to.
* * *
The office was already moving when I arrived.
Phones ringing, people between cubicles, the hum of an organization that did not care about my night.
I navigated to my desk on crutches, fielded one "what happened to you" with "slipped in the rain" (not technically a lie), and opened my laptop to a mountain of media releases and content calendars.
I'd been working maybe twenty minutes when Kyle walked in.
My boss. The Media Strategist I assisted. Tall, mid-forties, always perfectly dressed, always moving like he was late for something that mattered more than whatever was happening now.
"Carrie. Good, you're here."
"Morning."
"I need to talk to you about something." He pulled up a chair, sat backwards on it, and grinned like a man about to unveil a campaign. "I just found the best way to entice Matt Baker into joining the White Hearts."
My heart did something acrobatic and landed badly.
Matt. He was talking about Matt.
"Oh?" I said, and I was genuinely impressed with my own voice. Steady. Professional. The voice of a woman who had not screamed that name into her own ceiling approximately nine hours ago.
"It's perfect. Simple. Elegant." Kyle leaned forward. "We're going to use you as bait."
The blood left my hands. I felt it go, a cold drain from fingertips to wrists, and I pressed my palms flat on the desk so he wouldn't see them shake. I smiled. Let the smile say interested and not imploding.
"Baker has a thing for blondes," Kyle continued. "His last two girlfriends were blonde. There's a pattern. And you're blonde, attractive, new enough that he won't know you work for us."
I was processing this the way I'd been trained to process campaigns. Identify the target audience. Define the desired action. Build the funnel. Except the funnel was my face and the target audience was a man whose taste was still on my mouth.
"The Ice Hockey Annual Awards ceremony is in two weeks," Kyle said. "Everyone will be there. Boston. Us. Every team in the league. Press, photographers, fans. Perfect opportunity."
"For what exactly?"
"For you to get his attention. Strike up a conversation. Be friendly, be interested, laugh at his jokes. Then mention you're here alone. Suggest stepping outside for some air, somewhere the cameras can't follow."
"And then?"
"Our CEO 'accidentally' runs into you. Starts talking shop. Makes the pitch while you fade into the background."
He said it like it was a media buy. Like I was a placement, a channel, a reach metric. And the thing that made my skin crawl was that I understood the strategy perfectly. I'd built campaigns like this. Just never been the asset before.
"He's a highly coveted forward," Kyle went on. "One of the best in the league when he's on. Fast, smart, incredible accuracy when he's not choking in the finals."
The word "choking" went through me like a blade.
I saw Matt's face in my living room, pacing, fists balled, the raw crack in his voice when he'd said "I couldn't close my damn blade," and a protective heat rose in my chest that I had absolutely no right to.
I barely knew this man. I'd known him for one day. My body had not received that memo.
"But he's fiercely loyal to Boston. Turned down offers before.
Refused to even consider leaving. It's going to take a lot to move him.
" Kyle slid a folder across my desk. Thick, official, the White Hearts logo embossed on the front.
"Everything you need is in here. Background.
Talking points. Interests you can bond over. Topics to avoid."
I opened it. Matt's face stared up at me from a professional headshot, and my stomach turned over, slow and heavy.
I knew that jaw. I'd held it in my hands last night.
I knew those eyes, what they looked like when they stopped guarding and went soft, what they looked like when he was inside me, what they looked like when he'd said "ask me in the morning" with his arms still around me.
The headshot version of Matt Baker was serious, focused, the face of an athlete at the peak of his career.
The version I'd met was funnier, sadder, warmer, and had left my apartment before I could wake up and learn which one was real.
"This is my first major assignment?" I said.
"Congratulations." Kyle clapped my shoulder like he'd just handed me a promotion instead of asking me to weaponize my body against someone who'd trusted me with his.
He headed for the door. Stopped.
"Oh, and Carrie? This stays between us. No one else on the team knows about this approach. We don't want word getting back to Boston before we're ready."
"Of course."
"Study that file. Memorize it. I want you prepared for every possible conversation."
Then he was gone.
I sat there with the folder open in front of me. Matt's headshot. His stats. His personal interests, his family background, his talking points, every vector of approach the White Hearts had identified to get inside his defenses.
Born in Boston. Grew up playing street hockey with his brother. Drafted at eighteen. Three consecutive finals. Three consecutive losses.
The file didn't mention how that haunted him. How the pain in his voice had been real when he'd paced my living room. How he'd left without saying goodbye.
How that last part made what I was being asked to do almost easy.
Almost.
Because there was a version of this where his leaving was the permission slip.
Where the blanket on the couch and the empty pillow and the total absence of a note or a text made him the one who'd broken the contract first, and anything I did after that was just business.
I could feel myself reaching for that version.
The professional in me already building the deck, framing the narrative, writing the copy that made it clean.
The rest of me sat at the desk with my nails digging into my palms and my stomach in a knot and the taste of him still, still, after a shower and coffee and half a morning of pretending, right there on my tongue.
I closed the folder. Opened it again.
And started memorizing the talking points.