Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Cam
“Okay, spill.” Nate stopped in front of the treadmill and draped himself over the display. He looked up at and watched me run, his head cocked, one eyebrow raised.
“Spill is not a good word to use for a guy that's on a treadmill,” Blake remarked. He was running on the one beside me, face glistening with sweat.
If I pretended I couldn't hear either of them because of the earbuds in my ears, how long would it take for Nate to go away? With frustration, I realized it was too long. I pulled out my right earbud and held it in my fist.
“What?” I snapped. It was only a matter of time before he approached me, wanting the gossip. I was surprised it took until now .
“You and Andi,” he said, smirking at my obvious discomfort.
“What about us?” I asked. There was no ‘us,’ I knew that much.
“When she turned up at the meeting yesterday, you and her seemed to know each other. Judging by the way you bristled after I suggested giving her a tour, you know each other pretty well.” He straightened his head, but the expectant expression on his face remained.
“I did not bristle,” I said. “I don't give a crap what you and her do. It's nothing to do with me.” I started to put my earbud back in.
“Sorry, Cam, but you definitely bristled,” Blake said. “Was it just because she knew who I was and not you?”
I glanced over at him without breaking stride. “I don't give a shit about that. Since when do I care about being recognized?”
“Never before now,” Blake agreed. “There's a first time for everything.”
I smirked and turned away. “We might have met when we were at Shells the other night.”
Nate grinned. “Did you hook up with the boss? Way to go, Cam.” He offered me a fist bump, which I ignored.
“I did not hook up with her,” I said. I pressed a couple of buttons on the display to slow the treadmill to a walk. “We literally bumped into each other. She offered me a drink. I said no.”
“You turned her down?” Nate frowned. “No offense, bro, but you need your eyes checked. She's adorable.” He was clearly trying to provoke a response from me.
I wasn't going to give him one. Not in the way he wanted.
“Yes, I turned her down,” I said, my voice tight. “I told her I don't fuck puck bunnies.”
I remembered the look in her eyes when I said that, right before I pushed off the wall and stomped away like a dickhead. She had no idea what provoked me to respond that way, and now I knew why. Until yesterday, she didn't have a clue who I was. If I had to guess, I'd suggest she knew very little about hockey. She probably cared even less.
Nate stared at me for a moment, then grinned. “You thought Andi Welling was a puck bunny? That's absolute gold.”
I shook my head. “Who is she anyway?”
“You didn't look her up?” Blake also slowed to a walk. Now, he reached into the pocket of his shorts to pull out his phone and point the screen towards me.
I peered at it for a moment before grabbing the phone and holding it up. “Andrea Welling, daughter of billionaire property developer Harrison Welling. Executive at Welling Developments. Approximate net worth…" My eyes almost bugged out of my head. The article was accompanied by a photo of her in business wear, standing beside an older man in a suit. Her father, I presumed.
I handed the phone back to Blake and continued walking. “So what? She's some spoiled little rich girl who somehow now owns our team.”
“I think it's safe to say she's not a puck bunny,” Nate said. “It wouldn't surprise me if she knew exactly who all of us were. She might have turned up that night to feel us out. And you had the chance to feel her out, literally, but you turned her down.” He clicked his tongue.
“If that's the kind of person she is, I dodged a bullet,” I said.
If she'd sneak around, pretending to be someone she wasn't, then she wasn't the sort of woman I was interested in. Instinct told me she wasn't like that, but it might have been my balls, which were bluer by the day .
“I would have gone there,” Zack called out from one of the stationary bikes. “The chick has money and a pussy, what more does anyone need?”
Without thinking, I threw my earbud at him, hitting him in the side of the face.
“What the hell?" he protested.
“She's the boss, have some respect.” I glared at him until he looked away.
“Is that all she is?” Nate asked. “Because if she's not, you won't mind if I ask her out.”
I wanted to pull out my other earbud and throw it at him. “Like you said, she's not a puck bunny. Women like that want more than a one night stand. Since we all know you can't and won't give her more than that, I suggest you save it for the girls who only want some fun.”
I thought he might argue with me, just because he could, but instead he nodded.
“You're right,” he admitted. “She does seem like the commitment type.” He grimaced, before it slowly became a grin. “Seems more like your type than mine.”
If she was anyone else in the world, maybe. She was gorgeous and intelligent. But she'd turned up at Shells, behaving all innocent, when she clearly wasn't. She pretended she didn't know who I was, which wasn't something a person didn't do unless they had an agenda.
With people like her and her father, it was usually one thing—money. If her goal was to improve the team performance this season, then sell the Sea Dragons at a profit, the sooner she was gone, the better.
If nothing else, it was a good incentive to stay at the top of my game. We'd win, and then we'd be rid of her.
I ignored my balls’ suggestion that they didn't want to be rid of her. Sneaky, and with an ulterior motive wasn't sexy, but my balls insisted it was.
“Who is Cam's type?” Flynn wiped his face with a towel and stepped over to us. He'd been in the corner, lifting weights and listening to what was probably an audiobook. Whenever he was listening to those, he got that engrossed look on his face, like the rest of the world disappeared and he was lost in the story. Even Nate couldn't budge him out of it.
“Andi Welling,” Nate said, clearly enjoying being the bearer of gossip. He briefly told Flynn about the rest of our conversation, while I went on walking and trying to ignore them both.
“You really think she pretended she had no idea who you were?” Flynn asked me .
I shrugged. “Makes sense. She knew who Blake was, but only admitted when Zack started being a dick. She wanted to shoot him down.”
Zack gave me the side eye, but went on cycling. “I'd still go there.”
“I don't think she'd want you to go there,” Blake called out to him. “She has better taste than that.”
Any woman with a brain cell or two to rub together had more sense than to go for a player like Zack. According to some of the guys, he had mirrors in his bedroom so he could watch himself with whichever puck bunny he could convince to go home with him.
I didn't know if that was true, but I wouldn't have been surprised to learn it was. I kept the visual image out of my brain before I needed to invest in a factory to make brain bleach. Zack Reed naked was the last thing I wanted to picture.
Because you want to picture Andi, my subconscious whispered. Here's one of her crawling towards you on your bed.
I shoved the image back into a corner of my mind for later, when I was alone. The arena gym was top of my list of places I didn't want to get hard. Hard body yes, hard cock no.
Zack gave Blake a look to suggest he’d convince her otherwise given half a chance. He turned away, ducked his head and cycled faster.
I pressed the treadmill display to turn it off and walked until it came to a stop. “I don't know what her game is. I don't know what she wants with the team, or any of us. All I know is the only game I play is ice hockey. I don't play games with women and I don't play games with the team's owner. If that's her jam, I don't want anything to do with it. I'm here to do my job and do it well. If she tries to screw with that, we'll deal with her. Right now, let's focus on what matters: winning.”
I grabbed the towel, which hung over the side of the treadmill, and hid my frustrated expression behind the cotton, wiping the sweat from my face.
“Sounds like a good game plan,” Flynn agreed. “She might be just what we need.”
I lowered the towel just enough to reveal my eyes so he could see me stare at him.
“Ome un ohh as…" I pulled the towel away from my mouth so I could speak more clearly. “Someone who has no interest in the team? Whose knowledge of hockey either consists of googling some of us the night before she met us, or googling us all and pretending she didn't? How is that what we need?”
Whichever of those options was the truth, they were both the opposite of what we needed. Even if she was wrapped up in a sexy package with hair I wanted to wrap my fist around. Those plush lips would look perfect sucking on my…
Shit, I needed to stop thinking this way. Nothing was ever going to happen between me and Andi Welling.
“We can teach her,” Flynn said easily. “She said she's not going to make big changes. Would you prefer someone coming in and tearing everything down to start over? Someone who thinks they know everything and doesn't want to hear what we have to say? I know you don't. I think we can work with her.” He gave me a speculative look.
I looked back at him before I realized what he wasn't saying. “You think I should work with her?”
“Why not you?” he asked. “You're direct with people. Usually,” he added when Nate started to speak. “You won't try to get into her pants the way Nate will.”
“Guilty.” Nate grinned.
“You won't piss her off the way Zack will,” Blake said, getting in on the pile-on.
“And it would give you the opportunity to make up for making assumptions about her on the night you met,” Flynn concluded .
“What if I talk to her and find out my assumptions are right?” I asked.
“You're the best man to do that,” Blake said. “People like to tell you the truth. They know you're a straight shooter. If she was pretending, you're our best chance of finding out.”
“Blake is right,” Flynn said. “People open up to you.”
“People fill the awkward silence,” I muttered. I doubted it was because they thought I was a good listener. I made them so uncomfortable they felt the need to say something.
I glanced around, but it didn't look like any of them was going to back down. “Fine, I'll apologize to her for being an asshat. But that's all. There's no reason for me to spend time with her after that. I'll apologize because it's the respectful thing to do. But for the record, she'll probably tell me to get lost.”
I hoped she would. That would give me even more reason to stay the hell away from her.
It was going to be a long season.