Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
CARYS
Marilyn drops into the seat beside me in the arena’s family room. I pull my knees onto the leather loveseat, careful to make sure I don’t touch Marilyn, adjusting my skirt to cover my legs.
“That was a bloodbath,” she mutters, tipping her head back at the ceiling. “Media’s going to rake the guys over the coal. I don’t even know which ones to allow them to pull. None of them are going to go over well.”
The game was a mess. Whatever cohesiveness had been with everyone before the Christmas break is definitely gone now.
Rhett and Paxton’s natural on-ice chemistry isn’t there, either.
Every pass is just a bit too fast or too slow.
The puck gets caught in Paxton’s skates or Rhett misses a re-centering pass and causes them all to lose the offensive zone.
Tonight was especially bad, losing by three goals and going into the third period entirely shut out.
Thank God Kane, Timber, and Thorne—one of Noa’s Alphas—were able to put something together or it would have been an absolute circus in those last five minutes.
After a minute, Marilyn’s phone vibrates, and she sighs.
“All right, here we go,” she mutters. She blows out a breath, stretches her neck, and then heads to meet the metaphorical wolves that lurk in the press room.
A few of the other Omegas slowly come in, chatting quietly, their moods dampened by the mess of a game, too. None of them approach me tonight, and all of them leave before Rhett comes to find me.
I don’t move, closing my eyes and thinking through the next few days’ orders at the shop, trying to make sure I don’t accidentally drop anything from the three different six figure projects I’m working on for next weekend.
It happens to straddle the team’s first long road trip of the new year, the guys leaving early Saturday morning for a game in Minnesota and then Wyoming and then a third one two days later all the way in Florida.
Any break with the shop I’d hoped to get after the Christmas rush didn’t happen.
I guess I should just stop hoping business will slow down the way other florists warned me was typical.
I’m giving myself until Thursday, and then I’m going to have to accept that I need to find someone to help with the retail side of everything.
Eventually, my phone vibrates. My breath catches like it always does, a sliver of me holding on to hope it’ll be Billie. It’s not. It hasn’t been Billie for two weeks now. It’s a text from Rhett, instead.
Hey, baby girl. I’ve been pulled into the press fiasco. It’s going to be a while according to Marilyn. Paxton’s going to take you home.
My throat dries out.
Which home?
Whichever one you want. I’ll take you to the shop tomorrow morning if you stay with me.
His house it is, then.
Yours.
You got it.
I want to be surrounded by his scent and his pillows if he’s going to be late getting back home.
And a part of me I’m trying really hard to pretend isn’t getting louder relishes the amount of time I’ll be in such a small space with Paxton.
The rest of me feels nauseous at how easily the lines have all blurred since my heat.
At what point do we have another conversation given Billie’s continued absence?
I don’t know. I hate that I don’t know.
“Carys?” Paxton’s voice is a soft, tired croon. “You ready?”
I ease to my feet and open my eyes, rubbing some of the exhaustion from them.
I tuck my wallet and phone into my mini backpack and then casually sling it over one shoulder.
Paxton gently circles my wrist when I approach him, the touch so practiced, there are multiple players who haven’t noticed that he does it every time we see each other.
My skin tightens despite the touch, though. Nerves skate just under my skin.
“You okay?” he asks, feeling it in the bond.
I shrug, not trusting my voice. He scans my face for a long moment before opening the door to the family room and guiding me into the hallway, his hand brushing the small of my back as I pass him.
That electric current buzzing in my veins only gets worse as we settle in his Audi and start toward Rhett’s house south of Nashville.
I close my eyes and press my head to the window, trying to drown out both my motion sickness and my body’s desire for the man next to me.
God, what Timber had said in October about scent matches hadn’t been an exaggeration at all.
They’re all I can think of most of the time, the longing for Paxton so strong I forget to breathe, to eat under the weight of it.
If I hadn’t just gone through my first heat a couple weeks ago, I’d be tempted to warn Rhett that one might be coming. The sensations are so similar.
Paxton clears his throat when the car stops. He puts the engine into park and turns to me, his face mostly obscured by shadow. His dashboard lights are turned so low that only the single porch light about twenty feet away gives the car any light at all.
I don’t know why I do it. When all of this mess inevitably explodes again, I’ll blame it on that electric current, on the vibrating need that shoots through me every single time I smell his cypress scent.
Before I can climb out of the car or he can say anything, I lean forward, resting my elbows on the console dividing the seats, and kiss him.
He sucks in a breath, unresponsive for two long seconds.
I start to pull away, already cursing myself for losing my cool like that.
Then his hand cups my neck, his finger and thumb pressing into my pulse points, and he tilts my head for an angle he prefers, tracing his tongue along the seam of my lips.
I open for him, falling against him as he pulls me closer.
His cypress scent surrounds us, filling the car even faster than my own perfume.
His own desire floods my chest. The darkness, the bond, the feel of his lips—softer and more coaxing than Rhett’s, at complete odds with the dominant hold he has on my throat—have me panting and squirming, forgetting the very real lines we’d put in place in the hopes of being able to talk to Billie about everything.
I’m ready to crawl into his lap and beg everyone in my life for forgiveness for crossing every single line that might still exist. Except he pulls back, his eyes wide, his pupils dilated.
His lips are swollen, and he pants heavily, his entire body shaking.
My breathing is just as unsteady. Each of my heartbeats echoes in my clit, and I squirm in the seat again.
He clenches his jaw and closes his eyes, groaning.
“I… I have something for you,” he says after a minute, his voice ragged. “Consider it a late Christmas present.”
I drop back onto the passenger seat as he grabs a package from the backseat. It’s wrapped in a light pink, shimmering paper and a white bow. My hands shake as I slowly ease both off, trying to recalibrate from the kiss. It takes me an awkward minute to realize what it is.
“A flower press?” I ask, frowning as I look back up at him.
“You mentioned it one night while chatting with…” he trails off.
Neither of us have brought up her name since Christmas.
Not out loud, at least. “I thought Rhett might get you one for Christmas. But he didn’t so…
” He his beard before sighing heavily, shrugging and looking out the front of the car.
I circle his wrist, running my thumb over the bite marks I’d left behind on his thumb.
“Thank you.”
“Let me know if anything changes,” I say to the young man as I run his credit card for the multi-thousand dollar deposit. “Otherwise, I’ll touch base about four weeks before the wedding to confirm everything we talked about today.”
He nods, his eyes bright with happiness and excitement.
I hand him back his credit card along with a receipt for the deposit.
“Congratulations!” My smile is warmer than before, a lick of determination shooting down my sternum. It’s a sensation I’ve slowly figured out means the puck’s dropped for the night’s game.
The man blushes, then quietly leaves the shop.
I clean up my reference photography books and lay them under the counter, then go through my standard process of documenting and scheduling a new custom order.
It’s hard to believe it’s only a few short months before wedding season kick into high gear.
I’m already tired thinking of it, if I’m being honest.
I pull up the job listing Marilyn helped me build yesterday, reviewing it yet again.
I only save it as a draft, though, some part of me unwilling to make that final jump into accepting that she’s not actually going to come back.
That he need for space to figure everything out has actually led to her not wanting to figure anything out at all…
which is her choice, and one I can’t even fault her for.
The custom orders are finally caught up, so I spend the last hour the shop is technically open to reorganize the work room, catching up on all of the small tasks that have fallen to the wayside over the last month while the game plays quietly in the background.
Quietly because the media is back to hating the Scorpions, criticizing every action each of the guys make, especially the James brothers, and I’m at my limit of hearing people talk about them.
When all of my supplies and stations are sorted and wiped down and the floors mopped, I glance at the clock perched by my purse. Twenty more minutes.
I turn off the game as it drop into the first intermission.
Then I pull the roses I’ve been working on drying the last couple days, carefully twisting them to making sure they dry evenly.
Then I grab the rose I’d had to pull from an arrangement for dropping too many petals and pull the rest of them off, stashing them in the portable portion of the press to take home and add to the slowly growing collection I’ve been building all week.
The bells chime about five minutes before I’m ready to lock up. I roll my shoulders back and drop my phone into my pocket before heading into the front of the shop.
“How can I help…” I trail off as I see the black hair and hip-hugging jeans. It’s been nearly three weeks, but I’d recognize her anywhere. She turns toward me, and her ring catches the light.
She’s still wearing her ring.
An entire lifetime’s worth of emotions race through me as she locks eyes with me, and I’m sure they’re fucking up whatever Paxton’s trying to do on the ice.
Her throat moves with her swallow. Her eyes are sad but not red or puffy like she’s been crying.
She doesn’t wear any makeup, but she’s gorgeous without it.
Her voice blends with the shop, nervous like that first time she showed up and I was drowning under a custom order.
“Can we talk?”