6. Everett #2
The silence goes on long enough that I do look up, which is the mistake.
His scent has changed. There is an edge in it now, hot and close, and my own body reads it as a threat and as an invitation in the same half second and cannot tell me which.
He has straightened off the door frame, and his voice, when it comes, is very level. “What are you saying?”
“Probably what you think I’m saying.”
“They didn’t need you to love hockey.” Still level. Barely. “They needed to hear that when the league comes for one of us, the man signing the checks isn’t holding the door open for them.”
“So the ask is that I endorse the thuggery. Publicly. That’s the job.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “You’re an asshole,” he says, and walks away.
I should let him go. The conversation is over. I am out of the chair and down the hallway after him anyway.
He’s at the kitchen counter with his back to me, hands braced on the edge of it, shoulders filling out that hoodie, and the whole room is thick with him, and I start the fight we have been circling since the day he walked into my father’s office and ruined my life.
“You want to know why I can’t stand this sport?
Fine.” My voice bounces off all that granite.
“I watched my father’s last game. Four in the morning, in a hotel room in Zurich, right after the call came.
I watched a man get his face opened up at center ice, and I watched eighteen thousand people get to their feet and scream for more, and I watched my father, seventy-one years old, stand up in his box and clap the man who did it back onto the bench.
Delighted. Proud. And then his heart stopped.
That is the last thing my father ever did.
Cheering that.” I’m closer than I meant to be. “Cheering you.”
He turns around.
“So let me remove the ambiguity from this afternoon. I think your code is a fairy tale that violent men tell themselves that they’re beating each other up in a good way. It’s fucking delusional.”
“You done?” Quiet. His hands have come off the counter. His scent goes dark and I feel it land in the small of my back, and I want him to close the distance so badly that I say something worse instead.
“Not remotely.”
“Cade Dorn has ended three careers. Not shortened. Ended.” He steps in, and I hold my ground.
“The league fines him pocket change and writes another memo. And every night he’s on the ice, he picks out the youngest skater on the other bench.
Linus is nineteen. He’s never thrown a punch in his life.
He shook his head and skated away, and Dorn hit him from behind anyway, and the only reason he finished that game with his brain intact is that Dorn got answered by me.
That’s the code. Not pretty, not clean, and the one thing standing between kids like him and men like that. ”
“How noble. The league should do its job, and Dorn should be banned for life.”
“It should. He should. But it won’t and he won’t. Linus is about to play him again. So I need to be there.”
“Really? That’s your argument? He started it? You’re not a ten-year-old.”
“No, I’m not. I’m the adult on the team who watches out for the others. Because somebody has to and I’m built for it.” His voice finally cracks loud. “Your father understood that. He watched this game for fifty years. You watched one period of one broadcast and you think you know what you saw.”
“I know exactly what I saw.”
We’re a foot apart now, both of us breathing hard, his eyes gone dark and furious, and the whole kitchen smells like woodsmoke and orange peel, and two doses of the strongest suppressant money can buy are losing badly to one shouting alpha in a practice hoodie.
I hate him. I hate his code and beautiful ruined face and the fact that my horrible father died applauding him, and I am so hard I can’t think, and he isn’t moving, he’s holding himself back off me by main force with his fists shaking at his sides, waiting, because he will not be the one who does it.
I do it.
I grab two fists of his hoodie and drag his mouth down onto mine, and he makes a sound like something breaking loose and then I’m off my feet.
Counter edge in my back, his hands under my thighs, his body a wall of heat pinning me there, and we’re kissing like it’s the fight, teeth and no quarter, and I give exactly as good as I get.
He growls into my mouth. I pull his hair for it and he does it again, lower.
“Still think you’re a thug,” I say against his teeth.
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
He gets a hand between us and I stop being clever.
Belt, zip, his palm callused and huge and shockingly careful for a man who fights for a living, and then not careful at all when I bite his jaw and tell him don’t you dare stop.
It’s fast and it’s furious and it is nothing at all like the shower fantasies I have been refusing to have since the office.
Those were quiet. My hands are inside his waistband.
His mouth is on my jaw, my ear, nowhere near my neck, some last piece of him minding that line even now, and the wanting is so total, so loud in my blood, that there’s no room left in me for the lie that I don’t.
I come hard, my fingers dug into his shoulders. He follows seconds later with his forehead pressed to my collarbone and my hand working him through it, and the sound he makes is low and wrecked and goes through me like a shock.
The kitchen goes very quiet. The fridge hums. Neither of us has got our breath back, and the room smells like the pair of us now, his scent and mine wound together, and some animal part of me wants to lie down in it.
His forehead stays against my shoulder a second longer, and he turns his face in against my collar and breathes me in, once, helpless about it.
My whole body goes soft and traitorous and willing.
Then I push at his chest and he steps back instantly, all that weight off me at once, and I slide off the counter onto legs that mostly hold.
I put myself back together. Belt. Shirt.
Tie. My hands shake and I keep them low where he can’t see.
“Everett—”
“Don’t.”
I walk down the hallway to the guest room and close the door behind me. I can still hear him standing in that kitchen. I am wearing his scent all down my front and I do not take the shirt off. He doesn’t come after me and I don’t go back out. God, I hate the fucking Bureau.