Chapter 14
GAGE
Itake her phone out of her hand, tapping the screen to end her call. I place it on the bench beside her, close enough that she can grab it if she wants to. She needs to know she has options. She’s the one in control.
Her hands are shaking like she’s soaking in an ice bath after a particularly brutal game. I take them between mine, wishing I could fill her with comfort as easily as I transfer warmth.
“Aeryn,” I say, to make her look at me.
She doesn’t want to. She stares at the mirror I broke when I threw the bench across the room. She frowns when she spies a bit of wood that broke off one of Logan’s picture frames. She closes her eyes as I wait.
“Aeryn,” I say again. “I fucked up everything. It’s all my fault.”
Because that’s the truth. After my tantrum, after tearing apart the locker room, the equipment room, my fragile hold on my temper, I’ve plummeted to the bottom line.
I fucked up.
Ten years ago.
Tonight.
All of this is on me. And looking at the wreckage of my life, I can only pray it isn’t too late to convince Aeryn to forgive me.
Her sigh is so exhausted I want to gather her close to my chest, to swaddle her in flannel, to wrap her in down comforters. I want to keep her whole and safe and comfortable forever.
“I was there, too,” she finally says. “Not at the feckin’ game—that was just an accident. But I was on Beach Avenue for the entire month. I was the eejit who chose to hide.”
“I didn’t want to lose a single minute with you,” I say. “I didn’t want anyone stealing your attention. I wanted to be the only man in the world who saw you, first thing every morning and last thing every night.”
“It was all so new,” she says with a soft, tiny smile. “So exciting. You made me feel things I’d never felt before—physical things, yeah, but heart things, too. You changed me, Gage Rider. You made me fall in love.”
She’s a million times braver than I am.
“No, babygirl,” I finally say. “You changed me. I didn’t even know what was happening at first. I thought you were just another girl. Just Logan’s kid sister. Fun. Funny. But not…”
I know precisely how much I can bench press and how much I can dead lift and how fast I can run on a fucking treadmill. But I don’t have a clue how to do the one thing I need to do right now. How to say the one word she most needs to hear.
But she said it. So I can too.
“I love you,” I say. And when she doesn’t pull back, I say it again. “I love you, and I always have. Despite all the things we did wrong. Maybe because of them. Because of all the time we’ve spent apart. All the ways we miss him. Logan.”
“We would have explained it all to him,” she says, her Irish lilt turning her words into a poem.
“Made him understand who we really are. What we want. What we need. I love you because you were there that last day. I love you because you fought for me. I love you because he would have forgiven the pair of us, if he’d had half a chance, if he’d just had time to get over his surprise. ”
She’s a million times smarter than I am too.
I could never put the words together the way she just has. I couldn’t make them flow right. Couldn’t make them sing.
But the rightness of every syllable she’s said settles into my bones. I love her. She loves me. And all the choices we make together, all the things we do, make us stronger, as individuals and as a pair. That’s the bond that holds us together—man and woman, Dom and sub.
Love.
Trust.
Truth.
“Come here,” I say, rising to my feet and taking her by the hand. She moves willingly, following me out of the locker room.
But when she sees the mess I’ve made of all the team’s equipment, she gasps. “Gage!”
I manage a rueful grin. “What good is owning a team, if you can’t tear things apart every once in a while?” I glance at the destruction. “My equipment managers just earned triple holiday bonuses.”
“You can’t buy your way out of everything,” she chides.
I look directly in her eyes. “I know. I promise. I know.”
I wait for her to nod before I make my way to the shelves of jet-black skates.
They’re made for men, for warriors who need protection from flying pucks and slashing sticks.
But a few of those men have smaller feet than average.
A seven in these boots will match her women’s nine.
I snag a pair of heavy socks, for good measure.
I hold the skates like a bouquet, as if I can buy her back with steel and leather. The laces spill from my hands like trailing ivy. “Please,” I say. “Sit.” I nod toward a bench I didn’t manage to move.
She swallows hard. But she sits.
I kneel before her for the second time tonight. I tug at the skate, loosening the tongue and shoving the laces out of the way. I take her left ankle in my hand like I’m collecting a crystal goblet, and when I slip off her stiletto, I can’t help myself. I bend down to kiss the arch of her foot.
Her toes curl, and we both laugh as I help her into a sock before planting her heel inside the skate. My fingers tug the laces, automatically cinching them tight to give her the support she’ll need. The cords are long; I wrap them around the top of the boot twice before double-knotting a bow.
“You’re good at this,” she says, eyeing me through her lashes.
“Lots and lots of practice,” I say, making short work of the second sock and skate.
She watches as I move down the shelf, finding a pair of size thirteens for myself.
I’m walloped by a flash of memory as I toe off my shoes.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve pulled on hockey skates—playing for the Aces, for Dartmouth, for Brighton Academy.
All the pick-up games, all the special coaching sessions, all the lessons, just hitting the ice for fun.
Ten years I’ve gone without. Ten years I’ve forbidden myself the essential, basic pleasure of my first boyish love—hockey. Ten years I’ve stayed away.
Maybe I thought lightning would strike me. My feet would burst into flames. Logan’s ghost would rise up to choke me, dragging me off to hell.
They’re just skates. I’m simply going to glide across a sheet of ice, with a fearless, beautiful woman by my side.
Our blades are covered with plastic guards to make walking easier and to protect the sharp metal. I find my balance immediately—this is easier than riding a bike, more basic than sex.
Aeryn, though, wobbles. “The boots are so rigid!” she says.
“You’ll get used to it. Don’t forget—you don’t have a toe pick.”
She looks down at her feet like she’s having second thoughts. But she lets me take her hand. She allows me to walk her through the locker room and down the tunnel to the ice illuminated by exit signs and security lights.
Gripping the boards, she lets me pull away her plastic guards, left foot first, then right. I drop mine beside hers, and we both step onto the rink.
She wavers again, flailing her arms for balance. I catch her around the waist before she gets close to falling. “Easy, babygirl,” I say, breathing in the scent of my shampoo on her hair.
Her laugh is shaky, so I lace my fingers between hers. We push off together, matching stroke for stroke as we make our way down the long side of the rink.
My muscles still know how to glide. But the air feels colder than I remember, pressing in from the shadows. The sound of the slicing blades is sharper, the hiss louder than I expect.
We take a full lap around the rink, holding hands. Then Aeryn slips her fingers from mine. She lengthens her stride, picking up her pace. She rides out each stroke to its limit, gliding into a wide, sweeping turn.
She knows better than to try jumping—she’d need a toe pick for that. She doesn’t even try a spin. Instead, she pushes for pure, unbridled speed.
I stay close enough to hear her laughter, but I let her take the lead. When she begins her turn at the end, I cut across the rink, gliding backward as she hurtles toward me. We make another loop like that—giving and taking, matching each other, dancing on the ice.
She’s breathing hard now. Her strokes are coming slower. She catches herself at the end of the rink, pushing up against the goal. It shudders as it takes her weight, but she doesn’t have enough momentum to knock it off its posts. I come to a stop beside her, sending up a spray of ice.
Her hands are tight on the goal. She’s looking down at the blue-tinted ice beneath her feet, at the semi-circle that marks the crease.
“This is where it happened.”
She doesn’t phrase it as a question, but I answer anyway. “Yes.”
“In less than five minutes.”
“Yes.”
“He must have been so afraid.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve thought about it hundreds of times.
But I’m not holding back from Aeryn anymore.
“He would have gone into shock almost immediately. But he could see the trainers he trusted. They’d patched him up dozens of times before.
He would have trusted them to do it again. ”
“I wish I’d been here.”
Even if she’d come to the game, she would have been on the other side of the glass. She couldn’t have reached him in time. I say, “That was my job. I was supposed to be here, holding his hand, telling him he’d make it through, promising to tell his family he loved them.”
“He knew all that.”
“Did he?”
“He was a Reardon. He knew his clan.” Her voice is suddenly thicker with Irish than I’ve ever heard it before. “He knew his friends too. He forgave ya before he died.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. Because I’m a Reardon, too.”
She’s a girl. And the youngest. And Logan didn’t seem inclined to accept that she wanted to be a sub—much less with his best friend as her Dom. But she needs to believe her story. She needs to think it’s true. So I say, “He forgave both of us.”
She offers me a smile—simple and pure. Her eyes are huge in the dim light. Her hair gleams red.
Graceful as some sort of sea creature, she sinks to her knees. She touches her fingertips to her lips, then brushes them across the blue ice. I don’t know if she says a prayer when she bows her head or if she’s only whispering a final farewell.
I hook a hand around her biceps when she starts to rise to her feet. She overbalances a little, leaning into my chest. Folding my arm around her waist, I skate us over to the bench and match the plastic guards to her blades. She lets me help her down the tunnel to the ransacked equipment room.
The place looks worse than when we left it. It occurs to me that I should be ashamed of what I’ve done, but I won’t waste a second on that. I didn’t hurt anyone else. I didn’t hurt myself.
And for the first time in a decade, I feel like I can truly breathe.
Back to my knees in front of her, I strip my double knots from her laces. I tug off the skates, then the socks, setting everything aside before I take care of my own boots.
It’s time to return to the real world. I have to drive us back to New York. She needs to fly home to Chicago in the morning.
Before I can stand, though, she reaches out one steady hand, settling it in the center of my chest. My heart rate doubles, igniting an invisible spark between us. She feels it, I know, because her lips curve into a smile.
“Thank you,” she says. “For bringing me here. For taking me out on the ice.”
I want to grab on to the electricity sizzling between us. I want to tell her it was nothing, but that isn’t true. It was almost more than I could handle.
You’re welcome isn’t enough. Thanking her in return would almost hit the mark, but that isn’t right either.
She takes away my decision before I settle on a response. Flattening her palm against my chest, she leans forward to press her lips against mine. The spark between us flares into something bigger, something that burns off all the oxygen in the room.
“Let me do something for you now,” she whispers. “Sir.”