CHAPTER 79
Ana
FIVE UNOPENED TEXTS and two missed calls from Naomi illuminate my phone.
Getting a quick glimpse at each one of them as they flickered at the top of the screen, I knew they could all wait in response.
She’s wondering about details regarding a high school dance and whether we’re still going to the movies next weekend when I haven’t even had breakfast today and it’s already noon.
Maybe that makes me a little inconsiderate but the energy isn’t in me to reply. Not today.
Not when I’ve gotten the worst case of writer’s block, while I chew the top of my pen in anxiousness, wondering how to approach this science paper.
A paper I don’t give a shit about when Skate America is next weekend.
The second Grand Prix Event that Troy and I have to win.
Well it’s not a requirement for the Final but we have to beat Violet. And Ethan.
We have to beat Violet and Ethan.
Between the last conversation I overheard from the Dupont and her friends, then seeing firsthand what one of them did to Sasha a few days ago, the ability to keep my calm has been skating on thin ice.
Breathe in. Breathe out—No.
I shake off the thought, what I heard later that night, how embarrassed I was.
Troy Larsson saw me have a panic attack.
Troy Larsson knows that I have panic attacks.
He knows, he’s concerned, and apparently—his words—he cares about me.
It’s still a foreign concept, and for the strangest reason, I don’t believe him. I can’t accept that the guy who’s just as obsessed with winning as I am suddenly doesn’t care about the Olympics or that my well-being means something other than a joke to him.
I know Troy, he’s just using her.
And I know Violet, and her words have a very probable chance of ringing true.
In. Out—No.
I drop my pen over the empty sheet of paper because Troy Larsson knows about my panic attacks when I didn’t know my breathing technique to ward them off has been his all along.
_________
Breathe in. Breathe out.
In. Out.
You’re okay, Ana. You’re okay.
All this time it was him.
A small pair of hands gliding up to me at the Lake as my even smaller body trembled until my mom showed up and took me to the doctor’s.
My ankle had broken when I was ten-years-old, and Troy talked me down on the wild ice, stayed with me through the pain, and for a very odd reason I’d forgotten about that day until two nights ago.
When he saw me having a panic attack, repeating the script that’s carried me through years.
No.
Nothing.
Has.
Changed.
Except it has, but I can still act like it hasn’t.
My phone dings again.
When I see Naomi’s name pop up adding a sixth message to the bunch, I turn my phone on silent, facing it around.
_________
Troy
“What did Dad do to get Canada’s best player?” I ask Dimitri, eyeing him suspiciously as Xavier brings a couple of beers from his mother’s kitchen, handing one to each of us.
“I don’t know,” Dimitri says as Xavier takes a seat on the chaise next to the sofa we’re slouched on. “Probably had one of those hours-long calls with him.”
Xavier raises his bottle into the air like that’s definitely it.
If there’s one thing my father’s great at, it’s charming people with his sweet-talk when he needs to.
Looking at him right off the bat you’d never guess he could persuade the greatest hockey player on the Canadian national team—who also plays for the country’s top club—to join the Hummingbirds, but Gustaf Larsson has that effect in the hockey world.
“Nothing’s set still,” Xavier adds. “The trade might not even happen. But it’s leaning that way.”
That would bring even more publicity to the most publicized and scrutinized hockey team in the league. And in turn, creating even more tension with The Academy.
Next season’s about to be wonderful.
Smiling like we’ve all just muttered a whole lot of gibberish, Mrs. Herrera enters her living room, seating herself between me and my brother, one of her favorite interior design magazines sprawled on her lap.
Xavier reaches for a blanket beside him, moving over to rest it along his mom’s legs that have started to tremble, Mrs. Herrera raising a brow at her son for bringing any attention to her condition.
Rosie never liked the way eyes would draw toward her when she was sick—not when she’d have the flu or since she was first diagnosed.
And I see the way Xavier’s worried eyes linger over her a few moments longer than she’d like as she reaches for the remote, flicking it on to a new reality show she’s found.
The concern on her son’s face melts away when Dimitri’s humored voice fills the room, my older brother suddenly very interested in the television screen that’s now displaying a group of girls who are all shouting at a guy in the middle of a party at the beach in what looks to be a city in Greece.
“Are you coming on Friday?” Xavier turns to ask me.
“What’s Friday?” I say, taking a sip of my beer.
Dimitri shifts to face me, a sudden look of memory appearing between his brows. “Oh shit,” he slips out, “I forgot to tell you. Perla’s brother invited us to a race. She has four extra tickets so I asked Xavier and I was thinking you could also come.”
My brother directs his attention to my best friend and suddenly they’re exchanging this teasing look.
“I’m bringing Lauren and you can bring Ana,” Xavier says, drinking his beer like he knows I’m gushing on the inside about the girl.
I might be.
But Ana and I are a secret, if even that. More like two people who are having sex and that’s supposed to be kept a secret.
The reality makes my smile fade.
And makes me shrug at them both casually. When their mocking expressions remain slapped to their faces, I decide to throw a joke of my own at my brother. “You know Anya’s most likely going to be there.”
Dimitri’s grin starts to wilt, but he shrugs like the detail doesn’t bother him one bit.
Anya—or Princess Anya I should rather say—and Dimitri were friends in high school but grew close in college when the youngest member of the Aramdelle Royal Family attended the same university as him in St. Moritz, the town in Switzerland just a couple of hours away from her family’s castle.
And Anya’s cousin Levente De Smet or “Levi” De Smet is an up and coming Formula One driver (and Lance Norris’s rival), both of the guys competing in the race this weekend—and remembering what Ana said about Norris, the thought of her wrapping those pretty lips over that fucker’s crotch and him treating her like shit afterward, humiliating her publicly like that through his PR like the chicken shit that he is—knowing that I’d have a perfect view at Levi’s ass-kicking right from the stands, I kind of want to go now.
“I can ask her,” I say, downing a big gulp of the cold ale.
_________
Freshly showered, returning to my bedroom, and Ana’s already in it.
In my bed.
I nearly drop the towel that’s curled between my fingers in surprise, not even had a chance to wrap it around me fully yet.
“It’s a shame I didn’t scare you better.” Her lips curve like she’s already unraveling a whole lot of thoughts I suddenly have to know about. “Your towel could’ve come right off.”
I smirk, feeling the heat from her skin ghost over me even from afar. “Is that what you want?” Walking toward her, slow enough to catch the way her expression changes by the inch, I stop myself when my kneecaps hit the sheets. “For my towel to come off?”
Ana flicks her gaze down my body, first to my wet stomach—staying there for an awfully long time—then trailing up to my chest when a glimpse of her fucking perfect tongue slips out but immediately disappears back into her mouth, her lips pulling together in frustration when she finally lets her eyes fall on the center of my hips.
Her brows knit together like she’s torn. “I’m usually not this horny,” she says, her voice sexy as hell. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
I bite down on my smile that’s wanting to explode by her honesty. “Aw, you’re attracted to me, dearest.”
She grimaces in disgust. “Always have to make everything about you.” But when she pushes those pretty eyes onto mine and tries to lie again, I reach for the edge of my towel.
“It’s not because I’m—” And I give a soft tug at the cloth.
“—attracted to you—” Her mouth drops open as she takes me in, and I can’t help the laugh I give out.
“I liked how you finished that sentence, baby.”
I know that look.
The one where she’s too turned on to care with a response as she springs off the bed, sinking down to her knees, bunching all her waves into a rope and handing it to me, her eyes hooked onto mine without a drop of inhibition.
With a dart from her tongue, she flicks the tip of her hot flesh onto the skin of my upper thighs, my chest on fire from the warmth of her mouth, my jaw about to snap when she leisurely drags her pouty lips closer to where I’m dying for her, and she stops right there.
My dick twitches by the abrupt halt, my tip poking the corner of her mouth like it’s trying to suck her lips toward it, and her tiny laugh—her fucking laugh—a breath from my cock head tightens the grip of my fingers tangled around her tendrils, my other hand falling onto the edge of my nightstand behind me.
When she licks along that slit at the very edge and my vision starts turning white, the teasing feels like torture and I know she loves that, her evil grin hinting at that already.
“Suck it, Ana.”
The sound of her sweet moan at the roughness of my voice nearly has me falling to my own knees.
But this view, it’s a fucking sight to behold.
Her cheeks tinged hot pink, the prettiest lips eagerly sliding up and then down my shaft, the way she hollows her mouth to grab more of me, her tears from the stretch that mix with the drops falling from my wet hair onto her temple and down to the sides of her face, I can feel the pleasure coiling tight in my balls.