12. Nyah
NYAH
Dear Diary,
Exercise videos shouldn’t be R rated.
Ifound Dax waiting just outside the tunnel Luca and I had argued in. He stared out at the ice, watching the players flash by, but as soon as I moved back to his side, he put his arm around me and smiled down at me softly.
“So, Luca thinks Lynx is in love with you, huh?”
I grimaced. “You heard all that?”
“Tunnel kind of echoes straight back here. You may as well have been arguing into a megaphone.”
I groaned, hoping at least the players had been too occupied with their skates and pucks and whizzing around the ice to pay any attention to the owner of their team having an argument outside the locker rooms.
Dax kissed the top of my head. “Listen. I know you have a lot going on right now. You’re juggling a lot of plates. Luca. Lynx. The baby. Your family and the Guerras. But I’m not one of them.”
My chest tightened. “What does that mean?”
Because what it sounded like was, Nyah, you have too much fucking baggage, and I don’t want anything to do with you anymore.
Like Dax could read my mind, he twisted so he could tilt my chin up. I stared into his almost golden eyes, and all I saw was the man I’d fallen in love with, the father of my child, pulling back and walking away because I was too much effort.
I’d always been “too much.” Too loud. Too wild.
Too uncontrollable. I’d always driven my mother crazy because I had never fit the mold she had tried to force me into.
While my cousins and the other women in my life all seemed to fall in line easily, and were excited about marrying for money and power, and lived for exotic vacations and fancy clothes, all I’d wanted was to be free to choose.
Choose where I lived, what I wore, where I went, and who I loved.
Dax had been the first person who had ever allowed me all of that.
I didn’t want to lose him. And yet I knew in my heart, I couldn’t let him pin me down either.
But Dax brushed his mouth over mine. “It means, pretty girl, you are the best thing that has ever happened to me. And every time I almost lose you, it only cements for me that you’re it.
” He leaned in so our foreheads touched.
“But I’ve always been free to live and make my own decisions.
You haven’t. Until now. So just know I’m here.
Always. We’re together. Forever. And nothing is going to change that.
No matter what you do with Luca. Or with Lynx.
Or with anyone else. We’re good. We’re solid. ” He grinned. “We’re that ice.”
I squinted at it getting sliced up by the skates and melting in one spot. “I love you. But we could probably stand to work on your analogies.”
He booped me on the nose. “Deal. But in light of everything, I think I’m going to go.”
I grabbed his hand. “No. Don’t.”
He just kissed my forehead. “You have some things to think about. And I need to go check on my shop. Just for tonight, and then I’ll come back to the clubhouse. My brothers have probably changed the locks because I haven’t shown up there in weeks and they’ve had to cover for me.”
I grimaced. “They probably hate me for breaking your heart.”
“And they’ll love you again as soon as they see you also put it back together.”
I really hoped that was true. Because Dax was the sweetest soul I’d ever met. He deserved more than a wild child Mafia brat.
And yet he didn’t want it.
He wanted me.
Nothing untoward had happened at the hockey rink. Though I’d expected Carlos or Enzo or, hell, even my father to pop out of the woodwork at any minute, none of them had.
Lynx had eventually come out of the changing rooms and taken control of practice, barking out orders from the edge of the ice in a very unlike-him fashion, while Luca made phone call after phone call and spent the rest of the practice sending emails from his phone.
I just tried to stay out of the way, my head a jumbled mess and Luca’s warnings replaying on a loop.
I’d said nothing on the drive back to the clubhouse, and neither had either of the guys. Inside the gates, Luca went straight down the path that led to the house where his sister had spent the night, leaving me and Lynx to walk into the clubhouse together.
The tension in the silence between us was unbearable, and every time I looked over at Lynx, he turned away.
It went against my nature to give him space.
What I wanted to do was get all up in his face and demand he tell me what he was thinking and feeling.
I came from a family of people where I never knew what was truly going on in their heads.
It had made me crazy more than once. I had just wanted to scream at them to stop being such robots.
To actually say what they meant instead of forcing me to guess how they felt.
I wanted to tell him I didn’t like this weirdness that had cropped up between us. I wanted to tell him to go back to being my friend again.
Though that was apparently not what he wanted. He beelined for the only open stool at the bar, leaving me to find a seat elsewhere.
I settled on the cracked leather couches, while the other guys played pool and the smells and sounds of someone cooking something delicious in the kitchen wafted back. A hum of conversation enveloped the cozy room, and I watched Lynx’s back as Chirp poured him a drink.
Amber sat next to me on the couch and propped her feet up on the coffee table in front of us. “So, you fucked Lynx, huh?”
I widened my eyes and twisted so I was facing her. “What? No! Why would you say that? That was me and Dax last night. Not me and Lynx.”
She shifted on her seat, angling herself so she could pull her phone out of the pocket of her jeans. They were skintight, so I had no idea how she’d fit the phone in there in the first place.
She opened an app on her phone and distractedly scrolled through her feed. “No, I meant today. You fucked him today, right?”
She had to have heard what happened in the bathroom this morning. “No, that was me and Luca in the bathroom this morning.”
She glanced over at me with a smile on her red lips.
“Seriously? There’s something in the water around here.
The men all like to share. I can’t wait ’til it’s my turn.
” She went back to doomscrolling. “Lynx sent you the video though, yeah? Because clearly something has changed with you two. The vibe is…” She squinted over at Lynx sitting at the bar nursing a beer and very decidedly not facing in my direction. “Tense.”
“I don’t have a phone, so no. What video?”
“Who doesn’t have a phone in this decade? Christ, girl, I’ll give you my old one later. But he at least showed you the video, right? It’s a cinematic masterpiece, if I do say so myself.” She glanced at me. “I recorded it.”
I did a double take and looked between Amber and Lynx, wondering again if they’d slept together. Maybe Luca had this whole thing wrong, and Lynx’s mood today had been nothing to do with me and everything to do with him and Amber.
And her apparently recording it.
I suddenly felt really stupid and incredibly arrogant. “I really don’t need to see the video of the two of you.”
Amber screwed her face up. “What? Oh my God, you think… No. I mean, he’s hot, so I totally offered, but he turned me down. He’s so into you, girl. He isn’t looking at anyone else here.”
It should have made me feel good. And instead, it just made me feel like a jerk. “I wish he would. My life is so fucking complicated already. I really just need—”
“Girl, stop. Do not tell me you need that man to be your friend. You have Violet. And hell, me, if you want a friend that badly.” She gave Lynx an appreciative once-over, her gaze running up and down his back and ass, lingering on the broad shoulders, his T-shirt stretching over well-defined biceps.
“But you do not stay in the friend zone with a man like that.”
Despite myself, jealousy curdled my stomach. “I’ve got a lot going on. He’s lovely but he—”
Amber rolled her eyes and leaned against me, so we were shoulder to shoulder.
She scrolled through her phone and brought a video up on the screen.
From the thumbnail, I could tell it was of Lynx.
But it didn’t look like the sex tape I’d been expecting.
It was taken outside for one, and Lynx was in workout gear.
She thrust the phone toward me. “Please stop talking. Just watch this.”
I went to hit play, but she covered the screen. “Wait, actually, put my AirPods in. People don’t need to hear this.”
She pulled the earbuds from a little case in her other pocket and passed them to me. Not arguing with her, because Amber didn’t seem like the sort of person who would be persuaded easily, I took one of the earbuds from the case and stuck one in my ear.
I gave her a questioning look, and she gave me the “go ahead” nod.
I hit play, and the video rolled on the small screen.
It was Lynx in a push-up position, but supporting it on his forearms instead of his hands.
He held the plank with relative ease, occasionally glancing up and talking to Amber, and I recognized Reaper’s voice in the background, even though he wasn’t in the video.
That’s when I knew for sure this wasn’t going to turn into some kinky three-way sex tape.
Because Reaper was more committed to Violet and their other partners than any man I’d ever seen.
He’d never in a million years cheat on them.
I watched for a while, and while Lynx’s muscles were great, I really didn’t know why on earth I was watching this. I pulled out an AirPod. “Amber, what is the point of this?”
She leaned over me and dragged her finger along the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. She winked. “Yeah, you seem like the type to get impatient to get to the good stuff. Watch from here.”
I took her word for it and put the tiny speaker back in my ear.
The video had clearly been skipped forward several minutes, and though Lynx still held the plank position, he was not in the same easy breezy state he’d been in at the start of the video.
His head had dropped between his arms, and sweat rolled down the sides of his face and neck, dripping off him onto the leaf-littered ground.
His muscles shook with the effort of keeping himself in that position for so long.
And I instantly understood why Amber was showing me this video.
Lynx breathed heavily, tiny whimpers of pain escaping him as he fought to keep his body from collapsing. He lifted his head, his back arching just a bit, and his expression pure determination. Every muscle in his body shook, and when he dropped his head again, he gutturally ground out, “Fuck.”
And it just kept coming. The whimpers. The groans. The deep, growly words he ground out as he panted.
I widened my eyes and hissed at her. “Why does this feel like I’m listening to a preview of what Lynx is like in bed?”
Amber laughed. “You can thank me later, girl. The plank-to-failure challenge on social media is how I wasted five hours yesterday.”
I sniggered. “You pervert.”
She nodded. “There is no shame in my game. I gotta entertain myself somehow. Anyway. I’ll leave you to finish your video in peace. Once you’ve finished replaying it, just leave it on the coffee table there. I’ll pick it up once I’ve had a shower.”
She left me clutching her phone. I glanced at Lynx’s back, feeling a bit guilty about watching him like this.
And yet I couldn’t stop myself from staring down at the phone again and hitting play once more.
I briefly closed my eyes, and all I could hear was him.
My body heated instantly. Every moan that fell from his lips, every panted breath, every rustle of his clothes moving against his sweaty body sent images into my head about what it would be like to have Lynx on top of me, making all those noises, not because he was working on his core strength, but because he was buried deep inside me and fighting the urge to come.