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We both stop in front of my door.
“Thanks for keeping me company tonight,” I say.
His eyes shift across my face. “You’re a little red,” he says, pressing a thumb against my skin.
I can feel the heat radiating from my body, and I blush, making the redness worse, before looking away. My phone pings with a new text inside my bag.
“Well, try not to go too crazy if you go out tonight. I don’t need any more panicked calls from Mads in the middle of the night.”
He chuckles. “I’m tempted to do it just to drive Mads insane.”
I smirk because I’m aware of the love-hate relationship between those two.
I use my key card to open my room. “Good night,” I say.
The door closes, and I stand with my back against it, clutching my bag to my chest and taking a few deep breaths.
My head is spinning with confusion. Six nights ago, Sam and I were barely speaking. Four nights ago, I was fetching the drunk hockey player from a club. Two nights ago, he was saving me from a drunken asshole. And tonight, we seem like old friends. Sam has layers I never envisioned, and I feel like I’m peeling them back one at a time. He’s keeping me on my toes.
I can hear Sam’s door open and close through the wall that’s between us.
I take a shower and check in with Eliott. I call Eve, too, since I haven’t talked to her in a while. But she’s out somewhere, so we don’t talk long. I haven’t told her much about my job and not just because of the NDA I signed.
Later that night, when the lights in my room are out, and the hum of the air conditioner in the corner provides the only background noise, I check my app to see where Sam is.
I’m surprised when I track him to the room next door. He either stashed his phone in there so I wouldn’t know that he went out or he stayed in tonight, like he’d said he would. And the next morning, when I check, there’s nothing scandalous or new about him online.
He shocks me again mid-morning when the hotel spa calls, saying I have a prepaid appointment for a massage, manicure, and pedicure, courtesy of the hockey star. It’s an unexpected gift, a kindness that I didn’t see coming. And I start to wonder if I was wrong about Sam.
That maybe, just maybe, there’s more to him than meets the eye.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SAM
A sharp pain radiates through my shoulder when I strike the side of the arena, one of my former teammates throwing his entire body weight behind the hit so I feel every inch of the impact.
“Good to see you, Anderson.” He smirks before skating away.
Fuck you, I say to Sanders in my head because all the air has left my lungs.
I skate off the ice and collapse onto the bench next to Ollie.
This is our third game on the road this week, and we’re playing Anaheim tonight. It was strange, walking back into the place that I called home for the first three years of my professional career. But the problem was, it never felt like home. My old teammates aren’t happy to see me. Neither are the Anaheim fans, as they expressed when they welcomed me with boos every time I entered the ice the first few shifts. We’re in the first period, and it’s still scoreless. Neither team has hit the back of the net halfway through the second period either.
“Your teammates welcoming you back to Cali?” Ollie asks, his eyes on the game.
I rotate my shoulder a few times, reassuring the head trainer that I’m fine when he asks. “There’s no love lost between me and those guys,” I admit.
“Even if you were the best of friends while you were here, you became the enemy the minute you were traded.”
“Well, no worries there. I never pretended to like those guys, and they returned the favor.”
“Sounds like a fun situation,” Ollie retorts.
Ollie’s been in Chicago since he was drafted, and he was welcomed with open arms by the players, the organization, and the fans. I haven’t felt that kind of love since college.
I’m glaring at my former teammates. “They don’t want to go to war with me.”
