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“Phallon, let go.”

“Look at me. Just look at me.”

He tried to pry her hands off his shirt, and she let go just long enough to throw her arms around his neck. She went up on her toes, pulling his head down, her whole body plastered against his. Drew turned his face away, and her kiss landed half on his jaw, half on the corner of his mouth. He grabbed her by the arms to get her off him.

The door flew open and slammed into the wall. Drew whipped his head around. Nicole was standing in the doorway. Phallon’s arms were still around his neck.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Nicole had one foot off the elevator when the scream hit her, and she froze right there with her suitcase still half in the doors.

“I hate you, I hate you!”

It was a woman, way down at the end of the hall, and loud enough that the whole floor could probably hear her. Nicole dug the folded paper out of her wallet and checked the room number, like she didn’t already know it by heart. Then she checked the little brass sign on the wall across from the elevator. The arrow for Drew’s room pointed left, straight toward all that noise.

A man’s voice yelled back. “Good!”

The elevator doors bumped her suitcase and slid back open. Nicole didn’t move.

She knew Drew’s voice. She’d fallen asleep to it on the phone more nights than she could count. She’d heard it laughing in her kitchen and groaning her name in her ear while he was inside her, and the night of his frat party, she’d heard it singing Nirvana straight at her in the middle of a packed dance floor. And right now it was yelling at some woman at the other end of a hotel hallway in New York City.

Then Drew, louder: “I regret the day I ever fucked you!”

The bottom dropped right out of her stomach.

She was walking before she’d even decided to, her suitcase wheels snagging in the thick carpet. A few rooms down, a door opened, and a man in a white undershirt stuck his head out, squinting toward all the noise. Farther down, somebody else cracked their door and peeked out over the chain. Nicole kept her eyes straight ahead. She was not about to look at a single one of these people right now.

Then, from inside the room, quieter: “Drew.”

Just his name, all small and pleading, and Nicole knew that voice too. The last time she’d heard it, she was on the quad outside the art building, and that girl was swinging her hair in her face.

Phallon.

Nicole stopped in the middle of the hallway. Phallon was in New York. Phallon was in Drew’s room. Miss Thing herself. What the entire fuck?

No. She’d defended him to Toni, and to everybody else who’d ever looked at the two of them sideways. He’d told her a hundred times she was the only one, and she’d believed him, and if she was wrong, she was about to be the biggest fool at Drayton. Don’t, Nicole. She wasn’t going to convict him off a few words through a hotel door.

But her body hadn’t gotten the message. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat, and her fingers had locked around the handle of her suitcase, and some part of her had already gone somewhere she’d spent her whole life trying not to go.

Because she knew this. Not this hotel or this hallway, but this. She’d grown up in it. The women who hung around arenas and hotel lobbies waiting on her daddy’s teammates. The wives who smiled for the cameras and didn’t ask questions. Tiffany, crying on the phone at two in the morning over the superstar who’d looked her in the eye and lied for years. And her daddy, swearing up and down he’d never touched that woman, and their whole family ending up on the cover of a tabloid in every checkout line in America anyway.

Goddamn professional athletes. They’re all the same.

Tiffany had said it like it was a fact. Nicole had told herself she’d never give anybody the chance to prove it.

“Get out.” That was him again.

“Don’t say that. Drew, please. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to hit you.”

Hit him? Oh hell no.

“That’s it.” The man in the undershirt shoved his door all the way open. “I’m calling security.”

Good. Somebody needed to. Because if that girl had put her hands on Drew, security was the only thing standing between Nicole and a felony.

“I love you.” That was her again.

Nicole started walking, faster.