Defensive Zone

by Catherine Gayle

  I was jumping out of my skin, every bit of my body on fire in the best possible way, by the time he removed the toy and untied me from the chair. With a hand on my arm, he helped me to my feet. My legs wouldn’t support me, though, and I fell into him.

  He caught me with one strong arm wrapped tight around my waist, hauling me up against his side. “Have you finally learned your lesson?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure if he was still playing along with my game or if he’d dropped the act. Was he asking me or Hermione? I couldn’t tell, but either way, I gave him a resolute nod, my bottom feeling like it was on fire.

  “Good,” he muttered. Then he hauled me out of the office and into his bedroom. I collapsed on his bed, ready for whatever he wanted to do next as long as it involved his perfect cock and my overly stimulated pussy.

  What I wasn’t prepared for was him easing me onto his bed and then lying down beside me to massage my arms and legs. Yes, my muscles were all strained from the position he’d had me in, but still. The fact remained: I’d gotten my rocks off already, but he hadn’t. That didn’t seem fair.

  Cody nudged me onto my belly. I was too exhausted and sated to argue for once. He climbed over me, supporting himself entirely so that his weight wasn’t pressing me into the mattress, and started to massage my neck and shoulders.

  “Mmph,” I mumbled into the pillows, utter bliss making it impossible for me to complain, despite the fact that his very hard cock was pressing against my bottom and I wanted to get him off like he’d done for me.

  But he kept rubbing my aching muscles, and before I knew what was happening, I was fast asleep, his hands still working their magic.

  DANI LOOKED SWEET and innocent when she slept, which only served as a reminder to me about how young she was. Only twenty. Which then reminded me how sick and twisted I must be to go along with any of this. What the hell was I thinking? I was clearly out of my mind to get involved with her in any way, but this situation had already moved well beyond simply getting involved. Granted, her behavior blew the whole sweet-and-innocent idea out of the water, but still. Damn if I could keep my hands to myself whenever she was around. She was like a drug, and I was a junkie who couldn’t get enough.

  What the hell was I doing? Clearly, I’d lost my mind and was playing with fire. Dani was the flame. And she’d already burned me, but I couldn’t seem to stay away from the blaze that she had brought to my life.

  I needed to wake her up and send her on her way—she ought to go home in case anyone in her family decided to look for her at her house—but I didn’t have it in me to rouse her just yet. I wanted these quiet moments with her sleeping in my bed, my arms wrapped around her, holding her close. Craved them, even. So much in my life was beyond my control, but her presence right now felt like a soothing cup of hot cinnamon tea on a cold Kelowna night.

  I rolled onto my back, planting both hands under my head as I stared up at the dark ceiling of my bedroom, a thousand thoughts racing through my mind. My father and sisters. Dani’s father. The likelihood of being traded. The impending end of my career.

  Everything was a tangled spider’s web, and I was already trapped in the sticky threads. Every attempt to free myself only tightened the bonds keeping me tethered to an impossible situation.

  Dani turned toward me, still fully asleep, curling up against my side with her arm and leg draped across my body as though they could keep me in place. I gave her a bit of a nudge to wake her up, but I didn’t put much behind it. The truth was, I liked having her like this far too much. It felt comfortable. Right. Like there was nowhere she belonged more than in my bed, my arms.

  In my life.

  Fuck, this was the last thing I needed right now. But it was everything I wanted.

  She was everything I wanted.

  Dani brought a sense of lightness and innocence into my life, a sense of fun that was sorely lacking in every other area. My sisters used to give me that, but the nastier side of life had intruded and stolen that from all of us. Dani had seen her fair share of life’s ugliness, too, but she seemed almost unaffected by it, as though the darker parts of life couldn’t touch her.

  I needed that in my life. I needed her in my life.

  But when, in the last few years, had life given me what I needed? Instead, fate kept taking things away.

  Despite my better judgment, I let Dani sleep. Not that there was any chance of me doing the same. I was still hard as hell, and my thoughts were racing.

  And then she moved.

  At first, I assumed she was still asleep and simply rolling into my warmth out of instinct. However, it didn’t take me long to realize she was not only awake but fully aware of what she was doing. Because her hand—which had been resting idly on my belly—was inching toward my painfully hard cock.

  And I allowed it.

  She wrapped her fingers around me, squeezing me the way her pussy did when I was inside her. I let out a groan and melted against the mattress, that one specific part of me taut and tense, the rest of me turning to putty in her hands. She could mold me in any way she saw fit right now, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything but take it.

  She worked my shaft up and down a few times, and then she shifted onto her knees, leaning over me until a curtain of her brown hair fell down and tickled my thighs and abdomen. The heat of her mouth settled over me, and I groaned, all the problems in the world melting away from me in that moment.

  Dani Weber was utter perfection.

  I didn’t deserve her.

  But I couldn’t fathom a way I’d ever be able to let her go. She had me in her clutches, in more ways than one.

  “FUCK!” BURNZIE SHOUTED as he got tripped up over his own skates. He’d been trying to shift gears mid-stride when Vladimir Tarasenko of the Blues picked off a pass through the middle of the ice, and now he was flat on his ass and out of the play.

  This was our first game of the regular season—at home, no less—and we were losing two to nothing late in the second period. Not the way we wanted to get started, and our fans were letting us hear about it. I hadn’t heard this many boos in a long time.

  And we deserved them, too. We’d been playing like shit all night, and that had to change, stat.

  I didn’t bother wasting the breath it would require to tell Burnzie I was on it. Instead, I turned on my jets and raced the speedy Russian forward back into our zone. The good news was that Tarasenko was alone—for now. Stastny and Steen, the other forwards on Tarasenko’s line, were rushing back to join him, though, and only our goaltender, Nicklas Ericsson, and I stood in their way.

  The odds were not in our favor. Good thing I wasn’t the betting type.

  I kept my eyes trained on Tarasenko, hoping he’d give me some sign of his intentions. The guy was typically a shooter, but he had one hell of a sneaky pass up his sleeve, too. I positioned myself in such a way that I could cut off any pass he might try to get through to Stastny, leaving Nicky to deal with the other two. That was the best I could do.

  Tarasenko faked a pass in Stastny’s direction, but my stick was in the way. He held on to the puck instead, still in full stride, his eyes on the goal. The guy’d already scored on Nicky once tonight, and he looked hungry to notch another.

  Not gonna happen on my shift.

  In what was quite possibly a stupid move on my part, I forgot all about blocking a pass to Stastny, and I made a lunge for the puck. If I made contact, it’d be a brilliant move; if I missed, I’d be leaving Nicky to deal with a three-on-none by himself, against the Blues’ top line.

  Good thing I didn’t miss.

  I poked the puck just out of Steen’s reach, and lucky for me, Burnzie had almost caught up to us. He got the puck on his stick and calmed it down, and before I could change the direction of my stride, he had it zooming back into our offensive zone. It landed perfectly on the tape of Riley Jezek’s stick. Our top line was still in the zone, and the Blues’ defense had been chasing their forwards in the other direction—they could
n’t get back in time, so we had a three-on-none against their goalie.

  Tic-tac-toe. RJ, Babs, and Ghost got off a couple of crisp passes between them, and then before the Blues’ goaltender knew what hit him, the puck was in the back of the net. I caught up to the guys to join in the celebration.

  Two to one. We were back in it, and we had most of the third period left to tie the game. I hadn’t done anything that screwed us over.

  That didn’t stop Webs from glaring at me when we skated back to the bench after our shift, though. Did he know about me and Dani?

  He couldn’t. Could he? I’d already be dead if he knew.

  But if he somehow did, I was up shit creek without a paddle.

  I should never have gone along with any of her plans, but now it was too late to go back. Not only could I not convince Dani to leave me alone…but I didn’t think I was capable of leaving her alone anymore, either.

  She’d sunk her claws into me. And I liked it.

  I was a fucking glutton for punishment. There was no other explanation.

  NONE OF THE guys had been having a particularly memorable game—at least not memorable in a good way—but Cody seemed to be struggling more than most of them. I couldn’t help but think that I’d had something to do with it. I’d been distracting him lately. The good kind of distractions—sexy-as-hell distractions—but still…distractions. Now that the season was officially underway, I supposed I’d have to keep myself in check.

  Maybe.

  Kind of.

  I doubted I’d be able to stay away from him entirely, because what we were doing together was way too much fun. But maybe I could cut back on my unannounced visits to his place and whatnot. We could try to make plans instead of me just showing up whenever the whim struck me.

  Surprising him was a hell of a lot of fun, though. And I’d never been very good at making plans. I was especially bad at sticking to them once I’d made them. Something else always came up, and then poof, my good intentions went up in smoke.

  When one of the referees stopped play about five minutes into the third period because of Koz picking a fight with one of the Blues players, Mom took that opportunity to plop down in the open seat next to me.

  “How are things going with your new fashion line?” she asked, but there was a funny tone to her voice when she formed the question. She took a sip from her wineglass. Something told me she’d already had a couple of glasses before this one, too.

  My eyes still on the ice, I did my best to keep my tone level, because the last thing I needed was Mom poking her nose into things between me and Cody. That’d only lead to word getting back to Dad, at least if she hadn’t had so much wine that she couldn’t remember what I told her, and…yeah, no. Not going there. “Going great!” I said, maybe with a bit too much enthusiasm. “Bea’s in love with everything I’ve created for her.”

  “What’s she going to pay you for them?”

  I made a face at her and rolled my eyes. “She’s not paying. She’s the client who is going to get me other clients because she looks hot as hell in what I make for her, and she’s comfortable, to boot.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a very sound business practice. Giving away your product for free.”

  “You might have failed to notice,” Katie put in, leaning over from a few seats away, “but Dani doesn’t have a business-oriented bone in her body. She’s too much of a free spirit.”

  “I’m going to make money,” I countered, earning return eye rolls from both my mother and my sister. “I will,” I insisted. “But no one’s going to pay me if they can’t see what I’m capable of doing. I have to get my start somewhere. And my start is with Bea.”

  The ref dropped the puck again, and I returned my focus to the ice because Cody was back out there. The Blues had the puck and were heading into the zone. Cody skated backward, keeping pace with the guy. He tried for a poke check and just managed to slow the guy down, which was apparently enough for Burnzie to zip over and steal the puck away. Burnzie turned play in the other direction, passing the puck up to one of the Storm’s forwards.

  Cody followed the rest of the guys into the offensive zone, setting himself up along the blue line and finding a spot where he had a relatively clear path toward the goal.

  Jamie passed the puck back to him and tried to get free from the Blues’ defender who was on his tail. Ghost and RJ both had Blues players hot on their heels, too, making the Storm’s forwards work extra hard to get free and hold on to the puck. Every now and then, they would pass it back to either Burnzie or Cody, who picked their spots and fired off slap shots toward the net, but nothing would go in.

  They’d been set up in the Blues’ zone for so long that everyone was growing tired. One at a time, the Storm’s players made their way to the bench and traded out for fresh legs, but the Blues players were trapped far from their own bench, and exhaustion was starting to chase them. That could only prove to be a good thing for our guys.

  Before long, Cody was the only player who hadn’t yet made it over to the bench for a change. The Blues players had apparently been paying attention to that, too, because as soon as one of them managed to get a stick on the puck, he shot it up the boards on Cody’s side of the ice. Cody dove for it, but it squirted past him into neutral ice.

  He spun around to chase after it, but his ankle seemed to give out on him just as Blues forward Jaden Schwartz somehow found another gear and caught up to the puck before Cody could get there.

  Cody made a mad slash for the puck, but instead he took out Schwartz’s legs from under him. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the ref’s arm going up in the air. Damn it. Cody was going to be called for slashing.

  He knew it, too, if the sudden slump in his shoulders was any indication. Still, he closed the distance to the puck and got his stick on it. The referee blew his whistle, stopping play, and signaled for Cody to head off to the box as expected.

  Up on the Jumbotron, the cameras focused in on the coaches at the bench. Bergy was cursing a blue streak, his face red from the effort, all his attention directed across the ice where Cody was sitting in purgatory all alone. Bergy’s reaction wasn’t enough to give me pause, though. It was the way Dad’s lips had gone white because he was pressing them so tightly together in anger.

  I couldn’t delude myself. Dad was furious with Cody. If I could slip down to the bench, I could sweet-talk my father until he calmed down, but that wasn’t an option at present. No chance I could get to the bench. Cody was going to have to deal with this one on his own. And, yeah, Cody was a grown man, and he could fend for himself where my father was concerned—especially when it came to things related to his job. But damn if I didn’t want to go down there and see if I could smooth things over for him. Although, on second thought, that might not be the brightest of ideas. If I stuck my nose into things when it came to Cody’s job, Dad would surely suspect something, and we were supposed to be keeping this thing between us under wraps.

  So, instead, I bit down on my lower lip and determined to keep my thoughts to myself, letting Cody deal with his problems on his own.

  The Blues sent out their top power play unit. Cody would normally be on the ice for the penalty kill, but that couldn’t happen with him in the box. Instead, 501 joined Burnzie on defense, with Andrei Sokolov and Dylan Poplawski as the forwards.

  The puck dropped.

  The Blues controlled the play.

  The puck went into the net.

  Cody skated the skate of shame all the way back across the ice to the bench, with Bergy’s glare eating him alive. I could feel the heat of that stare from here, up in the owner’s box with all the wives and girlfriends. Bergy’s glare had nothing on the one coming from my father, though—and he didn’t even know about all the time I’d been spending at Cody’s house lately. And in his bed. And bent over his knees. And…yeah. All the other stuff.

  Dad would probably kill him if he found out. Cody had been right about that.

  As I watched, my f
ather made his way over to the spot directly behind Cody on the bench. He bent down and said something in Cody’s ear. I wished the Jumbotron had been focused in on the two of them so I could read my father’s lips, but it was no use. They were showing the face-off about to take place at center ice. Which, admittedly, was what most people in the arena wanted to see right now, but not me.

  “Your father knows, you know,” Mom said quietly, leaning over so that no one else could hear.

  My spine instantly stiffened. “Knows what?” I tried to sound nonchalant, but I’d never been very good at hiding things from anyone, least of all my mother.

  “That you’ve been trying to hook up with Harry.”

  “His name’s Cody,” I said before I could stop myself. I’d always called him Harry in front of my family and anyone associated with the team. Always.

  Until now.

  Mom took a sip of her wine, eyeing me for a long moment before speaking again. “Mm hmm. I know it is.” But she let the subject drop, because the Blues scored again, prompting Bergy to signal down the bench for the backup goalie to get ready to go into the game.

  Down on the ice, Nicky Ericsson threw off his mask as he skated toward the bench, yelling what were sure to be obscenities in the coaches’ direction. He wasn’t coming out of the game easily, that much was certain. Admittedly, the goals scored against him tonight hadn’t been his fault. It was more that the team playing in front of him hadn’t been playing very well, leaving him out to dry.

  When things quieted down again and Konrad Jokelainen had taken his place in the net, Mom leaned over close to my ear again. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked. But she didn’t sound like she was judging me.

  I met her gaze full on, studying her eyes to determine how to proceed. All I saw there was a concerned parent, not one who wanted to send me to my room with no supper or ground me for the next century. “I’m sure, Mom.”