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  She’d been trying to be hard for her entire adult life, and she could stop when it came to Anders. It filled her with awe and tenderness on top of the avalanche of lust she couldn’t get out from under.

  In a few days, he knew exactly what to say to her and how to touch her. When he’d sat down at her bar, looking sad and lonely, something in her universe had clicked into place for the first time.

  Fire flashed under her skin, and a ball of heat centered on her clit burst. He kept touching her as the orgasm crested until she wanted his touch anywhere but there. She felt rung out and wide open, as though she’d had a good cry.

  He moved up the bed, and kissed her neck, his voice deep and sure, uttering nonsense words like perfect, lovely, and mine.

  She didn’t know how long they lay there, touching and kissing and brushing body parts against each other. But she couldn’t keep her hands away from his cock for long even though he seemed content with less than everything she needed from him.

  “Anders?”

  He propped himself up at her side and looked down at her. His ice-blue eyes were more like the gas lighting a stove than the winter sky, and they bored through her. Maybe she could get used to the way he paid attention to her, but she wasn’t sure. It could be years, and he could still make her skin pink from a look.

  “Yeah?” She didn’t know why he looked so happy, couldn’t explain the lazy smile across his face.

  And she couldn’t help the matching, stupid smile that crossed her mouth. “Are you going to fuck me anytime soon?”

  “You don’t like to take your time with anything, do you?” He bent and licked the shell of her ear. “Don’t you think the best things are worth waiting for?”

  Fuck, he meant her. For him, she was worth waiting for. The size of him saying that she was worth the grief he’d gotten from the media, the taunts from his teammates, the bounty, floored her. If she hadn’t been flat on her back she would have fallen over.

  At the same time, his admission didn’t bolster her patience. She hooked his thigh with her leg and flipped them over so she was on top of him. “You don’t have to wait anymore.”

  She ran her hand over his cock, but he winked at her as if he weren’t painfully hard. “Then, by all means, have your way with me, woman.”

  He made her feel like a woman. Alone, with him, she was more than a failed chef, a disappointing daughter, the town bike. She was fresh and new again.

  She rubbed herself against him, teasing them both now that she was in control of when and how he got inside her. It was her turn to take her time, until he nudged her with his hips.

  Finally, she sunk onto his cock. At first, neither of them moved, the shift from two bodies to one taking a moment of adjustment. Then she rocked her hips against him, holding onto his torso for balance and leverage.

  In moments, they found a rhythm, and rocked and rolled together until she was arching her back, bracing for another climax. His hands were everywhere. When he took one of her nipples between two fingers, she broke again.

  “So pretty.”

  She was sure it wasn’t pretty being turned inside out by the last man she should ever let herself get involved with, but she didn’t correct him. Not that anything that came out of her mouth at that moment made sense—she was too busy having her own out-of-body experience.

  Before she finished, he took her hips and fucked her like he needed to come. She leaned back onto his thighs, letting him have her. She didn’t flinch when he cupped her throat with one hand to keep her in place. From anyone else, it would make her feel hemmed in and controlled. With Anders, feeling him take control of her body was delicious.

  When he finally came, the rush of heat inside her melted the last of her resistance to him. She never expected to fall for a someone like him—she’d honestly never expected to fall for anyone. But he was different from anyone she’d ever known. He was steady, but he still made her laugh. He’d been a virgin, but he knew how to turn her on and make her come harder than anyone. He played hockey, but he wasn’t a douchebag.

  She looked down at him, his eyes closed and his breathing still ragged. Touched his lips with her own.

  He said one word, one she hadn’t been sure she’d heard before, mine, as though it was a seal.

  Anders Sorenson wanted her to belong to him. And, to her surprise, she very much wanted that to be true.

  Ten

  Anders had always slept hard after a tough training session. When he woke up the morning after he’d claimed Dahlia as his own on the night after she’d relieved him of his v-card, he felt as though he’d run every drill in the book the entire day before. His body was wrecked, but he hadn’t had this much energy in months.

  And he wanted to jump on top of a table or a bar to tell everyone that he’d fallen for the sweetest, prickliest bartender named after a flower who’d ever lived.

  The only thing wrong with how he woke up was that he as alone, and he didn’t hear Dahlia anywhere in the room. As mushy as it sounded, he missed her already. Even though he’d slept like the dead and long-buried, he missed the feel of her body curled up next to his. He wanted her raspy wake-up/fuck-me voice in his ear when Edwin Motz wasn’t looming over them with the Cup.

  Fuck. Motz would be coming to get the trophy any minute. He’d pretty much decided to go back to hockey, and he didn’t want to spend any more time with the leering piece of shit, Motz. For an instant, he felt bad for thinking ill of a person he didn’t honestly know that well. But he banished his guilt when an image of the guy trying to get a glimpse of Dahlia’s tits flashed before his eyes.

  He got out of bed and cleaned up, throwing on workout clothes. Although he was heading out today, he needed to double down on his rehab before getting back to New Orleans. If he wanted the doctor to clear him to start training with the team again, he needed to get serious. He e-mailed the team’s lead physical therapist, Etienne “Bayou” Beaufort, and asked if they could Skype sometime that morning.

  The fire in his gut that had gone away when his knee blew out was back, and he had Dahlia to thank for it.

  Over the years, one of his teammates had joked that he needed to “pop his cherry with a pretty candy striper, and get it over with.” Anders wasn’t dumb or shallow enough to think that finally getting laid was what had given him motivation to get better, but meeting the right woman had gone a long way towards crystalizing what he wanted his future to look like.

  He was about to scroll through his e-mail and social media notifications when there was a knock on the door.

  He kissed his fingers and then the Cup, and took a lingering look at the piece of metal. On its own, it had no meaning, but it held the weight of decades of tradition in the League, and all the sacrifices he’d made to win that thing with his team. Every family vacation, dance, milestone he’d missed because of his dream of winning this thing wasn’t worthless. But now that he’d met a woman who’d rocked his world, it didn’t mean everything anymore.

  Even though he knew it was Edwin at the door, he couldn’t help smiling at the thought of Dahlia standing there the other night. His smile didn’t fade when he opened the door to the Keeper.

  “On the end table.” He motioned for Edwin to come in the room.

  Edwin moved—slowly as usual—towards the Cup. He looked more shifty than usual, and that was saying something. “Do anything fun with it?”

  Anders pushed his fists into the pockets of his sweatpants, unsure whether he should say anything to Motz other than “get out.” In the end, he was feeling magnanimous, and the guy already knew that the virginity bounty was a null and void proposition. What could a little bit of chit-chat hurt? “Nah. I didn’t really need it for what I thought I needed it for.”

  Motz pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “What did you need it for?”

  “To figure out if I wanted to go back.”

  Edwin made a choking sound. “You weren’t going to go back? I mean, I’m sure the knee surgery was painful,
but your chances of full recovery from that surgery were very high.”

  Anders laughed. “Did research on it?” Wow, didn’t this guy have a life?

  The other man was totally serious. “I modelled the probabilities myself.”

  “I didn’t know if I wanted it anymore.” Anders’s words had Motz looking as though him not wanting to play professional hockey any more was completely unthinkable. “I do now, but not because of the Cup.”

  “Is it because of that chef girl?”

  He bristled at Motz’s tone and implication that Dahlia was “that chef girl.” He didn’t like her being described as that anything. “Listen, I really appreciate you not saying anything. That bounty is stupid, and you know privacy—”

  “She hasn’t cashed the check yet.”

  At first, Motz’s words did not compute. Of course Dahlia hadn’t cashed the check because Edwin hadn’t said anything, and there was no check. “What?”

  Edwin blanched, and Anders realized he’d barked that word instead of speaking calmly.

  “She—uh—took the check when I went up to the restaurant yesterday. My instructions were very clear—”

  “I thought my instructions were clear.” Anders crossed his arms over his chest to stop himself from throwing Motz out of the window right now. “You weren’t going to say anything. You were going to pretend that you didn’t see what you saw.”

  “But the rest of the team—”

  “The rest of the team isn’t going to pay for you to put your fucking face together after I’m done with it.”

  “You can’t do that!” Motz looked terrified. Good. He needed to be scared because, unless the next words out of his mouth were “just kidding,” he was going to be carrying the Cup to the next player while wearing a full-body cast.

  “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t rearrange your face, and have my agent call the League with this shit.”

  “She took the check.”

  All the anger he was ready to pummel into Motz’s now-smug face raced around his body until he was looking around the room for something to throw. His gaze landed on the Cup, and Edwin put his body in front of the trophy. Probably a good fucking idea.

  Nothing made sense. Dahlia had told him she didn’t want the money. But she needed it. And sometimes need trumped morals. She was dying on the vine here, tending bar instead of cooking. All he could taste now was bile, but he couldn’t forget the pure joy in the food Dahlia prepared.

  After last night, he couldn’t believe she’d slept with him for money. If it was just for the money, she wouldn’t have come to him last night. He shook his head.

  “She really took the check, Sorenson.” Motz put his hand on his shoulder, and Anders sneered at him. “I know you’re new at this whole girl thing, but sometimes bitches be triflin’.”

  He had to be fucking kidding. He didn’t have anything better to do than probability modelling about the shape of Anders’s dick, and he thought he could give him advice about girls. He might not be the prolific fuckwad that some of his teammates were, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t trust his own gut. His gut had told him to lower his defenses and let Dahlia in, but apparently he was wrong.

  He did need to be alone to sort this out without some smug fuck trying to give him advice.

  “Get the fuck out.” Edwin dropped his hand and backed up to the door, taking the Cup with him.

  When he was alone again, he grabbed his phone. Since Edwin had been there, he’d received multiple notifications about a blog post entitled, Pro Hockey’s Only Virgin Loses It! Now that he knew that his secret was out, he clicked on the link.

  Fuuuuuuuucccccckkkk. There were pictures of him and Dahlia at the Temperance. They’d gotten witness accounts of them meeting. One of those assholes from the first night must have agreed to be interviewed because the article speculated that this was a long-term thing, and Dahlia was his “secret mistress.”

  Grim certainty settled into his bones. She had set him up from the beginning. Growing up here, she had to at least be aware of hockey. She’d read the original Deadspin article and decided that Anders was the solution to her problems almost as soon as he sat down at her bar.

  Along with the resolution that he’d been fooled, embarrassment raced through him. Just because she looked different didn’t mean she was more noble or more interested in him than any of the puck bunnies. They simply had more chemistry.

  And, idiot he was, he’d tried to spin chemistry into a future. If his teammates could see him now, they’d face plant on the ice from laughing so hard. Anders Sorenson—no longer a virgin, now a needy chick.

  She’d betrayed him, but he wasn’t going to confront her. No, that would only give her the chance to spin some bullshit in hopes of staying on the gravy train. Hell, if she’d come to New Orleans during the season, she’d have gotten on TV. Dating him for a season might have even been good for a hosting gig.

  A small part of him thought he should give her a chance to explain. Maybe his gut hadn’t been wrong, and it wasn’t her behind the bounty. The way something had clicked into place in his chest when she was around wasn’t nothing.

  Still, he pushed his doubts away. He needed to be with someone he could trust, and too many signs pointed to Dahlia being behind the blog post.

  As fast as he could get his rental car packed up, he was gone. Unwilling to face any of her relatives, he didn’t check out at the desk. He needed to put as much distance between him and Dahlia Clarno as possible. He could only hope that she hadn’t taken any nudes while he’d been sacked out last night.

  The farther away he got, the more burning raged in his chest. He felt like a piece of him was being ripped out the closer to Minneapolis he got.

  Any piece he lost to Dahlia, he would have to sack the fuck up and grow back.

  Eleven

  The bar was still open that afternoon and Dahlia still had to work even though Anders had left without a word. Dahlia’s uncle was back in the kitchen and she had to deal with people who weren’t kitchen staff, which didn’t bode well for her afternoon.

  She’d learned he was gone after her mother called her, bitching about how complicated it was to settle a bill when a guest didn’t check out. It took about five minutes before she realized that her mom was talking about Anders. At first, she’d try to convince herself that he had some hockey-related emergency that required him to leave without checking out. He would have texted her something when he hit a rest stop, or when he got to the airport if he had any intention of keeping in touch. If last night had meant anything, he would have called, wouldn’t he?

  But when her notifications were mostly silent all day, she realized that something must have gone wrong. Maybe he had second thoughts? Now that he wasn’t a virgin anymore, perhaps he didn’t want to be tied down to one woman. Especially if that one woman was her. What if he’d woken up that morning and realized he didn’t want her anymore? Maybe puck bunnies, without money or attitude problems, were more attractive now that he didn’t have the stupid bounty to worry about.

  Or maybe he’d found out about her taking the check and hadn’t waited around to hear her explanation.

  She knew that this was likely to happen sooner or later, but she hadn’t expected it that morning. When she crept out of his room earlier that day, she’d expected them to text back and forth for a few weeks, be unable to figure out a time for her to visit that would work for both of them. And then, the whole thing would taper off until they were each a fond and faded memory.

  Now the memory would have to fade a lot faster. And it didn’t help that the dudes at the end of the bar insisted that some hockey show play. The last thing that Dahlia needed to hear was about how Anders would be going back to the game he loved and leaving her behind.

  She’d never had this feeling before, like her chest was hollow because she wouldn’t get to see his face again. She already missed how he furrowed his brow, and the way he flattened his lips when something bothered him almost as much
as she missed the way his skin felt running along hers.

  Why had she taken the check? She should have shoved Motz out of the restaurant that instant, but a part of her had known that Anders was going to leave. And a part of her had known that the money was better than nothing. That’s the only reason why the check was still in her pocket.

  Although she’d blocked out whispering about herself shortly after she was assaulted in high school, she couldn’t help but perk up at the talk about Sorenson and Clarno on the television. Never in her wildest dreams did she imagine that she would ever see her face on SportsCenter. But she looked up, and there was a picture that someone had gotten from a magazine article about her defunct restaurant, posing in her chef’s jacket.

  She didn’t get to the remote fast enough to turn off the sound and stop anyone else in the bar from noticing. She felt her entire body go lobster red from the attention on her. The seed of humiliation she always felt in her hometown grew and threatened to consume her. Since she was a teenager, her sexuality had been a problem that other people thought was their business. Sleeping with Anders Sorenson had made that problem blow up.

  And now she had a choice. She could do what she’d always done: put her head down, work hard, and hope that something she made in the world overshadowed who she had sex with. Or, she could hold her head up high and push back.

  When she looked around the bar to see what she was up against, she saw her cousin, looking concerned. She also clocked the guys that Anders had beat up that first night in the bar, laughing at her.

  That was the last draw. Even if Anders was thoroughly done with her, it was her life, and it wasn’t something that these fuckheads should feel free to laugh at.

  Dahlia straightened her spine and felt the steel—the metal she’d been known for running her kitchen with—fortify her muscles and bones as she walked over to the end of the bar. Out of the corner of her eye, she felt Lilly’s readiness to jump in and smooth things over kick in. Dahlia shook her head slightly, and her cousin stayed back.