Sugar and Ice - RJ Scott Page 0,40

comments below it, but the Internet was quick to judge. I saw words like millionaires get away with hurting people, and worse, and I wasn’t ready to face any of that.

Vlad had been quiet since the text, withdrawn. He didn’t hug me and tell me it was okay; in fact he was pissed, and I couldn’t help but feel that some of that was directed at me.

Then there was the elephant in the room we both ignored.

There were two elephants in fact, but Lacey was the obvious one, sitting there waiting to be dealt with. Only, I was so done with talking about her and defending myself, and somehow last night I’d managed to stuff her in a teeny tiny box and hide her on a dusty shelf somewhere in the back of my mind, and thankfully Vlad hadn’t mentioned her once.

I hadn’t been arrested, hell there was nothing to charge me with, and the interview had gone well until the moment the cop had slid over the bank statement that showed the million dollar deposit to Lacey’s investment account. I hadn’t even told Vlad about that fuck up yet, and the ramifications for the team as a whole.

The detective had suggested with a sly tone that giving Lacey money made it look as if I was paying her off. My lawyer, or rather, the team lawyer, had told him to go fuck himself. Not in quite those terms, but with lots of legal talk that confused me, but had the detective nodding.

Ten said I needed to talk to some guy called Layton Foxx, the marketing social fixes-everything guy from the Railers, gave me his number, and said that there wasn’t much the man couldn’t fix. Not only to deal with the Lacey issue, but also to help with the star goalie and his damn emu. He can even fix stupid, Tennant had said, We have an Adler, and Layton fixed him.

Maybe I would take up the offer for the Lacey issue, but Vlad struck me as the kind of man who was very much not interested in help, with or without emus. He was control personified.

I had to wonder though, after yesterday and the hand-holding on the plane, and Eli’s stupid joke about the pool, was Vlad feeling like maybe his grip on everything was slipping away?

Is this my fault?

I couldn’t imagine the worries and fears in his head about what would happen back home if everything came out. Dwight had suggested a meeting, a restraining order, a public statement, in his official lawyer-type way. I didn’t want that, especially if it meant Vlad got pulled into the mess. All I wanted to do was play hockey.

Then, there was the other elephant, Tennant Rowe. Last night we’d gone back to Vlad’s, had sex that was less about getting off and more about care, then hugging, and not once had we mentioned Ten’s name. Only this morning, after the text with the blurry photo, Ten had texted me with Layton’s number, and also a message that was all about keeping positive.

It made me smile, but when I’d told Vlad about it, he’d been tight-lipped.

I’d seen the focus in his game when he’d hip-checked Ten and sent him careening into Colorado, and I’d have to have been an idiot not to notice the way he’d looked from Ten to me when we were talking.

“Ten and I cleared the air,” I announced, as we drew closer to my house. There was little traffic and we had maybe five minutes in the car before he dropped me there so I could drive separately to the arena. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Ten; with hindsight, possibly it was a bad idea? “That was what the text was about, just laughing is all.”

Why am I defending myself?

“Good,” he murmured, but it was too low for me to make out if he was lying.

“We laughed that I had a crush on him.”

Vlad sent me a sharp glare. “Rowe laughed at you?”

“No, we laughed together. He said, if only he’d known, then—”

“What?” Vlad barked. “What would he have done? Would you have chosen him over Lacey? What would you have done?”

I blinked at Vlad as he turned into my drive and entered the code for the gate. There were a few reporters clustered there, but Vlad ignored them, and so did I. Tinted windows were my saving grace, and he stopped the car just inside the gate watching for it to shut, likely checking no paparazzi got