Something was wrong. There was a loop here, and I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t even close to it.
London sank backward, and her lip was back between her teeth. “Right, about that—”
“I can’t even get these two to behave in the locker room, let alone make it through a game, and you honestly think they’re going to do some brotherly promo?” Coach rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Brotherly what?” What the hell was he talking about?
“The photoshoot with you and Maxim? The whole brothers-on-the-same-team aspect of our public relations strategy—” Langley explained.
“I’m sorry.” I went rigid and tried to remember that I wasn’t just seeing red at the head of public relations, but my captain’s wife. “On what planet do you think I’m going stand next to that asshole and declare that he’s my brother?”
“You picked a fine time to tell us that, Jansen!”
“He already knew? I’m just hearing this for the first time!” I swiveled in my chair and threw the ice pack into the trash can. “And the last.” I rose to my feet.
“The first…” Langley startled, her head swinging toward London.
London scrambled out of her chair and came around the table, gripping the sleeve of my hoodie. “Outside. Now.”
“Or?” I challenged.
She looked up at me and swallowed, a flash of fear streaking through those glacier-blue eyes. “Please,” she whispered.
I nodded. What the fuck else was I supposed to do when she looked at me like that?
She tugged me out of Langley’s office and into the deserted hallway, then closed the door and marched me right into another office.
This one was small. Windowless. She took one, sweeping look and shuddered, yanking me back into the hallway, where she dropped my sleeve so she could pace.
I leaned back against the wall and folded my arms over my chest, doing my damnedest not to notice that the sexy little black heels on her feet were the same height the others had been. I bet she barely comes up to mid-chest on me when those things aren’t on.
“Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“I did something.” She stopped right in front of me. A single step, maybe two, and she’d be right between my feet. “And you wouldn’t pick up your phone, so I just went with it, and…” She sighed, then turned those blue eyes on me. “I need your help.”
4
London
“Jansen,” I sighed his name as I tried and failed to collect the right words to explain myself to him.
Something deep inside me trembled at evidence of raw power rippling off of him—the slightly swollen cheek, the cracked lip. The way he’d slammed the ice pack down in the office moments ago, the look he’d given Maxim, all pain and rage.
It was absolutely stupid and reckless to even think ask this of him. To put myself in the middle of two thrashing beasts…
But I had to.
“Jansen,” I said, more gently this time. He had let me drag him into the hallway, trailing behind me with an eerie sort of silence as I pulled on that muscled arm.
I gazed up and up at him, those dark blue eyes churning with barely leashed hate and pain. My fingers itched for more contact, to trace the hard line of his jaw, to smooth those furrowed lines between his brow. A few blinks, and his emotions were replaced by cool calculation as he finally met my gaze.
“How deep does this issue with Maxim go?” I asked after a few moments of heated silence.
I asked that question instead of what I needed to ask him because part of me couldn’t bring myself to admit what I’d done—that I’d already booked the brother promos and had tried constantly to speak with him about it for the past month. Granted, with how easily Maxim had agreed to the promos, I didn’t think the hate ran this deep. But, after their locker room brawl, and the evidence on his face…God, I don’t know what I’d gotten myself into.
The tension practically vibrated off him, his muscles bunched and flexed beneath the tight black Reapers T-shirt he wore.
He parted his lips a few times, then shut them.
I blew out a breath, shaking my head as the adrenaline tried to cool in my blood. “Why would you go after Maxim like that? Your own brother?” Why did no one know until recently you were brothers? Why is there so much pain there?
Something ice-cold flash in his gaze—shock and disappointment.