Page 19 of Ice Cold, Red Hot (Coldwater Firehawks Hockey #1)

SHEPHERD

I’d taken to spending my evenings at the campus athletic training complex.

Being around Griff and the guys was too…

complicated, since I wasn’t playing. It was like my mind had been forced to operate in a sphere parallel to the one they were in.

I still thought about games, strategy—hell, Coach made me sit in on every meeting and I was practicing like my life depended on it (since it did, basically). But I wasn’t really a part of it.

I was like a ghost, still haunting the life I’d had before.

So I didn’t hang around the apartment. Our place was headquarters for the hockey team, and the common areas were dangerous if I was trying to ensure I didn’t run into Celeste.

And I was. She didn’t need me—I was a loose cannon and her life needed to stay straight. There was way too much at stake for us both and I didn’t trust myself to do what she needed if I was anywhere near her.

So the training room was my haven.

The rink had a training room we used after practices to meet with the team trainers, but it was closed a lot of the time. And this was slightly more anonymous. Athletes from every team at Coldwater worked out here, used the saunas and cold plunges. Maybe they knew who I was, but they left me alone.

Best for everyone that way.

I was sitting on the edge of a table, essentially zoned. My hand was killing me—another reason I shouldn’t have punched Ethan. My blue and swollen knuckles reminded me what a loser I was, and I welcomed the visual and visceral ping so I didn’t manage to forget.

My hand was in my lap, steam coming off me since I’d just come out of a too-long sauna session and was probably dehydrated and on the verge of passing out.

It was why I’d taken a seat here in compression shorts and nothing else.

Eventually I’d find my way to some sports drink, take a shower, and go home. But for now? Limbo was just fine.

Until the door opened and Celeste walked in. She stopped just inside the door, and a football player practically ran right into her.

“Sorry,” she said, moving closer to me, but only by a margin. Her eyes were wide, wary. Her wavy dark hair was down, flowing like an untamed river around her sculpted shoulders, which showed because her sweatshirt had slipped down, revealing the brown sugar skin beneath.

My insides clenched at the sight of her. I knew she hated me now. She needed to. I needed her to. But god, she was perfect. She was everything I wanted. My hands closed into fists, sending pain spiking through my right arm. “Hey.”

“Sorry, I had no idea you’d be here,” she said, glancing up at me from below her lashes and then dropping her gaze to the clipboard in her hands. “Just needed to grab some logs from Nat…” she trailed off, her dark eyes rising to meet mine again. Holding there.

Desire coiled inside me, winding through every cell of my body, pushing the pain from my hand to the far reaches of my awareness. “Yeah, whatever.”

Stupid. Stupid.

She stepped across the room, headed for the exit, and panic rose within me. It wasn’t enough. I needed more. Being near her even this brief second had been the best thing I’d felt in days—even if she hated me.

“You’re just going to go?”

She stopped, turning to face me, and let out a pained sigh that matched the desolate look on her face. “What do you want me to do, Shepherd?” The question was nearly a whisper, and laced with every ounce of pain and frustration I felt.

“Maybe ask if I’m okay?” I raised the bruised hand, and she flinched as she looked at it.

But then she straightened, her eyes taking on a steely glint. “No. I’m not going to ask. Because I did ask, and you shut me down. You made it clear you don’t want me near you. So this?” She pointed at the door. “This is me respecting your wishes.”

That desperation rose again inside me and my mouth started working before my brain. “Didn’t stop you the other night.”

“That was before,” she whispered. “You made it clear it didn’t mean anything, that it was nothing.”

“It didn’t feel like nothing.” Why was I goading her? Why couldn’t I say the right words, the ones that would make her eyes soften and her lips lift into the smile that she’d given me this summer?

“You came to my apartment,” she hissed.

“You didn’t stop me from touching you.”

Silence. She stood there, staring at me as the heat from my body evaporated and I started to feel cold.

I suppressed a shiver. With the dissipating heat, my anger seemed to drain from me, the desperation I’d felt to keep Celeste near replaced with acceptance.

This was an impossible situation. I shook my head. “What are we doing?”

She watched me deflate, and the pain I saw in her eyes twisted a knife in me. I saw sympathy there. Pity, maybe. “Nothing. Not anymore,” she said, she turned to go, her hand on the door.

I was on my feet without intending to stand, my hand reaching for her. My voice shook as I whispered her name. “Celeste.”

She turned, eyes wide as they moved from my face to where our hands met, my bruised fingers touching her wrist.

She moved, reversing the hold so that my hand lay in her palm, and she softly closed her long, elegant fingers over my swollen, bruised ones.

A tiny sigh escaped her, and she raised her eyes to mine.

Every molecule around us froze, the room suddenly in a universe removed from this life, this problem.

“Celeste. Don’t go.”

One step. That’s all she took before she was in my arms, her mouth crashing into mine.

I spun her, and the clipboard clattered to the ground as I lifted her to the training table. Her legs wrapped my waist as my mouth found her throat, tasting every centimeter of her skin like it was the last taste of anything I might have.

Her hands grabbed at the skin of my back, her nails digging into me as she pulled me closer with her thighs, her center hot on my waist. I found her mouth again, our tongues thrashing as if in battle, and a low moan escaped her throat, making me so hard it was painful.

“Not here,” I said, picking her up from the table. There were private dressing rooms off the sauna, and she slid from my body, retrieving her clipboard and following me into one, locking the door.

Inside the close space, we stood for a second, facing one another, chests heaving, eyes locked.

“This is a mistake,” she said, but there was no heat in her voice.

“I don’t give a fuck,” I told her.

And then she was on me again, bolted to my body in the close space, her hands pulling at the shorts I wore, peeling them from my skin as she dropped to the floor on her knees.

She looked up at me, and my heart stopped.

This image would be seared into my mind forever—her big brown eyes framed by thick lashes, her hair a wild mane around her gorgeous face, and those perfect lips pressed against the tip of my cock.

But I couldn’t let her do it, not after the way I’d treated her.

I dropped to my knees to face her, and kissed her gently.

Then I got to work removing her clothing.

The sweatshirt fell easily from her arms and she lifted them so I could pull off the tank she wore beneath it.

Skin…so much skin. I bent down to kiss her shoulder, licking, biting, as she moaned .

I pulled her back to standing and untied the joggers she wore, pushing them down with her panties all at once. She toed off her shoes, and stood before me in her bra and nothing else—every inch of her perfect.

But the delicacy of the moment couldn’t last. It was too much, too tender to support the anger between us.

So it broke. It snapped and frenzied lust took its place as I dropped a hand between her legs and took her mouth again.

She moaned as I pressed her against the wall, hard, my hand relentlessly teasing, stroking.

One of her legs wrapped my waist, and I pulled my hand away, soaking wet. I stroked myself once, her moisture enough for both of us, and I couldn’t repress a deep groan. She was so fucking hot. Angry, tender, it didn’t matter. I’d take her any way she was willing to give herself to me.

As I slid into her wet heat, inch by devastating inch, she moaned my name.

I had never been this hard, I was sure of it.

Sounds erupted from each of us, nonsensical words, syllables laced with need, with tension, with the unraveling of whatever this was we shared.

“I can’t...”

“Oh… fuck.”

“God...”

“Don’t stop…”

It was another plane—another realm outside the pained isolation of the training room just a few moments earlier. It was paradise, surrounded by the searing flames of hell. A moment of truth floating in a tiny boat amid a raging sea of pain and betrayal .

Celeste’s hands were in my hair, pulling, fisting painfully. I pressed my forehead to hers and opened my eyes to find her watching me, her face a mask of ecstasy.

“I’m so close,” she whispered as I plunged into her, again, again.

“Oh…” her mouth formed a circle and her eyes slid shut, then flew open again, wide, pupils dilated. “Oh god.”

She held me there, trapped in the fierce grip of her hands in my hair, and I watched her unravel, our foreheads touching. And when she was done, her head pulled back and her chin lifted, and I exploded inside her, holding her against the wall as the muscles in my legs threatened to give out.

“Fuck,” I said, breathing hard. God, she felt good in my arms. For the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe my life wasn’t spinning completely out of control.

“God, Celeste, I…” I wanted to tell her everything.

About Ethan and the money. About my father.

About the team. But I couldn’t tell her about Ethan.

She was working for the guy now…It would only make her life harder.

We stayed there, pinned together in that tiny space for a long moment. And the moment unspooled and time caught up with itself again.

She pushed me away, sliding back down the wall and dressing faster than I would have thought possible.

“Celeste…” I wanted her to talk to me. Wanted to talk to her. But her next words made it impossible.

She wouldn’t look at me. “This shouldn’t have happened. This didn’t happen.”

She was right. But it didn’t make it hurt less. “Wait,” I tried, having no idea what words I’d supply to follow that one.

“No. I have to go. Goodnight, Shepherd.”

And then she was gone. I leaned against the wall, every ounce of strength in me gone. And I was still so fucking hard.

She was the only thing I really wanted. And the one thing I ruined, over and over again.