Page 23 of Never Dance with the Devils (Never Say Never #6)

“I forget how much I hate you sometimes,” I grumble. My family is good too, both my parents and my sister, and I’ve helped them out too, but Maddox truly won the parental jackpot.

“Same,” Kayla agrees with a wry smirk.

“There are no romantic skeletons lurking in my closet, unless you count being thirty and never having actually had a serious relationship?”

“I do count that as a character flaw,” I offer, holding up a hand helpfully, and Kayla laughs at our comfortable teasing.

“Me too. Definite red flag,” she agrees.

Unbothered by our verdicts on the matter, he continues, “I dated here and there. Had a few casual girlfriends in my younger days, but basically, my whole life has centered around hockey. I made playing professionally my goal on my eighth birthday and never broke focus. Me and hockey, we’re like this.

” Maddox crosses his fingers. “Always and forever.”

She looks to me for confirmation, and I nod. “He’s telling the truth. Bor-ing!” I deadpan.

“Then I return to my original question, which you so deftly attempted to side-step. How’d this happen?

” Kayla asks, swinging a pink-tipped finger from me to Maddox as she sits back in her chair, still close but not touching either of us.

Her eyes have gone shrewd, her face stoic, and I recognize that we’re entering the interrogation part of the evening.

If Kayla has questions, which I’m sure she does, well then, we’ve got answers.

I already told her the worst of it, and I’ll tell her whatever else she wants to know to get inside her again.

My PIN number? 1230. My biggest fear? Roller coasters, and not being able to play hockey anymore.

My most embarrassing moment? Tripping over my skate lace and missing the game-winning goal when I was in the Pee-Wee leagues, because while sprawled on the ice, crying my eyes out, I’d looked up and realized the most popular girl in school, the one everyone had a crush on (including me), was looking right at me.

I’d been eleven, and it was catastrophic as far as I was concerned.

Not trusting my ability to say the right thing, I stay quiet, giving Maddox the floor.

“Yeah, about that…” he says slowly, “we told you we’ve done this before, but to be clear, not this .

” He waves a hand at the three of us around the table, his confidence cracking for the first time.

“Dinner dates and swapping life stories? Totally virgin territory here.” He means he doesn’t do those things, but he also checks in on me to see how I’m handling all this .

He knows this is the first date I’ve been on since Eliza, which should be a big deal, but it pales in comparison to this being the first date I’ve ever been on as one in a party of three, which is what Maddox is tip-toeing around too.

We haven’t done this, wouldn’t have even considered it until now. Until Kayla.

She has this energy, like she’s made up of chaos at her core but is uniquely able to control the wildness by the sheer strength of her will.

Mixed in with a ladylike presence that makes me want to treat her like a princess and filthily fuck her at the same time.

And I like never knowing what’s going to come out of her mouth, whether something polite or something sharply targeted.

I can’t help but want to be around her, and I’m pretty sure Maddox feels the same way. We didn’t discuss the logistics of a three-way date, the same way we never discussed them for a threesome. We winged it then and we’re winging it now. So far, I think it’s going pretty well.

“Just a Mad-Trick, right?” she says like it’s a serious ‘gotcha’.

Fuck. Spoke too soon.

“Ooh. Straight for the jugular, huh?” Maddox winces, grabbing at the back of his neck uncomfortably.

“Okay, first of all, and this seems particularly important, we didn’t name it that,” he rushes to explain.

“We didn’t even know about it, and when some girl called it that, right after , I might note, saying it was a blend of my first name and Riggs’s last, we were… ”

He looks at me like I might have a description, and I shake my head, not sure what we were—surprised, horrified, both? In the biggest hurry of our lives to get that girl out of our bed? That one, for sure.

“There’s a whole Reddit page about you two, you know?”

I nod reluctantly, all too aware. Once I got over the initial shock, I basically decided to ignore it, but now, I hate that Kayla saw that before talking to us. It makes it sound like something it’s not, like Maddox and I are something we’re not.

Trying to make sure she understands that this is different from whatever she read about us, Maddox says, “As you can imagine, after Eliza, Riggs was pretty fucked up.” He pauses to give me a chance to argue that fact, but I blink slowly, silently agreeing.

“And I was forcing him to go out, sometimes with the team and sometimes, without. Just to keep him from hyper-focusing and crashing out. There was a girl who wanted to take us both back to the hotel—her idea, and that night, we were just drunk enough to do it. Neither of us had ever done anything like that, but it… worked. Like it was just an extension of our friendship, you know? And while the suits on the team and in the league aren’t exactly happy about it, we’re not doing anything illegal. So it kinda became our thing.”

If you’d asked me a few years ago if I’d be fucking women with my best friend, I’d have punched you.

Maddox probably would’ve laughed his ass off.

I’ve never been one to share, and he’s definitely not the submissive type.

But with us, there was never any issue. He has his style, I have mine, and with the right woman, we all enjoy ourselves immensely. Like we did with Kayla.

“And…?” she pr ompts, asking without asking.

“No sword play, if that’s what you want to know. We’re friends, brothers in a way, but when we’re fucking, it’s all about…” My voice drops, going rough. “Well, now it’s all about you.”

I lay my hand back on her thigh, teasing my pinkie finger under the hem of her dress. Maddox smiles warmly, agreeing with me as he does the same to her other leg, more roughly pulling her thighs another inch apart.

“Me.” She says it like she’s considering the meaning of the word on a deeper level.

Like she can mentally play out all the possibilities, both good and bad, and I don’t know, maybe she can.

She’s definitely smart enough to analyze this whole thing more than Maddox and I could.

Or would want to. As different as we may be, we’re both ‘follow your gut’ types, more used to instincts than deep analysis.

Kayla, on the other hand, despite her spontaneous surrender to our night together previously, is a full-blown type-A strategist who I suspect can read people easier than most can read a picture book.

So when she looks past us to the living room beyond and says, “I think I’d like that tour now,” it feels like the beginning of something amazing.