Page 5 of Price of Victory (The Saints of Westmont U #5)

FOUR

AIDEN

Practice had been good. Better than good, actually. I’d held my own against players who’d been working together for years, and Coach had even nodded approvingly when I’d assisted on two goals during scrimmage. The team was warming up to me, slowly but surely.

Well, most of the team.

“You guys hitting up Lumière?” Patrick asked as we finished changing, his voice carrying that easy camaraderie that came after a solid practice. “I could use a beer and some terrible bar food.”

“Count me in,” Elio said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “Lennox? Rhett?”

I watched Rhett’s face carefully as the invitation spread around the locker room.

There was the slightest tightening around his eyes when he realized I was within earshot, the kind of micro-expression most people wouldn’t catch.

But I’d spent years studying faces at business events, learning to read the tells that revealed what people really thought.

“Yeah, sure,” Rhett said finally, like the words were being dragged out of him.

“What about you, Whitmore?” Easton asked, because he was team captain, and it was his job to make everyone feel included. “Want to join us?”

The apprehensive look that flashed across Rhett’s face was so quick I almost missed it. Almost. But I caught it, and the satisfaction that bloomed in my chest was probably visible on my face.

“Sounds great,” I said, making sure my smile was just charming enough to seem genuine. “I’d love to get to know everyone better.”

Rhett’s jaw tightened by a fraction, and I had to bite back a grin. This was exactly the reaction I’d been hoping for.

The thing about Rhett Morrison was that he was the only person I’d ever tried to flirt with who’d put up an impenetrable shield between us.

Most guys fell over themselves for a chance to get close to me.

I was good-looking, rich, confident, and open about what I wanted.

It was a winning combination that had served me well for years.

But Rhett? Rhett acted like I was some kind of plague carrier, like getting too close might contaminate him with whatever moral bankruptcy he thought ran in my family. It was annoying. Worse than that, it was boring.

Didn’t he know that hate-fucking was the best way to deal with unchecked anger? We could solve both our problems in about twenty minutes if he’d just stop being such a self-righteous prick about it.

Lumière was exactly what I’d expected from a campus bar—dimly lit, sticky floors, music just loud enough to make conversation require some effort.

The kind of place where college students came to pretend they were sophisticated while drinking beer that tasted like it had been filtered through old socks.

The team had claimed a large table near the back, and I slid into the booth across from where Rhett was sitting with Lennox. He was trying very hard to ignore me, focusing on his conversation with his roommate like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard.

But I caught him looking. Quick glances when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, his eyes tracking my movements when I got up to use the bathroom or my gestures while telling a story to the freshmen. He was trying to be subtle about it, but subtlety had never been Rhett’s strong suit.

After about an hour, I watched him get up and head to the bar, presumably to get another round for himself and Lennox. Perfect. I drained about three-quarters of my beer in one go and followed him, leaving just enough in the glass to provide cover for my approach.

He was waiting for the bartender’s attention when I sidled up next to him, close enough that he’d have to acknowledge my presence.

“Noticed you noticing me,” I said, letting just enough cockiness creep into my voice to get under his skin.

Rhett snorted, a sound that was equal parts derision and disbelief. “In your dreams, Whitmore.”

“In the locker room,” I clarified, because there was no point in being coy about it. We both knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Then you failed to notice me pouring bleach into my eyes afterward,” he shot back, but there was color rising in his cheeks that suggested the memory wasn’t entirely unpleasant for him. And it definitely wasn’t bleached out of his mind.

I leaned against the bar, making myself comfortable. “If you want to see it again, you just have to ask. You don’t need to be sneaky about it.”

Rhett spun around to face me, and I could see the barely controlled anger radiating off him in waves. His brown eyes were dark with something that might have been fury or might have been something else entirely.

“You have no shame,” he said, and it sounded like an accusation.

“That makes everything so much easier,” I agreed, tilting my head to study his face. “It means I don’t need to tiptoe around the things I want.”

“Why are you stalking me to the bar?”

“To get a drink,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward the bartender, who was still working on someone else’s order.

Rhett pointed at the beer in my hand. “You have one.”

I made a show of draining the rest of it in one long swallow, then set the empty glass on the bar with a soft clink. “Now I need another one. Simple math, Morrison.”

He was grinding his teeth so hard I was surprised they didn’t crack. “You’re unbelievable.”

“You’re lame,” I countered. “You should learn to have some fun.”

“If by fun, you mean sending dick pics in the first message, I’ll pass.”

The words hit me across the face, and I felt my carefully maintained composure slip for just a moment. That was a low blow, bringing up something that had been thoroughly embarrassing and completely blown out of proportion.

“That was private,” I said, unable to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

“And I never made it public, you little shit. But maybe that’s why you aren’t asking me to show you my dick in person.

You’ve got an old copy of Zing! to leaf through.

” I forced a chuckle, trying to play it off like the memory didn’t still sting.

Because it did. The whole thing had been a fucking nightmare, spun and weaved by a media machine that fed on scandal and humiliation.

For just an instant, Rhett’s features softened, and I saw something that might have been sympathy flash across his face. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“Who owns Zing! ?” I asked, because we both knew the answer.

“It’s your fault for trying to hook up with our journalist,” Rhett said defensively, but the fire had gone out of his voice.

“Your journalist, who was on a hookup app looking for exactly what I was offering,” I shot back. “Don’t act like I corrupted some innocent lamb. He knew what he was doing.”

“Right up until he decided selling your photos was more profitable than sleeping with you.”

The bartender finally made his way over to us, and Rhett ordered two beers with the practiced efficiency that came from being a regular. I ordered a whiskey, neat, because I needed something stronger than beer to wash the taste of this conversation out of my mouth.

“You really think this is all some master plan, don’t you?” I said while we waited. “Like I transferred here specifically to make your life difficult.”

“Didn’t you?”

I studied his face, looking for some hint that he was joking. But he was completely serious, which was almost funny. “You think you’re that important to me? That I’d uproot my entire life just to mess with you?”

“Your family’s tried it before.”

“That’s business, Morrison. This is…” I gestured between us, trying to find the right words. “This is something else entirely.”

The drinks arrived, and Rhett grabbed his beers like they were lifelines.

But before he could escape back to the safety of his friends, I caught his wrist, just for a second, just long enough to feel the warmth of his skin and the way his pulse jumped under my fingers.

Well, I might have imagined the latter. Or it might have been my pulse.

“You know what I think?” I said quietly, close enough that only he could hear me over the bar noise. “I think you’re afraid that if you let yourself want something, or someone, you might actually get it. And that terrifies you more than anything else.”

He jerked his wrist free like I’d burned him. It was a wonder he didn’t spill a drop of beer. “You don’t know anything about what I want.”

“Don’t I?” Knowing what people wanted was something of a superpower of mine. Rather, people were easy to read and lacked the imagination to want much beyond a nice snack and a good fuck.

For a moment, we just stared at each other, and the air between us felt charged with something dangerous. His pupils were dilated, his breathing shallow, and when his tongue darted out to lick his lips, I had to resist the urge to lean forward and see if he tasted as good as he looked.

Then he was walking away, carrying his beers back to the table like nothing had happened. But I could see the flush creeping up the back of his neck, could see the tension in his shoulders that hadn’t been there before.

I leaned against the bar and sipped my whiskey, watching him settle back into his seat and pretend to listen to whatever story Lennox was telling. But his attention kept drifting back to me, quick glances that he probably thought I wasn’t catching.

The whole incident came flooding back as I stood there, and it was not the sanitized version that had made it into the gossip rags, but what had actually happened.

I’d been on a hookup app, like half the gay men in Chicago, looking for someone to help me forget about the pressure from my family and the constant feeling that I was disappointing everyone just by existing.

The guy had seemed normal enough. Cute, mid-twenties, said he worked in media but was vague about the details.

We’d exchanged messages for a few days. They were flirty, sure, but nothing explicit until he’d asked for photos.

And yeah, I’d sent them. Not in the first message, whatever the collective memory of Chicago’s gay community might think, but after we’d been talking for a while.

It hadn’t been a dick pic that started the conversation, but good luck proving that to anyone who’d already made up their minds about what kind of person I was.

The photos had ended up in Zing! two days later, along with a breathless exposé about the “wild lifestyle” of Chicago’s young elite.

They’d pixelated just enough to maintain plausible deniability, but anyone who knew me would have recognized my body, my apartment, the distinctive scar on my hip from where I’d torn my ACL junior year of high school.

My father’s media empire had unleashed a storm of denials, lawsuits, and legal threats after the incident.

The official story was that the photos were deepfakes, sophisticated but fake nonetheless.

Most people had believed it, or at least pretended to, because calling Richard Whitmore’s son a liar and a boy whore to his face was bad for business.

But the gay community in Chicago was small enough that rumors spread like wildfire, and the collective memory had settled on the idea that Aiden Whitmore liked to flaunt his impressive size to anyone who showed interest.

It was bullshit, but it was the kind of bullshit that stuck.

I finished my whiskey and signaled for another, watching Rhett laugh at something Patrick had said. The flush hadn’t faded from his face, and when he reached for his beer, I noticed his hand wasn’t entirely steady.

That wasn’t a terrible outcome, all things considered.

I’d gotten under his skin, made him think about things he was trying very hard not to think about.

And he really did have a nice ass. It looked like it would fit perfectly in my hands, would look incredible in a pair of jeans or, better yet, out of them entirely.

In fact, he was the only guy with a really nice ass who wasn’t bending over for me at the first hint of possibility. Which should have been frustrating, but somehow just made me want him more.

My second whiskey arrived, but the taste was all wrong, bitter and harsh like disappointment mixed with regret. I threw cash on the bar, probably twice what I owed, and headed for the door without looking back at the table.

The night air was cooler than I’d expected, and I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, trying to decide if I wanted to go back to my empty apartment or find somewhere else to drink away the taste of rejection.

My lust was far from quenched, but it felt like a burden tonight.

It felt heavy and unsatisfying, like hunger that couldn’t be filled, no matter how much you ate.

I’d spent three years in Michigan perfecting the art of getting what I wanted, and now I was back to being seventeen years old and wanting something I couldn’t have.

It was pathetic, really. I was Aiden fucking Whitmore. I could have anyone I wanted, anytime I wanted them. So why was I standing outside a college bar, feeling sorry for myself because one uptight hockey player couldn’t see past a family feud that had nothing to do with either of us?

But even as I told myself that, I knew it wasn’t true. This wasn’t about the family business or old grudges or corporate warfare. This was about the way my pulse had jumped when I’d touched his wrist, the way he’d looked at me in the locker room when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.

This was about wanting something I’d never had to work for before.

I walked back to my car, fishing my keys out of my pocket and trying not to think about the way Rhett’s eyes had darkened when I’d leaned close to him at the bar.

Trying not to wonder what would have happened if we’d been somewhere private, somewhere he couldn’t hide behind his teammates and his moral superiority.

But as I drove through the empty streets back to my apartment, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something important, some key piece of information that would unlock whatever wall Rhett had built between us.

Because one way or another, I was going to figure out what it would take to make him stop running from what we both knew was there.