Page 2 of Save Your Breath

For a split second, we were both eighteen again.

She was begging me to kiss her.

I was begging her not to let me.

I knew even then that we were wrong for each other.

I knew even then that we’d break each other’s hearts if we ever tried to be more than friends.

“Whatever,” she said after a moment. The word was resigned, not laced with any sort of edge, and that upset me more than if she’d screamed it.

I could handle her yelling at me.

I couldn’t handle knowing I’d hurt her — even with all the practice I’d had over the years.

She sniffed, waving her hand in the air like I was one of the people paid to wait on her. “Do you at least have some tequila or something?”

“Need to get drunk to face the truth?”

“That I’m stuck in a high-rise condo with my fake fiancé with a hurricane barreling toward us?” She stood, a saccharine smile on her tight lips. “Um, yeah. Drunk is the bare minimum.”

She stormed past me and into my kitchen, and I took a deep breath, letting it out as slowly and calmly as I could as I folded my hands together and rested them on top of my head. I stared up at the ceiling, debating converting to the first religion I could think of just to see if there was a god who could save me.

Mia needed to drink to get through this, and I needed to sit on my fucking hands.

Because she wanted to hit me, and I wanted to kiss her.

And with the two of us forced to stay together for the night, I had no idea how the hell I was going to keep up the charade of anything I felt for this woman being fake.

Be A Good Boy

July — Three Months Earlier

Aleks

My phone was burning a hole in my pocket as the team’s media relations manager attempted to burn a hole through myheadwith his murderous glare.

Strings:Call me. It’s important.

Strings was the nickname I’d given to my only friend in the world back when I first met her. We were just sixteen then — she, an awkward girl with a guitar glued to her hand, and I, a broody asshole with a hockey stick glued to mine.

I knew her as Mia Conaway, my best friend.

The world knew her as Mia Love, world-famous pop star.

Mia’s text came through just as I was shoved into the conference room where half of our public relations team, along with our General Manager, were ready to lay into me. I’d had no choice but to put my phone away and wait to respond until after my lashing.

But where I should have been focused on the threats being thrown my way after I’d fucked up — yet again — all I could think about was her.

Despite how close we were in high school, our lives had gone in separate directions over the last eight years, the two ofus living on different coasts, and practically in different worlds. Every now and then, our paths crossed — she’d get to come to a game of mine, or I’d catch one of her gigs. Sometimes we’d find ourselves reunited with her parents for a holiday. But for the most part, about the only time we communicated was through a text or a smart-ass comment on social media.

So the fact that she’d asked me to call her, that she’d said it was important…

“You’re bleeding,” Dan Kilman said, rolling his eyes as he fished a tissue out of the box in the center of the conference room table. He handed it to me with a flourish before he was pacing again.

I dabbed at the corner of my lip where it had split, not the least bit fazed.

I was a hockey player, for fuck’s sake.