Page 22 of Stand Your Ground

“Was it like… a dare or something?”

“No,” he said with a rueful laugh. “It was my first year in the league. Our rookie party. She was the one who invited us up to her hotel room — three of my teammates and me. Her namewas Zina. She was gorgeous, confident, and… let’s just say she knew exactly what she wanted. She told us straight up it was her fantasy to have multiple hockey players at once, and she was in charge from the second we walked in the room.”

I raised my brows. “In charge?”

“Oh, yeah.” He grinned at the memory, sheepish. “She set the rules, told each of us what she wanted, where she wanted it.”

“You really do have a thing for Dommes, don’t you, Rook?”

“She was so kinky, Liv,” he said, sipping his wine with a grin like he was lost in the memory. “And honestly, I was kind of just enjoying watching. She was having the time of her life. But she saw me in the corner, probably sensed how nervous I was, and she crooked her finger at me and said, ‘Come here, baby. This is your lucky night. You can put it anywhere you want.’ So…” He shrugged. “I took her at her word.”

“You chose ass.”

He laughed, rubbing the back of his neck. “I figured opportunities like that don’t come around every day.”

That had a laugh bubbling out of me, too, as I stole the bottle of wine from him. “Well, I promise, with me? There will be plenty of ass opportunity...”

Carter paled when I sealed that promise with a wink. “Why do I feel like you’re talking about ass in a completely different context.”

“Oh, don’t be scared,” I cooed, rolling onto all fours before I stood. “I think you’ll like it.”

Carter scrambled up to meet me. “I think I need to revisit those safe words.”

“So, you’ve really never had sex?” I asked. “I mean, in the traditional sense. You’ve never fucked a woman vaginally?”

He swallowed, that beautiful pink shade of embarrassment tingeing his cheeks again. “Never.”

Something flared in my chest at the admission.

Maybe it wasn’t just the payday that had me buzzing.

Maybe it wasn’t just the fun of it all.

Maybe it was the promise of untouched territory — and the power that came with claiming it.

Free to Explore

Carter

“Atta boy, Carter! Let’s fucking go!”

The praise from Jaxson hit my ears as soon as I won the draw against the San Francisco Sea Dawgs’s center. We were on the penalty kill, and I won the draw clean in our zone, snapping it back to Vince to start the breakout.

And we were off.

Up by one with three minutes left in the game, every single one of us was locked in.

It was always a toss-up in a game like this — either every minute flew by in the blink of an eye, or every second dragged like the game would never end.

It was the latter in this case, my muscles screaming, lungs aching as I struggled for breath. We were in battle mode, defense doing everything they could to keep that puck away from where Will Perry, also known as Daddy P, guarded the goal while the rest of us looked for a breakaway to seal the win.

The last three minutes of a matchup were ripe for surprises. Just because we’d played the stronger game didn’t mean they couldn’t come back and tie it, forcing us into overtime, or, worse — score twice in a row and send us into the locker room with our tails tucked.

We had to be focused, all of us, to see this through.

And in a time where it should have been the last thing I was thinking of, I couldn’t help but channel what went down at Livia’s condo last week.

I should have been focused on the puck, on getting it down the ice and into our opponent’s net. Instead, I found myself thinking about those last couple of minutes of our first lesson, of how tightly strung I’d been, how hard I’d fought to focus enough to get her there before I let myself go.