All Chapters of Off The Ice: Fake Dating The Hockey Captain : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Charlotte's POV "No." Ryder's voice was sharp. "Why not?" I asked. "Because I don't dance." He said quickly. "Everyone dances." I said. "Not me." He picked up his glass. "Ryder." I leaned forward on both elbows and looked at him. "Your team just won. It's Friday night. We've had..." I counted in my head. "A reasonable number of drinks..." "It's four drinks now." His voice was flat. "A reasonable number." I pushed my hand across the table, palm up, and left it there. "One dance. That's it." He looked at my hand, then at my face, then back at my hand. "You're not going to drop this," he said. "I really am not." I smiled. He exhaled through his nose, set his glass down, and looked at me one more time, then he reached across the table and took my hand. His grip was warm and firm and certain, and he stood and pulled me gently up with him, and I followed him to the small dancefloor near the back of the bar feeling very pleased with myself.. He put his hand on my lower back an

Charlotte's POV I woke to sunlight streaming through Ryder's blinds, my body aching in the best way. For a moment I just lay there. His arm was draped over my waist, his chest rising and falling slow and steady against my back, and his room was warm and quiet and smelled like him, and everything was fine for approximately thirty seconds. Then reality hit. I slid out from under his arm carefully, holding my breath every time he shifted. He didn't wake. I found my clothes on the floor, my jacket half under the bed, one boot by the door and the other one God knows where, found it eventually behind the chair. My panties were gone. I checked under the bed, behind the nightstand, near the bathroom door. Nothing. They had simply ceased to exist somewhere in the chaos of last night and I did not have the time or the dignity left to keep looking. I pulled my clothes on without them, grabbed my jacket, and opened his door with both hands so the click was barely a sound. I didn't leave a

Roxanne's POV I told myself I was just walking. Campus was quiet on Saturday afternoons, the kind of quiet that had nothing to do with emptiness and everything to do with everyone being somewhere, doing something intentional. Games, training, the library, the common rooms. Everyone with a place. I didn't have a place, so I was just walking. The training grounds were a ten-minute walk from the residential block, and I was not going there, not really. I was going in that direction because the path was clear and the air was cold and I needed to be outside. That was it. It was completely coincidental that the path ran directly alongside the fence where you could see the whole field clearly if you happened to glance over. I glanced over and stopped. Tyson was running full contact drills with three other guys and the word that came to mind was was devastating. He was big in a way that the suits and the corridors and the party settings softened, out here in training gear with nothing

Tyson's POV Alice set the antiseptic kit on the counter, looked at my face, looked at Roxanne's face, and made the quiet decision to be somewhere else in the suite. Roxanne pulled the stool out and sat across from me without saying anything. She opened the kit, picked up the antiseptic pad, and reached for my hand. I let her take it. She started cleaning the knuckle and I watched her work focused, precise, not looking at my face, and tried to figure out what was sitting in the room with us because it was thick enough to feel. "I didn't know you had a medical background," I said. "I don't." Her voice was flat. "You're doing alright for someone without one." I said. "It's a cut, Tyson. Not surgery." She pressed the pad down and I felt the sting. She didn't look up. "You didn't have to do that, you know." "He had her arm." I said. "You provoked him." She reached for the gauze. "He let go and then you stayed in his space until he swung." "Was I supposed to walk away after he

Roxanne The cold hit me the second I stepped outside. The suite had been too warm and too loaded and his voice had been too close and I had stood at that door for three full seconds before I made myself walk through it, which was three seconds longer than I should have needed. I pulled my jacket tighter and kept walking. My brain kept replaying the almost-kiss, no part how hard I tried to erase it. He had leaned in, actually leaned in, not part of any plan, it wasn't a performance and I had pulled back like an idiot. My wolf had also thought the same way. She'd been lodging her complaint since the moment I stepped into the corridor. Who knows what would have happened if you didn't pull back. She said. I kept quiet, we both knew what would happen. You should have just let him kiss you, why did you pull back? She asked. I didn't have an answer for that. Instinct, maybe. The same instinct that had been protecting me from exactly this situation since I was twelve years old and