บททั้งหมดของ North & Rye: The Billionaire Hockey Captain Next Door: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 48

Emma: I was turning the key in the front door when I heard footsteps behind me. I knew who it was before he said my name, which was irritating enough on its own. “Emma.” I kept my hand on the lock. “It’s late, Ethan.” “I know. I waited until it was.” Of course he had. Ethan had always been annoyingly considerate whenever I wanted him to be careless. I turned and found him standing several feet away, his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. He had left enough space between us to make it clear he wasn’t going to force a conversation. “I’m not here to argue,” he said. “I need to say a few things, and then I’ll go. If you never want to see me again after tonight, I’ll respect that.” I folded my arms, still holding my keys. “Go ahead.” He glanced toward the bakery, then back at me. “I wasn’t trying to sabotage you. Or play you. Or use you. Whatever version of me you’ve been carrying around for the last two weeks, that isn’t who I was with you.” “You still kept the truth from me.”

Emma:The rink barely resembled the place where I had first watched Ethan skate laps by himself months earlier, my coffee cooling untouched on a bench across the street. Lights now looped along the rafters, handmade banners brightened the boards, and children filled every corner of the building. More than I had ever seen there at once. Some crowded against the glass, while others sat on the benches in various stages of being laced into their skates.Sophie and I had spent the morning setting up a table near the entrance with trays of pastries and a coffee urn borrowed from the bakery. By the time the doors officially opened, half the neighborhood had already come through. People greeted one another as if it were a holiday instead of an ordinary Saturday, which probably said more about how badly everyone had needed something good than it did about the rink itself.Ethan was there, though I had to look for him. He stayed near the far boards, helping a little boy adjust his helmet while

Emma:Morning light slipped through Ethan’s curtains, soft enough that I stayed where I was for a moment, listening to the city stir beyond the windows. His apartment still felt unfamiliar in the quiet of morning. So did the fact that I had spent the night there, tucked against him instead of waking alone in my loft.When I turned over, Ethan was already awake. He watched me with an openness I wasn’t used to seeing from him before coffee, before either of us had decided what the day might demand. I pushed myself upright and reached for my shirt on the floor, but when I glanced back, I saw the crease between his brows.“What’s wrong?”“Nothing.” He rubbed both hands over his face, then let them fall into his lap. “I don’t know. I’m scared.”“Of what?”“That you’ll go back to the bakery, go back to your life, and by tonight you’ll have convinced yourself this was a mistake.” His gaze dropped to the sheets. “That whatever happened last night won’t survive daylight.”I understood why he w

Emma:Two days after we finally made things official, Ethan asked me to leave the city with him for the weekend. He refused to tell me where we were going, which meant I spent the first hour of the drive guessing badly and pretending I wasn’t curious. By the time we were halfway there, I had run through every town within a reasonable distance and accused him of taking me to a cabin with no plumbing. “You’ll see,” was all he gave me.The beach house sat far enough from the road that the only sounds were the water and the wind. For two days, neither of us mentioned hockey, bakeries, fathers, or anything waiting for us back in the city. We let the rest of the world remain somewhere behind us. It was probably borrowed time. I knew that. I also knew better than to examine it too closely when I was finally happy.We spent the first evening on the deck with a bottle of wine between us, watching the tide come in while we tried to remember how to sit still. Ethan was better at it than I was. I