As it seems to be the case with every important away game, the fan bus was overbooked. I think the organizers secretly plan it that way, because they’re just graduated puck bunnies who would love nothing more than to ride with the team.
I would know. Amanda is one of them.
Whatever job CPU hired her for has kept her out of my line of sight until now.
She sits with a few other girls on the team bus. Coach already informed us that we’d be sharing, and he said it with a distant sigh. Like… it’s not unexpected. It would be more unusual if it didn’t happen.
But then I see Violet waiting for Greyson, and my stomach twists.
What would the odds of Aspen choosing this bus be?
Out the window, I can see the other bus waiting for us to load up. The buses travel together, which means that the fan bus inevitably follows where the team bus goes. Including to the stadium to pick up the team.
After a quick scan to make sure that Aspen is ducking me, I spin around and trot right off the bus.
“O’Brien!” Coach hollers.
“Be right back, Coach!”
I head for the second bus. The driver squints at me in confusion, but he opens its doors for me anyway. I pound up the stairs. The students break into cheers when they see me. Every one of them is decked out in over-the-top school colors.
“Aspen Monroe,” I call out loudly.
The bus goes quiet.
I spot her toward the back, next to her roommate.
“If you don’t come with me right now, I will go back there and carry you out,” I threaten.
She stares at me for a long moment, and I wonder if she’s going to actually call me out on my threat. But then her lips quirk into a smile, and she rises. She saunters down the aisle, ignoring the stares, and stops right in front of me. Her head has to tip back to meet my gaze, and I lean over her.
She cranes back farther.
“What are you doing, sweetheart?” I ask her loudly. “You’re supposed to be with me.”
“Is that a rule?”
“When you’re my girlfriend, yes.”
That gets everyone’s attention. Murmurs start up behind us, the noise steadily climbing. And Aspen’s face gets redder and redder, until she finally sucks that gorgeous lower lip between her teeth and nods.
“I’m taking this one,” I tell the driver, perhaps unnecessarily. He doesn’t seem to have much authority beyond driving anyway.
I curl my fingers around Aspen’s hand and tug her off the bus, quickly crossing to mine.
Ours.
Whatever.
Coach waits by the door, his hands on his hips. “What’s this, O’Brien?”
“Sorry, Coach, she’s my pregame good luck charm.” Hockey players are superstitious, and perhaps Coach the worst of us all. If I say she’s what I need to get my head in the game, then she’s what I get.
Besides, I’d rather focus on the feel of her instead of thinking about how I’m going to meet her gold-digging mother after this one.
I don’t release her hand. Not until I’ve sat and tugged her into the seat beside me.
What I really want is her on my lap, but Coach would probably yell about that. So, I’ll wait until he gets absorbed in his book or movie on his phone, whatever he has planned to keep himself occupied this time, and then I’ll have my way with her.
I brought her home after practice on Thursday and left. And then yesterday, it seemed like we were pulled in two opposite directions. I only saw her at lunch, for the briefest of moments.
Not enough.
Coach gives us some spiel about bus safety and how the trip will be four hours. We’ll have time to check into our hotel rooms and grab a ridiculously early team dinner, then we need to report to the stadium.
“Why did you want me with you?” Aspen whispers.
“Because.”
This is our first big away game, and last year, Greyson made this big stink about Violet being on the bus. Until he put her on his lap. Then he played the best game of his life.
Well, okay, the best game of his life thus far. He proved to continue to get better after that game, which I attribute to Violet.
Knox, on the other hand, seems to fluctuate. Willow isn’t his good luck charm, that’s for fucking sure. Which is why he’s sitting up front, closer to Greyson and Violet, and Willow is talking to Miles and Finch with one of the other dance girls. Michelle, maybe?
Their names escape me sometimes.
“‘Because’ isn’t a reason,” Aspen argues, drawing my attention back to her.
I shake my head and pull my phone from my pocket, unwinding the earbuds I had already plugged into it. Aspen stares at me as I set it to my pregame playlist and fit the buds in my ears.
With a sigh, she does the same. Hers are the fancy Bluetooth ones, though. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, when I should be focusing on the game ahead of us. She shifts, she flexes her legs. Her fingers tap on her thighs, and it takes me a few minutes to realize she’s not randomly tapping—she’s playing an imaginary piano.
And suddenly, my playlist be damned, I want to know what she’s playing.
I shut off my music and reach for one of her earbuds, plucking it from her ear and putting it in mine. The sweet melody of classical piano fills my head.
She glances sharply at me, and her fingers stop moving.
I glare at her.
She glares back.
I can’t exactly tell her what I want—which sounds fucking crazy anyway. So I turn away and pretend to ignore her. But my heart is hammering, and I peek at her again. It takes a moment for her to start drumming again. Her fingers match the notes. Maybe. I don’t know much about music, but the timing seems right.
“Can you play this one?” I interrupt.
Her fingers don’t stop, though. They dance in place, and she sighs. “I can.”
“I want to hear you.”
“You did,” she says. “And then you drugged me.”
I shrug. “You were feeding my dad information. I had to find out a way to stop it.”
Her mouth drops open, and she twists in her seat to face me fully. “Are you kidding? That’s why you did it?”
My brow furrows. “Why the fuck would I kid about that?”
“Because I told you that I wasn’t giving him anything.” She hits my arm. Hard.
I glance over the seats toward Coach. His head is down, so whatever. Fuck it. I grab her and haul her onto my lap, adjusting her until she’s straddling me. She squeaks in surprise, gripping my shoulders. Her ass settles on my thighs, her knees at my hips.
Her weight on me feels right, somehow.
Like we’re a perfect fit.
“I didn’t trust you,” I say, leaning up to get right in her face. “What was I supposed to do, Aspen, just believe that you were going to keep my image clean for my father? Any little bit of information you gave him could be twisted against me. And trust me, sweetheart, he’s been trying to get anything on me to prove I’m a disappointment.”
“Is your relationship with him really that bad?” she whispers. “I don’t understand why he asked me in the first place, why—”
“Was Crown Point your first choice?”
Her gaze shutters. That wall drops down, and she doesn’t answer.
So it wasn’t.
“My father manipulates people for a living, Aspen. I have my inheritance, but I’ve never done what he’s truly wanted: to take over his business. To become exactly like him. For a while, I was on track to do just that.” My fingers find their way under the hem of her shirt, inching up her back. “But then I found hockey.”
“And you want to make a career out of it,” she guesses.
“Exactly. So, outwardly, my dad is supportive. But on the inside, he’s boiling. Itching for a reason to yank me from this school and force me to join his business.” I shrug, like it’s not a big deal. But it does sting, sometimes, to know that he doesn’t really give a shit about what I want. “Dad has an empire. Empires need rulers, succession. And sometimes, I think Dad plans to force me to work for him.”
Aspen shifts closer.
My fingers reach her bra clasp, and I unhook it quickly. The band immediately loosens under her shirt, and I slide my hands around to her front. She sucks in a breath when I palm both of her tits.
I wasn’t lying when I said I loved them.
They’re the best fucking things I’ve ever seen. Perfect size for my hands, pretty nipples. If we weren’t on a bus, I’d push up her shirt and take one in my mouth.
As it is, my fingers will have to do.
My cock hardens between us, but I ignore it. A little tension will do wonders for my game—I think. I’m hoping.
“Steele,” she gasps. “What—”
“I just want to see if you’d come like this,” I murmur. “You can grind on me if you need to.”
Her face flushes. She went with makeup today, dark-blue stuff on her eyelids and dark-red lipstick. I’d love to kiss her senseless, but then Coach would really know that we were up to no good.
“Touch yourself,” I say under my breath.
Her eyes flash, and she lifts her head. She’s not so tall that she’s visible above the headrests of the seats. I can see if I crane my head, but she should be okay. Which means that we’re in our own little bubble with no one in our row.
Still… I say it knowing that she’ll refuse.
And then she actually fucking does it.
I like that she surprises me. I like that I can guess a hundred different scenarios and she’ll pick the least likely, the one that I never saw coming. Of course, there are other ways that I can read her like a book.
For example, the way her breathing hitches when I roll her nipples between my fingers and tug. Or when I palm her whole breast, my fingers digging into her flesh, and her eyes lose focus.
Her hand slides into her jeans, and she fucking touches herself. She tips her head back and lets out a soft moan like a quiet porn star, and I rip my hand out from under her shirt to cover her mouth.
She stares at me, eyes wide, and her hand in her pants moves faster.
My cock throbs. I might actually combust just from watching her, and the movement of her body so close to it is the sweetest torture.
I press my hand harder to her mouth, stopping the escape of certain noises that would definitely give us away. Her lips slide against my palm, and then her tongue flicks out.
“Fuck,” I groan. “You’re mine after the game.”
I pinch her nipple, and she whimpers.
Her eyes dilate, and she grinds down on my thigh. Her back arches, and her body goes tense as her orgasm overtakes her. I absorb it all and try not to blow my load just from the sight. After a minute, she comes back down to earth.
She pulls her hand from her pants, her fingers wet. She glances from them to me, then smears them across my lips.
Jesus Christ.
I open my mouth, and her two fingers slip in. I close my lips around her digits and taste her, not releasing them until they’re clean. I slip my hand out from under her shirt and remove my other one from her mouth. Her dark-red lipstick is smeared a bit, across her cheek. And there’s a messy print of her lips on my palm.
I ball my fist, protecting the mark. I’m not going to fucking wash that off until I have to, that’s for sure.
Aspen sags against me. She hooks her bra back together, fixing it under her shirt while she leans on my chest.
I wrap my arms around her and hold her against me.
The music is still playing in our ears, and I find that I don’t even mind listening to her classical shit.
Eventually, my hard-on goes away. Sort of. There’s no way I’m going totally soft with the gorgeous girl sitting on my lap, playing with my hair, but it’s not raging to the point of poking her eye out.
“You’re supposed to be wearing my jersey,” I say at some point. Time has passed, that’s for sure, but neither of us have moved. Just her fingers in my hair, twisting it and scratching at my scalp in a way that feels too good to be real.
“You didn’t give it to me,” she says, picking her head up from my chest.
I smirk at her messed-up lipstick and wipe at it with my thumb. She frowns and lets me do it, cleaning up the dark red until it’s contained to her lips again.
Her lip print is still on my palm, though. Right where I want it.
Well… I can think of better places.
But my palm is good for now.
“I brought a spare,” I inform her. “And we’re sharing a room.”
Her eyes narrow. “How?”
Knox and Greyson are the experts. I asked them yesterday, and they said they’d take care of it. Not sure what that means for Aspen’s roommate, or where she’ll end up. Maybe she’ll get a room to herself. Either way, all I know is that my girl will be in my room tonight.
We just have to survive our parents.
Oh, and the game.
