Full Contact

by ANDIE J. CHRISTOPHER

  She didn’t miss the fact that a couple of people had pulled out their phones and were taking pictures or filming her. They could take all the pictures or videos they wanted. Maybe one of them would find its way to Anders and he would know the truth. She didn’t believe for a second that anything she did or said now would change his mind about them together, but she wanted him to know the truth.

  “You do get paid for it, then?” Those were brave words for someone with two black eyes from the last time he called her a whore.

  “You know, you’ve been making jokes about who I get down with and how for years now. I wonder why that is?” She slapped a towel down on the bar in front of Red Hat so hard he jumped. Coward. “Is it because I would never fuck you?”

  He sneered. “I could never afford you.”

  “That’s true.” She pulled a glass and poured herself a Surly. If she was going to end up going viral, she might as well have a little buzz on. “But you can’t afford to pay your bar tab, either. And that certainly doesn’t stop you from showing your face here.”

  He sputtered as she took a long gulp of her drink. At this point, there were more than a few people watching and filming. She put down her beer and pulled out the check. She opened it up, and made sure Red Hat could see.

  His eyes rounded into full-on plates, and he looked like a fucking cartoon character. When she ripped the check down halfway, he reached out like he was going to try to stop her.

  As the paper gave way, something inside Dahlia lit up. She might be giving up her ability to leave here immediately, but she was taking her dignity back.

  “Anders Sorenson didn’t have to pay me anything to sleep with him. Because you know the difference between him and you?” She didn’t wait for Red Hat to answer, but leaned in close to his face. “He doesn’t need to pay for it.

  Then she turned and faced the crowd. “You people are strange and sick that whether or not a guy has had sex before holds this kind of fascination. But, then again, I shouldn’t be surprised. None of you held back when it came to gossiping about an eighteen-year-old girl getting assaulted at prom.”

  A few of the crowd had the decency to look shame-faced, but most stared at her slack-jawed.

  “Everybody out. Bar’s closed.”

  Dahlia wanted to be alone when she started crying about this.

  The cold air from the vents in the training room chilled Anders’s skin as he waited for the team doctor and head physical therapist. Since he’d been back in New Orleans for the last week, and thrown himself into training—and resting—his knee felt a thousand times better. Still, waiting for the team doctor to clear him to skate with the rest of the team kicked up the nerves in his system.

  His agent seemed nervous, not that him nervous was a huge difference than his agent on a normal day—he paced more while screaming at his assistant over the phone.

  When the trainer came back in with one of the team’s doctors, Anders’s stomach turned sour. Doc kept his eyes on the chart, and didn’t meet his gaze. Not a good sign.

  He wanted to stand up and walk the fuck out. He didn’t need to hear that his hockey career was over to know what was about to happen. After Dahlia, didn’t he know that he couldn’t trust himself? He might have been feeling better, but that didn’t mean that his knee was healed. It only meant that he was fooling himself again.

  “Seems like a distraction was what you needed.” Doc’s words were about the opposite of what he’d expected to hear. “I kept telling you that you needed to rest, and it sounds like laying down and letting that chef have your v-card was the way to do it.”

  He didn’t want to burst the doctor’s bubble, but fucking Dahlia hadn’t been restful. He’d gotten rest because he hadn’t been able to do anything but the prescribed PT and training since he’d left her.

  “What are you saying?” He thought he’d be elated when he got the all-clear to skate, but he wasn’t sure he was hearing that. Maybe Doc meant that he was “on the road” to recovery, but that he couldn’t get back out on the ice yet.

  “I’m saying you’re ready to play again.”

  Anders had his career back, but he still didn’t feel the kind of relief he expected. And he knew that part of him still felt empty because Dahlia wasn’t there. Then again, she’d never really been there. She’d all but warned him that she was the kind of girl who looked out for number one. He was the fool who wanted to believe that she cared about him because she didn’t go directly to the press after they slept together.

  But she’d taken the check.

  “You don’t look happy.” His agent might be a huge dick hole, but he was pretty good at reading people—even Anders.

  “I’m happy to be getting back to hockey.”

  “Then why do you look like you’ve just seen an animal cruelty video?”

  “Are you still having significant pain? The scans are clear, and the swelling is down, but we can take another look,” Doc said.

  Anders stood up and turned towards the exit. “The knee feels fine. Finally.”

  “Is it about the girl?” Sam wasn’t about to leave him alone. “I always liked working with you because I never had to deal with any paternity disputes or mediate between competing puck bunnies.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that now.” He didn’t need his agent’s help dealing with Dahlia. It was all about time and distance. He’d get over her as soon as the fact that she’d slept with him for the bounty didn’t loom larger in his head than the fact that he still wanted her.

  “I gotta admit, she’s not who I pictured you with.” Sam should shut up if he didn’t want to get a black eye. Even though he and Dahlia were done, Anders still felt like he needed to protect her. He was more fucked than he thought if he still wanted to break someone’s face for talking smack about her.

  “Don’t talk about her.” He stopped and turned to Sam, barely stopping himself from grabbing a fistful of his agent’s ten-thousand-dollar suit and pushing him against the wall.

  “You saw the video?”

  “What video?”

  “The one where she tore up the check.”

  “She what?”

  Sam pulled out his phone and cued up a video of Dahlia behind the bar, confronting the dumb fuck in the red hat who Anders had put down the night they’d met. The sound was shit, but she got in the guy’s face and tore up the check. Conflicting emotions filled his chest—pride that she stood up for herself, anger that she had to, shame at his own unwillingness to take a minute and listen to her instead of jumping to conclusions.

  “She tore it up.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said as though Anders had gone daft. “I mean, it could still be a publicity stunt. Maybe the check was fake.”

  He watched the video again and again. Every time, he looked for something that indicated that her anger wasn’t genuine, that it was staged. But it wasn’t, and he was in the wrong for not staying until she could explain. And he watched it again because he needed to look at her. The fact that he couldn’t touch her right now tore at his gut.

  He wanted to celebrate his clean bill of health with her. After that, he wanted to kiss her everywhere, and he wanted to wake up knowing that she’d be there the next morning. He didn’t just want her to visit, he needed her to stay.

  But he had no idea how to make that happen.

  “You’re really hung up on this one, aren’t you?”

  “I’m in love with her.”

  “You know that’s crazy, right? You have lost time to make up for, and plenty of hockey-loving, complication-free pussy waiting for you in the parking lot.”

  It might make him a weirdo, but he didn’t want to sow wild oats. He didn’t want anyone but Dahlia. She was the only brand of distraction he would ever need.

  “You still have a company plane at your disposal?”

  Twelve

  Dahlia never thought her family would force her into doing a local television segment. First of all, there was the purple hair. Throw in the vir
al video and her recent infamy on professional hockey blogs, and she expected her mom to encourage her to hide in her childhood bedroom forever.

  But her uncle had decided that she would be the best person to represent the resort during their push for reservations during “Fall colors,” which appeared sometime between September 1 and October 1. They were fleeting, but the resort made a ton of money from hikers and couples looking for a romantic place to get married or take engagement pictures. They were fully booked, even midweek, and Dahlia agreed to do a short cooking segment on a local morning show for the Minneapolis network affiliate because she needed to get away.

  Every time she came across a couple kissing on the boardwalk or hiking the Temperance during her daily run, she wanted to throw up. Now that she’d stopped tolerating bullshit from the assholes she went to high school with, she wasn’t about to go piling it on herself. She missed Anders, and she was woman enough to admit it.

  Still, she had too much pride to call him. She couldn’t take him not picking up, or hanging up the phone. Lying in bed the night she’d torn up the check, she’d let herself imagine him calling and telling her that he’d made a mistake. But she hadn’t gotten a call.

  She had appeared on local TV before. Prior to her segment, she made sure there were a couple versions of the main dish she planned to prepare and a couple of fun entertaining ideas to share. The make-up artist clucked over her face so long she didn’t get to decompress in the green room before they pushed her into the soundstage kitchen.

  She smiled at the perky, hungry-looking co-anchors and forced herself to smile. She hated being on display like this, especially now that people outside of the culinary world in Minneapolis knew who she was.

  Every line of her body felt tense when the producer counted down. Some of her anxiety eased as she went through the recipe, answering inane questions about the preparations and possible wine pairings. By the time they got to the apple crisp with honeycrisp apples, she felt almost completely at ease. Both co-anchors had stuck to questions about the food and the resort.

  The last thing she was expecting when the anchor threw to commercial was to hear him say, “And, in our next segment, local hockey-hero Anders Sorenson will join us to talk about his future in hockey. Stay tuned.”

  Dahlia wasn’t sure if the station had gone to commercial when she dropped the entire pan of dessert on the counter at the same rate that her stomach fell.

  Anders was in the building with her right now.

  It had to be a coincidence, or a mistake, or a sick fucking joke from the universe. Her first instinct was to run, leave her knives and her street clothes and run down Nicollet Mall before he saw her or found out she was here. Her second instinct was to find him and kick him in his good leg for not letting her explain. And her third, and most unreasonable, idea was to find him and drag him into a supply closet to remind him what he was missing out on by not being with her.

  But while her mind flew through the possibilities, Anders came out of the green room and looked straight at her. Fire raced through her veins—a heated combination of lust and a little bit of anger. The more disturbing sensation was the open, raw wound in the middle of her chest as she froze under his icy gaze.

  He didn’t stop looking at her while walking over to the grouping of chairs where he’d presumably be interviewed. Time stretched out as she ate up the vision of him in a suit. His gait was smooth, and he moved in that supple way athletes always walked—no hitch in his step.

  She’d never seen him dressed up, and that was a damned shame. If he was hers, he’d be required to wear a suit every day. But he didn’t belong to her. He hadn’t called, even to tell her to fuck off.

  When his mouth curled into a smile, she didn’t know what to think. Was he happy to see her? Or was he going to do something shitty—like deny that they had ever been together—on television? She didn’t think he would do that, but this whole situation was so weird she couldn’t feel her hands anymore.

  When he sat down, he gave her one last look and mouthed wait for me.

  Another guy in a suit showed up at her shoulder, and if he asked her to move, she was probably going to have to punch him in the junk. Anders wanted her to wait for him, and it was the first bit of home she’d felt since tearing up that check.

  “I’m Sam,” the man said as he leaned in.

  “I don’t care who you are. I’m staying here.”

  “Anders asked me to make sure you caught his segment.” She put a finger over her mouth in the international symbol of shut up, and the guy chuckled. “You’re trouble.”

  “I will be if I don’t see this.” She crossed her arms over her chest, running hot and cold and more nervous than she’d been before the previous segment. She felt like she was going to faint or throw up or die, and she wasn’t the one on television anymore.

  Then the producer counted down and the sports anchor introduced Anders.

  When Anders took his gaze off hers and put the careful smile back on his face, she felt as though he’d tossed a glass of cold water on her face. The anchor—thankfully—stuck to business. This wasn’t the way she wanted to find out that his knee was going to be okay, but that didn’t stop the relief from sinking into her bones.

  “Not all the publicity you’ve gotten recently has related to the Cup or the Ragin’ Cajuns.”

  He breath caught and she clutched her throat with one hand, hoping to stop any sounds from coming out.

  Anders shook his head, smile gone. “No, unfortunately, my personal life has gotten quite a bit of attention lately.”

  “Specifically, there was a bounty on something we can’t talk about on morning TV.”

  Anders looked at Dahlia, and she didn’t know whether it was good or bad. The man standing next to her disappeared and the anchor could have fucked off for all she cared when Anders said, “I think we can talk about me falling in love on morning television.”

  “Love?” The anchor’s one-word question was the same as the scream inside her own brain.

  “Yeah, love.” Anders didn’t look away from her, and she thought she’d turned into some swooning maiden. “I’ve been so focused on hockey since I could stand up on skates that I’d forgotten what was important. This injury—it forced me to take some time away and re-evaluate what I really want. And the bounty was always a stupid distraction. In a way, it kept me focused on the game.”

  “But the bounty’s over.”

  “Yeah, Phil, the bounty’s over.”

  “Well, Anders, thanks for taking the time to come on and good luck—”

  Blood rushed in her ears and she grabbed the counter for balance. Before she knew what was happening, Anders had his mic off and was stalking towards her. His gaze was trained on her, and she felt like prey as he approached. He grabbed her arms, probably more forcefully than he’d ever touched her, but it made an awareness deep in her belly hum.

  “Get lost, Sam.” Then he turned all of his lightning-hot attention on her. “Green room?”

  She nodded. “You mean me?”

  He furrowed his brow. “Huh?”

  “You love me?”

  He smiled then. “We should talk about this in private.”

  “You said you loved me in a very public way.”

  “But that’s the last time anything between us is public.”

  She walked with him down the corridor. They were the last two segments, and they were alone once her shut the door to the room where guests waited for their bits.

  She didn’t know if she should touch him, but he took away that worry when he set his mouth on hers. At that moment, she knew that he’d meant what he’d said. The last couple of weeks had made her feel like she didn’t have a grasp on reality, that her few days with Anders had been a nice dream, but that her world was dim and quiet and limited.

  But she hadn’t imagined this heat and fire; it came back in full force the second he laid his hands on her. He palmed her ass over her chef’s pants, and she moaned when
he squeezed. She pressed her pelvis into him, eager to feel him hard against her belly.

  Reluctantly, she stopped and pulled back. “You can’t know that you love me.”

  He furrowed his brow again and reached for her. She backed up until her legs hit the couch.

  “I love you.”

  “Then why did you leave without a word?”

  “I was confused about everything. What happened between us moved so fast that I couldn’t believe it was real.”

  “If you’d just needed a beat you could have told me that.” She walked back toward him, but she didn’t trust herself enough to touch him again. If she did, she’d get lost in him, and maybe he wouldn’t say what he needed to say—what she needed to hear—for her to be able to trust that this was a real thing between them. “You thought I accepted the bounty.”

  “For a few days.”

  Knowing that he believed that about her, even for a few minutes, gutted her.

  “How can you say you love me when you believed that?”

  He grabbed for her hand, and she let him take it. She still wasn’t confident that she could accept this apology, but stopping this small touch was beyond her.

  “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” He leaned down and touched his forehead to hers. “I wasn’t thinking straight. Everything about the two of us confuses me.”

  “Maybe you’re confused.”

  He looped his other hand around the back of her neck, and she felt the touch all the way to her toes. “I’m not confused anymore. A few minutes after I left, I realized that it wasn’t you—it couldn’t be you who told people about us. It was Motz, the dweeb.”

  “He left before I could rip up the check and stuff it up his ass.”

  “I knew it had to be something like that.” His smile proved the fact that he liked the visual she’d created.

  “And if you need the money to leave and be close to me in New Orleans, I’ll get them to re-issue it.”