Page 399 of Bad Prince
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Tristan
I told myself watching her match would calm me down.
That was my first mistake.
My second was thinking I could sit in a generic hotel room hundreds of miles from campus with two teammates arguing over room service fries and keep my head on straight while Stella Cortez lit up a playoff court on my phone.
The stream quality was garbage. The audio kept clipping.
Somebody in the gym had a whistle that sounded like a dying bird.
Didn’t matter.
The second I saw her on screen, everything in me locked.
She looked lethal.
Hair up.
Shoulders gleaming under the lights.
Kneepads on.
Eyes hard.
There are beautiful women and there are dangerous women.
Stella has somehow always been both, and tonight the danger was winning.
I sat on the edge of the bed in sweats and a black team tee, elbows on my knees, staring at my phone like it held the code to my entire nervous system.
Maybe it did.
Kane came out of the bathroom toweling off his hair, took one look at me, then at the screen, and snorted.
“Oh, so we’re all pretending not to know what this is?”
I didn’t glance up.
“Shut up.”
He wandered farther into the room and peered over my shoulder just in time to watch Stella go up for a kill and absolutely smoke the ball through a double block.
The sound of it cracked even through the bad speaker.
Kane let out a low whistle.
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
He looked at me.
Then back at the screen.
Then at me again.
