Page 82 of Ruthless Game

Emma blinked at me.

“I wasn’t trying to drown myself, you fucking idiot,” she said. “I needed to think, and underwater is quieter. You know I can swim. I had like, ten more seconds before I had to surface.”

Oh, Jesus.

My heart began to slow, images of her dead and unseeing finally fleeing my mind. I took stock of where I was. In a large body of water, Jesus fuck, clinging to the edge of the pool so I didn’t drown.

“You jumped in the pool?” She said quietly.

I swallowed. My face was wet, and it wasn’t just because I’d almost drowned. “I told you, Angel. I’m not about to lose you.”

She snorted, but it sounded like a sob. “You have a great way of showing it.”

Finding the ladder, I clambered out of the pool, then reached down to lift her out.

“I’m not done in here,” she protested.

“Too fucking bad. After the stunt you pulled, you’ll be lucky if I ever let you near a pool, ever again.”

I didn’t bother putting her down, carrying her back to the women’s locker room, ignoring her as she kicked and slapped and tried to fight me.

“Lawson, put me the fuck down. I want nothing to do with you, don’t you understand that? You called me a whore!”

“I called us both whores,” I pointed out, pushing the door open and heading directly to the showers. I was freezing, and I needed to warm us both up so I could calm down my heart. Seeing her at the bottom of that pool … it was an image I’d never get out of my head, for the rest of my life. A nightmare I’d have every night, forever, only soothed by having Emma in my arms, alive.

She shook her head, fighting me harder. Nails scratched my neck. Any other situation, and I’d take that as an invitation, but for once my dick was too worried about her to want to get involved.

In the shower stall, I turned the water on and began to strip her down, ignoring her attempts to stop me. Once she was naked, I pulled her under the water with me, wrapping my arms tight around her, effectively straightjacketing her so she was trapped against me, and lowered my forehead onto the top of her hair, breathing her in.

“Lawson, let me go,” she bit out.

“No. No, Starburst.”

“Do not call me that.”

“Emma. Angel. I’ll call you anything.”

“Like whore?”

“Never that. Not again. I’m so sorry, Starburst. I never in a million years should have said that. Not back then, and not now. I just … seeing both of us in that video, it brought back the worst night of my life, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

She was quiet for a moment then she relaxed against me. I sighed, just holding her as my heartbeat began to slow to a normal pace. She was here, she was alive, she was mine, and I’d figure out how to make this up to her.

“Lawson, you need to let me go,” she said again, quieter this time.

“When you feel warm enough.”

“No, I don’t mean in the shower. I mean period. Let me go back to Oxford. Stop doing this to both of us. I don’t care anymore. If you want to destroy Jeffrey’s future hockey career, I won’t stop you. If you need to fuck me one time so you can let go of the past and move on, I’ll let you. Hell, do it right here, right now. But I don’t want to do this anymore.”

It felt like she’d slit my throat with the blade of a hockey skate. Like I was slowly dying, bleeding out all over the floor.

“No, Emma,” I gasped.

“Yes, Lawson. You can’t keep me. I thought … I thought maybe we could move past this. But you’ll never forgive me for something I didn’t even fucking do, and I am starting to realize you won’t forgive yourself, either.”

That’s what you’re calling it? That you cheated by choice?

I banished Asher from my head, focusing on the problem at hand.