Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 114951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 575(@200wpm)___ 460(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 575(@200wpm)___ 460(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
My lungs seized.
How were we supposed to do this?
How were we just supposed to sit down and have dinner with him in this state?
Panic clawed at my throat.
Suddenly, the television cut out.
“Hey!” Jay screamed. “The game is on!”
“I thought we could all play a game ourselves, instead.”
Shane stood with a grin — holding two Nintendo Wii controllers in his hands.
He handed one to Georgie and then to Jay. “What do you say? Some good old-fashioned competition? Georgie, I’ll be on your team. Bowling or tennis first?”
Jay grumbled, but I could see it in his glazed eyes — his interest was piqued. He was nothing if not competitive. “Bowling.”
“You’re on!” Shane said, and the way he was smiling, the way he bent down to Georgie and helped him pull bowling up on the screen before talking him through the controls like nothing wrong had happened all day…
It wrecked me.
Tears flooded my eyes when Shane glanced up and found my gaze across the room.
“Thank you,” I mouthed.
He smirked, winking at me like it was nothing.
It was everything.
It was him seeing me for exactly who I was, for exactly where I came from, for exactly the baggage I held — and staying, anyway.
It didn’t scare him.
It didn’t seem to faze him at all.
We somehow survived dinner. Jay passed out not long after, and the rest of us had a peaceful evening playing board games.
And later that night, when I crawled into bed with Shane, he pulled me into his chest and let me cry. He held me through every shake of my shoulders, and then he wiped the tears away and swept my hair from my face, his hands framing my cheeks, eyes locked on mine.
“I am so in love with you,” he whispered.
And then he showed me it was true until I forgot about everything else from that day.
Without Looking Back
Shane
Present
The first time I ever had a gut feeling about something, I was seven years old.
It was the night my parents died.
I was with my grandparents. Mom and Dad had been on a trip together celebrating their anniversary. They ended up flying home one day early to try to beat the snowstorm barreling toward the south — a region of the States ill equipped to handle what was coming.
I remember leaning over the back of Grandma’s couch and staring out the window as the snow fell down. I thought it was so pretty, but it also made my stomach turn.
“I don’t like the snow,” I’d said to Grandma.
“That’s silly. Every kid likes snow.”
“It’s dangerous.”
She’d frowned at that, ruffling my hair. “What an odd thing to say about snow.”
I think sometimes the universe tips us off. It gives us that little wriggle in our stomachs or tightening of our chest for a reason. I’d listened to that gut feeling ever since that night, no matter how ridiculous it felt, because I trusted my body. I trusted my instinct.
And now I had a gut feeling that Nathan Black was doing something to compromise the integrity of our game.
It started as nothing more than a flicker in the back of my mind, and I’d convinced myself I was being ludicrous because Ariana being back in my life had scrambled my brain. I didn’t like the man because he was with her, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t a good relationship.
But over the last two weeks, that flicker had grown teeth.
Nathan’s sudden trips to Vegas were easy enough to write off as work-related, but now I wondered what exactly he was doing there. The way he strutted around the facility like he owned not just the team, but the men on it, only added to my suspicion. The way some of my players had been acting was heavy on my mind, too — jokes dying the second I walked into the locker room, eyes cutting away, tension where there’d never been any.
None of it proved anything. But it all struck the same nerve.
I had a very slimy feeling that something gambling-adjacent was happening.
I didn’t tell anyone. I’d considered confiding in my assistant, Kozak, but the truth was I knew I had to be absolutely certain before I breathed a word of it to anyone.
And part of me hoped I was wrong.
Because if I was right, then it meant the mess went deeper than any of us wanted to consider — that the boys might be involved, that they may be being pressured or promised something behind closed doors.
It also meant I could lose Ariana before I’d even truly had her back.
I didn’t have proof of any foul play, and I hated that I was even thinking it. But the thought wouldn’t leave me alone, and I’d learned too young not to ignore that gut feeling.
So, I started writing things down. Dates of his trips and games that felt odd. Comments I heard from him or other staff members or players. Looks between people that made me suspicious. Patterns I hadn’t noticed before but felt keyed into now. It felt insane, maybe even personal, but the truth was simple: once the idea took hold, I couldn’t shake it.