16. Trevor

16

TREVOR

The Devil Birds won. I didn’t play, and they won. Mac had a hat trick. Alvarez was great on the first line. The guy brought up from the Demon Geese got an assist to earn his first point in the PHL. Everyone had a great game. Because I wasn’t on the ice. I wasn’t a distraction. No one had to step up to prevent me from becoming roadkill, so they could focus on getting the puck in the net.

Am I being selfish wanting to play professional hockey? Maybe I’d help the team more by not being on the roster.

“Stop it,” Mac says in his deep Scottish brogue. We’re sitting together on the flight home from Colorado. Sophie and Randi are huddled together across the aisle, giggling over something Randi has pulled up on her phone.

“Stop what?” I ask, looking first at him and then across the table to Bedard and Stone. We’re playing the card game Uno and Bedard just hit Stone with a draw two card.

“Thinking you’re not good enough and shouldn’t be on the team. Don’t be daft. You’re necessary. You belong. You not being on the ice didn’t help us win tonight. Our losses aren’t because of you. Hockey is a team sport.”

We joke about Mac being able to read minds, and he swears he can’t, but it’s spooky how much he knows.

“Yeah, but…”

“No,” Mac says firmly. “You start thinking this shit and it’s going to screw you up. Everyone hits rough patches. There’s a bunch of shit hitting the fan all at once—trying to make the playoffs, you having to compete on the dance show, me and Bedard getting into relationships…”

I’m startled when he says this. Shocked when Bedard nods in agreement.

“Dude,” our team captain says, “it’s not just you dealing with changes and worrying it’s affecting your game. You also have the other teams placing a bounty on you. They aren’t doing that because you’re dancing with Sophie. They’re doing it because you are so important to us on the ice and how it’ll impact us if you aren’t playing.”

I swallow thickly. It’s nice to hear these words from my teammates, men I respect and care about.

“But…” I say again.

“But we are a team,” Bedard says insistently, with Stone nodding in agreement. “Our success does not rest solely on your shoulders. As important as you are, everyone is important. We all have our roles. And we’ve all slipped sometime during the season. It’s a shit show when it’s a bunch of us at once, but that’s not your fault. You’re not getting any time off. When you’re not skating, you’re dancing. You’re doing everything you can. Give yourself a break.”

I appreciate his kindness, but I’m not dancing for me, I’m dancing for Sophie. I can’t let temporary weakness undo what Sophie’s been working toward for a lifetime. Nodding, I throw a card down on the pile to move the game along.

* * *

Waking in my own bed with Sophie in my arms is a heaven I never knew existed. We arrived home at dawn and fell into bed. I’m going to miss the peace I find holding Sophie. Hockey doesn’t press sleepy kisses on my pec or wear the cutest pink plastic eyeglasses I’ve ever seen. Swallowing the lump that forms in my throat whenever I think about my time with Sophie ending, I press a kiss to the crown of her strawberry-scented hair.

“Hmm…” She nuzzles into my chest. “Good morning.”

“Did you sleep okay?”

She answers me by snuggling deeper under my covers and running her toes along my calf. I yelp because they’re like five little ice cubes against my skin. Her giggle isn’t like tinkling bells. It’s like an asthmatic piglet and that makes me laugh as I wrap her in my arms and roll on top of her. Gone is the sleepiness in her ocean-blue eyes. All I see now is hunger.

Brushing her hair off her forehead, I run my fingertips down the side of her face. “You are so beautiful.”

Her impish grin invites me to kiss the corner of it. “You’re okay, I guess, boyo,” she teases. “Are you okay?”

I press my hard cock against her center. “You tell me.”

She smirks and raises her hips to rub against me. “That part working was never a question. How are your ribs and other bits?”

“Sophie, everything’s working as it should be. I think limbering up before we start dancing is a good thing, don’t you?”

Her low, sexy chuckle rubs her tank-top-covered breasts against my bare chest with delicious friction. I start kissing behind her ear—that always makes her gasp. When I reach the spot where her neck and shoulder meet, the urge to give her a mate mark is overwhelming. It’s what wolf shifters in the old days did to claim their mate, but modern wolf shifters don’t do it anymore. Even if we did, I can’t do it. I can’t claim a mate, especially not Sophie. It wouldn’t be fair to Sophie to claim her as my mate when I can’t give her what any female wolf shifter would want for her life.

My desire to make love to her is still there. It’s always going to be there as long as I live. But I can’t right now. It’s going to reveal too much of my heart, and I can’t do it. I give her neck the tiniest nip as a salve to my soul before rolling away.

“Sorry,” I say. “I can hear Mac and Miranda moving around, and it’s just weird.”

Sophie props up on her elbow and looks down on my face with a furrowed brow.

“You better not start getting performance anxiety on the dance floor too, Trevor.”

I roll my eyes. “Your brother has been watching us dance for weeks. I’m used to that. But I don’t think this brother wants to hear us boinking, and I don’t want to have to look him in the eye over a plate of eggs, knowing the delicious things I just did to his little sister with him in earshot. It’s a respect thing as much as it’s a self-preservation thing.”

With a big sigh, Sophie rises from the bed, giving me a great view of her pert ass cheeks peeking out from the little shorts she wears to sleep in. I almost regret the slight fib I just told. I don’t want Mac to hear what we do, but I added extra soundproofing to my room when I was renovating the apartments, so they’d have to be pressing their ears up to the door to hear anything. But I can’t trust myself to make love with Sophie and not claim her. Not this morning.

She dresses in dance clothes then pulls joggers and a T-shirt out of my dresser and tosses them at me.

As my head emerges from my shirt, I ask, “Are we practicing here, or do we have to be filmed?”

“Practicing here and being filmed. Logan is going to help us. Tonight’s the full moon, so if we can get the part of our dance in shifter form filmed tonight, it’ll be awesome.”

Sophie walks to the window overlooking the field between the barn and the trees. “Can we use the field?”

I walk to her and wrap my arms around her from behind. When she leans back and turns her face up to mine, I bend my head and press a tender kiss to her lips.

“Anything you want, Princess. If I can give it to you, I will.”

It must be my imagination that a mix of sadness and longing flashes in her blue eyes. She can’t want anything from me—she’s been insistent that what we have remains a fling. I don’t blame her.

We leave my room and find everyone sharing eggs and pancakes in the common kitchen. That’s a nice thing about being shifters—we burn calories so efficiently that we can enjoy things like pancakes or waffles and not be cheating on a nutrition plan like our human hockey league counterparts. We do have to pay attention to nutrition, of course, but we enjoy flexibility too.

“You’re starting the choreography for the shifter week dance today?” Miranda asks, dropping marshmallows into her hot chocolate.

Sophie holds out her mug for Miranda to drop some into hers too. Neither one of them is back to drinking tea yet. “Yeah, Logan agreed to film us so we can use the footage for the opening of our dance on the show. With the full moon and it being a clear night, it’s too perfect to pass up.”

* * *

Sophie’s fur is lustrous in the moonlight. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she sprayed glitter to give her an extra sparkle, but it’s all Sophie. The contrast between my dark fur and her silvery strands is striking. She jokes about her wolf being decorative due to poor eyesight, but I could never find fault with a creature so stunning.

We spent the morning working on this portion of our dance. Normally we use counts, but since we can’t speak in wolf form unless we yip or howl, Logan is playing the track on his phone. It will be dubbed into the final version to cut out any of the crunching our paws make on the frozen field we’re dancing in.

Taking our spots across the field from each other, I fix my gaze on Sophie. She’s looking in my direction, but she can’t see clearly enough to view my expression. Is Logan’s camera picking up the way I look at Sophie? It’s like she hung the moon resting heavily in the sky.

“Five, four, three…” Mallory counts us down as she starts the song. Logan is in his golden eagle form and using a specialty camera so he can film us aerially. The dreamy notes of a guitar with a steady drumbeat carry across the field as Sophie and I start our measured advance toward each other, meeting in the center of the field in a stream of moonlight. We move so we’re side by side, facing in opposite directions, and then circle counterclockwise. With the stark difference in our coloring, we’re almost a furry yin and yang symbol as our bodies curve. Logan glides above us, his massive wingspan carrying him silently.

After our circle together, I continue around Sophie until we’re side by side again. We turn our heads and nuzzle each other in greeting and affection. I sneak a playful nip in along her jaw, my wolf’s teeth so close to that place he wants so badly. I can feel the need pulsing in him. Claim her . I can’t. He’ll have to be satisfied with a nip. Her crystal blue eyes, stunning against the pewter-colored fur surrounding them, widen in surprise, but she doesn’t miss a step. We stride in tandem toward the treeline, entwining our tails as if we’re holding hands.

I’m certain we got it in one take, but we do it a few more times so Logan can edit if necessary. We gather in the main room of the barn to watch the rough footage. Daphne is rubbing her eyes as she sits up on the sofa where she’d been taking a nap. Logan gives her a cuddle and rubs her baby bump before queuing up the footage. Pretty sure we all gasp when we realize what Logan’s camera captured. What I’d imagined we would look like pales in comparison to what’s on the screen. We can faintly hear the track in the background, and it confirms that we’re hitting the beat as we approach each other. I’m holding Sophie’s hand as we watch, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to do. And to me, it is.

* * *

The silence in the ballroom is deafening as Sophie and I walk toward the judges hand in hand. There’s a flicker of panic in her eyes when she looks up at me, and I squeeze her hand in reassurance. She has nothing to worry about because the applause is thundering when it comes. Her smile is brighter than all the studio lights put together when she hugs me. I lift and spin her as we reach Ian where he’s standing before the judges’ table. The audience is on their feet, joined by Carlo and Mary Ann. She’s wiping away a tear. Glen isn’t standing, but he’s applauding and nodding approvingly. He motions for the crowd to sit and quiet down, and when they do, he bestows us with one of his rare smiles.

“Very well done, you two. You were stunning in your wolf forms, and the videography for that outdoor sequence was magical. The way you mixed the lifts of contemporary dancing with the classic Viennese waltz was lovely. Trevor, your experience as a cheerleader and your obvious strength created spectacular moments, but you were always in control and Sophie seemed perfectly at ease. Have you ever done lifts and tosses like that, Sophie?”

I look down at her and meet her eyes. She kept pushing me to throw her higher and make our lifts more complex because she wanted to feel what it was like to fly. The trust she put in me is humbling.

“No, Glen, I haven’t. It was incredible. I wouldn’t trust anyone other than Trevor to do some of those moves. I knew he wouldn’t let me fall.”

She’s right, I would never let her fall. But that hasn’t stopped me from falling for her.

“I could see how seriously he was taking it. Trevor, you danced beautifully, but we could see on your face how much you were thinking about everything. You can do this, your body knows what to do, now get your face following the program. No more stress or worry, look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

Mary Ann wipes away a tear before giving us praise. Carlo just shrugs and starts clapping again. We get our first tens from Mary Ann and Carlo, but Glen is stingy and gives us a nine. From what I hear, a ten from Glen is a rarity, but I’m determined to earn one for Sophie. She deserves it. We’ll get tens across the board next week in the semifinals. If I can’t give us a future, at least I can give Sophie the tens she deserves.