“You can’t solve this, Ty. He’ll do it. He’s not bluffing. He’ll ruin you to get what he wants.”
“He can’t ruin me, Faith.” He pointed to Pebbles jumping up on her back feet. “Settle your ass down.”
The dog stopped barking and sat. Faith would have been impressed if she didn’t have more important things on her mind. “He planned to trade you, but I think I’ve convinced him that you broke up with me. So I don’t believe he’s going to now. Which makes your being here too risky. You have to leave. Sneak out somehow, just in case.”
She expected some sort of gratitude. Instead his gaze narrowed even more. “And you weren’t ever going to tell me any of this?”
Her eyes started to water once more. “No.”
Deadly quiet, he asked, “Why the hell not?”
She thought she’d made it clear. “Because you have a lot of other things to worry about right now.”
“And you thought what? That you should sacrifice yourself and hand over your hockey team?”
She brushed a sudden bead of moisture from beneath her eyes. “I know how important winning the cup is to you.”
“Don’t you think you’re important?”
She stilled and her hands fell to her sides.
“I see that you don’t.” He folded his arms across his chest like he was mad at something. No, not something. At her. “You don’t have a very high opinion of yourself. Or is it me you don’t have a very high opinion of?”
“I have a high opinion of you.” She was confused and shook her head. “Why are you mad at me?”
“Why?” he asked, incredulous. “I’ve been in hell these past few days. I almost punched your assistant because he’d seen you and I hadn’t. I’ve been walking around worried and pissed off and it all could have been avoided.”
Now it was her turn to be incredulous. He’d almost punched poor Jules. “How?”
“You should have told me about this. You should have let me take care of it. This involves me too. Do you honest-to-God believe I’d let you hand over your hockey team to cover my ass?”
She nodded and laid it all out quite reasonably for him. “For five years I let Virgil take care of me. Now it’s my turn to take care of someone.”
He laughed without humor. “You want to take care of me?”
“Yes.”
“If I let you do that, what kind of man does that make me?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant.
He cleared it up for her. “It makes me a pussy.”
“It’s done.” She’d saved his ass and he was worried about being a “pussy”? So much for gratitude. “I signed the letter of intent to sell.”
“If I recall, you signed one before and changed your mind.” He moved toward her. “Do you trust me?”
“To do what?”
“Do you trust me, Faith?”
It seemed very important to him, so she answered, “Yes.”
He shoved his hand in his pants pocket and pulled out his keys. “Then show up for Game Seven tomorrow with your skates.”
“Landon banned me from the skybox.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just show up with your skates, and when we win, come out onto the ice.”