“Your bad mood doesn’t have anything to do with a pretty girl who may or may not live down the hall from you, and may or may not have been half-naked in your kitchen this morning, right?”

“You’re gonna want to get out of my face right now.”

Rigby reached over with one arm and gave me a side hug, the disarming bastard. “We’ll talk about this at home, Riv. No need to be so grumpy about shit that you don’t need to be grumpy about.” With that, he strode out of the locker room and down the hall toward the conference room with Perrier, the goalie.

Ludo came up to me, his tie still undone around his neck. “Lover’s tiff?”

“Fuck off, Ludo.” I picked up my bag and strode down the tunnels beneath the stadium. I needed to find a bar. I needed to find a pretty little puck bunny who’d be happy to take the edge off this fucking horniness.

That’s what I’d do. Rigby or Julieta would get Nova home. I’d go down to Biscuits Bar and get fucking slammed until I could find a girl and not imagine she was Nova as I fucked her.

“River!”

Shit. I’d thought about Nova too hard and she’d appeared. I seriously considered ignoring her. I thought about pretending I hadn’t heard her shout for me down this near-empty hallway. But I couldn’t. Because I wanted her so bad, my body was turning before I’d even made a conscious effort.

She bounded up to me with a grin. “Good game!”

It was deceptively easy in that moment to see her as just any other beautiful woman, in her jersey and her sneakers, a grin on her face from watching sixty minutes of a brutal sport. She wasn’t Huey’s mom. She wasn’t the woman raising my best friend's baby. She was a woman barely out of college, fresh-faced and happy.

And irresistible.

I grabbed her by the hips and spun her against the wall, my mouth landing on hers hard. She froze in shock, her lips still beneath mine, but only for a heartbeat. Then she was kissing me back. Her hands went up to my shoulders, gripping me tightly, like she was holding on so she wasn’t swept away.

I groaned into her mouth. She felt electric in my arms, my fingers flexing against the soft curves of her hips, wedging her tightly to my body even as I had to stoop down to kiss her. I wanted to go deep, taste more of her.

I picked her up and pressed her against the concrete wall, and she hissed at the cold sensation. I didn’t care. I’d warm her back up again. She wrapped her legs around my hips, clinging to me as our tongues fucked.