Page 77 of Ruthless Game

And people were staring at me like⁠—

Like they’d seen me naked.

Maya glanced up at me, then hopped out of the pool and strode quickly over.

“Emma, you might want to—I mean, let’s go in the locker room, so we can talk. There’s something you need to know.”

Well, that was obvious.

“What’s going on?” I asked, distantly aware that my muscles had gone stiff.

“There’s a⁠—”

The door to the men’s locker room slammed open. It hit the wall and it echoed through the pool like a gunshot.

Lawson stood there, staring at me like he’d never seen me before. No, not like he’d never seen me before. The blatant hatred in his cold blue eyes, and the sneer on his cruel mouth, were familiar.

It was the way he’d stared at me that horrible day.

“Lawson, what⁠—”

He heaved a breath, and if I thought my muscles were stiff, his were so tight, so swollen, so prominent, it was like he was about to break something. Veins stood out on his neck, his arms. And his eyes.

His eyes.

Was that hatred for me? Or for himself?

I wasn’t afraid for me. I was afraid for him.

He jerked his head to the right and to the left, not saying anything, just … growling. Not in the sexy way when I was naked and he was touching me, or vice versa. No, this was an angry, broken animal that wanted to lash out.

I moved forward to him, reaching out to touch his cheek.

“Max, what’s going on? Why are you looking like that? What happened?”

Grabbing my hand, he thrust it away from his face, dropping it like I was on fire and could burn him.

“Don’t fucking—” his chest heaved, like it hurt to say the words, “—call me that. You don’t have the right—” another heave of his chest, “—to call me that. Not after,” he gasped. Was he having a panic attack? “—everything. I was wrong to think we could make this work. Wrong to think I could forgive you. Everything that happened was because of you.” His voice shook. “Everything was your fault.”

He didn’t sound sane. He sounded fucking frantic. Angry and terrified, all at once. Was he here? Or was he in the past?

My heart dropped right out of my chest and landed with a thud on the wet floor.

“Why … what brought this up?”

There was a loud snicker behind me.

“It was probably that video of you both fucking other people. It went viral,” one of the girls who’d flirted with Lawson before said.

I whipped my head around to look at her. “What?”

“There’s a mashup of two videos, both of you younger, both of you …” Maya stopped, like saying the rest would hurt me too much.

As if I weren’t already hurt.

“What are you talking about? What video of us both?” I asked. I only knew of the one with a girl Lawson had thought was me.

No one answered me.