Loud Mouth Read online

  Finally, something was going right today. Ian let out a sigh of relief and the muscles in his shoulders unwound enough to inch downward from his earlobes.

  Shelby wrinkled her nose. “Milk? Really?”

  “It does a body good,” he and Christensen said at the same time.

  Ian was grinning and holding up his glass to clink against Christensen’s before he realized it. He stopped just in time, changing direction so he gulped down half his milk in one swallow instead.

  It was habit—everyone on the team busted their chops about the milk. It had just made them more likely to order it more often until it became part of their pregame routine. Fine. Superstition. There was no shame in that. Hockey players were notorious for being very specific when it came to game prep. Stuckey had been wrapping his stick the same way since Juniors at least. Blackburn isolated, scaring the shit out of anyone who broke his silent zone. He and Christensen drank milk and chipped at each other. It was what worked. No one fucked with that, not even when the other guy was a complete asshole.

  “I went through two gallons a week growing up.” Christensen wiped a milk mustache away with the back of his hand.

  Like that was anything to brag about. “Me too.”

  “Maybe it was three,” Christensen said.

  Ian snorted. “Oh yeah, well—”

  Shelby interrupted with an exhausted sigh. “If you two don’t stop now, one of you will have grown up drinking straight from the cow until it was sucked dry.”

  The mental picture she described would be giving him nightmares for the next sixty years.

  Christensen made a gagging sound. “Gross, Shelbs.”

  Annoyance sharp as a poker jabbed Ian in the right eyeball. “Shelbs?”

  The fuck? They were becoming buddies with pet names for each other? After spending ten minutes together at this stupid table with its white tablecloth and little candle sitting in the middle?

  “That’s her nickname.” Christensen shrugged. “Everyone needs a nickname. I’m The Smile and you’re—”

  “David Petrov’s journeyman son,” Ian finished, the bitterness in those four words etched into the marrow of his bones.

  That’s all he was to most people—the not-quite-as-good substitute. And now the second-place son. He didn’t have to wonder what they thought. Everyone was always more than glad to share it in every sports column, blog, and Instagram comment.

  Christensen picked up his glass. “Our dad is an asshole.”

  He didn’t think, didn’t consider. The words were just too true for that. “On that we can agree.” He clinked his glass against Christensen’s.

  They both chugged the rest of their milk at the same time—another tradition—while Shelby watched them from across the table as if she was trying to decipher hieroglyphs. “Is this the beginning of a truce?”

  Ian glared at his his former best friend. “Not even close.”

  “Too bad.” She took a sip of her water with lemon. “You two are the only people in the world who know what it’s like to be David Petrov’s son. Man, I’d give anything to have a brother or sister.”

  Yeah, maybe if their father hadn’t hidden Christensen’s existence for all of Ian’s life and then if his former best friend hadn’t continued to keep their dad’s secret when he’d known the truth the entire time, things would be different. But they weren’t. His dad and Christensen had both shown their true colors.

  “This situation is a little different than the usual,” he said.

  “True.” Shelby picked up her menu. “But you two are pretty far from the usual, too.”

  Before he could come up with a retort about how wrong Shelby was, the waiter showed up to take their orders and he was left to wonder if she just might be right.

  …

  For two solid days, Shelby had done everything she could to make sure she wasn’t alone with Ian. It sounded easy when she’d made the plan in her head. Of course, that was before she realized that he’d be sitting in the visitor’s suite watching the Ice Knights games with her.

  Lucy had taken pity on her and joined them for the Phoenix game, but tonight in L.A., Freya had let it be known in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t up for sitting through another game.

  “I’ll watch from my hotel room,” Lucy said as she headed for the suite’s door. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m too far away to give you the evil eye.”

  Now it was just the two of them. And he was in a suit. She’d always been a sucker for a guy in a good suit. Ian’s had probably been custom-made. That would explain how it fit his broad shoulders perfectly and clung to his high, round hockey ass like it had been made for him—because it had.

  Look away, Shelby. There be dragons with really great asses.

  Ian glanced over at her and narrowed his eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?” she all but squeaked in response as she took her seat as quickly as possible and became incredibly fascinated by the linesmen doing their warm-up circles around the ice.

  He let out a grunt. “With your nose all wrinkled like I stink.”

  Ian did smell. Wonderfully. So much so that she may have leaned closer while they were getting drinks from the buffet at the back of the suite so she could get a good long whiff. God, if he noticed that, she was going to die of embarrassment right here.

  “Is that why you smelled me before?” He sat down next to her and did one of those sly pit-sniffing maneuvers.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck. “I was clearing my sinuses.”

  One eyebrow went up. One yeah-sure grunt was emmited. One very hot hockey player turned away from her and focused back on the ice below where his teammates were lined up for the first face-off of the game. Meanwhile, Shelby sat there frozen with indecision about whether to go all in and tell him about her myriad sinus issues and the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about her fake ailment.

  The hockey gods, though, took pity on her.

  The puck hit the ice and they were both glued to the action. Pheonix wasn’t a dirty team like the hated Cajun Rage, but they were hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners go-getters and they wanted to win. Badly.

  By the end of the first period, Shelby’s voice had gone hoarse from yelling. By the end of the second, she’d thrown off any pretense of maybe-sorta-kinda playing it cool and had spent most of it either standing up and cheering on the Ice Knights or pacing in front of the buffet table, grumbling about missed passes as she rolled her six-year-sober coin over her knuckles like the talisman it had become. By the time the second intermission started, she was twisted up so tight, she was ready to pop.

  Plate of snacks in one hand and an unopened beer in the other, Ian sent a pitying look her way. “Want a beer?”

  She palmed her six-year chip, her attention yanked away from the possibilities of the third period. “Nah.”

  “Want something else?” He glanced back at the well-stocked bar behind the buffet table. “This place has pretty much everything.”

  “Ginger ale, please.”

  It was her go-to. Carry around a glass of that and people assumed it was spiked. It wasn’t that she was hiding her sobriety but more that she dreaded having to deal with the other person’s reaction. It usually fell into one of three categories. One, pity. Two, scorn. Three, the come-on-you-don’t-look-like-an-alcoholic-just-have-one-drink disbelief.

  Ian nodded and grabbed an old-fashioned glass. “With?”

  She let out a small sigh and braced for the conversation she’d been hoping to avoid. “Ice.”

  He hesitated for half a second and swiveled around to face her. “You don’t drink?”

  And there it was. Her gut knotted in anticipation of how he’d react. It shouldn’t matter—she barely knew Ian—but somehow it did.

  The reality of that fact had her lifting her chin i
n defiance as she looked him straight in the eye, ready to take the metaphorical hit. “Not anymore.”

  It was easy to spot the moment the lightbulb went off. The slight wrinkling of his forehead and the quick nod. “Sorry.”

  No pity. No scorn. Definitely no come-get-drunk-anyway disbelief. It was more of just straight acceptance.

  Ian handed her the ginger ale. “How long?”

  “Six years.”

  He took a bite off a carrot stick and shot her a long, contemplative look while he crunched. “And how long has The Biscuit been around? It’s been about that, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, close to six years.” Yeah, that brain of his put that together quick. But that had to mean— She gasped. “Are you a secret reader?”

  “Maybe.” The tips of his ears turned pink, and he hustled back toward their seats.

  What? That couldn’t be. She knew her stats. Most of her visitors engaged; that’s what made her site special enough to gain the Ice Knights’ attention, which meant…

  She hurried as fast as she could with a ginger ale filled nearly to the brim down the five stadium steps to the suite’s private row of seats and sat down next to Ian. “Have you commented?”

  He snapped another carrot in half with one bite and ignored her.

  Oh no, this wasn’t going away that easily. No. Way. She cleared her throat with a dramatic “ahem.”

  Letting out a long-suffering sigh, he kept his gaze on the ice as the final period started. “I have not commented as myself.”

  The puck dropped. The clock started. The play went on. And Shelby couldn’t stop staring at the man who’d followed her blog when he had a million other things he could have been doing with his time. “Aren’t you just an onion.”

  “As long as I don’t smell like one,” he shot back.

  The urge to tease him about following The Biscuit was there, but she wasn’t going to keep poking at the bear’s vulnerable underbelly. They could have an unstated truce again. It was better than the pretending each other didn’t exist, especially since her job basically depended on being around him nearly twenty-four-seven.

  “So who do you think is going to finally score?” she asked during a break in play. “My money’s on Alex.”

  Ian scoffed. “Nope. He’s got the twitch tonight. Not gonna happen.”

  She zeroed in on Alex as he sat on the bench fiddling with his stick as he watched a replay on the Jumbotron. “The twitch?”

  “Watch the way he can’t sit still.” Ian nodded at his half brother, a knowing grin on his face, as if he’d had this conversation with Alex a time or twenty. “He’s messing with the tape on his stick, he’s asking for gloves that have been sitting on the heater in the tunnel, he’s chewing on his mouth guard like it’s bubble gum. He’s shit-talking himself in his head after that missed pass. That play always gets him in his own brain. He won’t score. What he needs is to refocus and work on that play until it’s muscle memory.”

  “So help him fix it, Coach Know-It-All.”

  He grunted and retreated back into himself as the players took the ice and the game resumed.

  In the end, it was Phillips who scored off a beauty of a slap shot that the goalie never saw coming. It was one of the most gorgeous things she’d ever see. Shelby jumped out of her seat, yelling her head off. High off the thrill of a close victory, she spun around to face Ian, right hand raised for a high five. Instead of slapping his hand against hers, though, he wound his arms around her waist, picked her up, and twirled her. She didn’t think; she just threw her arms around his neck and kissed him with maybe—okay totally with—a little bit of tongue. In that moment, with her entire body zoned in only on Ian, the feel of him pressed against her, she forgot the crowd and the game and the rest of the world. Then he broke the kiss and she remembered where she was, who he was, and exactly why this was a very bad idea.

  “Shit.” She pushed softly against his shoulders and he let her down. The second her feet hit the ground, she wanted to run. “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have done that. Very unprofessional.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and turned toward the ice. “It was a good goal.”

  “Really good,” she said, trying to ignore the way her lips were still tingling and how that feeling had zipped all the way to her core.

  “Amazing,” he said, looking everywhere but at her. “One for the highlights.”

  Oh God, this wasn’t awkward at all. “Without a doubt.”

  At least this road trip couldn’t get any worse.

  …

  Ian hadn’t stopped thinking about that kiss in two days.

  Every meal when he, Christensen, and Shelby had been sequestered from the team on Lucy’s PR orders for “bonding time,” he’d talked, but he’d been wondering if she kept remembering that kiss, too. Every time they had to watch a game with an empty seat between them like a personal DMZ, he couldn’t help but curse a little extra that the team had entered a scoring drought. And now, when she was across the practice rink in Vancouver as the team practiced drills and he did a slow skate around the oval, finally cleared by the doc for that much at least, he still couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Yeah, he was watching her as she sat on the bench yakking with Christensen whenever he stopped nearby.

  He had no clue what they were talking about, but it must have been funny as hell considering the size of her smile. Meanwhile, Ian was doing loops around the ice like it was couple skate and he was the lone loser out by himself.

  “Ian,” Shelby hollered, waving him over.

  His gut reaction was to ignore her, because God knew he’d been practicing that for the past few days. However, her shout had cut through the sounds of the skates and sticks, and every player on the team glanced over at him. Then they all stopped, their blades turning the ice to snow as they skidded to a stop. Gossipy assholes, they just wanted to see what would happen next.

  Of course, if this didn’t involve him, he’d be gawking without shame, too.

  There really wasn’t a way to avoid being a damn coffee klatch, always in one another’s business when you spent nine months out of the year skate-to-skate with one another.

  Since there was no way around it, he made his way over to the bench. It took everything he had not to land a not-so-friendly hip check on the other man for talking to Shelby with that hey-baby smirk of his that had landed him on billboards with millions in endorsement deals. That, of course, made no sense. There were a billion other reasons to put the weight down on Christensen, but flirting with Shelby? What the hell did he care?

  “So Alex here”—Shelby smiled at Christensen as if he were hot chocolate on an icy morning—“doesn’t think he has tells when he’s mad at himself during a game.”

  “Are you kidding?” Christensen asked with a chuckle. “I’m always cool.”

  Ian laughed. Out loud. A huge belly laugh that made his abs ache.

  Christensen’s jaw squared, and his eyes narrowed. “Fine. What’s my tell?”

  “There are about a billion of them.” He flicked the top of the other man’s stick. “If you don’t stop messing with the tape after you miss passes, the other teams are going to notice, and then the Rage are going to tear you apart.”

  The Ice Knights’ biggest rivalry games were always preceded by hours of watching film of the other team to gain any edge—no matter how small—to take the other team out. There was no way the players on the Cajun Rage weren’t doing the same thing.

  “It’s a new play,” Christensen said.

  “So practice.” Until every move was like breathing.

  Christensen scoffed. “What, you’re ready to show me how it’s done?”

  More than ready. Watching the games from the visitor’s suite was torture. “Let’s do it.”

  He’d been on the ice with Christensen runni
ng the passing drill under Coach’s watchful eye for close to thirty minutes before he realized Shelby wasn’t there anymore. One moment she’d been on the bench watching them, and the next time he looked over, she was gone. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think she’d set up this little “brotherly” practice session.

  Christiensen came to a fast stop next to him, the edge of his skates sending snow-cone-thin layers of ice flying. “You know she did.”

  Had he said it out loud? Was he finally losing it? Nah. There’s no way. “What are you talking about?”

  “I can still read you like an unlocked phone. She totally made this happen right after she was telling me what a great coach you’d be.”

  Fuck. Was he that easy to maneuver? “You’re both a pain in my ass.”

  “You’re not wrong, but she’s right, too. You are a pretty good coach.” Christensen looked away, down toward the empty goal. “I’ve been working on the play for weeks. This is the first time it felt right.” He cleared his throat and started toward the tunnel leading to the locker room. “Thanks, Petrov.”

  “Anytime,” he shot after him, taken aback when he realized he meant it.

  What if his mom was right? Maybe Christensen did have a side to this story. A very feminine laugh yanked his attention away from that unpleasant thought. Shelby was back, this time chatting with Lucy in the stands. He couldn’t have looked away if he’d been run over by the Zamboni.

  Because he was staring, he was looking right at her when she tried to sneak a peek at him, her cheeks going pink the moment she realized she’d gotten caught. Her fingers went immediately to her lips, as if she couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss, either.

  Makes two of us, sweetheart. So what are we going to do about it?

  Chapter Twelve

  Shelby was going to hyperventilate and pass out alone, all because of one stupid headline and an out-of-context pic. She wasn’t even out of her softest cotton nightgown and hadn’t started the hotel room coffee maker, but she was 100 percent fully awake at the ungodly hour of six a.m. thanks to her social media notifications going on a buzzing spree. Ignoring the sound would have been the best plan. Then again, so would sticking to her original plan of not lusting after one Ian Petrov. That hadn’t worked out, either.