Parental Guidance (Ice Knights) Page 22

  How many times in her life had she been asked that? Too many to count, and unlike any of the trivia questions he’d been asking, she didn’t have an answer. It was the way her brain had always worked.

  “Let’s make this interesting,” Not Thor said. “Miss Chef Boyardee and me against all six of you, best out of three sets.”

  Wait, what? How had she gotten involved in this? She glanced around at the room for backup. However, her girls were all preoccupied with the men they’d fallen for, and everyone at the other tables who she kind of knew—including the entire Hartigan family—was either dancing or sitting at one of the many tables around the parquet floor laughing and taking pictures. It was just her.

  “What’s on the line?” one of the other guys asked.

  Not Thor lifted up his glass of what looked like scotch on the rocks. “Losers cover the bar tab for the weekend.”

  Another player Lucy had introduced her to, Alex Christensen, let out a low whistle. “Considering this is one of our few weeks off until the season ends, that bar tab will be substantial.”

  “Worried, Christensen?”

  Alex snorted. “Just trying not to make that famously locked-up-tight wallet of yours cry.”

  “You won’t because we aren’t gonna lose.” Not Thor glanced over at her, everything about him screaming ultra-confident sex god, from his blond hair that brushed his shoulders to the dimple in his chin to his not-of-this-world muscular forearms visible below his rolled-up sleeves. “Right?”

  She was not the woman guys like Not Thor talked to. She was the one in the corner in a fandom T-shirt with bookish earrings. Okay, tonight she had on a dress and her obnoxiously curly hair was pulled back instead of corkscrewing around her face and getting caught in her glasses, but still, she was not even close to being that woman.

  “Everyone loses,” she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. Nerves and old habits made the possibility of stopping a random factoid from spilling out next to impossible. “Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected thirty times before it was accepted.”

  “But we’re gonna be number thirty-one.” He stood up and pulled one of the empty chairs out for her. “Come join the fun.”

  Peopling was never fun. It was fraught with danger and embarrassment and that sickly damp-palmed feeling that she was about to make a mistake, or more likely a million of them. Walking away was her best choice, but she didn’t, and she had no idea what to think about that.

  …

  “Oh my God, Thor, how did you know that minimum wage was twenty-five cents an hour in 1938 but not that Lisbon is the capital of Portugal?”

  Cole Phillips let the Thor comment go. When Tess had sat down at their table, there had been introductions all around, but she’d stuck with her nickname for him. Cole had given up on correcting her when she’d gotten ten questions in a row right. He knew better than to fuck with someone’s process. As long as they won and he didn’t end up footing what was going to be an epic bar tab, Tess could call him Scrumdidilyumptious while spanking his ass if she wanted.

  Still, his ego couldn’t take that comment lying down—especially not after he watched his ex sneak out an hour ago with the Wall Street type she’d been dating for the past month. Sure, his pride was dinged up about it, but it didn’t bother him as much as he’d figured it would when he’d heard she was coming. Maybe change wasn’t Satan on a pair of roller skates after all.

  “Not everyone is such a trivia nerd that they’re gonna know that Cincinnati was known at Pordo…Porso…Portopolis in the nineteenth century,” he said, stumbling over the word.

  “Porkopolis,” she said with a giggle that was a little breezier than it had been a glass of wine ago. “Oink. Oink.”

  Damn, she was cute with her big blue eyes that her glasses didn’t do a thing to hide. Even the curls that had slipped free from her pulled-back hair and the pale-blue dress cut like she was a pinup girl couldn’t take away from the fact that Tess was the human equivalent of a cinnamon roll—sugar and spice and everything nice. If he was the kind of guy who did cute, he might be tempted.

  But he didn’t do cute.

  Really, he only did one type of woman, and her name was Marti Peppers and she hated his guts. They’d been on-again/off-again since he’d joined the league six years ago. They’d been off for the past six months, and this time it wasn’t going back on again. She’d been explicitly clear on that. He’d given her his heart and she’d given him, well, not a pen but about a dozen paintballs to the back and a single-finger salute.

  Christensen turned to the other Ice Knights players who’d come upstate for the weekend for Lucy’s wedding. “How are these two drunk assholes beating us?”

  Tess let out a squawk of protest. “We’re not drunk; we’re happy.”

  He nodded in agreement. “What she said.”

  Okay, there were too many jagged pieces where his heart had been for him to be happy, but he definitely wasn’t drunk. Slightly off-kilter? Yes. Blasted? No.

  “Last question for the six,” Ian said, using the fake announcer voice he used in the locker room to make everyone laugh. “If you chuckleheads miss, then team twosome gets a chance to steal. If they miss it, you win. Either way, I’m going to drink my weight in beer and you fools are covering the bill. Ready?”

  The others nodded.

  “In what country was Arthur Conan Doyle born?” Ian asked.

  Svoboda cocked his head to the side. “Who?”

  “The guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes,” Christensen answered.

  One of the rookies, Thibault, took a drink from his beer and said, “I thought that was a TV show.”

  “It was a book first,” Christensen said, giving the rookie a don’t-be-a-dumb-ass glare. “It’s gotta be England. Holmes was the greatest English detective.”

  “Wrong!” Ian exclaimed.

  Everyone on the other side of the table groaned. Christensen sank down in his chair while the rookie tried—and failed—to keep a serves-you-right smirk off his face. Ian turned to Cole and Tess.

  “He was…” Tess paused. “Can I confer with my partner for a second?”

  Ian nodded.

  She waved him closer, and he leaned half out of his chair so he’d be close enough for this little chat about who in the hell knew what because it wasn’t like either of them didn’t know Doyle was born in Scotland. She pivoted in her chair so her back was mostly turned away from the guys on the other side of the table to give them a modicum of privacy. The move gave him a perfect view of the top swells of her tits—or it would have if he’d looked. He did not. At least not for long.

  “The league minimum is around three-quarters of a million dollars,” she said, her voice low. “You make at least that, right?”

  “More.” A lot more, but he didn’t need to put that out there.

  “Oh,” she said, surprise lifting her tone. “Are you a really good player?”

  Maybe he was a little more than off-kilter because he couldn’t wrap his brain around the fact that she didn’t know the answer to that. He did have a billboard up in the middle of Harbor City’s touristy hot spot, he had a contract with Under Armour, he was in the sports news pretty much all the time. “You know the league minimum but not if I’m any good at hockey?”

  “People aren’t really my thing.” She played with the tail of the bow holding the straps of her dress in place. “And the other guys, some of them are rookies so they make a lot less?”

  If he hadn’t been so distracted by the way she toyed with the bow, wondering if it was going to hold, he would have caught on to her plan sooner. “You’re not thinking…”

  She nodded. “I am.”

  His wallet cried out in metaphorical protest, but how was he supposed to say no to that face? “You are a horrible influence.”

  “Nothing could be further from the truth.” She smiled, showing off a dimple that could probably cause cavities. “I’m completely harmless.”

  He didn’t belie
ve that, not even for a second.

  “You’re sure?” she asked, turning serious.

  When he nodded, she smiled, and it gave him the same buzz he’d gotten when they’d made the playoffs.

  Turning back so she faced the table, Tess said in a loud, clear voice, “While I disagree, my partner insists he’s right. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was from Australia.”

  “Wrong,” Ian said, smacking his palm down on the table for emphasis. “He was born in Scotland.”

  Cole couldn’t believe it. She’d gotten him to pay the bar tab and thrown him under the bus. Australian? That wasn’t even in the right hemisphere of the correct answer, and she knew it. There was definitely some tart to her sweetness.

  While the other players erupted in high fives and smack talk, Cole wrapped his fingers around the arm of her chair and tugged it close. “That was not very nice.”

  “True,” she said, not looking the least bit sorry. “But look how happy you’ve made them.”

  Of course they would. The lucky bastards were going to be drinking on him all weekend—and he wasn’t going to hear the end of it pretty much ever. In fact, Christensen had that look that always preceded enough shit talking to fertilize every cornfield in Nebraska.

  “But now you have to figure out a way to get me out of here without it looking like a retreat so I don’t have to deal with all of that.” He waved a hand at the celebratory dance moves Christensen and Svoboda were trying to pull off. “That would be cruel and unusual punishment on top of that bar bill.”

  She looked guilty for about three seconds, then said as she stood, “Well, we may have lost, but at least we don’t have to dance or anything like that.”

  His fellow Ice Knights players clamped on to what she’d made sound like a throwaway line that most definitely wasn’t.

  “Dance! Dance! Dance!” they chanted in unison.

  Not laughing wasn’t an option, so he gave in to what had lately been a foreign reaction. “What have you done?”

  Given the fact that he’d had to almost yell to be heard over his idiot teammates, he wasn’t surprised when instead of hollering back, she raised herself up on her tiptoes and leaned in close.

  “Giving you an escape,” she said, her lips nearly touching his ear. “Come on, once around the dance floor and we can go out through the conservatory doors.”

  He glanced over at the door on the other side of the mostly packed dance floor. It would take some weaving and skill to get through the crowd without looking like they were running, but he was a guy used to taking the puck through a line of professional athletes paid highly to take it away by stick or by check, so this would be easy.

  Grinning down at her, he took her hand. “Good plan.”

  And it was, right up until they stepped onto the dance floor and he had her in his arms. His steps were half a beat too slow but more due to his own inability to dance than the scotch. His hand spanned the small of her back, resting against the smooth silk of her skin exposed by the backless dress, and her head fit against the pocket of his shoulder, because of course it had changed to a slow song as soon as they stepped on the parquet.

  He noticed everything about her as they swayed to the beat: the hitch of her breath when he brushed his thumb against her skin, the way she moved closer as they made their way across the floor, and the tease of her curly hair against his neck. All of it combined into a heady mix of anticipation and desire that had him searching for the door before he did something stupid like give in to the urge to kiss her in the middle of the dance floor. Then she looked up at him, her full lips slightly parted and desire on full display in her eyes. Suddenly, doing something stupid seemed like a very good idea.

  “On the count of three, we make a break for the door,” he said, forcing the words to almost sound normal.

  And what came after that? Hell if he couldn’t wait to find out.

  Turn the page to start reading the sexy, new Romantic Comedy from USA Today bestselling author Stefanie London!

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  Chapter One

  No. No, no, no, no, no.

  It was something Sophia Andreou said in her head a lot more than she said aloud. Chalk it up to having a control-freak father who was an expert in getting his way, with an arsenal of techniques up his sleeve to make sure he had the last word. Voicing her opposition was unheard of.

  Until now.

  Because this…this was taking it too far.

  “Dad, you can’t be serious.” Sophia tried to laugh, but the sound had a razor edge to it. “Marriage? To a guy I’ve never met?”

  She looked over to where her mother sat on the windowsill of their Brooklyn brownstone, studiously avoiding Sophia’s gaze and picking at an invisible piece of lint on her skirt. As usual, she said nothing.

  “To a man who will save this family,” her father corrected. “Dion Kourakis is willing to buy our company and put the necessary funds into reviving it. Without that money, we’ll be—”

  “Nothing.” The quiet word slipped from her mother’s lips, but then her eyes immediately darted over to her husband. Sophia knew her mother would never question the head of the family, because for as long as she could remember, he’d always known—and done—what was best for them all.

  But she was really struggling to see how marrying her off to a stranger as part of a business deal was the best solution.

  Besides, why did everybody want to be somebody? She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Sophia would have been perfectly happy to leave New York and live a quiet life somewhere green and peaceful with a small army of furry friends. Somewhere far, far away from her father’s influence.

  Did she love her father? That was a complicated question about a complicated man. But Sophia valued being part of her family, valued the lifestyle her father had worked hard to provide, and valued the fact his decisions were born of the best intentions, though she could have done without his steamrolling. So she’d been a good daughter. Everything he’d ever asked for, she’d done. Like a good little princess. Well-mannered and well-behaved, that was her in a nutshell. But now it appeared they’d reached the point where she would have to put her foot down.

  Delicately, of course.

  Before she could say another word, her father tapped his finger on his desk. “Dorothy, leave us for a minute. I want to talk to Sophia alone.”

  The command was enough to have Sophia’s mother on her feet and exiting the room without so much as a backward glance. So much for reinforcements.

  Her father turned to her. “This isn’t the time for you to be doubting your loyalty to this family.”

  Sophia’s lips tightened. She was nothing if not loyal. She always put her father’s requests ahead of her social life. She always dropped her own needs to care for her mother when she had one of her bad spells. Doubting her loyalty? Seriously?

  Clearly, she was the worst person in the world because she didn’t want to be sold off like livestock.

  She reined in her emotions as best she could, but her blood had started to boil. “My loyalty is not the issue. Aren’t you concerned about a guy who wants a wife thrown in with a business deal? I’m not a gift with purchase!”

  Whoops. That had not come out as calmly as she’d hoped it would.

  Her father’s eyes narrowed.

  That was a mistake. She knew better than to raise her voice when negotiating with Cyrus “the Greek” Andreou. Anything that could be classed as insubordination was like flashing a cape at a bull. Sophia sucked in a slow breath, composing herself.

  “I didn’t mean to yell,” she said before he had the chance to blow up. “It’s just…marriage? What’s so wrong with this guy that he’s using a business deal to leverage a wife?”

  Cyrus folded his arms across his chest. “He didn’t.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “It was my part of the deal. My request.”

  Sophia reeled as if
she’d been slapped. Wait, what? Her father could be a bully, sure, but she never thought he’d pimp her out like she was a piece of property. “You asked him to marry me?”

  “I didn’t ask.” Her father’s black, bushy mustache bobbed up and down. “I told him if he wants this company, then you are part of the deal.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, my dear child, when I sell the company to him, it’s gone.”

  Realization seeped like ice through her veins. “The marriage will mean our family retains a claim on the company.”

  The return smile was calculating. “Smart girl.”

  She gripped the edge of her seat, nails biting into the soft leather until she felt it dent under the pressure. Was the company so important that he was willing to sell off his only daughter in order to keep a handle on it? Of course he would do it. In his mind, it was the best move for their family.

  Everything he did was in the best interest of their family.

  Sophia glanced around her father’s office. The room wasn’t big, but it was packed with as many status symbols as he could possibly fit in: a Montblanc pen in a fancy crystal holder, a shiny new laptop—which was a glorified paperweight, since he barely ever used it—a precious antique painting, and classic novels lining the bookshelf behind his desk.

  The wealthy, sophisticated veneer was a lie, however. The Montblanc pen was a fake—high quality, but a fake. The laptop was of dubious origins, meaning it had come from one of her father’s shady business acquaintances. The painting was a replica, and the vintage collection of classic novels, which made her father appear educated and well-read, was a sham. He’d never even cracked one open.

  Needless to say, the Andreous weren’t some upper-crust blue-blooded family. Her mother grew up in a house with more mouths to feed than there was food to go around. And her father was a glorified blunt instrument, the muscle who’d gone on to inherit his boss’s property development company after the man’s untimely death.

  So her father had switched steel-toe boots for pinstripe suits and wanted a reputation to match. But that didn’t change who they were underneath it all. Or her father’s “do whatever it takes” personality.