Parental Guidance (A Hot Hockey Romantic Comedy) Page 22

  “Holy shit, that’s right,” Ian said. “How did you know that?”

  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 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 an empty chair 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 Scrumdiddlyumptious while spanking his ass if she wanted.

  Still, his ego couldn’t take that comment lying down—especially not after he’d 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 believe 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 seeming the least bit sorry. “But look how happy you’ve made them.”

  Of course they were thrilled. 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 moving the puck through a line of professional athletes paid highly to get it away by stick or by check, so this would be easy.

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

  And it was, right up until they moved 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.

  Chapter Two

  Tess’s pillow was tickling her nose as it moved up and down in a smooth, steady rhythm as if it was taking deep, steady breaths—her heart paused and her lungs stopped functioning as she jackknifed into a sitting position, her eyes squeezed closed because looking meant seeing and that meant…she peeked.

  Oh my God. It hasn’t been a steaming-hot dream.

  She’d had sex with Cole Phillips.

  Cole.

  Fucking.

  Phillips.

  Not Thor himself.

  Multiple times.

  In the conservatory.

  In the foyer of his massive hotel room.

  Finally, in the ginormous bed that was only being half used because they had been curled up together until about ten seconds ago.

  Oh my fucking God.

  She had obviously lost her mind. Oh sure, she could blame the three glasses of wine or the wedding atmosphere for helping to lower her guard, but one of Lucy’s clients? A professional athlete? A guy she’d just met? For a woman who had three friends and figured that was more than enough, she didn’t make new friends let alone lovers in an evening.

  Next to her, Cole started to move, his hand patting the bed for her. “It’s too early to get up, Mar—” He jolted up.

  Now both of them were sitting in bed, staring at each other with horror-filled eyes and breathing as hard as if they’d just gotten done outrunning a pack of zombies.

  Good thing she was the type of woman who accepted that fate had it in for her. If not, she would have been painfully disabused of that notion as soon as the metaphorical light bulb went on over her head that the first guy she’d had sex with in nearly forever had woken up thinking she was his ex-girlfriend. That would have been some real ouch right there.

  “Tess,” she said, gathering the sheet close to her chest and scooting one butt cheek at a time over to the edge of the bed. “My name’s Tess.”

  “Of course it is.” Cole shoved his fingers through his hair, and it magically fell untangled to his shoulders like he was in some kind of shampoo commercial. “I just wasn’t all the way awake.”

  That wasn’t fair—his perfect morning hair, not what he said. A giant whatever on almost calling her Marti, because it wasn’t like she had any delusions about who she was and who he was and what the hell had just happened. Nope. She was all about unvarnished truth regarding her interactions with all but a handful of people. It’s why she loved trivia. Facts were simple, straightforward, and easily defined. People were very much not that. Ever. Which she knew more than anyone and why the bold truth that she’d fallen prey to the wedding curse felt even worse. Judging by the way Not Thor’s gaze was darting all over the hotel room, landing on every piece of furniture twice but not her a single time, he didn’t get it.

  “Don’t freak out,” she said as she lowered one foot to the floor and stood up, taking the sheet with her. “We got weddinged.”

  Of course he looked at her now, while she was trying to hold up the sheet with one hand and put on her panties she’d swiped off the carpet with the other. One-handed pantie put-on-ing was not easy for the non-coordinated like herself. Looking up at the ceiling and away from the man in the bed seemed to help, though, so that’s what she did, using a standing-on-one-foot hop move followed by a quick yank up to get her undies in place.

  “Weddinged? What does that mean?” Cole asked.

  “We got caught up in the whatever of the happy occasion.” She glanced down at him. That was a mistake. He was totally naked, but the sheet around his waist stopped her from getting the whole view in the morning light. “Then this happened.”

  “Weddinged.” He added a little huh sound to the end of it, as if he was putting the new vocab word in a mental filing cabinet for use later.

  “Exactly.” She clutched the sheet to her chest as if he hadn’t already seen, touched, and licked every bit of her, which she was not at all thinking about as she walked sideways to the chair where her dress had landed in the
rush to get naked last night. “But hopefully it’s still early enough that I can get back to my room without being seen.”

  He grabbed his phone off the bedside table. “It’s ten.”

  “What?” An electric zap of panic shocked her right down to her toes. Shit. No.

  Abandoning the sheet, she sprinted the rest of the way to the chair, grabbed her dress, and tugged it over her head as she hurried to the door. “I was supposed to be in Lucy’s suite getting my hair done thirty minutes ago.” She grabbed her purse, stuffed her bra inside it, and picked up her shoes from the floor by the door where she’d left them last night. “I gotta go.”

  “I’ll see you later at the wedding.”

  Later? She had to face him again after this? Oh, fuck me running.

  And since she had no idea what to say to that, she did what she always did and fell back on her friends the random factoids, whether she wanted to or not.

  “Romans used to give newlyweds a special loaf of bread, and some grooms would break it over the bride’s head, which is why we have wedding cakes now,” she said.

  Shut up, weird brain.

  Cole chuckled. “I really hope Frankie doesn’t try that with Lucy. I don’t see it going over well.”

  She didn’t disagree, but she didn’t trust herself not to give a whole lecture on the history of that phrase, so she opted for brevity. “Bye.”

  And she all but ran from the room, down the nearby stairs and to her floor. Setting a speed record, she showered, got dressed, grabbed her bridesmaid’s dress, and hustled with still damp curls to Lucy’s suite. Her girls were all there. Lucy was getting her makeup done. Gina sat on a stool while a hairstylist pulled her hair into a complicated updo that seemed to be held together by hope and hairspray, but there were probably a million hairpins in there. Fallon sat in the corner, dress already on, hair pulled into a simple French braid as she watched hockey highlights on her phone.

  “Look who finally arrived,” Lucy said with a smile as she gave Tess an assessing once-over.

  Tess jerked to a stop, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from spilling secrets or factoids. She did not want them to know what just went down. Cole would forget about her before the vows were said, and she was totally okay with that. She knew how to deal with being forgotten about. What she didn’t know how to handle was her three best friends all looking at her like she was a king cake with a surprise hidden inside.