Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)
Avery Flynn
Dear Reader, Thank you for supporting a small publisher! Entangled prides itself on bringing you the highest quality romance you’ve come to expect, and we couldn’t do it without your continued support. We love romance, and we hope this book leaves you with a smile on your face and joy in your heart.
xoxo
Liz Pelletier, Publisher
For all my weird, nerdy, never-say-the-right-thing sisters. Normal really is highly overrated. Xoxo
Chapter One
Tess Gardner was just about all peopled out. But sadly, ditching her bestie’s wedding wasn’t an option.
Standing in the shadow of one of the potted palms along the edges of the Hayes Resort dining room, she sipped her wine and counted down the minutes until she could go up to her room, slip between the ridiculously high thread count sheets at the luxury hotel, and fall back into the book she was reading. They’d barely finished with dessert, and there would be more toasts and lots of dancing celebrating Lucy’s wedding tomorrow.
It wasn’t that Tess wasn’t thrilled for Lucy and her soon-to-be husband, Frankie—she was. However, over the course of the past year, Tess had become a seventh wheel in their friend group. Every one of her three best friends had paired up. Now she was standing off to the side at a fancy lodge resort outside Harbor City watching Lucy dance with Frankie, Fallon laugh with Zach, and Gina kiss Ford.
It was amazing and awesome and completely awful all at the same time.
Her three best friends were moving on without her.
Oh, no one would actually say that out loud. In fact, her girls probably didn’t even realize it was happening, but growing up like Tess had, being shuffled from relative to relative like an unwanted familial obligation had given her a sixth sense about not belonging.
Sure, there was still their weekly girls’ night at Paint and Sip, but how much longer would that continue? Not long. So even as she knew she’d stand up as one of Lucy’s bridesmaids tomorrow and be genuinely happy for her friends, she’d be resigning herself to the reality of the situation as well.
Everything was temporary. That’s just how life worked.
Maybe she should get a cat or a dwarf pig or a goat or something to help fill the inevitable friend void. She could name it Kahn and then reenact the great Captain Kirk bellow of “Kahn!” whenever it was time to call it in for dinner. Or she could always go with Darth or Rey. A puppy named Boba Fetch would be pretty funny.
“Gouda and Edam are cities in what country?” one of the guys gathered around a nearby table asked.
A group of the Ice Knights hockey players whom Lucy worked with as a PR goddess had been sitting there for the past ten minutes playing some trivia app. So far, they’d been doing okay—well, the guy playing by himself against the four teams of two men each was—but it physically pained her to hear so many wrong answers hurled out.
This question was a prime example. The teams facing off against the lone man were going through every popular city in Italy and France as the app’s timer beep-beeped its way down to the limit.
“The Netherlands,” she said quietly to herself as she watched Frankie spin Lucy around on the dance floor.
One of the players who was acting as the questioner, the one with the curly hair Lucy had introduced as Ian Petrov, called out “The Netherlands” as the answer and then asked the next question to pop up on the app. “What is another name for the star fruit?”
There was a moment of silence followed by grumbles along the lines of, What the hell is a star fruit and Where are the sports questions?
“Carambola.” Tess sipped her wine as the information about the fruit scrolled through her head, one word after another, just like it had her entire life.
The yellow-green fruit originated in Sri Lanka and grew on a small tree that produced bell-shaped blooms that eventually became star fruit. She could go on with more facts and stats. Sometimes, she couldn’t stop her brain. It had always been like this. Factoid after factoid getting downloaded onto a massive mental server that never seemed to fill up and always seemed to come out at the worst times.
Like now.
The Thor look-alike Ice Knights player, whom she hadn’t met, must have caught her saying that last answer because he wasn’t laughing at his friends like he’d been doing for the past ten minutes. Instead, he watched her, assessing her with a calculating gaze as cool as the ice blue of his eyes. Then he winked at her.
Pulse kicking into high gear, she whipped her head around so her gaze was back on the dance floor, if not her attention.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
The first rule of being the odd woman out was to not be so fucking obvious about it that strangers noticed. And yet, here she was lurking near a group of people she didn’t know, answering all the trivia questions in a game they were playing without her like a supreme dork. And she’d gotten caught.
She pulled her phone out of her bag and glanced down at it, hoping it looked like she’d just gotten a text from someone. Was it late enough that she could escape? How much more attention would she draw to herself if she sprinted away like her body was screaming at her to do?
More than an injured gazelle limping through the lion enclosure at the Harbor City Zoo.
Take deep breaths. Scroll through old texts from Gina, Lucy, and Fallon. Smile as if you aren’t in a fight-or-flight panic moment right now. In a minute, you can calmly walk away without flagging yourself as being completely and utterly awk-weird.