Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(2)

“Perfecto, torpedo, and parejo are all shapes of what?” asked Ian, reading off the question from the app.

Before Tess could answer—in her head this time, because humiliation was not her kink—Thor’s twin answered.

“Cigars,” he said.

She didn’t mean to look over at him. It just sort of happened. And because this was her life, which was filled with one uncomfortable situation after another, he was staring right at her. Unlike Tess, he didn’t seem to have a single qualm about getting caught watching. The other men at the table groaned, and someone told him to fuck off. He shrugged away the curse and flipped the bird at his buddies, but his gaze never left hers.

Looking away now would be good, Tess. Go on. Turn your head. Turn it.

But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Maybe there was something in her wine pinning her to the spot.

Ian asked, “What was the first name of the real Chef Boyardee?”

Thor’s twin raised an eyebrow, challenging her to answer.

“Hector,” she said, meaning to do so only in a soft whisper, but the combination of the song ending, the wine, and the man who watched her as if she were the most fascinating person in the room made her voice louder than she intended.

“Holy shit, that’s right,” Ian said, swiveling his body around to look at her—a move replicated by everyone else at the table except for Thor’s twin, who’d been staring at her the whole time. “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, giving her an out when things got overwhelming or just plain shitty.

“Let’s make this interesting,” Thor’s twin 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.

Thor’s twin lifted up his glass of what looked like scotch on the rocks. “Losers cover the team 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.” Thor’s twin 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 cheek to his not-of-this-world muscular forearms visible below his rolled-up sleeves. “Right?”

She wasn’t the kind of woman guys like Thor’s twin 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-girlfriend Marti 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.”