Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(3)

Damn, she was cute with her big 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 before 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.”

“Is that your final answer?” Ian asked and waited for the other man to nod yes. “Wrong!”

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 Cole 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 salary 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 had a billboard up in the middle of Harbor City’s touristy hot spot, a contract with Under Armour, and 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 screamed 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, her smile got even bigger, 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 team bar tab and had 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.”