Charming as Puck(10)

Clean it up or you’re done, Coach told me then.

He didn’t mean I’d be traded.

He meant I’d be hanging up my skates. Benched for the rest of the season, and then done.

My agent insisted any other team in the league would want me, but I don’t want another team.

I was born in Copper Valley.

My dad retired from hockey and always said he wished he’d played one more season, so he could’ve played here.

My mom covered the Thrusters in the paper for years after that.

Felicity works in the front office, and she’s so freaking smart, she’ll be running the entire organization in another five years.

It took me six years into my career to get traded here. I want to play for the Thrusters until the day my body doesn’t work anymore.

Some guys don’t care. Like the Bergers. Give them a hockey stick, they’ll play for any team that wants them.

Me?

This is it. When I retire, I want to go out on my home turf. Hopefully not for another five or ten years—which would be a long fucking career for a goaltender—but here.

So when Coach sat me down for my come to Jesus moment last season, I took him at face value. I quit pucking around with the bunnies. I pulled back on the pranks.

Mostly.

I let Berger take care of the shitheads who bugged Felicity even though every fiber of my being demanded I protect my little sister the same way I always have since the first moment some shithead dared to call her weird in my presence.

I started hanging with Kami.

Who still hasn’t texted me back when we leave the dressing room—again—to take the ice for the game twenty minutes behind schedule.

Zeus Berger holds out a gloved fist, and because he’s my teammate, and because, yeah, a cow in the bed is actually a pretty fucking fantastic prank, which calls for an equally epic payback, I bump him.

“I got your back, Murphy.” He smirks. “And your front. Ain’t nobody getting past the Zeusinator tonight.”

Like he knows I’m nervous.

His ego doesn’t bother me, because he backs it up. The guy doesn’t rely on just his size. He works hard to be one of the best D-men in the league.

Lavoie leads the rest of the guys past me, all of them rubbing my helmet for luck, like we do every game when we take the ice. “Head in the game,” he tells me.

“Nowhere else exists,” I reply.

It’s the same routine we go through every night. Same order. Same script.

Except tonight, I catch sight of Felicity at the end of the tunnel, watching me with a frown.

I know she got called down to cover the penguins with her Thrusters mascot puppet—she’s a ventriloquist, and she’s so fucking hilarious it makes up for the freakiness that comes with her being able to talk without moving her lips—but I didn’t know she was still down here. Heard she had plans in the team’s suite.

We lock eyes.

She has a damn good poker face, but I know my sister.

And that expression says she suspects something.

Which might mean I’m a dead man.

Ares is last in line. He rubs my helmet and slides a gaze back toward Felicity, whose face transforms and lights up as she blows him a kiss, then waves with the puppet.

They’re both weird.

And awesome.

My brother-in-law looks down on me. “Later,” he says.

That’s all he needs to say, and I get it. Whatever’s up with my family and friends, we’re saving it for later.

“My head’s in the game, big guy,” I answer.

He grunts and shoots a look at my crotch.

“Not that head.”

He smirks and pushes past me.

I roll onto the ice last, pulling my face shield into place, stick in hand.

And with one last glance around the arena—Kami’s here somewhere, I’m sure, because she almost always is—I put everything else from today behind me.

It’s time to play hockey.





Six





Kami



The nice thing about working for my mom in the veterinary clinic that’s been in the family for over fifty years is that when I tell her that I need Thursday morning off to move a cow out of a hockey player’s apartment, she doesn’t bat an eyelash.

Nope, she just says she’ll call a retired friend to cover my shift for me, so long as I get him an autographed stick, which I can easily do, because Nick Murphy owes me, even if I’ll probably try one of the other guys on the team first, since they basically all owe me.

The next phone call isn’t as easy.

“Kami! I was just about to call you,” Felicity says.

“Do you have keys to Nick’s Jeep?” I ask.

She makes a strangled noise that might be a laugh. “Yes.”

“Great. Can you meet me at his place and help me move a cow?”

“We have the best conversations.”

An hour later, Sugarbear’s on a leash and we’re pulling her into the elevator. I’m trying to pretend like everything’s normal, except it’s not.

“So how long have you and Nick been sleeping together?” she asks as soon as the door closes.

I gasp. “We’re—I—you—”

Her lips twitch up into an amused smile. Her greatest talent is talking. Talking as herself, talking as one of her dozen different ventriloquist voices, talking like she’s Ares or their pet monkey or, more recently, the baby, who’s no bigger than an orange but still gets a voice. But since she fell in love with Ares—the king of one-word sentences and master of text by gif—she’s gotten freaky good with silence too.