Charming as Puck(100)

He juts his chin up, grin going wider. “You’re going to get a woman. While you’re dressed like that.”

Yeah, I know what it looks like. Me and Ares, we’re the biggest mother puckers to ever strap on skates and wield sticks in the NHL. I’m sprouting a five o’clock shadow before I’m done shaving every morning. Each one of my thighs is the size of one of those European sissy cars. Solid muscle too. My ma calls us big-boned. My sister calls us overgrown apes. I make one ugly-ass woman.

“Damn fucking right,” I tell Prince Manning anyway. Because you don’t get to be the biggest, hairiest, most feared badass on the ice by owning up to your shortcomings. No, I bear my teeth at those fuckers and take them down. If you ain’t got your balls, you ain’t got anything. “I’m gonna make her switch sides, then when we get back to my hotel room, I’m gonna make her switch back, and I’m gonna rock her fucking world.”

“As completely wrong as that sounds, I’ve seen him do it before,” Chase says.

Ares grunts an agreement, even though both of them know I’m full of shit and I know they’re each looking forward to watching me fail. I share a look with my twin.

You’re such a fucking dumbass, his says, because he knows it’s biologically impossible for any woman in this stuffy, exclusive clubhouse to seriously be attracted to me like this. I flunked biology, and I still know it too.

Two words, my look replies. Endorsement. Dollars.

I don’t give two shits if I score a chick tonight. I score plenty, on and off the ice, and everyone knows it.

The other thing everyone knows?

Zeus Berger doesn’t back down from a challenge. And I smell a challenge coming on.

“Care to put some money on that?” Manning says, right on time.

“Double or nothing,” I reply. Win or lose, no man will ever say I didn’t put my heart in it. And I’ve got my winning personality on my side. I might be ugly, but I’m not out.

Ares snickers again.

“Go on and pick the girl,” I tell Manning. “Wouldn’t want you to think I planned this.”

He rubs a hand over his dark blond beard while he scans the room. “I’m beginning to see why Willow speaks so ambiguously of you.”

“That means she only half-likes us,” I translate for Ares. “Probably intimidated by our awesomeness.”

“Or the fact that you threatened her fiancé with a ten-pound wheel of moldy cheddar,” Chase muses.

“Fucker needs to put his foot down with his mother.”

“On that, we’re in complete agreement,” Manning says crisply. He stops and nods toward the wall of windows overlooking the golf course with the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west. “Her.”

I squint, because that half of the room is backlit by the light glaring in. “The chick who just shoved her finger into Levi Wilson’s beer bottle?”

Ares perks up. “Boy band Levi?”

“Aw, shit, Bro’s gonna be pissed she missed this,” Chase mutters.

That’s right—my sister is a boy band ho. Got a thing for Levi’s old band, Bro Code—which she swears is a total coincidence, considering Chase has called her Bro since we were kids, a nickname she claimed to hate until she realized how much she liked Chase.

“Not the beer bottle-finger,” Manning says. “The woman with her.”

I shift my attention from the woman trying to shake a beer bottle off her finger while obviously stuttering apologies to the world’s reigning pop rock god, and a familiar beat takes up residence in my pulse.

Long, dark hair. Tall. She’s built—not heavy, but not turn-sideways-and-she’d-disappear slender either. She’s in pants that accentuate her curves and a no-nonsense blouse that can’t hide her rack. Even in the backlight, there’s a feline grace to her movements as she efficiently grabs her companion’s arm, neatly twists the stuck bottle off her friend’s finger, and hands it back to Levi Wilson.

I do love me some feline grace.

And even though she has the bearing of a woman much smarter than my usual type, there’s some stirring over my southern coconuts that suggests I might be about to start a bigger scene.

These rich mofos would shit a brick if I popped a boner in this dress.

Heh.

But while I’m damn proud of my Neanderthal heritage—gets me a big paycheck on the ice every year, and sponsorships for everything from deodorant to car jacks off the ice—even I know the quickest way into a lady’s pants isn’t always showing her the goods. So I tell Jupiter to cool it down there—what? You’re damn right both me and my junk are named after kings of the gods—and nod to Manning. “You’re on.”