Parental Guidance (Ice Knights #1)(31)
“More like it’s irrelevant,” she said, looking around and realizing she had walked past the bookcase dividers that blocked off her bedroom from the rest of the apartment.
Paging Dr. Freud.
She would have turned right around but Anchovy, who’d been trailing behind her the whole time, did his favorite trick and turned out the lights.
“Is Anchovy telling you to go to bed again?” Caleb asked.
The involuntary thrill of hearing him say the word “bed” should have been negated by the fact that he was talking about her dog. It wasn’t. Damn. She seriously needed to get off this call.
“Yeah, he’s a pain that way,” she said as she scratched Anchovy behind the ears to say thank you.
Caleb, still perfectly lit in his bedroom, sat down on his bed that she could lay down on spread-eagle and not touch the edges. Not that she was thinking about doing that. Not. At. All.
“It’ll be crazy over the next few days. We have our first road trip,” he said. “But I’ll see you for date number three when I get back into town next week. Have a good night’s sleep, Zara.”
“Night, Caleb.”
She ended the call, let her head fall back, and released a half moan/half groan of OMG-what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-me. A good night’s sleep? Yeah, she’d be lucky to get any shut-eye tonight.
And the third date? Oh God, she definitely wouldn’t be sleeping if she tried to imagine what it would be.
Chapter Nine
Six days and three games later, Caleb finished the short walk from the subway station and looked down at the Bramble app on his phone to confirm he was at the right location. Yep. Fifty-eight Forty-two Rockaway Avenue. This was it. He glanced up at the sign hanging above the opaque glass doors that read Hot Thang Review with a kitty cat strutting above the word “thang.” Everything about the place, from the neon sign to the no-neck guy standing with his arms crossed over his massive chest outside the doors, screamed strip club.
What in the hell had Zara been thinking? Her official third date message had come through while he’d been at the morning skate. Just the address, the time, and the note that their parents had sweet-talked the Bramble folks into letting them pick out where date three would take place. That was, without a doubt, the scariest bit of news he’d had since he’d sat down for his ass-chewing in Lucy’s office.
He hadn’t done any Google searches, just showered, got on the subway, and traveled across Harbor City to make it on time. Now he didn’t know what to do. His position with the team was better than before the Bramble stuff started, but getting photographed coming out of a strip club covered in glitter was not going to keep him in Coach Peppers’s good graces.
Just when he was about to text Zara, the front door opened and she strolled out. She was in a pair of heels that added at least four inches to her height, a pair of tight jeans, and a low-cut blue T-shirt tied just under her tits. Her skin glowed with a heated flush, as if she’d been running sprints, but there wasn’t a sparkle of glitter on her.
This isn’t a real date, numbnuts.
Well, it was but it wasn’t and it couldn’t, so whatever dirty thoughts were screaming through his brain and bad ideas had his cock thickening against his thigh didn’t mean anything.
There were rules.
It took a second for the sudden rush of blood from his brain to his dick to even out before he understood. Realization crackled like thunder, loud and ominous. This was not good. Not at all. He’d heard about this from one of the guys on the team who’d gone with his girlfriend.
His mom and her dad had set them up on a learn-to-pole-dance date. Britany, no doubt, was somewhere laughing her ass off.
“Are you going to stand outside all day or come in for your lesson?” Zara asked, opening the door farther.
The guy next to the doorway shot a dirty look her way and then ambled off down the block.
Caleb hustled over to the door, holding it for her but not going inside. “I’m not stripping.”
She crossed her arms and exhaled a sigh that perfectly telegraphed how disappointed she was in him. “Well, you know how to suck all the fun out of things.”
Shaking her head, she looked away and down. It started small—just an up-down bobbing of her shoulders—before the first giggles broke free and she looked back up at him, a huge smile on her face.
“Oh my God, you are too easy, Caleb. This isn’t a strip club. It’s a restaurant, and the chef, John Thang, is giving us cooking lessons. Do I look like I’m about to go strip?”
No matter how hot she looked right now, he knew better than to answer that question. Instead, he followed her inside the Hot Thang Review, which turned out to be a pop-up restaurant/cooking school. There were about fifteen people in the dining room, which was decorated with small shadow boxes showing the same family in different domestic scenes. Walking along the back wall, he could follow the progression from scene to scene as the baby in the first one grew up until, in the final shadow box, he wore a chef’s toque as his parents and grandparents looked on with proud smiles.
The man standing closest to the kitchen wasn’t in a toque, though—he was wearing a chef’s jacket and he held out his hand. “You must be Zara’s friend Caleb. I’m John. Welcome to class. I hope you two have as much fun as your parents hoped you would when Jasper called to see if I had room for two more today.”