Parental Guidance (Ice Knights #1)(70)

A group of the Ice Knights hockey players who Lucy worked with as a PR goddess had been sitting there for the past ten minutes playing some trivia app. So far, they’d been doing okay, but it still hurt to hear so many wrong answers get hurled out. This question was a prime example. They were going through every popular city in Italy and France as the app’s timer beep-beeped its way down to the time limit.

“The Netherlands,” she said quietly to herself as she watched Frankie spin Lucy around on the dance floor.

One of the players, the one with the curly hair who Lucy had introduced as Ian Petrov, called out the Netherlands as the answer and then asked the next question to pop up on the app. “What is another name for the star fruit?”

There was a moment of silence followed by grumbles along the lines of what the hell is a star fruit and where are the sports questions.

“Carambola.” Tess sipped her wine as the information about the fruit scrolled through her head, one word after another, just like it had her entire life.

The yellow-green fruit originated in Sri Lanka and grew on a small tree that produced small bell-shaped blooms that eventually became star fruit. She could go on with more facts and stats. Sometimes, she couldn’t stop her brain. It had always been like this. Factoid after factoid getting downloaded onto a massive mental server that never seemed to fill up and always seemed to come out at the worst times.

Like now.

The Thor look-alike Ice Knights player, whom she hadn’t met, must have caught her saying that last answer because he wasn’t laughing at his friends like he’d been doing for the past ten minutes. Instead, he was watching her, assessing her with a calculating gaze as cool as the ice blue of his eyes. Then he winked at her.

Pulse kicked into high gear, she whipped her head around so her gaze was back on the dance floor, if not her attention.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

The first rule of being the odd woman out was to not be so fucking obvious about it that strangers noticed. And yet, here she was lurking near a group of people she didn’t know answering all of the trivia questions in a game they were playing without her like a supreme dork. And she’d gotten caught.

She pulled her phone out of her bag and glanced down at it, hoping it looked like she’d just gotten a text from someone. Was it late enough that she could escape? How much more attention would she draw to herself if she sprinted away like her body was screaming at her to do?

More than an injured gazelle limping through the lion enclosure at the Harbor City Zoo.

Take deep breaths. Scroll through old texts from Gina, Lucy, and Fallon. Smile as if you aren’t in a fight-or-flight panic moment right now. In a minute, you can calmly walk away without flagging yourself as being completely and utterly awkweird.

“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—Not Thor answered.

“Cigars,” he said.

She didn’t meant 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 off the curse and flipped off 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?”

Not Thor 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. “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.

“Let’s make this interesting,” Not Thor 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 at 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.

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