Parental Guidance (Ice Knights #1)(71)

She was not the woman guys like Not Thor talked to. She was the one in the corner in a fandom T-shirt with bookish earrings. Okay, tonight she had on a dress and her obnoxiously curly hair was pulled back instead of corkscrewing around her face and getting caught in her glasses, but still, she was not even close to being that woman.

“Everyone loses,” she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. Nerves and old habits made the possibility of stopping a random factoid from spilling out next to impossible. “Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected thirty times before it was accepted.”

“But we’re gonna be number thirty-one.” He stood up and pulled one of the empty chairs out for her. “Come join the fun.”

Peopling was never fun. It was fraught with danger and embarrassment and that sickly damp-palmed feeling that she was about to make a mistake, or more likely a million of them. Walking away was her best choice, but she didn’t, and she had no idea what to think about that.

…

“Oh my God, Thor, how did you know that minimum wage was twenty-five cents an hour in 1938 but not that Lisbon is the capital of Portugal?”

Cole Phillips let the Thor comment go. When Tess had sat down at their table, there had been introductions all around, but she’d stuck with her nickname for him. Cole had given up on correcting her when she’d gotten ten questions in a row right. He knew better than to fuck with someone’s process. As long as they won and he didn’t end up footing what was going to be an epic bar tab, Tess could call him Scrumdidilyumptious while spanking his ass if she wanted.

Still, his ego couldn’t take that comment lying down—especially not after he watched his ex sneak out an hour ago with the Wall Street type she’d been dating for the past month. Sure, his pride was dinged up about it, but it didn’t bother him as much as he’d figured it would when he’d heard she was coming. Maybe change wasn’t Satan on a pair of roller skates after all.

“Not everyone is such a trivia nerd that they’re gonna know that Cincinnati was known at Pordo…Porso…Portopolis in the nineteenth century,” he said, stumbling over the word.

“Porkopolis,” she said with a giggle that was a little breezier than it had been a glass of wine ago. “Oink. Oink.”

Damn, she was cute with her big blue 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 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.”

“Wrong!” Ian exclaimed.

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 him 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 is around three-quarters of a million dollars,” she said, her voice low. “You make at least that, right?”