Tomboy (The Hartigans #3)(74)
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
“Fine,” he said, picking up the muffin closest to him. “I’ll eat the muffin.”
It was almost up to his mouth when he noticed the shining gold ring sitting dead center in the middle of the crumb topping.
“Zach Blackburn.” Fallon got up from her chair and then kneeled beside him. “Will you marry me?”
Okay, that was not how he planned on this whole proposal thing going. He was going to get down on one knee and ask her. She’d fan her face and get a little teary because pregnancy hormones were no joke, then she’d say yes. However, she’d pulled a fast break on him. He really should have expected it.
He helped her up before reaching into his pocket. “Only on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
He withdrew the little black box from his pocket and flipped the lid open, revealing the diamond engagement ring. “You always stay one step ahead of me.”
She grinned up at him. “Consider it done.”
Unable to wait another second, he pulled her close and kissed her, promising all of the tomorrows and forevers he could, as the friends and family who’d packed the bakery cheered them on.
Later, after everyone had given them their congratulations and Fallon’s brothers had shot him death glares of warning to not fuck this up, they stood alone at their table. He glanced down at the muffins and chuckled.
“Did you really have to put the ring in a muffin?”
She shrugged and winked at him. “It made me laugh.”
Because of course it did. That was his Fallon, always there to bust his chops just as much as she was there to have his back, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Acknowledgments A huge thank-you to the readers who make all of my books possible. Without you guys, I wouldn’t be lucky enough to have the best job in the world. Y’all are my Lady (and Dude) Lucks. xoxo. I couldn’t have written Tomboy without the support of my editor Liz, who rolls her eyes at my pronouncements that this is my worst book ever and my promises to actually meet a deadline. Thank you, thank you, thank you, going out to the entire Entangled team for everything that they do behind the scenes. Y’all know exactly how to make an author look good. Thank you!!! A hug and a promise to Jenn at Social Butterfly that we will actually get to have that drink together. You amaze me with every book. Thank you! And, as always, I couldn’t do hardly anything without the support of my girls, Robin Covington and Kimberly Kincaid, and my family. All together, we’re probably about as loud the Hartigans, if not quite as much fun. LOL
And don’t worry, readers, there will be more Hartigans coming. We are just taking a short break for some hot hockey players. Get ready for the Ice Knights! Turn the page for a sneak peek at the first Ice Knights book, Parental Guidance.
xoxo, Avery
Parental Guidance
Ice Knights 1
Just when Caleb Stuckey thought it couldn’t get any worse, his mom walked in.
Now, some people might think getting an ass-chewing by Ice Knights coach, Winston Peppers, and the team’s oh-my-God-our-players-fucked-up-again public relations guru, Lucy Kavanagh, was about as bad as it could get. They would be wrong. Having his mom join the ass-chewing party in Lucy’s office on the fifty-sixth floor of Harbor City’s Carlyle Building brought the entire shitstorm to a whole new level of misery.
Brittany Stuckey—AKA Britt the Ball Buster, according to some of her players—wasn’t just a state champion high school boys’ hockey coach and one of the handful of female boys’ hockey coaches in the country, she was also the Stuckey family titleholder for taking absolutely, 100 percent no shit from anyone. The anyone in this case being him. And fact that he was a grown man and a professional hockey player with the Harbor City Ice Knights meant nothing. He would, as she often told him, forever be her little Caleb Cutie—a nickname that proved a mother’s love blinded her to her offspring’s physical flaws—and she would probably treat him as such until the day one of them got hit by the number six crosstown bus.
He turned to Peppers, a man he thought would have had his back despite the video-recorded smack talk that had been blown all out of proportion. “You called my mom?”
“Yes,” Peppers asserted, not bothering to slow his pace as he marched from one end of the room to the other as if he were still in the locker room giving his team a what for in between periods. “Because she was a crucial part of this rehabilitation plan to fix your fuck-up.”
Caleb slouched down in his chair. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Really?” Lucy asked from her seat behind her desk, snark dripping from her voice. “Do I need to play the video again? I can because every media site on the face of the earth has posted it. Bad Lip Reading even did a mockup of it.”
Yeah, and he would have laughed his ass off at anyone else who’d been caught running his mouth in public like an idiot. Objectively, it was funny. It wasn’t every day almost the entire first line of a hockey team bitched and moaned about the team, their playing, the coaches, and the quality of puck bunnies they banged. They’d sounded like spoiled assholes, which he totally admitted wasn’t 100 percent not the truth.