Winter Love

by Kennedy Fox

  “But—”

  “Drake, we’re not building a damn rocket here. If this is about some girl you slept with last night, hate to break it to you, but retrieve that phone number out of the trash. We’re talking about your career here.”

  I nod and leave coach’s office.

  Maksim comes up to me, naked, swinging his huge dick way too close to me. “What do you need me to do? Pick up food from a certain place? Not touch your shit? Wear your jockstrap? Hell, you name it.”

  “Yeah, Shamrock, we’re your men. Whatever you need us to do to make this a streak.” Ford comes alongside of Maksim, looking down. “God damn, remind me never to do a porno with you.”

  I think long and hard for a moment. “I think I have to track someone down. Maksim, do you have that business card from that woman you met on New Year’s—Saige?”

  “The cute blonde?” he asks.

  “I knew you went home with her when we couldn’t find you. Home alone my ass.” Ford flips me off.

  “Yeah, the blonde.” I nod a Maksim.

  He reaches into his bag and hands it over to me. “Here you go.”

  I sit on the bench and twirl it around in my hands. I have to be delusional to be thinking she has anything to do with my performance on the ice tonight, right? But why risk it.

  I shove the card into my bag and hit the showers. After overthinking it all, my career is everything and I need to protect it. I have to keep this up no matter the costs.

  TWO DAYS LATER

  I walk into a small office that holds only two employees. I bypass the brunette and head right to the blonde, placing a glass and an opened bottle of white wine on her desk.

  She looks up and slides back as if repulsed by my nearness.. “Aiden,” she says, a little breathless.

  I ignore all the effects her saying my name has on me. I’m here for one reason.

  “I need you to throw this drink in my face.”

  Could Saige be Aiden’s lucky charm? Find out in My Lucky #13, releasing June 29, 2021

  Pre-Order now!

  About the Author

  Piper Rayne is a USA Today Bestselling author duo. Our goal is to bring you romance stories that have "Heartwarming Humor With a Side of Sizzle" (okay...you caught us, that's our tagline). A little about us... We both have kindle's full of one-clickable books. We're both married to husbands who drive us to drink. We're both chauffeurs to our kids. Most of all, we love hot heroes and quirky heroines that make us laugh, and we hope you do, too.

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  Chapter One

  Sadie Rollins wasn’t sure what it was about Christmastime in Havenbrook, but she couldn’t deny that it felt as if there were actual magic floating in the air. Snow may have been rare in their pocket of Mississippi, but that didn’t stop the holiday spirit from settling over their quaint little town. From Thanksgiving through New Year’s, the homes and businesses were decked out with wreaths and garland and enough twinkling lights to be seen from space.

  Just exactly how she liked it.

  The festiveness wasn’t relegated to just outside, though. Since she was little, she’d always loved decorating, and that had only grown now that she had an entire bed-and-breakfast in which to do so. The Starlight Haven Inn’s six trees were trimmed within an inch of their lives, garland was draped around each of the plethora of fireplaces in the old Victorian, and fairy lights hung from the ceiling like the icicles they so rarely saw in Mississippi.

  She couldn’t deny the happiness she felt every morning when she stepped inside. Though maybe that sentiment had nothing at all to do with the decorations and everything to do with the fact that she was in the business of Happily Ever Afters.

  “Yes, I’m sure, Naomi,” Sadie said into the phone, nodding even though the harried bride on the other end of the line couldn’t see her. “All 120 poinsettias you ordered for the gazebo arrived this mornin’. I counted to make sure.” Twice.

  Naomi exhaled a relieved sigh. “You’re a godsend, Sadie. A godsend. Have I told you that?”

  Sadie laughed. “Not today.”

  “I’m serious! I have no idea what I’d do if I didn’t have you helpin’ me with this. Brad’s so sick of my craziness.”

  “I’m sure that future husband of yours isn’t sick of anything. And I’m always happy to be able to make things a little easier for you. You can call any time for whatever you need.”

  “Well…”

  Sadie’s lips twitched. “Was there something else you were wonderin’ about?”

  Naomi blew out a sharp breath. “Would you think I was a total diva if I had you go over the schedule one more time?”

  “Not at all,” Sadie said without hesitation, already pulling up the schedule she’d painstakingly created, down to the minute. “This is your big day, and we want to make sure everything runs smoothly for you.”

  Timing was a challenge even under the best circumstances, but after planning almost fifty weddings, Sadie knew most didn’t come close to the best circumstances. Which was why she had the day detailed within an inch of its life. And also why she had Plans B through Z just in case A didn’t go off without a hitch.

  She, once again, went over the schedule with Naomi, assuring her everything would be perfect for her special day before ending the call with a promise to check in again tomorrow. Sadie was so comfortable with the task now—both planning the day and dealing with the frantic brides leading up to it—that no one would ever guess she’d fallen into the job when she, along with her twin sister, Elise, had inherited the bed-and-breakfast at the ripe old age of twenty-five.

  Three years ago, she’d still been fumbling through her life, trying to figure out what she wanted to do when she grew up. Yes, she had a business degree that had gotten her a job as an office administrator in town, but that hadn’t ignited any sort of passion within her. It had been a job, plain and simple. It hadn’t been until she’d planned her first wedding at the B&B—full of one mistake after another, but amazing nonetheless—that she could say she’d truly found her calling.

  Of course, with as tiny as Havenbrook was, there was no way wedding planning alone—even when one included all events within that distinction—would keep her busy, but the inn itself was enough of a job to fill her days.

  Elise rushed out from the tiny back office as she shrugged into her winter coat. “Okay, I’m outta here.”

  Sadie’s brow furrowed as she glanced around the bustling inn. “Where’re you goin’?”

  The inn was booked solid, as it usually was this time of year. The holidays were one of their highest-grossing seasons, thankfully allowing them to float by in the leaner months. But busy meant Sadie couldn’t do this on her own—although her sister definitely pushed those boundaries as much as possible. It wasn’t a secret that Elise didn’t love the inn like Sadie did. Sometimes she thought her sister would sell the B&B at the first opportunity.

  Sadie would find a way to make it work on her own before she ever let that happen.

  “I have that thing, remember?” Elise wound a scarf around her neck and fluffed her dyed black hair—so very different from their natural red. A tiny rebellious streak that had started shortly after her divorce.

  If Mr. and Mrs. St. Charles weren’t sitting in the parlor, drinking their afternoon tea in front of the roaring fire only fifteen feet from where she and her sister stood, Sadie might have snapped back. Instead, she pressed her lips together and forced a smile. “No, I don’t. What thing?”

  “I told you yesterday.”

  She absolutely did not. “Tell me again.”

  Elise rolled her eyes. “I promised I’d help Will get things set up for the tree lighting and parade this weekend. You know how frazzled she always gets during the holidays.”

  That was certainly true. The festivities in Havenbrook between Thanksgiving and New Year’s were even more i
nvolved than their Fourth of July celebration, and Willow Haven—their cousin and event coordinator for the town—spent months coordinating that. That wasn’t a surprise, considering the Fourth of July lasted a single day and Havenbrook went all out every weekend for more than a month straight. Even though she desperately needed Elise’s help around the inn, Sadie couldn’t fault her for helping their cousin when Will barely stayed afloat this time of year.

  She just wished Elise would check once in a while to make sure she wasn’t the one who was drowning.

  Sadie’s shoulders slumped as she realized she was on her own. Again. “Yeah. All right. Do you know when you’ll be back?” she asked, pulling up the rest of the day’s schedule.

  “Not really. Why?”

  “Why?” Sadie gestured to the full, color-coded calendar displayed on the monitor in front of them. “Um, because I’m tryin’ to run an inn here, and it’d be great if I could have some help.” She pointed to each event on the screen as she recited them, hoping against hope that her sister would wake up from whatever this funk was she’d been in since her divorce and actually…care about something. “The day is packed. I need to show Mr. and Mrs. St. Charles to their couple’s massage by four, have to confirm the Baumgartners’ dinner reservation tonight at six, and then make sure the horse-drawn carriage is here by seven sharp, not to mention we need to start plannin’ for the Sip and Shop event in two weeks.”

  “See? And you’ve already got this all under control. I’d just get in the way.”

  “Just because I’m better at the details doesn’t give you a free pass to bail,” she said, conscious of keeping her voice down so as not to draw attention to them. “While I’m doin’ all that, you can handle—” She glanced at the screen, her eyes stuttering over the name blocking out the one and only room they’d converted within the inn to be used as a meeting space.

  Okay, so yeah, making her sister help the man who’d represented her ex-husband in their divorce wasn’t an option. Although Sadie wasn’t exactly a good replacement. Cole Donovan, with all his arrogant, insufferable cockiness, made her blood boil, and that feeling hadn’t receded at all in the three years since Elise’s divorce.

  “See you tomorrow,” Elise tossed over her shoulder, fluttering her fingers in a wave as she blew out the front door before Sadie could even sputter a response.

  Her mouth dropped open as she watched her brat of a sister flee as if she were running from the scene of a crime. Too bad Sadie couldn’t have her arrested for being an asshole.

  “You’ve got to be kiddin’ me,” she muttered, running her hands through her hair as she surveyed the schedule, which had suddenly morphed from a few hours of her day to another overnight shift.

  They’d been bequeathed the inn with nothing but its contents, and the upkeep was astronomical and ate up a good majority of the funds brought in by guests. Without enough cash flow to hire additional staff, she and Elise took turns staying the night in the guest house on the property—or they did in theory, anyway. More often than not, it was Sadie who stayed on-site.

  She couldn’t say she actually minded too much, though. The cottage was adorable, and she’d considered more than once just biting the bullet and officially moving in. But staying there meant she was on call twenty-four hours a day for whatever issues came up at the inn. True, they were few and far between, but she’d gotten enough 3 a.m. wake-ups that she could say it wasn’t exactly peaceful.

  “Well, I guess I know what my plans are tonight.” She exhaled a sigh, her shoulders slumping as she prepared herself for another long evening.

  But it wasn’t like she had much else going on. She might have planned forevers for happy couples, but she was nowhere near finding that for herself. In order for that to happen, one needed to actually, you know, date. And Sadie couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out on one of those.

  Finding her soul mate was definitely on her to-do list, though. You couldn’t plan weddings for a living and bear witness to two people promising to share their lives with each other without yearning for the same. She’d just hit a few snags along the way. And by snags, she meant jerks.

  Seemed she had a way of attracting them.

  No sooner had she thought that than had the master of jerks himself walked out of the inn’s makeshift conference room, one of his smarmy clients leading the way.

  “You think since I paid for her fake titties, I can get ’em, too? Best thing that ever came out of that prison sentence of a marriage, if you ask me,” aforementioned smarmy client said.

  “It would be a shame for you not to get a souvenir,” Cole said, not an ounce of emotion in his voice. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Ugh. The way they talked about that woman—about that marriage—as if both were inconsequential was enough to turn her stomach. It was reason number four thousand and fifty-three why she truly detested Cole Donovan. She couldn’t keep the disgust from her face—she always wore her heart on her sleeve, for better or worse—and from the subtle lift of Cole’s eyebrow in her direction, every bit of that showed.

  She cleared her throat and averted her gaze, focusing her efforts on sorting through the pile of mail Edna had dropped off earlier in the day. As the conversation continued in front of her, she listened with disgust, all the while pretending to be incredibly interested in the latest issue of Happily Ever After that had been delivered.

  “You think you can get me that, Donovan?”

  Sadie’s ears perked up. Somewhere along the way, she’d been pulled into the artfully decorated reception locations and stopped listening to the men’s conversation. Were they still talking about his soon-to-be ex-wife’s breasts?

  Cole paused, then cleared his throat. “If that’s what you truly want.”

  Smarmy guy—Travis—snorted. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about her doll collection. I just don’t want her to have it.”

  No longer breasts, but something equally infuriating. Sadie ground her molars together so hard her jaw ached. While she hadn’t been privy to the specific details surrounding her ex-brother-in-law’s sudden obsession with the collection of antique furniture housed in the inn that had been part of their family for generations, she had little doubt the conversation had gone remarkably similarly to the one happening in front of her. Were these men’s penises so tiny that they had to overcompensate by stripping their wives of what they loved the most?

  She made a disgusted noise in her throat and quickly covered it up with a cough, but not before she’d snagged Cole’s attention. He turned his devastating blue eyes on her, and she was so caught off guard, she had to grip the counter just to steady herself.

  Why did all the gorgeous men have to be complete pricks?

  Cole wore a navy suit, very obviously expensive and very obviously tailored to fit his body like a glove. She averted her gaze before she could catalog the breadth of his shoulders or the planes of his chest beneath the baby-blue button-up he wore. But looking at his face was no better. His dark-blond hair was floppy, almost careless, and a whisper of scruff brushed his chiseled jaw—both of which were incongruent from the otherwise perfection of him. Honestly, was it so much to ask for a freaking scar or something?

  Although, she supposed his horrid personality was blemish enough.

  “Long as it don’t take too long,” Travis the Smarmy Jackass was saying. “Wanna be free and clear ASAP. Though that never stopped me before, if you know what I’m sayin’.” His lips turned up in a sneer, and he elbowed Cole, intent to bring him in on the joke. “’Specially when there’re ones as pretty as this just waitin’ to get the D.” He turned his attention to Sadie and braced his elbows on the front desk, leaning too close for comfort, his wretched breath nearly knocking her over. “What’s your name, darlin’? I’ve got only a few months till this thing is final, but we don’t gotta wait that long…”

  Sadie bared her teeth in a semblance of a smile, reminding herself that maiming an individual was most definitely a crime. “Such
a charming proposition,” she said in a voice that dripped faux sweetness, “but I’m gonna have to pass. I don’t think my boyfriend would take too kindly to me seein’ other men. But I do so appreciate the offer.”

  Travis shrugged, unbothered, no doubt because he’d be dropping those lines again later that evening. For men like that—and no doubt men like Cole Donovan who helped these miserable excuses for human beings—it wasn’t about love. It wasn’t even about the person. It was about what she could offer him—namely a warm place between her thighs and little else.

  Sadie wasn’t in the business of one nights. She was in the business of forever. And there was little doubt neither of the two men in front of her could provide that.

  Chapter Two

  If Cole Donovan had ever doubted that his ex-wife was the actual devil, he had days like this to remind him. There was no other explanation for why he’d been thrust into a situation where he’d be tormented. Tempted, day in and day out, for three solid weeks, with what he absolutely, without a doubt, could not have.

  He walked his client, Travis Allen, out of the Starlight Haven Inn, schooling his features as he kept a tight leash on his irritation, despite anger crackling beneath his skin. For years, he’d been able to separate what his clients did and said from what he needed to fight for on their behalf. So then, why was he letting Travis’s dick comments get to him?

  “What do you think of Red in there?” Travis elbowed Cole in the stomach and nodded back toward the inn. “Think it’s natural?”

  Clenching his hands into fists, Cole locked his jaw and reminded himself that his relationship with Travis—both personal and professional—would soon be coming to an end. And then he was done doing favors for old friends. He was still feeling the chill courtesy of his last one.