by Avery Flynn
Forget awful, this situation was a fucking nightmare. He was stuck on a plane holding a baby—a baby!—he’d never seen before, while sitting next to his former best friend whom he wasn’t speaking to and across from the woman he had the hots for—thanks, PopPop, for giving me the mental slang of a Boomer—who would rather never set eyes on him again. Even worse? They were all forced to stay together like this for the entirety of a cross-country flight that would last approximately six hundred years.
Ian slid his gaze back over to Lucy. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I never joke when it comes to my sweet Freya.” She blew a kiss to the baby, who was drooling like someone had left a tap on. “She gets grumpy right before she falls asleep. I suggest tucking her in against you and letting her stroke your hair. It seems to calm her down the fastest.”
With that, the team’s PR genius and his personal tormentor walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, sat down in an empty row, popped in her earphones, and closed her eyes.
Meanwhile, he was still standing in the middle of the aisle, blocking the handful of Ice Knights players trying to get to their seats—the lucky kind that didn’t come with a baby, a nemesis, or the woman who had told him to go straight to the penalty box and not come back. The baby wiggled in his grip, her little chin starting to tremble under the weight of her apparent dissatisfaction. His pulse picked up and his mind went blank. This was like holding a live bomb, and he had no idea which wires to cut.
He looked over at Christensen and Shelby. Christensen still sat with his back to the aisle. Shelby just lifted an eyebrow and shook her head. Panic starting to make his palms sweat, Ian adjusted his hold on Freya but kept his arms locked so she was about as far away from him as possible.
Squaring his jaw, he gave the baby a firm look. “You’re not gonna cry.”
Freya’s answer was to let out an earsplitting yowl and turn a shade of purple he hadn’t been aware was possible for a human. Grown men winced. Stuckey, who was known for slamming into people with enough force to knock teeth out, sank down into his seat as if to hide. He swore he spotted Lucy smirking for half a second before she flattened her lips and went back to pretend sleeping.
“You can’t hold a baby like that if you want her not to cry,” Christensen said, his voice having no problem cresting over the crying.
Turning to Christensen, he glared at the other man. “How do you know?”
The forward’s’s expression turned smug. “Because I babysat all through high school to pay for my hockey gear.”
“So take her.” He held the baby out to Christiansen.
Freya hollered louder.
“No way.” He held up his hands, palms forward. “Lucy said you had first shift.”
Freya wailed again. It was like an ice pick being jabbed into his ear. Ian turned to Shelby and silently offered her the kid.
Her blue-lined eyes rounded before narrowing into tiny slits. “Why, because I’m a woman?”
Ian didn’t respond. She looked like a woman who knew how to fillet a man and was getting ready to show off her skills on him—probably with a rusty knife that had a dull edge.
The sound of a fake cough that distinctly sounded like “dumbass” came from the direction of Christensen, but Ian’s gaze was locked on Shelby. It wasn’t that he couldn’t stop staring because he really thought she’d shiv him, but that he just couldn’t look away. Steel and softness wrapped up in a fuck-you package complete with leather boots and a vine tattoo he’d kissed from one thorn to the next, Shelby was turning into his fucking catnip.
Too bad she wanted absolutely nothing to do with him, as she’d made plain at the sheriff’s office. The reminder had his gut twisting, and he pulled Freya in closer until her soft hair tickled his chin and she snuggled into his shoulder. Why did he do it? Because he remembered Lucy’s advice or because he needed a hug? Fuck if he knew, but the toddler’s chubby little fingers that no doubt were sticky with kid goobers immediately sought out his hair.
“Please take your seats, Ice Knights,” the pilot said over the intercom. “It’s time to get this bird in the air.”
Ian looked from the empty seat by Christensen to the one next to Shelby. There was no good choice here, but he had to make it. The devil he could ignore or the devil who made him feel like some sad-sack sucker who wanted what he couldn’t ever have? Oh yeah, that last bit sounded familiar.
Ian sat down next to Christensen and tried not to grimace as Freya went from petting his hair to straight-up trying to yank it out of his head as she sucked her thumb.
“Your turn soon, Christensen,” he said, as if that was why he’d picked that seat rather than the one next to Shelby.
“Works for me.” The other man shrugged and turned back to the window. “Babies love me.”
Of course they did. Everyone loved Alex Christensen. It was hard not to like him unless you had a massively important reason—which Ian sure as hell did.
He did the awkward moves necessary to buckle his seat belt while holding a crashed-out kid. Finally finished with the sixteen-part play, he looked up and right at Shelby. The team jet was already zooming down the runway when he realized his mistake. He’d have to spend the entire flight across the country staring right at the woman he hadn’t been able to get out of his head since she jabbed that Taser of hers into his ribs.
Just great.
…
Shelby had no interest in having kids anytime soon. Babies did nothing for her. Her ovaries did not explode when a photo of a hot guy holding a baby crossed her social media streams. She didn’t sigh and press her hand to her heart when she spotted teeny-tiny booties. The sound of an infant giggling didn’t make her want to toss her pills in the trash.
So why in the hell couldn’t she stop staring at Ian as Freya snuggled deeper agains his chest and drooled on his crisp white dress shirt? Why did it do funny things to her stomach? And why in the name of Gordie Howe did it make her all melty?
It wasn’t just the fact that his shoulders seemed broader or his hands bigger or that—
“Wanna switch seats?” Alex asked.
The question jarred her out of the hot-guy-with-a-baby trance she’d accidentally landed in and she startled, trying—and failing—to appear cool about it. “No. Why would I want to do that?”
The Ice Knights’ other first-line forward grimaced. “Because the things I’m reading on your face as you stare at him are making me uncomfortable.”
So much for not making an idiot of herself on her first official workday. Great. Fabulous. Wonderful. Why didn’t they give out parachutes when a person boarded just in case of extreme in-flight-embarrassment events like this?
“Stop making shit up to bust her chops,” Ian said, keeping his gaze focused on the empty chair in front of him as if it held the secret to winning the lotto.
“He speaks to me.” Alex let out a dramatic gasp. “Careful there, or between calling me when you used your get-out-of-jail-free card and addressing me directly, people might think you’d actually pulled your head out of your ass.”
Ian barely unclenched his jaw as he responded. “There is a baby here.”
“Freya isn’t going to repeat it.”
Even with the undeniable tension between Alex and Ian, there was something else, too—a connection that only really good friends or siblings had.
It made all of this back-and-forth idiocy tolerable because as an only child, Shelby had never experienced it. She’d only watched longingly as her friends fought with their brothers and sisters one minute and then zoomed into protector mode the next. What would that be like to have someone so firmly on your side? Ian and Alex were both morons for not seeing how lucky they were.
“Yeah, so you say.” Ian snorted, then went completely still when the baby wiggled around in his arms. The second she settled back in with a soft sigh and clos
ed her eyes again, Ian kept his voice low. “Wait until Lucy comes after you because Freya’s first word is ‘ass.’”
“I’ll tell her you said it while holding Freya. It’s true. You just did. And you”—Alex turned his focus onto her, pulling her into the discussion from the sidelines—“were staring at him like you were ready to take a bite out of him—in the good way.”
“You’re mistaken.” There, that almost came out as if she wasn’t lustily remembering every touch, every stroke, every kiss that had happened between them.
Alex lifted an eyebrow. “Am I?”
Ian’s gaze locked with hers and her breath caught. There was just something in the look in his eyes, the demand and the promise, that had her entire body humming with need. This was bad. This was so very, very bad. And she’d never wanted anything more. The reaction was so outsized, so out of character that the shock of it was a bucket of ice water tossed onto the fire that always seemed to sizzle to life around Ian.
“So you two got stuck in that cabin together for a week?” Alex asked, his voice sounding distant.
Unable to look away from Ian, she replied, “Three days.”
“Uh-huh. And the cabin lost power?”
“Yeah,” Ian said, the word coming out more like one of his sexy cabin grunts than English.
“Had to find a way to stay warm, huh?”
She flushed. “There was a fireplace.”
One that was warm enough to lie in front of naked for hours. Or was that because of Ian? Damn. She was scared the answer was the second one.
“Any chance there was a bear rug in front of it?” Alex looked from her to Ian, his grin getting bigger with each second. “I see.”
“You see nothing,” Ian said, his tone as harsh as his hold on Freya was gentle.
“You’re right,” Alex said. “It’s not at all what I was thinking. You two. Alone. A cabin. Sex pheromones flying through the air, rubbing up against each other.”
“Nothing happened,” Shelby said, surprised she wasn’t hit by a lightning bolt on the spot for that lie.
“Then maybe it should have,” Alex said. “Unleashing all this pent-up attraction upon unsuspecting folks like myself in the middle of a tin can shooting through the sky seems a mite dangerous.”
“You’re imagining things,” Ian said.
God knew she was right now, and pretty much all of them involved being naked.
“I am?” Alex laughed. “Fine. Whatever you two say. I won’t say another word about it.”
With that, the other man crossed his arms over his navy dress shirt, leaned his head against the headrest, and closed his eyes.
Relief swept through Shelby from her boots up her pleather pants to the dressy top she’d ironed this morning so she’d fit in with Coach’s requirement that everyone dress up during road trips to the tips of her multi-pierced ears. The last thing she needed now that she was officially on the job was to have someone figure out that she and Ian had had sex. On a bearskin rug. In front of a roaring fire.
Oh God. She was a hot mess, and she could only think of one way to make it through this cross-country flight. She closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep. Immediately. She considered fake snoring but decided against it.
Hours later, when the captain announced they were landing, she opened her eyes and did a fake stretch, as if she hadn’t spent the entire flight with her ears attuned to Ian’s every shift in his seat. Not that anyone would know that. Against her better judgment, she snuck a peek at Ian. He was still holding Freya, but he was looking right at Shelby.
One side of his mouth curled up in a smirk that all but screamed that she wasn’t fooling anyone.
Way to go, Shelby. They obviously should be meeting the plane to give you your Oscar.
So even though she knew he knew, and he no doubt knew that she knew he knew, they both kept their mouths shut on the team bus to the hotel. She ditched him in the hotel lobby, making a quick break for the shortest check-in line. However, her hotel luck turned out to be the same as her grocery store luck, and she picked the line that barely moved. Once she finally had her room key in hand, Ian was nowhere to be seen. Sending up a quick thank-you to the fates, she hustled to the hotel elevator so she could hide in her room.
Chicken? Me? Cluck, cluck.
She stepped inside the crowded elevator just as the doors were closing. And it wasn’t until the mirrored doors shut that she realized Ian was in the back of the elevator car. At the opposite corner stood Alex. Heart hammering in her chest, she glued her gaze to the numbers lighting up on the elevator panel. With each stop, the elevator emptied out a little, but Ian and Alex remained. It wasn’t until they hit the twentieth floor—her floor—that all three of them got off.
Alex took one look from her to his brother and back again before rolling his eyes. “Yeah, absolutely no unfinished business between you two at all.” Then he shook his head and headed down the hall.
Ian answered with a noncommital grunt that sent her straight back to the cabin. Her skin flushed all of a sudden, and she kept her gaze on the room numbers and not the hot hunk of man next to her. They stopped at the same time.
Not again.
He jerked his head to the door opposite hers. “This is me.”
“I’m right here.” Was that relief making her stomach sink? Yes. Had to be. There was no way it was disappointment.
He nodded and headed for his door, rubbing the back of his neck. After swiping his key card and turning the knob, he paused. “I’ll see you for dinner, then.”
“Yeah,” she said, her mutinous body perking up in inconvenient places. Not a date, boobs, it’s work. “You and Alex get to have brotherly bonding that I’ll tell the world about.”
He grimaced before striding into his room and letting his door swing shut.
Way to go, Shelby. You are so a people person. Always with the right thing to say.
Letting out a sigh, she went into her own room so she could shower off the flight and maybe—just maybe—get her head on straight before she had to spend the evening with a hot, surly hockey player she absolutely for sure wanted nothing to do with beyond a professional work relationship.
Really.
For sure.
Without even an itty-bitty smidgen of doubt.
Chapter Eleven
An hour later, Ian walked into the private room of the hotel’s restaurant to find he was the last to arrive. Everyone else was already at the table, enjoying appetizers and gabbing about the Phoenix players they’d be facing off against tomorrow.
Normally, he’d be all on board for some pregame smack talk, but that would be all it would be for him because of his stupid thumb injury. He wasn’t even wearing a brace anymore, just some wimpy little bandages that declared what a dumbass he was for tripping over his own big feet. It barely hurt anymore; he had range of motion back—okay, mostly back. All he had to do was talk Doc into giving him the okay.
How hard could that be?
Spotting the free seat by the team doc, Ian made his way over to the table. It had to be a sign from above. This was gonna happen. He was getting back on the ice, and then that nagging sense of not being enough would shut the fuck up.
“Heya, Doc.” Ian pulled out the empty chair. “Anyone sitting here?”
Doc, an older guy with not even a hint of hair on his perfectly round pale-pink head, looked up at him. “Not you, I’m afraid.”
What the hell? How had he turned an affable guy like Doc against him?
Before he could ask, Lucy walked up with Freya in her arms. The chubby little baby gave him a huge gummy smile, showing off one tooth starting to come in.
“What Doc means is that your reservation is for that table over there.” Lucy pointed to a three-person table in the corner.
One that Christensen and Shelby were already sitting at. Shelby w
as listening to whatever bullshit story Christensen was telling her with utter rapt attention, a soft smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. Ian was grinding his molars together before he even took the first step toward them.
Christensen was like this with every woman. It had barely registered with Ian until now—until Shelby. Gaze locked on Shelby, the way her lips had curled into a half smile as if Christensen was the most fascinating person ever, he marched past the long table of Ice Knights players who weren’t in PR hell.
“Have fun at the little kids’ table, Petrov,” said Stuckey, a defenseman who was a constant smart-ass when he wasn’t on the phone with his girlfriend or telling the team stories about the horse of a Great Dane they shared.
“Are you ever going to stop being in a shit-ass mood?” asked Phillips, the team Thor look-alike.
“Not until I’m on the ice,” he shot back as he strode past, barely slowing in his speed as he watched Shelby lean in closer to Christensen to take a look at whatever it was he was showing her on his phone.
“Have pity on us, Doc,” the team captain, Zach Blackburn, hollered from his place at the head of the big table. “Clear the asshole.”
“Don’t drag me into this, boys,” Doc said. “The body heals when it heals. You can’t hurry it.”
Doc took a deep breath that was no doubt the precursor to a mini lecture on patience, visualization, and doing what it took to stay healthy, which Ian considered his cue to speed the fuck up before he got called in to be used as an example of exactly what not to do. He’d heard the speech before, and that was more than enough.
He had no more than sat down at the tiny circular table when a waiter came by with two large glasses of milk over ice and put one down in front of Christensen and the other in front of him.