by Lili Valente
Hot as Puck
A Bad Motherpuckers Novel
Lili Valente
Self Taught Ninja
Contents
About the Book
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
13. Chapter Thirteen
14. Chapter Fourteen
15. Chapter Fifteen
16. Chapter Sixteen
17. Chapter Seventeen
18. Chapter Eighteen
19. Chapter Nineteen
20. Chapter Twenty
21. Chapter Twenty-One
22. Chapter Twenty-Two
23. Chapter Twenty-Three
24. Chapter Twenty-Four
25. Chapter Twenty-Five
26. Chapter Twenty-Six
27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
29. Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tell Lili your favorite part!
About the Author
Also by Lili Valente
Sneak Peek
All Rights Reserved
Copyright Hot as Puck © 2017 Lili Valente
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. This erotic romance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. This e-book is licensed for your personal use only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, especially if you enjoy hot, sexy, emotional romantic comedies featuring alpha males. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work. Cover design by Bootstrap Designs. Editorial services provided by Help Me Edit.
Created with Vellum
About the Book
The NHL’s biggest bad boy is about to fall for the virgin next door…
*
I am the world’s biggest dating failure. We’re talking my last date went home with our waitress kind of failure.
*
But I have an ace in the back pocket of my mom jeans—my sexy-as-sin best friend, NHL superstar forward, Justin Cruise.
*
Justin owes me favors dating back to seventh grade, long before he became a hotshot with a world famous…stick. So in return for my undying platonic loyalty, all I want is an easy-peasy crash course on how to be a sex goddess.
*
How hard can it be?
I have never been so hard in my life.
*
The things I want to do to my sweet, kindergarten-teaching, mitten-crocheting best friend Libby Collins are ten different kinds of wrong. Maybe twenty.
*
But I’m a firm believer in teaching by example, and by the end of our first lesson, we’ve graduated to a hands on approach to her sexual education: my hands all over her, her hands all over me, and her hot mouth melting beneath mine as I prove to her there isn’t a damned thing wrong with the way she kisses.
*
Give me a month, and I’ll transform Libby from wall flower to wall banger, and ensure she’s confident enough to seduce any guy she wants.
*
Problem is… the only guy I want her seducing is me.
*
Hot as Puck is a sexy, flirty, friends-to-lovers Standalone romantic comedy from USA Today Bestseller Lili Valente.
Dedicated to Sylvia Pierce, a talented
author and gifted friend.
Chapter One
Justin
This is it, the night I’ll look back on in fifty or sixty years and stab a finger at as the moment my life changed forever. Somewhere out there, in the throng of people wiggling to the club beat pulsing across the Portland skyline from the most exclusive rooftop lounge in the city, is the woman I’m going to marry.
Next summer.
In eight short months.
Because I’m dying to settle down, develop a food-baby where my six-pack used to be, spend Friday nights on the couch in my give-up-on-life sweatpants arguing about what to watch on Netflix and picking out names for the five or six kids my wife and I will bang out as quickly as possible to ensure we’ll have an army of small people to share in the grinding monotony of our wedded bliss.
Ha. Right.
Or rather no. Hell no. Fuck no, with a side of “what kind of reality-altering drugs have you been huffing in the bathroom?”
Sylvia is out of her goddamned mind! I’m twenty-eight years old—tonight, happy fucking birthday to me—and at the top of my game. I have zero interest in a long-term commitment to anything but my team.
The Portland Badgers are riding a ten-game winning streak, thanks largely to the fact that I bust my ass in the gym every other morning so I can bust my ass on the ice every time Nowicki spaces-out eighteen minutes into the period and forgets what his stick is for. That rookie’s untreated ADHD is a pain in my ass, but the rest of the forwards and I are taking up the slack and then some. I’m averaging over a point a game, leading the league in goals, and on my way to an elite season. Maybe even an Art Ross Trophy-winning season, though I don’t like to count my eggs before they’ve been scrambled, smothered in cheese and hot sauce, and wrapped in a burrito.
God, a burrito sounds good. I’m so fucking hungry. I would kill for Mexican right now, or at least something cooked and wrapped in something other than seaweed.
Nearly three thousand dollars in hor d’oeuvres are being passed around this party on shiny silver platters, and there’s not a damned thing I want to eat.
I let Sylvia—who has very firm opinions about many, many things—handle ordering the food, and apparently she thought sushi, sushi, more sushi, and some weird, rock-hard, low-fat cookies that taste like vanilla-flavored air were all anyone would want to shove in their pie-hole tonight. Just like she thought I should get down on one knee and put a ring on her finger in time to plan a blockbuster summer wedding or she would need to “explore her other options.”
Explore her other fucking options. What the fuck? Who says something like that to a guy they swear they’re desperately in love with? If she were really that gone on me, wouldn’t I be the only option? The only person in the entire world that she could even remotely consider spending the rest of her life with?
I kind of want to hate Sylvia—what sort of person tries to blackmail you into proposing to them on your birthday? She should have at least waited until her birthday next month—but I just keep thinking about how lonely my bed is going to be tonight. Sylvia is clearly deeply deluded about how far along we are in the evolution of our relationship, but she’s also very pretty, gives the best head I’ve ever had, bar none, and smells really, really nice.
I have a thing about the
way a woman smells. Not her perfume or her soap or her body lotion, but her. The woman herself. Her base note, the scent that rises from her skin when she’s lying in the sun or kissing me after a run or just hasn’t showered in a while.
Yes, with the right woman, I enjoy logging some quality bedroom time while she’s a little bit dirty. Don’t fucking judge me! It’s my birthday!
Anyway… No one smells as good as Sylvia does at the end of a long day on my boat, with sweat, sea salt, and sunscreen dried on her skin. Making love to her on the deck this past summer, with her long legs wrapped around my waist as I did my best to take home the trophy for most orgasms delivered in a single afternoon, I was convinced I’d finally met someone I could stick with for longer than a season.
But it’s not going to happen. It’s only October and I’ve just told Sylvia she’s coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs and that I’ll have her shit packed up and sent to her office tomorrow afternoon.
And then she said that I was an emotionally unavailable jerk who is incapable of sustaining an adult relationship. And then I said that she’s a blackmailing, birthday-ruining, manipulative, sushi-obsessed control freak who should try to choke down a carb once in a while because it might make her more fun to be around on pizza night or donut morning or any other day of the goddamned week involving carbs because a life without carbs is a stupid life. And then she flipped me off and told me to “have a nice long, lonely existence, asshole,” before knocking over a tray of champagne glasses on her way to the elevator at the other end of the roof.
The only good news? Very few of my guests seemed to notice our fight or Sylvia’s dramatic exit.
It’s nine-thirty, we’ve all been drinking since six, and most of my nearest and dearest are feeling no pain. I should be feeling no pain, too. I’m on my third tumbler of GlenDronach, haven’t eaten anything since lunch because the food at my party is unacceptable—if Sylvia and I were really meant to be, she would have realized I hated sushi two months ago—and haven’t drunk anything more serious than a beer since before the preseason.
But somehow, I’m stone-cold sober.
Sober and tired of celebrating, and wishing I could slip out and grab a deep-dish pizza from Dove Vivi. The cornmeal crust thing they’ve done to their pies is addictive, and I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in the world fresh mozzarella, house-made bacon, and a hearty slathering of pesto can’t fix.
Portland is home to some of the best eats in the world. It’s also home to more strip clubs per capita than any other city in the nation. If I weren’t committed to being a good host, I could have pizza in my belly and boobs in my face in under an hour. But I’m not the kind to ghost on my guests. I leave that for weirdos like my team captain, Brendan, who consistently vanishes from bars and clubs without warning, and clearly has issues with saying good-bye.
Not that I can blame him. After six years as a happily married man, going back to hitting the scene solo can’t be easy.
I’m just glad to see him finally out and about again. After Maryanne’s death, he shut down so hard a lot of us on the team were worried there might come a day when we’d show up for practice and learn Brendan wasn’t coming back to the ice, either because he’d lost the will to play, or because he’d lost the will to live.
That’s how much you should love the woman you’re going to marry. You should love her so much that if she were taken away from you it would feel like your rib cage had been cracked open and some sadistic son of a bitch was cutting away tiny pieces of your heart, slathering them in salt, and eating them right in front of you.
I’ve never felt anything close to that. For Sylvia or any other girl I’ve dated.
So maybe Sylvia is right. Maybe I’m going to spend the rest of my life solo, with my loneliness occasionally broken by short-term relationships with various hot pieces of ass.
“Poor me,” I say, lips curving in a hard grin.
Seriously, cry me a river, right? I’ve got a multi-million-dollar contract, a stunning loft with one-hundred and eighty degree views of the city, and my health, which is not something I’m stupid enough to take for granted. I was born with the kind of face that not even a black eye from scrumming with those douchebags from L.A. can wreck, and a body that performs—on the ice and in the bedroom. I should be laughing all the way to the dance floor, where I know of at least six or seven unattached hotties, any one of which would be happy to ease my birthday breakup pain by riding my cock all night long.
What do I want instead?
Pizza. My pajamas. And a crochet hook with an endless supply of yarn.
Nothing calms me down like hooking on a granny square until I’ve got one big enough to cover my entire damned bed. I’ve graduated to more complex projects since those early days learning how to hook so I wouldn’t go crazy while I was stuck in bed with mono for three months, but sometimes mindless repetition is the only cure for what ails me.
And yes, I like to crochet. Again, I’ll ask that you not fucking judge me, because it’s my birthday, because my charity, Hookers for the Homeless, has provided over two thousand caps, gloves, and scarves to people in need, and because my Instagram account—Hockey Hooker—has over a million followers. Clearly, the women of the world have no problem with a man who enjoys handicrafts. Though, the fact that my first post was a body shot of me wearing nothing but a Santa Hat I’d crocheted over my cock probably didn’t hurt.
I have no shame when it comes to selfies with my latest project. My friend Laura—childhood partner in crime and current public relations master for the Badgers—says she approves of my social media efforts to promote good will for the team. Her little sister and my crochet guru, Libby, thinks it’s great that I’m using my yarn addiction to raise awareness of the homeless crisis. But let’s get real. I started posing semi-nude for the tail and the attention.
I’m usually a big fan of tail and attention.
But now, as Laura and Libby climb the steps leading up to the patio from the dance floor, clearly intending to wish me a warm, bubbly, old-friends happy birthday, I wish I had an excuse not to talk to either one of them. Laura because she’s insane when she’s drunk—once she’s had a few, the usually level-headed La can’t be trusted not to embarrass herself and everyone around her—and Libs because I’m incapable of hiding anything from that girl.
Ever since thirteen-year-old Libs spent months teaching me how to crochet when I was housebound my sophomore year of high school—keeping me company and furthering my yarn-based education while we watched 80s movies and debated important things like whether Better Off Dead or Just One of the Guys was the superior underrated teen flick of that particular decade—I’ve had a chink in my armor where the youngest Collins sibling is concerned.
She sees through me. Every damned time.
When I had a shitty first half of my first season with the Badgers five years ago, Libby was the one who noticed I was being eaten alive by self-doubt and talked me back from the edge. When my charity was getting audited by the IRS, Libby realized I wasn’t nearly as chill about the whole thing as I was pretending to be and sent me a knight’s helmet she’d crocheted and a note promising that everything would work out. And when Sylvia and I had a pregnancy scare last summer, Libby was the only person I told.
Hearing Libs say that I could absolutely handle being a dad had made me a little less terrified. Not that I’d believed her, but hearing that trying your best and loving your kid is all that really matters from a woman who spends every day with a classroom full of rug-rats was comforting.
But I don’t want to be comforted right now. I want to get through the rest of this party and then hide out at home and lick my breakup wounds in private. So I plaster on a smile and hope it’s too dark for Libby to see how shitty I feel.
“Hello, birthday boy!” Laura throws her long arms around me, hugging me hard enough to make my breath rush out with an oof as she crushes my ribs, reminding me she’s also freakishly strong when she’s three sheets to the wind. “I lo
ve you, Justin. I’m so glad we’re still best friends. Let’s go do happy-birthday shots on the roof to celebrate!”
“We’re already on the roof.” I grunt again as she hugs me even tighter.
“Yes, we are, and as high up as anyone needs to be right now,” Libby agrees, meeting my pained gaze over her sister’s shoulder, her brown eyes anxious. Clearly, she’s also aware that her big sis has entered the bad-decision-making portion of the evening and should be monitored closely until she’s home in bed.
“No, the real roof, the one through the locked door behind the DJ booth.” Laura points a wobbly hand toward the stairwell on the other side of the dance floor, then twists her long red hair into a knot on top of her head. “I’ve been practicing my lock-picking skills so I’ll be ready when I quit PR to become a spy.”
“As one does,” I observe dryly.
“Exactly!” Laura jabs a bony finger into the center of my chest. “See, you get it. So let’s do this. We’ll break the lock, climb the stairs, and be the highest things in downtown. Get shots and meet me there. Or maybe we should stick with martinis.” She moans happily as she wiggles her fingers in the general direction of the bar. “Those Thai basil martinis are so amazing! Perfect with the sushi. Like, seriously brilliant. Sylvia did a bang-up job with the catering, Jus. Especially for a woman who looks like she hasn’t eaten since last Christmas.”
“Laura, hush,” Libby whispers, nudging her sister in the ribs with her elbow.
Laura bares her teeth in an “oh shit” grimace before smacking herself on the forehead. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I forgot about the storming out and knocking over a tray of drinks on her way out of the party thing. Are you two okay?”
“We’re fine,” I say, cursing silently. So much for avoiding this particular conversation. “She just decided it wasn’t working for her. It’s no big deal.”
“But breaking up on your birthday sucks.” Laura’s lips turn down hard at the edges. “And I thought she was one of the nice ones. I mean, I didn’t know her that well, but she seemed nice.”
“She was nice.” I take another too big drink of my scotch. “And now she’s gone. But she hadn’t even unpacked her boxes yet, so it shouldn’t take long to move them all out.”