by Lili Valente
“You’re sure you won’t miss the dress and the flowers and all that?” I ask as I finish off the last slice of feta and rosemary pizza.
“I’ve already had the dress and the flowers,” she says. “And we’ve already had all the people we love there while we said our vows. As far as I’m concerned all that’s missing is the paperwork.”
“And a honeymoon.” I bob my eyebrows suggestively. “A long honeymoon.”
She grins. “I think four days is all we can get away with on such short notice, but we could always call this the practice honeymoon and take a longer trip over the Christmas holidays.”
“I like the way you think,” I say, leaning in for a kiss.
“And I like the way you make love to me in the shower,” she murmurs against my lips. “Which reminds me… I’m feeling kind of dirty after all that time in the barn.”
“Well, I like you dirty, but I’ll most happily help you get clean, soon-to-be Mrs. Hunter.” I stand, helping her to her feet before sweeping her into my arms and making a beeline for our bedroom.
Ours, where I hope to get clean and dirty and everything in between with this woman for many years to come.
Epilogue
Luke
Two years later…
My humans are the best humans—truly wonderful two-legs in every way.
I’ve known they were special from the moment I met them, but they’ve really outdone themselves with the new puppy.
The new puppy is beautiful.
The new puppy is a chubby little angel with the softest cheeks and the best giggle I’ve ever heard.
The new puppy also occasionally squeezes my ears too tight, but I understand—puppies don’t know any better, and a pinched ear is a small price to pay for the sweetest treat on the face of the great green earth.
Puppy socks…
The sight of them lying there on the quilt as Zoey changes the puppy’s diaper—two tiny scraps of blue, fresh from the puppy’s sweet, sweaty little feet—is enough to make my mouth water. I wipe my muzzle on my front legs, trying to hide my excitement as I inch closer to my prize on my belly, waiting for the perfect moment.
“Don’t even think about it, Luke,” Zoey says, her back still turned to me. “Those socks are going in the washing machine and nowhere else.”
I whine softly, making Tristan laugh as he emerges from the hallway dressed in baggy clothes with straw sticking out of the arms and legs. “She’s got eyes in the back of her head, man. You should know that by now.” He crouches down beside Zoey, depositing a heap of brown fabric onto the quilt. “One cowardly lion costume, Dorothy. Should I get the Tin Man into his gear or wait until you’ve got Gabe ready to go?”
“Go ahead and dress Luke,” Zoey says. “Gabe is clean and changed, and we’ll be ready to go in a few minutes. Right, buddy?” She squeezes the puppy’s tiny feet. “Are you excited for your first Halloween?”
The puppy burbles happily, waving his chubby fists in the air as Tristan and Zoey beam down at him with love in their eyes.
“I’m excited, too,” Tristan says, rubbing a hand up and down Zoey’s back. “I love you guys.”
“And we love you, too, baby.” Zoey turns to Tristan, smiling as she brings a hand to his cheek. They both get that look in their eyes—that soft, melting, grateful look that means they’re about to kiss—and I brace myself.
This is my one shot…
My last chance…
My final opportunity to score those sweet, sweet socks for my very own…
I hold my breath, watching as my two favorite humans move together, their lips meeting in a way that leaves no doubt how much they love each other. I wait until their eyes slide closed and then—I pounce!
Quick as a flash, I’m on the quilt, snapping the tiny socks into my mouth, and bolting for the basement. By the time Zoey shouts—“Bad dog, Luke! Bring those back!”—I’m already down the stairs, bounding into the corner behind my kennel, where I lie down to relish the exquisite flavor of puppy feet.
I taste salt and milk, sweat and puppy funk, and an earthy undertone that reminds me of long days running through the grass and hot summer rain. I close my eyes, soaking the sweet taste into my soul for a few precious moments before Tristan appears on the other side of my kennel.
“Are you going to drop them on your own, or do we have to wrestle?” he asks, propping his hands on his hips. “Come on, buddy. Drop the socks. You don’t want to end up at the vet tonight, do you?”
Of course, I don’t—and I haven’t eaten a sock since long before the puppy was born, I’ve just tasted them.
It would be nice to get a little credit for my self-restraint, but I can’t blame Tristan and Zoey for hoarding the socks for themselves. It is their puppy, after all, and after all the work they do to keep the little guy fed and clean and happy, they ought to be able to enjoy a chew on his socks at the end of a long day.
Exercising the maturity I’ve worked hard to develop since becoming a big brother, I pad around the kennel and drop the now soggy socks at Tristan’s feet.
“Good boy,” he says, scratching my neck the way I like, getting deep under my collar. “Now let’s get you dressed. It’s almost party time.”
Back upstairs, Tristan helps me into a silver costume with a generally irritating cone hat I intend to rub off at the first opportunity, while Zoey dresses our puppy, who is even cuter with his cherub’s face ringed with a lion’s mane.
Not long after, we’re out in the cool autumn air, Zoey pushing the stroller as we head to the annual spooky gathering, where I will steal all the treats the little humans and the humans who’ve had too much wine drop on the grass, run and play with my friend Clarence, and dance with Tristan, Zoey, and our puppy.
My humans are excellent dancers.
And excellent people.
And excellent parents.
I truly can’t imagine a better pack to be a part of than this one. Though, if Tristan and Zoey decide to have more puppies, that would be nice. We’ve got more than enough love in our house to go around. More puppies would just mean more love, more happiness, and of course…more socks.
The thought makes me smile as we reach the party and head for the gate.
It’s a sweet life, all right.
Sweet and getting sweeter every day.
The End
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HOT AS PUCK by Lili Valente
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Sneak Peek
Hot, hilarious hockey romance…
Meet the Bad Motherpuckers, starting
with book one, HOT AS PUCK.
Available now.
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.
Please enjoy this excerpt from
HOT AS PUCK!
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.