Chapter 8
Finley
“Oh, hell, no.” I shake my head. “Certainly not.”
“I didn’t pick them.” Kane slips the apron over his head and ties the strings around his waist.
“Where’s Sabrina?” I ask, looking around the large room set up for the cooking competition.
I’m not sure how the last two weeks passed so quickly, but somehow, the practices and games flew by when all I wanted was for time to stand still, so I never had to do this ridiculous challenge.
On the plus side, our defense is finally getting it together. We’ve won eight of our last twelve games, including one against the Chicago team who took Pike out of commission.
Kane shrugs his large shoulders. “Avoiding you, if I had to guess. I don’t think it was an accident that she had someone from her team give me our aprons.”
Fucking Sabrina.
“For the love. I cannot wear this,” I groan taking in the monstrosity they expect me to be filmed in. The apron is designed to look like a yeti body with your head replacing the mascot’s. It’s ridiculous. And worse, it’s an apron.
“We’re all wearing them.” Beckett looks down at his chest, now completely covered by the yeti apron. “It’s not a big deal.”
That is so much easier for him to say. No one is going to see him in that and all of a sudden think his place is in the kitchen. In fact, with his black T-shirt that is tight in just the right places, he looks like a DILF about to go grill some hamburgers at the family picnic.
“I guess these are going to be a fundraising item,” Beckett comments. “Honestly, I think Sabrina and her team are onto something. People are going to love this.”
He looks at my face and holds up his hands. “Woah. No need to blame me. I’m just doing what I’m told.”
“I’m not blaming you,” I say. Unless he means that as a member of the male population, then, I’m totally blaming him and, in all fairness, the female half of the population, too. “I’d just prefer not to wear fucking aprons.”
“Coach, are you annoyed about this as well?” Larsen asks, barging into our conversation.
“Obviously, Larsen.”
“Right?! I told Li the yeti body is dumb.”
I nod. I’m not sure how Larsen became my ally in the crusade to ditch the aprons, but I will take what I can get.
“They clearly should’ve done our bodies wearing, like, Yeti-branded boxers,” Larsen continues. “Like the bikini ones, but for guys. Or yours could’ve been a bikini one. Oh, man, yours would’ve been awesome. Can you imagine a little black bikini—”
Larsen is cut off as Li, with a look of absolute horror on his face, pulls him away from me and the ungodly number of sprints he was about to be told to go skate.
I swallow the laugh that’s about to escape me at Larsen’s ridiculousness when I realize Kane is staring at my stomach, his gaze vacant.
“Um, Earth to Kane?”
He shakes his head, dragging his focus back to my eyes.
I hold out the apron. “I’ve made an executive decision: I’m not wearing this.”
“Then don’t. I’m, personally, not willing to appear anything but an active participant for something the owner seemed overly invested in, but that’s just me.”
I glare at him, then, begrudgingly, put the apron on, pulling the strings tight behind me. As someone who desperately needs the owner in her corner, the man has a good point.
“You look,” Kane starts, running a hand through his dark hair, “ready. You look ready.”
“Well, looks can be deceiving, because I am, in fact, a terrible cook.” I purse my lips, realizing that’s not quite correct. “Unless it’s a big piece of protein and a salad coming straight from a plastic bag.”
He smiles, and it disarms me slightly. This might be the first real smile I’ve seen on him.
Kane has been stepping up at practice lately, and while I occasionally catch him joking around with the other guys—usually exchanging good-natured insults with the other defensemen—he’s not a guy who smiles frequently.
“This might be rough,” he warns, and I nod.
“Hopefully, Sabrina is one of the judges—it’ll serve her right for making us do this.”
Kane chuckles, and I realize I’ve said more than I usually would’ve. Exposed a glimmer of my nonprofessional side.
***
“Do you know anything about making cupcakes?” I ask, forcing myself not to grind my teeth as Larsen and Li sprint toward the supply shelf behind us. I hate losing.
We’re in a teaching kitchen, with cameras trained on us from every angle. If it’s not the social team in our faces, recording on their cell phones, it’s the professional cameras of our PR team set up to capture each of us.
“I’m pretty sure I haven’t eaten a cupcake in the last decade,” Beckett mutters, massaging a point on the back of his neck as he scans a vanilla cupcake recipe in front of him. “Jesus Christ, how do those two dumbasses already have their ingredients?”
I follow his gaze to where Li and Larsen are back at their station, setting out bags and tubs of God-knows-what.
“Okay, it’s supposed to be Yeti themed,” I say, trying to work through this. “So, we could do ice rinks, skates, or jerseys?”
“Do you have a secret cupcake talent you’ve been keeping from the world?”
“No.” I shake my head. “But for the record, if I did, I would certainly keep it from the world. Plus, how hard can it be?”
“I mean, hard?” he asks. “Isn’t that the point? To make us look like idiots?”
Knowing that running out of time is a real issue in the cooking shows this event is based on, I force myself to focus, looking through the recipes the PR team set out for us to choose from.
“Too bad for them, I’m pretty good at not looking like an idiot, even when I have no idea what I’m doing.
Okay.” I tap the vanilla recipe in front of him.
“I think we go vanilla on vanilla. If it turns out neither of us is good at decorating, we can at least call them snow mountains or something.”
“Smart,” Kane says. “Or we can draw lines and turn them into rinks. Though vanilla on vanilla is the worst flavor combination, and taste is half of the score.”
“I like vanilla with vanilla. It’s what I had every birthday growing up.”
Kane’s look of disgust makes me want to give him a good uppercut to the solar plexus, but instead of resorting to violence, I put down the recipe cards.
“I’m open to your suggestions.”
“You call the plays, Queenie.”
Queenie?
“I will not be going by Queenie,” I declare. Ice Queen is fine. It evokes small amounts of fear. Queenie feels like I’m on a throne doing story time with the kingdom’s four-year-olds.
Though if the smirk pulling across Kane’s face has anything to say about it, he seems to think otherwise.
I’m forced back to this ridiculous competition when the interns run by giggling.
Splitting up the work is our best bet, so I announce, “Okay, I’ll get the cupcake ingredients, you get the frosting.”
We make our way toward the shelves in the back, both spending more time searching for one ingredient than Li and Larsen spent getting all of theirs.
“Not that one,” I hiss as Beckett grabs the bag of sugar. “Yours calls for powdered sugar.”
Beckett raises one eyebrow, looking down at his armload of ingredients. “Yeah, which is why I have it right here.” He lifts his right elbow, where there is a plastic bag full of white powder tucked. “This sugar is for you.”
I look down at my arms and then again at the recipe. Fuck. How did I miss that?
“I figured we’d make healthy cupcakes,” I say.
Beckett walks away, headed back to our station. “No one wants that, Coach,” he calls over his shoulder. “No one.”
We get to work on the cupcakes, measuring ingredients and dumping them in.
“It says to slowly pour in the dry ingredients. How slow do you think is slow?” Kane asks.
I eye the mixer in front of us. This thing is intimidating. My mom passed away when I was three, and it has been Dad and me ever since, which means I’ve used a mixer exactly zero times in my life.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I have no idea.”
“Okay, well, I definitely have some vague memories of going too fast with my mom and ending up with flour all over the kitchen. So, I think we need to go pretty slow. Though I’m worried we aren’t going to have enough time.”
“They only have to cook for twenty-four minutes.” I read the instructions for what feels like the millionth time.
“Yeah, but then they have to cool before we can decorate them.”
I look at where his finger is tapping, ignoring the way the muscles in his hand flex. “Can’t we just stick them in the freezer, or something, to get them to cool?” I ask.
“I mean, maybe?” he replies, working the silver machine with much more confidence than I feel.
Silently, we scoop the cupcakes into their liners, and Beckett shoves them into the oven as I set the Yeti-branded egg timer on the counter.
“Frosting?” I ask.
“Frosting,” Kane agrees, a look of resignation on his face.
As Kane combines our ingredients, I scope out the competition.
Sutton is meticulously adding their powdered sugar to the mixer.
She angles her wrist again and again, pouring slightly more of the white powder into the bowl each time until, clearly fed up, Lefevre grabs the silver cup from her hand and unceremoniously dumps the whole thing into the silver bowl at once.
Her entire demeanor screams outrage until a puff of white dust shoots up and covers Lefevre’s face.
I laugh loudly and gently bump my arm against Kane’s to make sure he doesn’t miss out on the hilarity. The hairs on my arms tingle as a static shock passes between us at the contact.
Kane pulls his arm away abruptly as Sutton shouts, “Culture of accountability, Lefevre!”
Following the noise, he chuckles. “At least we’ve got them beat.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Sutton seems like the type of person who might secretly be crafty and will crush the decorating portion of the competition.”
Kane leans closer to me, his warm breath dancing along my ear when he murmurs, “What does someone who’s secretly crafty look like?”
I examine Sutton closer. “She just has that vibe that she knows what Mod Podge is.”