2. My Knight In Shining Hockey Pads
MY KNIGHT IN SHINING HOCKEY PADS
LAKE
Holy shit. My unexpected visitor turned stalker knows who I am.
Should I be flattered? Freaked out? My ego doesn’t need any more stroking. I’ve already reached the apotheosis of bad bitch energy. But instead of channeling my inner cool and upholding some semblance of leftover mystery, my vocal cords screech like broken organ pipes.
“You know who I am?” I splutter, unsure if I should be offended that my only claim to fame around here is Buford’s sloppy seconds.
Mr. Mullet shrugs. “Everyone on the Mustangs knows who you are.”
With that sliver of realization, two terrible thoughts pour over me.
One, I’m still exceedingly half-naked and burning underneath the scrutiny of this man’s microscope.
And two, this stranger has all the ammunition he needs to end my reign of terror and blast my criminal status to the entire town of Maple Grove.
I really shouldn’t be giving him any ideas, yet I can’t help but fear for the reckless way he juggles my smoking gun. “Are you going to turn me in?”
Amusement simmers in the dark pits of his eyes. “Turn you in?”
I gesture to the pathetic state of Buford’s room—the aftermath of too much arrogance and a disturbing amount of self-destructive behavior.
I felt fucking vindicated in the beginning, but now my stomach churns with the harebrained decision of pre-revenge tequila shots.
Add intoxicated climbing to my endless write-up.
“You know, for breaking and entering. Insect warfare. Indecent exposure.”
“I don’t think ‘insect warfare’ is a thing.”
The chill of the house peppers my exposed skin in gooseflesh. At least, I think the cold is responsible. “Maybe not yet, but after tonight, Buford will probably do anything to see me behind bars if he knows I did this.”
My knight in shining cotton surveys the room, most likely formulating some internal thought about how pitiful the girl in lingerie is to resort to the unwarranted liberation of nature’s best clean-up crew.
“That’s not going to happen,” he promises with a chest-deep rumble that would make any woman strip on command. It would take a military-grade firehose to extinguish the physical spark between us.
I cant my head. “What are you talking about?”
A little gorge forms between his eyebrows, and the hinge of his jaw hardens. “Look, Buford’s not my favorite person either. Just because he was generous enough to let me use his shower doesn’t mean we’re buddy-buddy.”
“What are you saying?” I squeak, swallowing down the sour aftertaste of bile.
Sensing my concern, he soothes my nerves with a warm, pulse-fluttering smile, any and all judgment scrubbed from his expression. “I’m saying that I’m going to get you out of here, and Buford doesn’t have to be any wiser.”
“You’d do that? For me?”
“Figure it would be kind of hard to take you on a date if you’re stuck in jail,” he quips, running his tongue over his canine as that self-assured tone of his burns a hole straight through my belly.
Date? Am I…am I hearing things correctly? I have to be dreaming. There’s no way one of Buford’s teammates is asking me out when I have on minimal clothing and even less sensibility. I’m a hot mess. Emphasis on “hot,” but I digress.
Sure, there’s a part of me that’s celebrating the possible death of my post-ex abstinence, but there’s another part that has to scrutinize the pitfalls of this operation and reaffirm a pragmatic approach.
I don’t want to offend this man—seeing as he holds my future in the palm of his very large hand—but I can’t just fawn and fall over without some much-needed explanation. “Are you serious?”
He narrows his eyes—the universal sign for yes, I’m serious. It’s as sexy as it is nerve-wracking.
Where was this handsome suitor when I was trying to reel weekly dates out of my ex-boyfriend? Under any other circumstances, I’d skip the small talk altogether and get straight to dessert. I.e., licking every inch of this stranger’s God-sculpted body until I overdose on his sickly sweet pheromones.
He shuffles a bit closer to me, holding up his hands in surrender when I shirk away like a cornered animal. “I don’t want this to come off the wrong way, but I know what happened between the two of you. Buford is a gigantic asshole, but he has an even bigger mouth.”
I throw my arms up in the air, momentarily forgetting that said arms were the only censor bars covering my lace-clad nipples and crotch. “Oh, great. Does everyone on the hockey team know that I’m the sad sack he cheated on?”
My admirer’s eyes gravitate to my chest on instinct, then farther down, and, surprisingly, he averts his stare with the brightest blush spilling over his cheeks. He suddenly seems interested in the two crickets that are humping each other in the middle of the floor.
“Actually, everyone on the hockey team knows that he’s a dog with no self-respect. We pity him, not you.”
Huh. I mean, I’ve never cared what any of the Minnesota Mustangs think of me, but I’m glad that my reputation seems to be salvageable after Buford’s category-five event. I lower my arms back to my private areas.
It’s not every day that my plan for vengeance backfires, much less in a way that makes my heart hiccup and my brain falter like an overworked engine. “Well, thank you. I think.”
Damn. In the span of twenty minutes, Mountain Man may have single-handedly revived my faith in the male species. A feat so grand that I thought it would take a few more…unsupervised outings…to Buford’s house until I found it in me to bury the past.
“Yeah, anytime.”
He’s so…calm. How is he so calm? He’s also not exploiting my semi-nakedness to play a game of tongue war. A respectful hockey player is about as imaginary as a goddamn unicorn.
The urgency to evacuate the premises has taken a back seat. “So…” I start, rocking back on my heels.
“Shit, you’re still in your underwear,” he says. “You can borrow my clothes. I can just stay in a towel.”
I think there’s a very sick and twisted part of me that doesn’t mind talking in the half-nude. She is beyond saving.
My lips part in an embarrassed rebuttal, but I don’t get a word out before he’s hightailing it to the bathroom in search of an oversized cover-up.
When I get a glance at his back, I see a cybersigilism tattoo that spans the width of his shoulders, all curved lines and geometric shapes converging into something both ancient and contemporary in design.
In the blink of an eye, Hercules Jr. is back with the coveted necessities, and he deposits his contribution into my outstretched arms. I already know these are going to be huge on me, but it beats having my ass hanging out.
“Thank you, um…” I still don’t know this man’s name.
Bristling, the tips of his ears flare red. “Sutton.”
Sutton. Even his name is hot.
“Thank you, Sutton. I’m Lake, but you, uh, already knew that.”
He turns around to give me some privacy to change, and if my eardrums don’t deceive me, it sounds like his voice pitches an octave higher. “Don’t mention it. You’ll probably look better in them anyways.”
Honestly, I know it’s bad to make generalizations, but I was under the assumption that all hockey players were walking STD magnets who only thought with their micro penises. Clearly, the micro penis belief is unfounded.
I hold Sutton’s shirt up to gauge the overhang on this thing, and the minute I slip it over my head, it dwarfs me like a nightdress. I’m not petite—five foot seven, to be exact—but Sutton’s eye level is inches above my head. I barely reach his pecs.
I cinch his baggy shorts around my waist, losing about half my sex appeal as I don what is essentially a fashionable potato sack.
“You can turn back around now,” I tell him, feeling self-conscious.
Sutton does as I say—albeit slowly—and his pupils dilate in the low light of the bedroom, his near-black irises overridden with reverence or lust. Nobody has ever looked at me like that before—not Buford, none of my high school exes.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say all of this is a figment of my alcohol-induced imagination.
It wouldn’t be the first time I zonked out after drinking one too many shots and had a hyper realistic dream about a man who could bench press me without breaking a sweat.
Sutton shakes his head. “Buford is a fucking idiot for letting you go.”
Heat curls around the back of my neck—similar to a fever burning too close to the surface. “Nobody has ever said that to me before.”
“I’m glad I got to be the first.”
Ugh, there he goes again! Not only is he making me rethink my previous stance on hockey players, but he’s—shudder—giving the male species a good name. If I didn’t love dick so much, I would’ve turned to lesbianism a long time ago.
“Thank you again for letting me borrow your clothes. I just feel bad that you don’t have anything to wear.”
Do I feel bad for taking his clothes? Yes. Do I hate the view? Not one bit. I’m a perverted woman.
Sutton adjusts his towel ever so slightly, endearingly unaware that I’m not going to be able to resist him without combusting into a million pieces. I’m like a rabid dog teething on a big, juicy bone.
“Please don’t. I tend to run hot anyways.”
“You are hot,” I mumble dazedly.
“What?”
Panic threads through my voice, and the overbearing heat that has been dispatched to the rest of my anxious body is on a mean kill streak. “I mean, you run hot! Yep, totally. I get that.”
I’m not one to lose my cool when talking to a guy. I usually just picture them in their underwear—or towel, more appropriately. But unfortunately for me, my Freudian slip isn’t that easy to cover up. Nor are the dozens of crickets that still hop around aimlessly.
A deep chuckle localizes in the pit of Sutton’s chest, and he’s about to (probably) comment on my nerves before his phone pings somewhere to the left. He swipes his device off the top of Buford’s dresser, reading the incoming message with wide eyes.
“Buford is on his way back home,” he announces.