Chapter 4
COLLETTE
We get back to the table, and somehow, in the time we were gone, the whole thing has merged into one big group.
Bouch has pulled a chair up next to Marlowe and Eve, and whatever he is saying has them laughing so hard that she’s wiping tears off their cheeks.
Nelly and Billie are deep in a conversation that looks weirdly intense.
Evan is nursing his beer in silence, which, from what I’ve gathered this week, is just Evan’s personality. He’s sitting back, taking it all in.
Suddenly, Vi appears from her manhunt, wrapped around a guy in a suit, while his friend tags behind them like a lost puppy. Oh, he’s cute.
“Everyone, this is Trent and Griffin,” she purrs as she runs her hands all over Trent.
Griffin is tall, with dark hair and a square jaw, the kind of guy who was born to wear a suit. He looks like he’s just stepped off the set of Wall Street.
“Hold on.” Trent’s eyes land on Fish, then Bouch, then Nelly, and lastly Evan. “You guys play for the Mavericks.” The guys grumble and nod, but look slightly uncomfortable, while Trent looks so excited, as if he can’t believe he’s meeting his heroes.
“Guilty.” Fish grins.
“You didn’t tell me you were hanging out with Mavericks players,” Trent says to Vi.
“Didn’t think it was important.” She shrugs, totally unimpressed with the situation.
“You didn’t think it was important?” Trent stares at Vi as if she’s grown a second head. “These guys are fucking legends.” Trent grabs Griffin’s arm. “Look who it fucking is.”
“I can see,” Griffin says, looking awkwardly as his friend starts fanboying over the guys.
The awkwardness doesn’t deter Trent. “I was at the game against Boston. That one-timer in the third?” Trent is looking at Fish like he scored the goal personally for him.
Fish handles it fine because, of course, he does.
This is what he was built for, charm and attention and people telling him he’s great.
“Appreciate that, brother,” he tells him, which makes Trent practically glow.
“And Bouchard, the fight against Tampa …” he continues, reminiscing the guy’s glory.
“Which one?” Bouch grins, which pulls Trent into a conversation about how awesome he is, which Bouch is loving.
“The guy is giving me the ick.” Vi pouts at me.
“I’m sure he will settle down once the initial shock has worn off,” I whisper to her, which earns me an eyeroll.
I was wrong. Trent continues fanboying over the guys, who are polite about it and saying the right things, but I work with athletes for a living, and I can read the room.
Evan orders another beer without making eye contact with anyone.
Nelly checks his phone. Fish’s grin is still there, but it’s the professional one now, not the real one.
They came here to not be hockey players for five minutes, and now they’re hockey players again.
Vi eventually whispers something into Trent’s ear, which makes his cheeks turn pink.
The hockey talk dies down eventually, and normal conversation takes over, which is how Griffin ends up next to me.
I don’t know if Vi put him there or if he migrated on his own, but he’s close enough that I can smell his cologne, it’s expensive and not terrible, which in New York is basically a green flag.
“So, you work with these guys?” He nods toward the table.
“Unfortunately,” I say, sipping on my drink.
He laughs. “What do you do?”
“Social media for the team.”
“That’s kind of cool. If you hadn’t noticed, we are big hockey fans.” He smirks.
“Not sure what gave it away,” I tease, making him laugh, which pulls Fish’s attention to us. His brows rise, and I see he is checking to see if I need saving, which is kind of sweet. I give him a subtle head shake, and he goes back to his conversation with the boys.
“And what do you do?” I ask back.
“Work in finance, the suit didn’t give it away?” He grins.
“Kind of did. What do you do there?”
“Mergers and acquisitions.”
“So, you buy companies and fire people,” I ask, taking a sip of my drink.
He grimaces a little. “You make me sound like an ass, but you’re not entirely wrong.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s a job.” He shrugs. “Do you like your job?”
I nod. “Yeah, I love it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but it was always going to be something with hockey.”
“You’re a big hockey fan then?” he asks.
“Had no choice. My father was a player, as are my brothers.”
He stills, his beer bottle paused on his lips. “Do they play for the Mavericks?” he tentatively asks. I nod. His eyes widen. “Are they here?”
I shake my head. “If they were there would be no way in hell I could be talking to you right now.”
He seems surprised. “Your brothers are protective, I take it.”
“Suffocatingly.” I groan, which makes him laugh.
“My sister would probably say the same thing about me.” He chuckles lightheartedly.
“Well, on behalf of your sister, stop it,” I warn him, which makes his grin widen even more.
Griffin is easy to talk to. He’s smart, he listens, and he doesn’t make every conversation a competition, which is refreshing when your daily existence involves men who think the most interesting topic in any room is themselves.
We talk about New York, about how I just moved here, about how he grew up on the Upper West Side.
“Where did you move from?” he asks.
“South Dakota.”
“Oh wow. New York must seem crazy compared to South Dakota,” he says, sipping his beer.
“Look, I loved my time in South Dakota, and I miss the wide-open spaces, my friends, the safety of it, but I’ve always wanted to live in New York. Maybe because I grew up on Gossip Girl or something, but I just felt like it was for me.”
“I get that, New York is amazing. It just has something that other cities don’t.”
“Oh great,” I grumble as I see a group of puck bunnies converge onto our table.
Three of them, glossy and polished, appear out of nowhere with the kind of precision that suggests a group chat pinged the second the boys walked through the door.
They descend on them within minutes of walking into the club.
“Guessing you don’t like those women,” Griffin asks.
“They’re puck bunnies.”
He chokes on his drinks. “Excuse me, what did you call them?”
“Puck bunnies. Women who go after hockey players, like a gold digger.”
Griffin’s eyes widen. “How can you tell?”
“You just can.” I look over at the girls, and they have all clocked the intruders. The girls work with warp speed, and before I know it, Fish has his arm wrapped around a brunette. Bouch is suddenly very animated. Even Evan looks slightly less miserable, while Nelly is chatting with a blonde.
Forget about them, they are grown-ass men, and you are talking to a gorgeous guy.
“I’m guessing that happens a lot,” Griffin says, watching me watch the puck bunnies.
“You have no idea.” I sigh. My eyes flit over to where the giggles are.
Griffin subtly places his finger under my chin and redirects my attention back to him. “Think I might have to distract you.”
“Distract me?”
“You’re not at work right now. They’re big boys, they can look after themselves.” He shifts closer.
He’s right. I have this gorgeous man in front of me.
Who cares what those guys are doing? “How are you going to distract me?” I ask him, my eyes falling to his lips before looking back up into those molten chocolate swirls.
I look at him. Really look at him. Square jaw.
Dark eyes. That easy grin that hasn’t faltered once all night, even when his friend was making a fool of himself by fanboying over Fish.
He’s been sitting here talking to me while the chaos unfolded around us, and not once did he try to go back and join the hockey conversation.
He stayed when many before have left me in their dust to get closer to their idols.
“I have my ways.” He smirks.
“Which are?” My heart thumps wildly in my chest. Is he going to kiss me? Please kiss me.
And thankfully, he does. Griffin’s hand slides to the back of my neck as he pulls me in close.
His lips are warm and sure, he tastes like whiskey, and I kiss him back because why wouldn’t I?
He’s gorgeous and he’s not a hockey player, and right now in this bar, no one is watching, and no one cares, and it feels so good to just be a girl getting kissed on a Friday night.
His other hand finds my waist and pulls me closer.
I let him because his mouth is doing things that are making it very hard to remember why I should be sensible right now.
We pull apart, and he’s grinning, and I’m grinning, and my heart is hammering in my chest.
“That’s how you distract someone,” he says.
“Consider me distracted.”
He chuckles and kisses me again. This time it’s slower, deeper, his thumb tracing circles on the back of my neck.
I lose track of how long we stand there because the bar has faded, it’s just him and me, and his mouth and hands, and the way he keeps pulling me back in every time I think about pulling away.
When we finally come up for air, my lipstick is definitely on his face, and I don’t care.
“Lettie, sorry to interrupt, but we’re going,” Eve says. Oh. Damn. I look at Griffin, I’m not ready for the night to end. “Are you coming or staying?” she asks.
“Come home with me,” Griffin whispers in my ear, sending goosebumps down my neck.
Yes. Say yes. Say yes, right now. You need to get laid.
I want to. God, I want to. Every single part of my body is screaming at me to say yes.
But I can’t. Because fifteen feet from my bedroom door, there are two six-foot-plus French-Canadian men who will absolutely hear me not come home tonight, and by morning there will be a search party.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” he asks.
“Can’t. Trust me, it’s not a won’t situation.” I pull back enough to look at him properly. “I live with my brothers.”