Ice Breaker (3 page)

IT TURNED OUT
that Scotty only wanted to rescue me from the swarm of girls surrounding me and give me a break.

“You looked like you were about to pass out from overabundance of giggles or something,” he said once the woman who’d fetched me left us.

I figured it was best to keep my mouth shut about what might really be behind me being close to passing out. Scotty didn’t need to know how late I’d been out with Razor last night, or that I was hungover. It was bad enough that it had happened at all.

He chuckled over my lack of response. Fucking hell, he had probably read straight into my mind. I hated how my face gave everything away. Then he pointed toward Cam Johnson, one of the other guys on the team. “Go hang out with Jonny,” Scotty said. “He’s got a much smaller crowd. If you’re lucky, they won’t all notice you heading that way. And even if they do, he’s big and scary-looking. They might back off because of that. You can get a breather.”

“Yeah,” I said, heading that way. “Thanks, Scotty.”

He’d already moved on to talk with some fans, though, and I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Either way, I had a plan now, and I’d escaped the gaggle of girls long enough to be able to breathe again. I was so focused on getting to Jonny and the safety he could provide me that I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. At all. Not until I bumped into her. Yeah,
that
her. The girl with the brown hair and the blue eyes.

“Oh!” she said, putting out her arms to catch herself at the same time as I grabbed her waist to steady her.

But then I realized I was touching her, and I dropped my hands to my side.

She wobbled, and she blinked those blue eyes up at me and blushed as badly as I always did, and I was a fucking goner. My heart stopped, and I was glad to allow it to happen.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t...wasn’t…” She stopped and shook her head. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“My fault,” I forced myself to say, not that it was easy to get any words out at all. I’d never felt so damn speechless before in my life, but I needed to say something. Anything. Mainly because I couldn’t stand the thought of letting her think anything at all was her fault.

Her lips curled up in the cutest smile, and my whole face went hotter than the sun. I’d only thought she was pretty before. Right at that moment, I knew I would never see anything more beautiful in my life, no matter how long I lived, than the look on her face when she was staring at me.

She said something, but I was stuck in my head, trying to figure out how to make my mouth work again. So I could ask for her name. Or her number. Or tell her how fucking pretty she was. Or say anything, really. But I couldn’t do anything but stare, until I heard her say the word
dimples
. Then I got even more self-conscious than I’d been before because my dimples were the absolute bane of my existence, even worse than my tendency to blush at the drop of a hat. I couldn’t control them. It was the curse of being a Babcock, I supposed, since all of my brothers shared the same affliction to some degree or another.

But she was still smiling at me when she mentioned my dimples. So maybe they weren’t all bad.

She gave me the most adorable apologetic look. “I’m really sorry. I should go.”

And before I could stop her so I
could
ask for her name, she scurried away. She went straight over to Webs, actually, which I thought was odd. Until she stretched up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

Then it hit me. I knew exactly who she was. She had to be one of his kids. Which meant she was a teenager, just like the hordes of giggling girls who’d nearly trampled me when they’d been let into the arena earlier. And it also meant she was absolutely, unequivocally, one hundred percent
off-limits
.

I watched her a hell of a lot longer than I should have, but when I finally let my gaze drift up to her father, it was to find him staring at me in a way that made me wish I was dead. That was likely what he wished, too. He was probably plotting ways of making it happen. He looked like he wanted to rip my nuts off and feed them to me before chopping me to bits a tiny piece at a time.

It probably wasn’t a good idea to keep looking at his daughter, then.

With one more glance at her—she shrugged and gave me a sweet smile—I ducked my head and took off walking toward Jonny, not stopping until I reached his side.

He gave me an inscrutable look, raising an eyebrow in question.

“Scotty sent me over here,” I said, leaving out a thousand things related to how I’d ended up where I was. None of them were things he needed to know, and I doubted he would care, anyway. He was the enforcer on the team, a guy who just went out and did what needed to be done and otherwise minded his own business.

Jonny grunted, rubbing a hand over his close-cropped hair. Then he shrugged and went back to signing autographs for the two older men who’d stopped to talk to him.

I decided to follow his example and do what I’d come here to do…and attempt to put all thought of David Weber’s teenaged daughter, with the gorgeous blue eyes, out of my mind.

THE CROWD IN
the arena was finally starting to thin. I hadn’t seen much beyond the ocean of girls who’d followed me everywhere for what felt like hours.

Much to my chagrin, sticking close to Jonny’s side hadn’t done a damned thing to scare them off. He might be a beast on the ice, someone who the opposition didn’t want to mess with, but around girls? He was a giant teddy bear. He spent half the time I was with him acting as an amateur photographer as the girls passed him their cell phones and posed with me, getting way too close for my comfort. “Three younger sisters,” he’d replied when I asked him about it, as though that were all the explanation I needed.

But now their parents were herding them away, and somehow I’d managed to avoid doing anything stupid. No signing of boobs. No agreeing to go to Homecoming or prom or anything else with any of them. I considered the day a success.

Razor headed our way, his usual cocky grin plastered on his face. “How many hearts did you break today?” he asked when he reached me and Jonny.

More like I’d had my own heart broken by Webs’s daughter. But that might be taking things too far, seeing as how I didn’t even know her name. I didn’t know her well enough to have my heart broken by her. She was drop-dead gorgeous, but that was it. I needed to get her out of my head or I’d be in for a world of hurt, handed to me by her father.

“Only a few hundred,” Jonny said before I could answer. He winked at me. “Don’t worry. They’ll just try harder next time they get you in their clutches.”

That was probably the first time I’d ever heard him crack a joke.

“I’ll have to work harder to be sure none of them can get me in their clutches, then,” I said. But there was the one I would gladly allow to trap me. Fuck, I was a mess. I had to stop thinking like that, or I’d never make it out on the ice as a real NHL player. Webs would make sure of it.

All around the room, the guys were taking off their jerseys and getting ready to leave. Jonny and Razor both tossed theirs toward our equipment manager, Drywall Tierney, who was coming around to collect them. I reached over my shoulder and dragged mine up and over my head, leaving the T-shirt I had on underneath. When I turned to throw it to Drywall, I froze. Webs was coming straight for me.

“Shit,” Razor said, laughing. “What’d you do to Webs?”

I shook my head and walked away from the two of them, heading toward Webs to meet him halfway. Cowering behind Razor wouldn’t help anything, Jonny hadn’t been any help all day, and the last thing I needed was to give either of them more ammunition to use against me when they wanted to poke at me for something. This needed to be between me and Webs, and that was that.

Webs stopped about a foot away from me and crossed his arms, his feet planted shoulder-width apart. He glared at me so hard I thought I might melt into a puddle on the floor. “I like you, Babs,” he finally said, and I tried to remember how to breathe. “You’re a good kid. You’re smart. Got a good head on your shoulders.”

I kept waiting on him to drop the bomb on me. I knew it was coming, whatever
it
was. Some part of me expected
it
to be his hands, wrapping around my neck, squeezing the life out of me. I shuffled my feet and shoved my hands in my pockets.

“I want to keep liking you,” he said. “But right now, you’re not making that very easy.”

“I’m not?” I said, mainly because he made it seem like he expected an answer by the way his brows were coming together to form a single, intimidating line across his forehead.

“You’re not. I think you should know that Katie is only sixteen years old.”

“Yes, sir.” Duly noted. Way off-limits.

But now I knew her name was Katie.

“She’s my little girl.”

“Yes, sir.” That part wasn’t in any doubt.

“You’re old enough to be one of my teammates, which means you’re too fucking old to be looking at my little girl the way you were earlier.”

“Yes, sir.” Note to self: don’t look at Katie Weber. Ever.

But then she walked over to us, and she put her hand on her father’s arm and waited until he looked down at her, and my heart stopped cold. Because I couldn’t look away from her. Tried. I really did try. But I couldn’t do it. My mouth went dry, and my tongue got thick, and I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I would get Katie Weber out of my mind any time in the next few centuries.

“Dad, he didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.

I might not have done anything wrong yet, but the more time I spent around her, the more I wanted to do things that would be very, very wrong. Like kiss her. She had such a sweet smile, and her lips looked utterly kissable, and that was exactly the
wrong
thing for me to be thinking about right now.

“He hasn’t
yet
,” Webs said gruffly. “I’m just making sure he won’t turn into an asswipe who would do anything wrong. Go on back to your mother. I’ll be there soon.”

As soon as he finished wiping the floor with me.

She gave me a remorseful look and shrugged, but then she bobbed up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek again. And she walked away.

Webs cleared his throat, which reminded me that I was staring at Katie as she walked away, and I was supposed to be avoiding that at all costs if I valued keeping my balls where they currently resided. I shot my gaze back over to him.

“Let’s just get one thing straight, Babs.”

“Yes, sir?” It came out as a squeak, and I was starting to think those were the only two words I remembered how to say.

“You stay the fuck away from my daughter and keep your eyes where they’re supposed to be, and the two of us will be just fine,” he said. “But you put one toe out of line, and I will make sure you don’t have any more toes. Or anything else. Got it?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.” No doubt he and I were both thinking of a certain appendage that wasn’t anywhere near my feet.

“Good deal.” He slapped me on the back before stalking off. “Don’t be an asswipe, Babs,” he shouted over his shoulder.

Got it. Don’t be an asswipe. Eyes off his little girl. Keep my hands to myself. Try to forget that Katie Weber might be the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and ignore the fact that I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her since the moment I’d bumped into her.

That shouldn’t be too hard.

Razor came over after Webs disappeared with his family, chuckling as he draped an arm over my shoulders. “Fuck, Babs. Of all the girls to get tangled up with, you had to go and pick a teammate’s daughter?” He shook his head and started guiding me out to the parking garage. “That’s a hell of a way to start your career.”

“I just hope it’s not over before I even get started.”

One thing was certain, though. I’d dreamed of playing in the NHL for years, nearly as long as I could remember. But the dream had never included being around a girl who was off-limits and left me fucking tongue-tied. Hell of a way to start my career. Razor had gotten that one right.

Catherine Gayle is a
USA Today
bestselling author of Regency-set historical romance and contemporary hockey romance. She’s a transplanted Texan living in North Carolina with two extremely spoiled felines. In her spare time, she watches way too much hockey and reality TV, plans fun things to do for the Nephew Monster’s next visit, and performs experiments in the kitchen which are rarely toxic.