He grimaced before striding into his room and letting his door swing shut.
Way to go, Shelby. You are so a people person. Always with the right thing to say.
Letting out a sigh, she went into her own room so she could shower off the flight and maybe—just maybe—get her head on straight before she had to spend the evening with a hot, surly hockey player she absolutely for sure wanted nothing to do with beyond a professional work relationship.
Really.
For sure.
Without even an itty-bitty smidgen of doubt.
Chapter Eleven
An hour later, Ian walked into the private room of the hotel’s restaurant to find he was the last to arrive. Everyone else was already at the table, enjoying appetizers and gabbing about the Phoenix players they’d be facing off against tomorrow.
Normally, he’d be all on board for some pregame smack talk, but that would be all it would be for him because of his stupid thumb injury. He wasn’t even wearing a brace anymore, just some wimpy little bandages that declared what a dumbass he was for tripping over his own big feet. It barely hurt anymore; he had range of motion back—okay, mostly back. All he had to do was talk Doc into giving him the okay.
How hard could that be?
Spotting the free seat by the team doc, Ian made his way over to the table. It had to be a sign from above. This was gonna happen. He was getting back on the ice, and then that nagging sense of not being enough would shut the fuck up.
“Heya, Doc.” Ian pulled out the empty chair. “Anyone sitting here?”
Doc, an older guy with not even a hint of hair on his perfectly round pale-pink head, looked up at him. “Not you, I’m afraid.”
What the hell? How had he turned an affable guy like Doc against him?
Before he could ask, Lucy walked up with Freya in her arms. The chubby little baby gave him a huge gummy smile, showing off one tooth starting to come in.
“What Doc means is that your reservation is for that table over there.” Lucy pointed to a three-person table in the corner.
One that Christensen and Shelby were already sitting at. Shelby was listening to whatever bullshit story Christensen was telling her with utter rapt attention, a soft smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. Ian was grinding his molars together before he even took the first step toward them.
Christensen was like this with every woman. It had barely registered with Ian until now—until Shelby. Gaze locked on Shelby, the way her lips had curled into a half smile as if Christensen was the most fascinating person ever, he marched past the long table of Ice Knights players who weren’t in PR hell.
“Have fun at the little kids’ table, Petrov,” said Stuckey, a defenseman who was a constant smart-ass when he wasn’t on the phone with his girlfriend or telling the team stories about the horse of a Great Dane they shared.
“Are you ever going to stop being in a shit-ass mood?” asked Phillips, the team Thor look-alike.
“Not until I’m on the ice,” he shot back as he strode past, barely slowing in his speed as he watched Shelby lean in closer to Christensen to take a look at whatever it was he was showing her on his phone.
“Have pity on us, Doc,” the team captain, Zach Blackburn, hollered from his place at the head of the big table. “Clear the asshole.”
“Don’t drag me into this, boys,” Doc said. “The body heals when it heals. You can’t hurry it.”
Doc took a deep breath that was no doubt the precursor to a mini lecture on patience, visualization, and doing what it took to stay healthy, which Ian considered his cue to speed the fuck up before he got called in to be used as an example of exactly what not to do. He’d heard the speech before, and that was more than enough.
He had no more than sat down at the tiny circular table when a waiter came by with two large glasses of milk over ice and put one down in front of Christensen and the other in front of him.
Finally, something was going right today. Ian let out a sigh of relief and the muscles in his shoulders unwound enough to inch downward from his earlobes.
Shelby wrinkled her nose. “Milk? Really?”
“It does a body good,” he and Christensen said at the same time.
Ian was grinning and holding up his glass to clink against Christensen’s before he realized it. He stopped just in time, changing direction so he gulped down half his milk in one swallow instead.
It was habit—everyone on the team busted their chops about the milk. It had just made them more likely to order it more often until it became part of their pregame routine. Fine. Superstition. There was no shame in that. Hockey players were notorious for being very specific when it came to game prep. Stuckey had been wrapping his stick the same way since Juniors at least. Blackburn isolated, scaring the shit out of anyone who broke his silent zone. He and Christensen drank milk and chipped at each other. It was what worked. No one fucked with that, not even when the other guy was a complete asshole.
“I went through two gallons a week growing up.” Christensen wiped a milk mustache away with the back of his hand.
Like that was anything to brag about. “Me too.”
“Maybe it was three,” Christensen said.
Ian snorted. “Oh yeah, well—”
Shelby interrupted with an exhausted sigh. “If you two don’t stop now, one of you will have grown up drinking straight from the cow until it was sucked dry.”
The mental picture she described would be giving him nightmares for the next sixty years.
Christensen made a gagging sound. “Gross, Shelbs.”
Annoyance sharp as a poker jabbed Ian in the right eyeball. “Shelbs?”
The fuck? They were becoming buddies with pet names for each other? After spending ten minutes together at this stupid table with its white tablecloth
