It was easy to spot the moment the lightbulb went off. The slight wrinkling of his forehead and the quick nod. “Sorry.”
No pity. No scorn. Definitely no come-get-drunk-anyway disbelief. It was more of just straight acceptance.
Ian handed her the ginger ale. “How long?”
“Six years.”
He took a bite off a carrot stick and shot her a long, contemplative look while he crunched. “And how long has The Biscuit been around? It’s been about that, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, close to six years.” Yeah, that brain of his put that together quick. But that had to mean— She gasped. “Are you a secret reader?”
“Maybe.” The tips of his ears turned pink, and he hustled back toward their seats.
What? That couldn’t be. She knew her stats. Most of her visitors engaged; that’s what made her site special enough to gain the Ice Knights’ attention, which meant…
She hurried as fast as she could with a ginger ale filled nearly to the brim down the five stadium steps to the suite’s private row of seats and sat down next to Ian. “Have you commented?”
He snapped another carrot in half with one bite and ignored her.
Oh no, this wasn’t going away that easily. No. Way. She cleared her throat with a dramatic “ahem.”
Letting out a long-suffering sigh, he kept his gaze on the ice as the final period started. “I have not commented as myself.”
The puck dropped. The clock started. The play went on. And Shelby couldn’t stop staring at the man who’d followed her blog when he had a million other things he could have been doing with his time. “Aren’t you just an onion.”
“As long as I don’t smell like one,” he shot back.
The urge to tease him about following The Biscuit was there, but she wasn’t going to keep poking at the bear’s vulnerable underbelly. They could have an unstated truce again. It was better than the pretending each other didn’t exist, especially since her job basically depended on being around him nearly twenty-four-seven.
“So who do you think is going to finally score?” she asked during a break in play. “My money’s on Alex.”
Ian scoffed. “Nope. He’s got the twitch tonight. Not gonna happen.”
She zeroed in on Alex as he sat on the bench fiddling with his stick as he watched a replay on the Jumbotron. “The twitch?”
“Watch the way he can’t sit still.” Ian nodded at his half brother, a knowing grin on his face, as if he’d had this conversation with Alex a time or twenty. “He’s messing with the tape on his stick, he’s asking for gloves that have been sitting on the heater in the tunnel, he’s chewing on his mouth guard like it’s bubble gum. He’s shit-talking himself in his head after that missed pass. That play always gets him in his own brain. He won’t score. What he needs is to refocus and work on that play until it’s muscle memory.”
“So help him fix it, Coach Know-It-All.”
He grunted and retreated back into himself as the players took the ice and the game resumed.
In the end, it was Phillips who scored off a beauty of a slap shot that the goalie never saw coming. It was one of the most gorgeous things she’d ever see. Shelby jumped out of her seat, yelling her head off. High off the thrill of a close victory, she spun around to face Ian, right hand raised for a high five. Instead of slapping his hand against hers, though, he wound his arms around her waist, picked her up, and twirled her. She didn’t think; she just threw her arms around his neck and kissed him with maybe—okay totally with—a little bit of tongue. In that moment, with her entire body zoned in only on Ian, the feel of him pressed against her, she forgot the crowd and the game and the rest of the world. Then he broke the kiss and she remembered where she was, who he was, and exactly why this was a very bad idea.
“Shit.” She pushed softly against his shoulders and he let her down. The second her feet hit the ground, she wanted to run. “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have done that. Very unprofessional.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and turned toward the ice. “It was a good goal.”
“Really good,” she said, trying to ignore the way her lips were still tingling and how that feeling had zipped all the way to her core.
“Amazing,” he said, looking everywhere but at her. “One for the highlights.”
Oh God, this wasn’t awkward at all. “Without a doubt.”
At least this road trip couldn’t get any worse.
…
Ian hadn’t stopped thinking about that kiss in two days.
Every meal when he, Christensen, and Shelby had been sequestered from the team on Lucy’s PR orders for “bonding time,” he’d talked, but he’d been wondering if she kept remembering that kiss, too. Every time they had to watch a game with an empty seat between them like a personal DMZ, he couldn’t help but curse a little extra that the team had entered a scoring drought. And now, when she was across the practice rink in Vancouver as the team practiced drills and he did a slow skate around the oval, finally cleared by the doc for that much at least, he still couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Yeah, he was watching her as she sat on the bench yakking with Christensen whenever he stopped nearby.
He had no clue what they were talking about, but it must have been funny as hell considering the size of her smile. Meanwhile, Ian was doing loops around the ice like it was couple skate and he was the lone loser out by himself.
“Ian,” Shelby hollered, waving him over.
His gut reaction was to ignore her, because God knew he’d been practicing that for the past few days. However, her shout had cut through the sounds of the skates and sticks, and every player on the team
