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Now.
“I made some tweaks to the training plan you put together,” she said, giving Cal a wide berth as she headed toward the tunnel so she could escape with her panties and plan to stay away from him still intact. “I’ll…uh…email it over.”
His lips curling in a lazy smile, he stalked toward her, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking and wanted to deliver on all those maybes. “Did you add different drills?”
“No.” She shook her head, putting all of her energy into looking normal on the outside while on the inside she was all take-me-now-please-immediately-seriously-I’m-not-joking. “I just added player insight…uh…motivational stuff—like BBQ chicken pizza.”
“Thank you,” he said, stopping in front of her.
He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t move an inch. He just stood there all hot and big and so close she could smell his woodsy soap and see the tiny sliver of a faded scar on his chin. God, she wanted to trace that jagged line. She wanted to kiss it better. She wanted to—
“Ihavetogo,” she said, all of it rushing out like one long compound word as she turned around and walked as fast as she could without breaking into a sprint before she did something stupid—like kiss him or worse.
Chapter Seventeen
“You don’t have a chance, you know,” Jones said with a smirk after taking a drink from his water bottle and tossing it onto the back of the net next to his helmet.
Cal couldn’t decide if he was more impressed or annoyed that the goalie could be so cocky after failing to block half of the shots Christensen and Petrov had sent his way. The ego on this kid was almost as big as the stupid billboard ad of him in his underwear.
“At fully yanking your head out of your ass?” Cal asked. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Jones squared his jaw and shot what he probably thought of as an intimidating glare Cal’s way. “Of getting with her.”
“Who’s her?” Cal asked even though he didn’t need to.
“Astrid,” Jones said as if he had a right to ever let her name leave his mouth. “She doesn’t date hockey players.”
“Yeah.” Cal looked up from his clipboard and straight at the jackass. “I heard some piece-of-shit goalie totally fucked her over on her wedding day.”
“Fuck you Matsen.” Tig dropped his gloves and squared up to Cal. “You wanna go?”
Tempting. Very tempting.
“There is nothing more in the world I would love to do than to punch you right in the face, but knocking you on your ass isn’t going to do a damn thing to improve your play, and that’s what I’m here to do,” Cal said, keeping the violence rushing through his veins out of his tone as much as possible. “I’m doing my job. You think you can stop being a bag of dicks long enough to do yours?”
Jones’s face fell and his shoulders slumped as if he was disappointed not to get his nose broken. “I should’ve never got on that damn airplane that day. Everything would be different now.”
“Probably,” Cal agreed since he had absolutely no reason to make this fool feel any better about his shitty life choices.
“So you think I should get her back?” he asked. “I always played better when we were together.”
Something inside Cal snapped.
He tossed his clipboard down onto the ice and got right in the goalie’s face. “Are you fucking shitting me, Jones?”
“What?” the other man asked, his eyes huge.
“You want to get back with Astrid so you can fucking play better?” Rage, pure as a blue flame, swept through Cal at this dipshit’s attitude. “Not because you like her or love her or even think of her as anything other than a prop for your life?”
“It’s not like that.” Jones skated backward, putting some space between them, obviously realizing too late the danger he was in. “Astrid likes being there for people. Why do you think she’s with the team now when we both know she doesn’t really want to be? It’s to help her dad, like she always has. I’m not the only one who works better when Astrid is around to keep everything on a smooth, even keel.”
Cal had seen that himself. She took those shifts at the pub to make things easier for Nola and her family even though she had more than enough on her plate. She’d practically chewed him a new asshole when he’d argued that having her dad asking her take this job helping Tig was over the line even though it had to be a fucking nightmare. And that night they’d met, she’d given him her Cheetos because he was hungry even though that meant she didn’t have anything to eat. Yeah, things ran smoother because of Astrid but only because she always took the short stick.
“And who does the same for her?” Cal asked. “Not your sorry ass.”
The tips of Jones’s ears turned red, and he dropped his gaze to the ice. “I’m not going to get her back.”
“No,” Cal agreed without hesitation.
