Page 38 of Double Puck

"You know he's not my date, right, Mom?"

Right on cue, Beck appears at my side and offers his arm with a grin.

"She's right, ma'am," Beck says, winking at me. "I'm just the guy trying to impress your daughter so she doesn't send me packing half way across the country."

I stare at his bent elbow, trying to shut out Colin's voice.

Another team is interested.

With a sigh, I take Beck’s arm.

Officially, I’m assessing his community presence.

Unofficially, he is making the biggest decision of my career feel dangerously difficult.

Chapter 6

Darcy

I'm currently three glasses of champagne into the evening, and I've come to a horrifying conclusion.

The Beachside Bears are the best-behaved guests at this gala.

I don't understand it.

I’ve been braced for disaster since Colin bought the table. A broken champagne tower. A fistfight over hors d’oeuvres. Corbin Cole face-planting into the ice sculpture of my mother’s foundation logo while somebody films it for TikTok.

Instead, they’ve brought the room to life.

The ballroom glows gold beneath cut-crystal chandeliers, candlelight scattering across marble floors and white orchids spilling from every centerpiece. Servers glide past with silver trays of tiny lobster rolls, truffle arancini, and seared scallops balanced on saffron risotto. In the corner, a pastry chef torches crème brûlée to order, each sharp crack of a spoon through caramelised sugar followed by somebody making an indecent noise.

And in the middle of my mother’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar evening, Finn MacAllister is holding a champagne flute like it’s a pint of Guinness.

“Nope. No.” Beck reaches over and repositions Finn’s fingers onto the stem. “Hold it like this.”

Finn squints at the glass. “Why?”

“Because your giant Irish hand is heating it up, and it’s not a beer, mate. You don’t chug it.”

“It’s just fizzy juice.”

“It’s four-hundred-dollar fizzy juice.”

Finn looks down at it with fresh respect, then downs the entire thing in one swallow.

“Grand,” he announces, looking around. “What else is free?”

Across the room, Mason is sitting on a velvet settee, entirely surrounded by four women, none of whom are under seventy-five. They're all holding martinis, one has a hand on his forearm while another is showing him pictures of her grandchildren on her phone.

Mason is tuxedo-perfect, looking less like a hockey player and more like he owns a private island with inconvenient inheritance laws.

“Is that Barbara Vanderbilt?” I ask.

Beck follows my gaze. “The one touching him or the one about to?”

“The one about to.”

“Then yes.”