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“Why didn’t you tell me one of my teammates hit on you?” Cam demanded, turning into a surly, growly papa bear.
“He didn’t hit on me. He asked me out. There’s a difference.”
“Not much.”
“Enough.”
“You’re splitting hairs, Cadence.”
I shifted my bag again, not because it was heavy but because it gave me something to do with myself. Which I needed. Desperately. Anything other than to sit here under Cam’s scrutiny.
“If he didn’t hit on you, why are you so nervous?”
Because Levi wasn’t talking to the other guy anymore. He was about half a second away from us, and I wanted to skedaddle before the uncomfortableness of this conversation swelled to mammoth proportions. But instead of hightailing it out of the rink, I did the stupidest thing I could have possibly come up with. I looked up at my brother, stared straight into his eyes, and told a bald-faced lie.
“BECAUSE YOU GOT it wrong,” Cadence said, right as I skated into earshot. “He did ask me out, but I didn’t disappear before answering him. I said yes.”
“You what?” Jonny roared at the same time as I said, “You did?”
Jonny turned on me, eyes blazing like he was about to bash my nose in.
“She did,” I said, putting a bit more distance between us, just in case.
Only she hadn’t. I would have known if she’d said she’d go out with me. It would have made the rest of the night a hell of a lot more interesting, because I would have spent the time trying to get to know her better instead of drinking as much as possible to ignore the fact that I’d struck out, proving once again that my brother was the better Babcock.
The look in Jonny’s eyes was enough to pin me in place. Then he spun around to face his sister again. “You’re not going out with him.”
“I am if I want to. I may be your baby sister, Cam, but let me remind you. I’m all grown up now. An adult. I can make my own decisions.”
“Not if those decisions have anything to do with dating some asswipe teammate of mine, you can’t.”
“It’s a date. One date. That doesn’t mean we’re dating.”
“What the fuck kind of screwed up definition for the word do you have in your head?” he bellowed, and half the team turned to see the show.
“Watch your fucking language in front of your sister,” Koz shouted from the other end of the ice. “Fucking douche canoe.”
“One date,” Cadence reiterated, undeterred by the way the guys were acting. Jonny had never been much of a practical joker. He was quiet and kept to himself, for the most part, so I wasn’t sure how much of this kind of behavior she would have ever been exposed to before. Still, it was a good sign if she wasn’t letting the guys’ crudeness sway her now.
“When is this supposed to happen?”
Cadence looked at me, her expression one of pure sweetness as she shrugged and raised her brows in question.
Holy hell. Maybe this was actually going to happen. After the way she’d run off, I’d convinced myself she wasn’t interested. But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe she simply hadn’t wanted to hash it out in front of her brother last night. And if that was the case, I couldn’t say I blamed her. It was damned uncomfortable trying to do this with him standing between us in the present.
“Tomorrow,” I spit out. “Tomorrow night.”
“Exactly,” she said. “You’re picking me up at eight, right?”
I supposed that meant I was. “Yeah, eight.”
The way she looked at me then, gratitude mixed in with her undeniably adorable charm, was all I required to breathe easier.
“I’ll see you then,” she said. Then, like a spring breeze, she floated past us and took the warmth of the sunshine with her.
I started to skate back over to my new defense partner, Chris “Hammer” Hammond, but Jonny grabbed a fistful of my jersey and stopped me.
“Everything you do to her, I will do to you. Got it?” His voice was quiet but as intimidating as anything I’d ever heard.
