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There’s a lump the size of Manhattan in my throat as I stare back at him.
“Any time,” I tell him. And then I let him take me home.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
ELI
“What are you doing?” Mackenzie grumbles. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this woman, it’s that she hates waking up. Unless my mouth is doing the waking. Then she’s as sweet as a damn cookie.
But we don’t have time for that today.
“I’m getting up,” I tell her, pulling on my shorts. “And so are you.”
“It’s Saturday.” She frowns. “I want to sleep.”
“We need to head to the stadium early. Before we head to Misty Lakes.”
“What? Where?” She rubs her eyes with bunched hands. Damn, this woman is adorable.
My lip curls. “You’re going to skate on your own today. Then I’m going to reward you by taking you to my cabin for the weekend.”
She looks more awake now. “What kind of cabin?”
I pull a t-shirt over my head. “It’s pretty. By a lake. I built it myself. Now are you getting up or do I have to drag you out of bed?”
I’m kind of excited. We have a few days off before next week’s exhibition game. Some of the team headed home to see their families, a few of the others are headed to Vegas to play the tables.
As for Mackenzie and I, we’ll be spending it naked by a roaring fire if I have anything to do with it.
And lucky for me, Idohave something to do with it. Misty Lakes is a vast estate owned by my dad. As kids, we’d spend every summer there with him, messing around in the lake, and getting up to no good.
As we became adults, we got to choose a piece of land around the biggest lake and build our own cabins. We got some help, but mostly we built them with our own hands. By the time I got to build mine, both Myles and Liam had already constructed theirs and they gave me a hand.
But mine is definitely the best. It has two bedrooms and a hot tub I had installed last year. It’s my favorite place to chill out.
Now I get to do it with Mackenzie. If she’d get out of bed.
“I’ll put some coffee on,” I tell her.
“Good idea,” she mumbles, turning over and slamming her face into the pillow. I head out to her kitchen and switch on the machine. It’s more of a wet bar than a kitchen, like you often get in these serviced apartments. After the machine warms up, I slide a pod inside and grab a cup from the cupboard.
She’s still face down in her pillow when I get back. I put her cup on the table and lift her hair up to kiss the back of her neck.
“How about we skip the skating lesson and just head to Misty Lakes,” she mumbles into her pillow.
“Nope. We haven’t come this far to stop now.” It pisses me off that her family let her think she couldn’t skate. Okay, so she’s never gonna win a medal, but that doesn’t mean she can’t feel comfortable on the ice.
It’s like they saw she wasn’t going to be a winner and ignored her.
She groans again and twists in the bed to sit up. Her hair tumbles down over her shoulders, though a few strands are sticking in weird directions.
I hand her the cup, and she gulps it, probably scalding her tongue. And then something miraculous happens.
You know that part ofBeauty and the Beastwhere the beast turns back into a prince? It’s like that, but with Mackenzie. Though she isn’t a beast but a grumpy-ass caffeine addict.
A really beautiful, grumpy ass.
“Oh.” She closes her eyes. “I needed that. Thank you.”
