by Anya Nowlan
A BEAR GOAL
PUCK BEAR BRIDES
BOOK 3
BY
ANYA NOWLAN
A LITTLE TASTE…
“Hey, I hit harder than both of them, so you really want to go about insulting my family here, wiseguy?” she asked with a quirk of her brow, giving Heath the closest thing she had to an evil eye.
“Yeah? I wouldn’t mind seeing you get a little hot and bothered, I think,” Heath quipped back.
She held her breath, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t run the joke into the ground like she thought he would. But of course he did.
“Or a little bit ‘Heathed,’ if you know what I mean.”
His grin was so wide and self-congratulatory that Sable couldn’t do anything but groan and shake her head at him, wanting to choke the living daylights out of him and, oddly enough, climb him like a tree at the same time. It was becoming a real bother, honestly, because the more she looked at him, the better he looked. She loathed it.
“Really, that’s what you went with?”
“Hey, don’t knock it until you try it,” he said with a flourish, sweeping his hand along his toned, muscled body.
Her eyes tracked the motion, and she might have gulped a little when her eyes reached his crotch, shooting back up again quickly. He didn’t miss it, ordering two more shots to fill the awkward silence.
Copyright © 2016 Anya Nowlan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Bear Goal
Puck Bear Brides
Book 3
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Anya Nowlan. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
Cover © Jack of Covers
You can find all of my books here:
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
A LITTLE TASTE…
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EPILOGUE
BEAR NO DEFEAT EXCERPT
WANT MORE?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
Sable
“Oh come on!” Sable screamed, banging her hand against the Plexiglas partition that kept her from flinging herself on the ice and showing these amateurs how it was really done.
“Sable! Calm down! It’s just the first game,” Heather said with a laugh, tugging at her San Diego Predators jersey in a feeble attempt to get the fiery Latina to sit down.
“Did you see what that Locklear bastard did to Cayman? How did he not get a penalty for that shit?!” Sable huffed, crashing down into her seat and running a hand through her wavy, auburn hair just as Heath Locklear came surging by where she was sitting, wearing the most frustratingly smug smile she’d ever seen. “The ref must be blind.”
“I’m pretty sure you always think that when it comes to any mistake made against the Predators,” Heather huffed, rolling her eyes as she scrolled through some sort of a news feed on her phone. “Now calm your pretty ass down before Caleb or someone else comes here and makes you do that personally. Do we really need another scene like the one we had in North Dakota?”
Sable threw her friend a withering look, but a huff and a sip from her drink later, she was placated enough to focus on the game once more. For some reason, her eyes stayed with Heath, one of the best snipers in the league and the main reason for her chagrin at the moment, far longer than she would have liked.
It was the last third of the first game between the San Diego Predators and the Shifter Grove Shovelers—ridiculous name, by the way—and the series of three would decide which team would end up going to the National Shifter Hockey League Eastern Conference Playoffs. The Predators had worked hard all season to get to this point, and Sable as their supply line manager was more than a little invested in seeing her team succeed.
It also didn’t hurt that her two stepbrothers were grinders for the team, a particularly vicious duo known for their underhanded tactics, speed, and precision when they needed to take someone out fast and clean. Though frankly, if it were just because of them, Sable would have been perfectly fine with seeing the whole team go down in flames.
Cocky bastards. Heath’s too fast for them. But if they can’t catch him, we’re toast, she thought morosely, watching the game unfold in its intricate pattern.
“You know what grinds my gears?” she started, not bothering to glance at Heather to make sure that she was still in the conversation, because at that very moment James “Wall” Lagerfeld plowed into the Shovelers’ team captain, Cannon Wright, and gloves were being thrown off.
“Everything, as of late?” Heather asked dryly, looking up from her phone just in time to witness Cannon getting crushed against the ice by a haymaker from Wall, and then Heath and one of the Shovelers’ defenders, Memphis, going at him like rabid dogs before they could be split up.
It wasn’t a particularly friendly game. No wonder, of course, considering how much was on the line this time. It was just a best of three and the next two games were going to be on Shifter Grove ice, where their new ice rink had been opened up to the public only a week ago. No one enjoyed playing games that meant this much on foreign ice, and the Predators were all in to win this night.
Sable cringed as Cayman plowed into the scene like a freight truck, almost taking out the referee. If they kept that up, by the end of the game there wouldn’t be anyone on the ice because both of the teams would be sitting in the box, thinking about the decisions that had led them there.
“Ouch,” Sable murmured, watching Heath deck Wall as easily as he had done to Cannon a moment ago, catching herself admiring just how fast and hard the Shovelers’ sniper could throw a punch and dance away on the ice before anyone could catch him.
Fast for a bear, she thought mildly, allowing another glance at her werewolf stepbrothers, twins as they were, wondering if they were going to figure out how to stop Heath before it was too late.
“Anyway,” she started again as the ice was getting a quick clean from the blood that had splattered on it and the teams were split up and told to behave themselves for what must have been the seventh time that evening—no one was going to listen. “What gets me is why does Coach Jefferson keep this lineup? I mean obviously Cayman and Caleb aren’t keeping up with this bastard Heath, so why screw with our chances? Put more offense on the ice, see if we can push through. Frustrating.”
“And here I thought we were going to have an actual conversation,” Heather remarked, having to almost scream to be heard over the roaring crowd as the players took the ice again.
“About?” Sable asked, popping a few Milk Duds in her mouth, though her hands were moving automatically at this point and she didn’t spare a look at the box of candy either.
What if she’d miss something on the
ice? That wouldn’t do!
“You know? The elephant in the room? Or the tiger shifter in the room, I guess.”
Sable snorted at that, rolling her eyes now even though her stomach clenched slightly and she could feel the makings of a cold sweat dappling the back of her neck. Oh no, she had no interest in talking about that particular topic. Not tonight. Not any night.
Which was probably why she was there, yelling her head off and getting angrier at the players and the refs than any fan should, even one that lived and breathed hockey like Sable did.
“Nothing?” Heather coaxed, getting echoing silence in return, or at least what passed for it when twenty thousand people crammed themselves into the stands and whistled, booed, and cheered along with every pass or minor confrontation on the ice. “Okay, but you know this is all going to come out of you in one gigantic bad idea at one point, right? It’d be so much easier to just vent. You know, have a drink or ten, cry into a pillow, eat some ice cream with me, and tell me just how the big bad tiger hurt you.”
Okay, so that deserved a glare.
Sable twisted herself in her seat, about to give Heather a piece of her mind, but right then, the large, bulky form of Caleb Lynderly got rammed into the partition right in front of Sable, her stepbrother’s face twisted against the glass as he rolled down along it onto the ice. Sable’s eyes were wide as platters and she jumped up immediately, peering down to see if he was okay, sending her candy flying between the seats.
“Shit,” she hissed, her surprised gaze meeting the laughing eyes of Heath Locklear straight on now.
The bastard had the gall to wink at her and make a damn hand-gun motion at her after having wiped out her brother right in front of her.
“This one’s for you, baby!” he said with a wide grin before skating off as Caleb brushed himself off and got up, pure murder flashing in his eyes.
“That motherfucker!” Sable said incredulously as she stood there for a moment, shaking her head at the audacity of the bastard. “You see that? He got away with it again. This ref is totally bought off.”
“Or maybe he was too busy clearing up the other fight your beloved brother managed to stir up and didn’t notice?” Heather muttered, shaking her head.
“Whatever,” Sable grumbled, the tension of discomfort unraveling quickly while a whole different kind of heat took its place, pulsing through her.
She chose to believe it was anger and not at all the sexy-as-sin look that she’d received from the Shovelers’ sniper. Biting down on her lip for a moment, her brows knit in irritation, she banged on the glass once more with her first and then sunk into her seat with something more akin a growl than anything else.
“I’m going to have to give that guy a piece of my mind after the game is over, you know.”
“Which one? Cayman or Caleb?” Heather asked, only mildly paying attention because apparently Purseblog was far more interesting than one of the single most important games the Predators would play that season.
Well, truth be told, to a woman who only got dragged to these things because Sable didn’t want to go alone, then that wasn’t too far from the truth. With Sable’s crazy schedule and Heather’s job as a personal assistant to a certain A-list star who was not to be named—and whose name may or may not have rhymed with Bryan Breynolds—they barely had a chance to see one another despite living together. A two-and-a-half-hour game of hockey was usually just what they needed to get all their gossip out of the way and for Sable to also pretend like she was keeping up with what was going on with her team.
“Heath, obviously.”
That finally got Heather’s attention.
“Wait, you’re trying to tell me you’re going to wait until the game’s over, then find Heath Locklear, one of the main players on the opposing team, they’re just going to let you talk to him, and you’re going to school him for beating up your brothers in a game of professional hockey? I didn’t know you cared so much, honey!”
“I don’t. I just think he needs to hear what a fucking asshole he is.”
So maybe she was projecting a little. Okay, a lot. After her recent painful and very public breakup from Mackey Aldren, a tiger shifter playing for the Florida Gators, she might have been a little bit more on edge on the topic of hockey players who were also giant assholes. A girl could only be humiliated on national television once to get properly pissed at most guys who swung a hockey stick and liked to think they were hot shit for chasing a puck around on some blades on ice.
“Riiiight. We’re not taking this personally at all,” Heather said with a sigh, but luckily for both of them, chose not to expand on the topic at hand.
“Damn straight,” Sable said, slouching in her seat and shaking the last remnants of her Milk Duds out onto her palm, popping them in her mouth in one go.
Funny how one bastard could really spoil her enjoyment of the game. At this point, she wasn’t entirely sure if she meant her ex or the preening peacock on the ice now, Heath Locklear, who was suddenly but surely managing to incorporate all that was bad about professional hockey into one completely fuckable and entirely despicable persona. Or maybe that was just the bitterness talking.
Whatever.
I’ll teach him a thing or two about manners, she thought darkly, watching the man whirl past her again with the clear intention of entirely fucking up the Predators’ chances of winning this game.
When he scored another goal, Sable found herself hating him even more, which a moment ago had seemed impossible. Life works in mysterious ways, doesn’t it?
“He’s cute, though,” Heather said suddenly, tracking the wide-shouldered form celebrating his goal with his stick in the air, giving the cockiest smile imaginable as his team surrounded him in jubilation.
5-4. The damn asshat had taken the Shovelers into the lead. A lead they were destined to hold.
“I don’t see it,” Sable grumbled.
But she did. It was impossible not to. That smile could blind from half a mile away and despite getting his nose broken probably a dozen times and his jaw patched up at least twice, Heath Locklear was one handsome devil.
But the devil was supposed to come in the most enticing form imaginable, right?
CHAPTER TWO
Heath
“Heath bringing the heat tonight, huh?” Jax “Sweeper” Darmuth asked, clapping Heath on the shoulder as he lurched into the seat next to him, almost spilling the two beers and four tequila shots he was carrying.
“I do my best,” Heath commented with mock modesty, earning a round of chuckles as a shot was thrust into his hand and a beer set down in front of his nose. “So what are we drinking to, other than my ever-living glory?”
“Wiping the ice with some Predators! Let’s make it two games—I need a breather after all of this goddamn training Coach has been putting us through,” Logan Garant commented, one half of the famed Garant Grinders duo, with his brother Leo skulking around somewhere at another table.
Probably causing trouble as usual. Those damn twins couldn’t keep their nose out of other people’s business or the knuckled end of a fist for longer than a few minutes usually. That probably explained why Heath got on with them as well as he did.
“I’ll drink to that,” Jax nodded, with Sawyer grabbing the last shot.
Sawyer was a tall, surly guy who you wouldn’t want to meet on a dead-end street. He was also the iron gatekeeper of the Shifter Grove Shovelers, their first goalie, and the best man to have on your side if the gloves came off. Which they did often enough as of late, but in Heath’s opinion that wasn’t to reflect negatively on him, but the aggressive nature of the game overall.
Or at least that’s what he was telling himself.
“To kicking some Predator ass,” Heath bellowed over the hotel bar, rousing a round of cheers as the rest of the tables joined in on the little celebration.
Heath downed his shot, cringing slightly as the hot trail went down his throat, his bear grumbling its grumpy commentary to the
whole matter. Heath chose to ignore it; he was sure he’d get schooled for it some other day. The grizzly didn’t like to be flippantly dismissed like that, but Heath wanted to have some goddamn fun that night.
Which of course was nearly impossible if Coach Wiley hid them away in the bar right at their hotel, not even telling a single one of the bloggers where the Shovelers were going to celebrate one of their first victories, being back on the ice in an official manner. Luckily, that was where Heath could come in and fix all of that.
A wide grin snaked across his lips a minute later when he caught sight of a flock of at least ten puck bunnies pushing their way through the front doors of the hotel lobby, locking eyes with him and the rest of the team and descending down on them like locusts. They wouldn’t be the only ones, just the first batch, because Heath had posted an innocent little tweet of himself and Jax, with the sign hanging over the hotel bar showing the name of it in clear view.
Coach had called it a night an hour ago though, so it was safe enough to get on with his antics, and if Heath had any say in it, his room would be going loud and strong way past everyone else’s bedtime.
Leaning back in his chair, Heath sipped at his beer, taking part in the conversation moving forward only casually, watching the endless stream of fans pile into the bar in ones and groups. What had been a reasonably quiet gathering of twenty or so hockey stars was turning into a rager fast enough, and the barkeep was getting a bit white in the face. So when Heath ordered a round of tequila for everyone, the poor guy looked like he was going to pass out.
Heath couldn’t help but grin. What was life without a little bit of trouble, right?
He was just stretching his arms over his head, working out a few kinks while trying to figure out which one of the lovely, and obviously eager doe-eyed fans he would be asking up to his room to party that evening, when he stopped in mid-yawn. The next people in through the door weren’t fans at all. It was about six guys from the Predators.
