by Pippa Grant
She turns and marches out, pulling me by a fistful of shirt. I smirk at Chase. Or try to. There’s this emotional shit going on in my chest and head and I can’t exactly think straight. “Good luck with them, you pansy-ass moneybags.”
That shit-eating grin he gives me suggests I’m the one who needs the luck.
But I don’t need luck.
Nah. I got the Zeus Berger charm going on.
Somewhere under all these feelings and the fucking fairy princesses twitterpating that muscle in my chest.
Fine, fine.
I’ve got hope.
And Joey’s knuckle punching me in the breastbone every time we fall out of sync. Which is pretty fucking awesome in my world.
Takes a lot to hurt a big brute like me.
Physically. And she’s not coming close.
She drags me out the building, across a grassy strip separating the aluminum-sided building from the edges of a runway. We cross the asphalt too, heading to a hangar.
She’s not saying anything.
We’re walking to an airplane’s garage.
Fuck.
She’s got a plane. She’s gonna fucking take me to New York and dump my ass.
“Joey—”
“Shut up.”
I don’t know what that voice is. It’s thick and heavy and loaded, and it’s fucking effective.
She marches me into the hangar through a side door and pulls me toward her massive, gravity-defying plane. The side door’s open, staircase rolled down.
I dig in my heels at the base of the staircase. “You’re not fucking taking me to New York.”
At that, she spins, brows momentarily crinkled in surprise. “You—” She shakes her head, and a devious smile takes over. “No?”
“No. Not just no, fuck no. I’m. Not. Leaving. You. I’m staying, Joey. I’m fucking staying right here, with you. Because I—”
I don’t finish, because she’s leaping at me. I catch her, her legs go around my middle, she attacks my lips with her mouth, and fuck, she’s so strong and determined and delicious and I will fucking love this woman until the day the universe no longer exists.
Her fingers clamp in my hair. Her ankles lock behind my back. And she kisses me like she’s trying to reach the stars through my mouth.
“Get on my airplane,” she orders.
My legs follow orders and carry her up the steps even though I don’t want to. She’s not taking me to New York. Can’t make me go.
But kissing Joey on her airplane?
Yeah.
Fuck, yeah.
I can get into that.
I turn at the top of the stairs and carry her into the open space where she made me fucking weightless. No windows here—they’re all covered by the padding against the walls. The space is dim, the walls curved outward so I can’t easily shove her up against one.
Instead, I go to my knees and lay her on her back.
Trapped.
So I can kiss her.
Rub my hard dick into that sweet pussy.
Keep her from getting any more ideas about flying my ass anywhere.
I find the right spot between her legs, and she bucks into me. “God, Zeus, I love you,” she gasps.
I lift my head, my heart threatening to beat out of my chest.
Those big dark eyes are shiny and wide open. Committed. Dedicated. Strong.
Not terrified like last night. Not holding back.
She strokes my cheeks, kisses my nose. “I love you,” she whispers.
I have to clear my throat twice before I can push words past the damn lump clogging my airways. “I fucking love you so much, Joey.”
A smile teases her lips. “Show me?”
Oh, I’m gonna show her.
I’m gonna fucking show her every day for the rest of our lives. I lower my mouth to hers and take a slow, leisurely stroke of her upper lip. She sucks my bottom lip into her mouth and scrapes it with her teeth. Jupiter surges like he’s racing around the sun, his moons go hard and tight, and everything else disappears.
Just me and Joey.
Those lush tits. Her strong legs. That mouth. Her eager hands exploring my body and pulling clothing away from skin so she’s stroking my chest, my arms, down my pants to—
Yeah.
To where just a stroke of those nimble fingers can put me so close to the edge I lose my fucking mind. “Want you now,” I gasp.
She’s already snapping the buttons on her fancy work shirt and shimmying out of her pants. I snag a condom from my wallet before she shoves my pants down with her feet—fuck, that’s hot—and spreads her legs while she rolls it on me.
“Love me, Zeus,” she whispers.
I want to thrust in as deep as I can go, but instead, I push just inside her, only my head disappearing into her folds.
Her eyes roll back while she rocks against my tip. “Ohmydog, Zeus, you feel so fucking good.”
She’s so tight and hot, squeezing my head. Her eyes are glittering with stars, those lush lips parted, her head tipped back in rapture. I reach between us and thumb her clit, and she bucks into my touch, pulling my cock further into her. “Yes,” she gasps. “Oh, dog, there. More.”
I jerk into her, press her clit, and her legs go straight and rigid while she cries my name and her walls convulse around the top of me. I grit my teeth and count to potato while she squeezes and pumps, taking me deeper with every spasm while I order Jupiter to wait his turn.
Because Joey’s going twice before we go once.
It’s the fucking rule.
And she can suck my dick if she doesn’t like it.
Fuck, I hope she’ll suck my dick even if she does like it.
Her neck arches back and her eyes clench shut as one last wave crashes over us.
She’s so fucking hot when she comes.
Her lids drift open, and she smiles. “I love you,” she whispers.
Yeah, that’s about all I can take. I dip my head to eat the hell out of her mouth while I push the rest of the way inside her, and soon she’s gasping and writhing again, scraping her nails over my back, squeezing my ass, pumping up into me while I drive home.
Over and over.
Deeper and harder.
Kissing her mouth and licking her neck and nipping at her shoulder until we’re exploding together in a fiery mass of climax, giving and taking and squeezing and thrusting and clenching and shooting fucking fireworks.
I’m coming for fucking days. Harder and longer and just fucking better than it’s ever been, because she’s holding me and coaxing me and giving me everything in her pussy, everything in her touch, everything in her whole heart.
After we’re both so spent neither of us can move, we lay panting on the floor of her airplane. “You’re gonna fucking fly me to the moon for real one day,” I tell her.
She laughs, and god, I want to hear that laughter every day.
It’s better than any boy band song I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard—and loved—all the boy band shit there is to hear and love.
“You think you can boss me around now?” she asks.
“I can ask real pretty.”
She rolls to face me, her fingers reaching out to my chest like our bodies are magnets and need to be touching all the time. “You need to go to New York.”
“Joey—”
“I know. I know, Zeus. You’re not leaving. But we’re going to be okay. We can make this work. You’ll come back. I’ll come to you. Phones. Video chats. Email. Text messages. It’s just a few years. You love hockey. You can’t give that up for me. I won’t let you.”
She’s wearing that I’m the boss of you face. Like that’s gonna work. “Too bad.”
Her eyes narrow.
I grin.
“You’re impossible.”
I trap her hand over my heart. “That’s why you love me.”
There’s nothing soft about my Joey Fireball.
Nothing soft except her heart. She keeps that fucker locked up good. Do
n’t think I don’t know just how lucky of a bastard I am that she’s letting me see it glow in those captivating dark eyes now. “Unfortunately,” she sighs with more melodrama than even my sister could pull off in her teenage years, “you’re not wrong.”
“I know. I’m always right.”
She laughs again and pulls me in for another kiss.
Because me and Joey?
We’re not normal, but we’re perfect for each other.
And I’m gonna spend the rest of my life loving the shit out of her.
Epilogue
Zeus Berger (aka the biggest, baddest, most lovesick motherpucker on the ice)
The only thing I want after an ugly game is to climb into bed with Joey, but that’s not happening tonight.
Yeah, yeah, she got her way.
I reported to the Rangers three days late. Meant it when I told her I wasn’t leaving, and I parked my ass in her office every minute of the day to prove my point.
When we weren’t at her place banging our brains out.
But she finally wised up and threw down a bet. If I won the best sixteen out of thirty games of darts, thumb wars, and boy band trivia, I’d hang up my skates, forfeit the end of my contract, and bake her cookies every day. Sounded pretty fucking awesome to me.
If she won, I’d report to the Rangers.
Fine. It was supposed to be best two out of three, and I refused to concede until game seventeen.
But I was having fun. And who the fuck knew how much she knew about boy bands? That’s sexy shit right there.
And considering every time she beat me, I distracted her with sex, she wasn’t exactly complaining.
Until that one time Gracie caught us in the fridge.
Don’t ask. It’s not exactly what it sounds—never mind.
Point is, tonight, we barely pulled off a win against the Predators—yeah, that felt fucking good, even if it was ugly—and since the game was in Nashville, it was easy for Joey to drive up.
She flew instead, which is good for everyone.
She’s a real terror on the roads.
We should be headed back to the hotel so I can bang her brains out. But no. She shoved me in a Lyft and dragged me to the airport, and now she’s landing the small private jet Weightless owns at a dinky airport in the middle of nowhere while stars sparkle overhead.
Because I promised to be good, I got to sit in the cockpit with her.
Because watching my girlfriend fly a plane is fucking hot, I’ve got a titanium two-liter in my pants.
“Where are we?”
“The middle of nowhere. I’ve decided to sex you to death and dump your satisfied body as a warning to all the wolves to not challenge my alphaness.”
“I knew that fucking shapeshifter romance was a bad idea.” Yeah, I’m in a romance book club. And yeah, Joey is too now. You got a problem with that, you’re reading the wrong fucking epilogue.
“Bad idea for you maybe.” She howls in the cockpit, and fuck, if I could fit, I’d be crawling into her instrument panel to lick her pussy until she howls again.
Don’t ask what happened last time I tried.
“Can we go somewhere we can fuck?” I ask.
She grins. “Soon.”
Right.
The problem with dating a pilot? They have to do all this post-flight shit.
Which is really hot.
But not as hot as we make a dinky little hotel room an hour or so later.
Too soon, she’s poking me awake. “Come on, sleeping beauty. Time to go.”
I’m on a rare day off, and I know she knows I’m probably gonna get my ass chewed six ways to Pluto for not riding back to New York with the team, but I don’t mind an ass-chewing if it means I get more time with Joey.
I make her scream my name in the shower before we get dressed, because I’m Zeus Berger, and that’s what I fucking do for my woman.
But I don’t like the looks of the rental car sitting in the parking lot. Yeah, it’s big enough, but— “You driving that?”
“Depends. Can you take orders?”
“Just did, didn’t I?”
You know what’s different in the three months I’ve been dating Joey?
She’s getting laugh lines around her eyes.
That’s what’s different.
She surrenders the car keys, and she directs me through a modest town on a gray, chilly morning to a community center.
The Seven Foxes Community Center.
I know that name.
I grab her wrist before she can climb out. “What are we doing here?”
“In the parking lot? Sitting in a car.”
“Joey…” I glower.
She smiles.
Sweetly.
Fuck, I hate when she does that. First of all, sweet’s just not her. And I don’t want it to be. Second of all, it still makes the demigod in my pants surge to attention, because he’s fucking helpless.
“An old friend asked me to drop a puck to start her first hockey game,” she says on a shrug. “And she asked if you would come along to watch me do what you’d fuck up.”
Bailey.
That little turd.
Trash-talking me through my own girlfriend.
“That all?” I ask.
“You think I’m going to put either of us through a parade in your honor?”
Yeah, I do. I know she knows why Bailey has a hockey team. And I don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes kids need a hero, and sometimes that hero doesn’t want the world to know he’s a good guy, because it’s way more fucking fun to let everyone think that planting obscene flamingoes in the shape of a Z on a sports reporters’ lawn when he calls me washed up is the only legacy I’ll leave behind when I’m done at the end of this year.
Which mattered to me a fuck-ton more a year ago than it does today.
Doesn’t mean I want a parade though.
“You can sit here if you want,” she says, “but I’m going to go see Bailey.”
She climbs out like it doesn’t matter if I don’t go with her.
I let her get almost to the door before I climb out too. “Hey, Fireball,” I boom.
A dozen little girls and their families, all tromping through the misty morning to get inside, turn and look at me. A few of the mothers gasp and cover their kids’ ears like they’re afraid I’m gonna start flinging fucks and turdwads and all kinds of profane ideas all over the parking lot. A couple of the dads get that look in their eyes that suggests it’s a good thing I still keep a Sharpie in my back pocket.
And no, I don’t want to talk about how many of those fuckers have gone through the wash and ruined half my wardrobe.
“Get your sass back here,” I yell at my girlfriend. “I left my bodyguard at home.”
She cocks a hip. “Protect your own sass, Berger. Mine’s worth more anyway.”
True enough.
I saunter through the parking lot and consider bending over to eat a few rocks out of the asphalt, but that’s more Ares’s style. If there weren’t kids present, I’d drop trou and streak.
“Making me boring,” I grumble to Joey when I meet her at the door.
She slaps my ass. “Nah, it’s called getting old.”
I love that she doesn’t take my shit and gives it right back. Which is why I’m still grinning when a blondie streaks by me to tackle my girlfriend. “Joey! You came!”
Bailey’s mother eyes me with a cross between healthy fear and grudging admiration. Like maybe she knows, too, why her daughter now has more tools in her arsenal of weapons.
To beat the boys off, I mean. Naturally.
Like Fireball used to have to.
Joey squats to Bailey’s level while the kid rattles off all the ways Joey’s her hero and how many drills she’s done this week and how much better she’s getting at reading since the foundation hooked her up with a tutor who gets the way her brain works.
“Come on, come on, it’s game time.” She snags Joey by the hand and pulls her throug
h the crowded hallways to the rink. I contemplate signing Bailey’s mother’s forehead, but decide against it.
Fuck, maybe I am getting old.
“Holy shiii-take mushrooms, it’s the Brute,” a girl who can’t be more than twelve says as I walk by. “Will you sign my forehead?”
“Mine too?” another kid says.
Soon I’m surrounded by a pack of Zeusleaders all wanting to give me shit about last year’s play-offs and me being late reporting to the Rangers, and also whisper in awe about the three hat tricks I’ve pulled in the last month.
Yeah.
I got my game back. And then some.
But I’m still done when the Rangers win the Stanley Cup this season. Just for the record.
I got cookies to bake for my hot girlfriend every day.
“It’s time!” someone hisses. “Come on, Fireball’s gonna drop the puck!”
Fuck if I’ll miss that. I hustle along with the girls, pulling my phone out. I want video of this shit.
Bailey’s mom signals me from down the hall. “Here. The view’s better,” she says.
I bypass the double doors everyone else is streaming into to follow her, and two seconds later, I’m standing at the edge of the ice.
Fuck.
Joey’s not out there yet. No, she’s right next to me, with Bailey all suited up and a guy who’s probably the coach.
Also there?
Ares.
Ambrosia and Chase.
My parents.
Gracie.
Peach.
“Joey…”
“Shut the fudge up, Berger,” Bailey says. “Your stick work stinks this season, and you’ve got weak ankles. If you hurt Joey, I’ll rack you in the pucks.”
“Scary short one,” Ares says.
“You surround yourself with the best women,” Ambrosia says while Chase snickers. “Seriously, Zeus. They keep getting better.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask her.
“Watching Joey drop the puck. Like family does.”
Oh.
Huh.
Even I can’t argue with that.
I clap her on the shoulder. Maybe a little too hard. “Nice of you.”
“You ready, Joey?” Bailey asks. She’s a mini badass in her pads and gloves and helmet, and I can’t help grinning.
Kid’s going places.
And when I hang up my skates at the end of this season, I know exactly what I’m gonna do.
