by Avery Flynn
Frankie grimaced, no doubt still holding a grudge for the almost-playoffs a few years ago. “That guy—”
“Is about to be a part of your family.” She slapped her hand over her mouth, but it was too late. Shit. She was not supposed to say anything yet.
“What are you talking about?” Frankie asked, ruffling Trey’s hair as the toddler continued to bang on the glass and wave at the exiting players.
“Well,” she said, calling up all her work skills to smooth over her snafu. “He’s basically my family, so that makes him your family.”
Frankie lifted an eyebrow and snorted in disbelief. “That’s not what you said. What do you know?”
Shit. For someone who made her living snuffing out crisis after crisis, she sure was good at creating her own. Time to think fast. Good thing she had just the bit of news to distract him.
“So does that mean you’re against naming the baby after the former Most Hated Man In Harbor City?”
His jaw dropped. “Baby?”
She nodded, her hand automatically going to her belly as her heart fluttered. This wasn’t exactly how she’d planned on letting him know, but when had anything gone as expected when it came to Frankie Hartigan? No matter what she dreamed up, reality was always better than she’d imagined.
Frankie let out a yell loud enough to gain the attention of a bunch of screaming hockey fans, scooped up Trey, and pulled her in for a family hug. “I love you so much that we can name the baby whatever you want.”
“I’m gonna hold you to that,” she said, blinking away her tears of joy.
He brushed a kiss against her forehead. “Whatever makes you happy.”
“That’s easy. You make me happy.” She looked down at Trey’s smile, then back up at her husband’s beaming face, and couldn’t imagine it was possible to feel any better than she did right now at this moment with her family. “We make me happy. You really do know how to deliver a happily ever after.”
“Only with you, Lucy,” he said. “Only with you.”
…
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Chapter One
Every part of Zach Blackburn ached as if an oversized green muscle man had plucked him up from the sidewalk and smashed him against one of Harbor City’s skyscrapers.
Some of the biggest names in professional hockey had threatened to tear the defenseman’s head off—several of them were even justified in doing so. Then there were the fans. The last poll of Harbor City Ice Knights fans had his approval rating at 3 percent. There were bloodthirsty dictators who ranked higher than that. And the media? They’d circled him like vultures waiting to pick the meat off his bones as soon as he’d signed his contract, reporting his every move and mistake.
But it hadn’t been any of those who’d made him wish for death. Nope, that had happened thanks to food poisoning from God knew what.
Sitting up in bed hurt his tortured gut enough that he couldn’t bite back his groan. At least no one was around to overhear it.
“Welcome back to the land of the living.” A distinctive alto reminding him of brass knuckles wrapped in silk filtered into the room from the doorway. “You’re not going to throw up on my shoes again, are you?”
Shit.
She was here. Of course she was—his own personal demon nurse.
Fallon Hartigan had arrived last night—at the insistence of his PR manager Lucy Kavanagh—right in time to watch him puke like a high schooler after their first taste of peach schnapps. And, yeah, some of it had landed on her. Even he wasn’t a big enough jerk to not feel bad about that.
She’d been sent by Lucy Kavanagh, his PR savior and friend—well, as much of one as someone like him could have. Zach had argued he didn’t need any help. That argument probably would have worked better if he hadn’t made an offering to the porcelain gods without hanging up on Lucy first. Since Lucy was out of town, she’d called in the queen of mean who happened to be one of her best friends and an emergency room nurse.
“Go away,” he grumbled, shoving his hands through his hair, pushing back the part that flopped over his forehead and got in his eyes.
“Not gonna happen,” she said, taking a few steps inside his bedroom. “I promised Lucy I’d stay until I was sure you were on the mend.”
“And last night was such a good time you wanted to stay here for more? That’s your idea of fun?” It looked like it just might be. Nothing about her, from her no-nonsense braid to her oversized T and joggers combo, screamed party girl, puck bunny, or anything else close to the women he’d found himself surrounded by since it became apparent he was designated for hockey’s big time.
“Since I usually see much worse on a daily basis, I’ll live. You look like you might today, too.” Her gaze flickered down from his face before speeding back up to somewhere just north of his head, her eyes wide. “You need to pull up your covers.”
That made him bristle. The last people who told him that he needed to do something were his folks. And he’d unknowingly signed huge loans they’d taken out in his name. They’d called it boring minutia he didn’t need to worry about, since they were his managers and would always watch out for him. The accountant he’d finally hired called it embezzlement and financial ruin. So long, humiliating, shitty story, he could give two shits what anyone felt he “needed to do” ever again.
However, something about the pink staining her cheeks had him looking downward. The basketball shorts he’d been wearing when he’d finally collapsed onto his king-sized bed, the only piece of furniture in the huge bedroom, had worked their way down, waaaaaay down. And Fallon had noticed.
He glanced over at her and caught her snapping her attention back up to his face and keeping it there as she approached his bed. But she couldn’t stop looking, even though it was obvious from her grimace that she didn’t want to.
Well, this could be useful. All he wanted was to deal with the grossness of food poisoning on his own. Alone. No one seeing any crack in his defenses. That’s how he lived his life now. He probably always should have.
But he couldn’t kick Fallon out of his house and stay in Lucy’s good graces.
However, if he got her to leave on her own…well then, that was a different story completely.
“Pull up my covers?” he asked, knowing he was about to put a skate across the line of decency even if he had absolutely zero plans of following through. Of course it wouldn’t be the first time he fought dirty, as many of his opponents on the ice would attest. “If I do that, how are you going to give me a sponge bath?”
She jolted to a stop at the foot of his bed, and he practically heard the match strike the dynamite. “A. Sponge. Bath?”
He shoots. He scores. He would have lifted his arms in celebration—after she stormed out of the house, of course—but something in his gut bubbled and cramped, causing beads of sweat to pop out along his forehead. Want had nothing to do with it anymore, he needed to get her away from here.
Hello? This is karma here to fuck you up, asshole.
Ignoring the vehemence in her tone, along with the continuing fizzle and twist in his stomach, Zach shrugged his shoulders and ran one of his hands down the hard ridges of his six-pack, playing the part of a sexist jerk who would actually ask for a sponge bath. “I ran a fever yesterday. It made me all sweaty.”
Closing her eyes, she tipped her pointed chin toward the ceiling and sucked in a deep breath. That gave him a chance to try to will his stomach into chilling the fuck out, which worked about as well as could be expected. Everything inside his abdomen did a shimmy-slosh thing that did not bode well. He barely got his oh-fuck expression off his face before she lowered her chin and opened her eyes, staring right at him with nothing but sweetness a
nd light.
The air around him stilled, and the little hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
“Well, I’d hate for you—in your weakened condition—to slip in the shower and crack open your head,” she said, putting enough sugar in her words to put him in a diabetic coma. “Where do you keep your sponges?”
Like the Homecoming Queen in a slasher movie, Zach bolted from his bed, managing to yank up his basketball shorts from just above his junk to his waist.
He held up his hand like she was a vampire he had to ward off. “Don’t even think about it.”
Her laugh burst out, full and teasing. She’d gotten him. She’d seen right through him like he was an unshaded window.
With her eyes as big and round as an anime heroine’s, she cocked her head to one side. “Do you no longer need my professional sponge bath expertise? I’ll have you know that I excelled in the wax on, wax off motion of it at nursing school.” She let out a deep, melodramatic sigh. “If only I could have specialized in that instead of trauma medicine.”
Zach dropped his hand and closed his eyes. She was fucking with him. He clamped his jaw shut so she wouldn’t see the smile fighting to get out even as his stomach started to roil again.
Finally, he opened his eyes and took in a deep breath, knowing he had to get her out of this room before he puked again if he had any hope of hustling her from his house this morning. “Point taken. I’ll just get in the shower.” He started edging toward the en-suite bathroom.
“Good.” She crossed her arms and gave him a don’t-fuck-with-me-again smirk. “Anyway, hasn’t anyone ever told you that nurses aren’t scared by anything?”
They hadn’t, but then again, if it didn’t have something to do with on-ice defensive strategies, he wouldn’t have been paying attention.
And how’d that work out for you, Blackburn?
“So, are you going to play nice now, so we can make Lucy happy and she can stop worrying about her clients and enjoy her well-earned vacation?” she asked as she walked to his bedroom door.
An invisible icy wave washed over him, the kind that meant the fates were sending him a big fuck-you on the no-more-throwing-up thing. “I don’t want to.”
Fallon snorted. “Welcome to the real world, where we rarely, if ever, get what we want.”
And then she was gone before he could accidentally admit out loud that he’d learned that lesson all too well.
He’d wanted parents who hadn’t embezzled all of his money, a hockey career that wasn’t marred by scandal, a town that didn’t hate him, teammates that didn’t look at him like he was nothing but trash, and to end the streak of shitty playing that had plagued him since the Ice Knights traded for him. But, most of all at that moment, he wanted to keep whatever was in his stomach in place. Cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck. Fallon Hartigan may be a pushy pain in his ass, but that didn’t make her wrong. He was most definitely not going to get what he wanted.
Propelled by a powerful sense of stomach-mandated urgency, Zach hustled to his bathroom to puke up his guts. Again.
This sure as hell wasn’t the life he’d dreamed of when he laced up his skates for the first time, back when he’d thought his parents saw him as more than just a paycheck.
…
A civilian would have bolted. However, when they said that nothing scared a nurse, they weren’t kidding. Plus, when one of her best friends called in an SOS, there was no way Fallon would say no. It would take more than Zach Blackburn dry heaving hours after his sponge-bath stunt to send her screaming for the exits.
And yes, that would be exits plural. The house he lived in was massive, if woefully under-furnished. Literally, it looked like the guy had just arrived in town a week ago instead of seven months—right in time to ruin the Ice Knights’ run for the playoffs last season. Not that Fallon was still bitter, but she was totally still bitter.
As any fan knew—and Fallon was a die-hard—the team had overpaid to bring Zach Blackburn here, and thanks to his shitty playing and piss-poor attitude, he was now known as the most hated man in Harbor City.
Fallon might live in working-class Waterbury, but the feeling on her side of the harbor was the same. Blackburn was a selfish player. He had a huge chip on his shoulder. He punched out fans. He ignored his coach. He didn’t talk to the other players on the team once they left the rink—and sometimes not while they were in it.
He also happened to be Lucy’s biggest client, which was not a surprise because she was the best crisis PR management bad-boy whisperer in town. That meant when Blackburn fucked up, Lucy magically managed to make it all better.
Except not this time.
Why? Because this time he needed a nurse. So here she and Zach were, in his kitchen sharing a moment of awkward silence—one of the many since she’d arrived last night after a long shift at St. Vincent Hospital.
She’d walked in the door of his gargantuan house, and he’d promptly puked all over her. She wished she could say that was the first time that had ever happened to her but life as an emergency room nurse usually didn’t work out that way.
Zach had one of those fancy kitchens where there was a cooking area, an island the size of her bathroom, an eating area big enough for a table for ten that only had a card table and a single folding chair, and a sitting area with a dark brown leather couch and a massive TV. He was sitting in the middle of the couch with a green plaid blanket wrapped around him. It would almost be comical, this hulk of a man with the dimple in his chin, the steel bar going through his eyebrow, and the hint of a vibrant tattoo on his forearm where the blanket had fallen away, if it wasn’t for the fact that his skin had a sweaty, pasty, been-puking-my-guts-up sheen to it.
Poor guy.
Okay, he was still the jerk whose selfish play ended the city’s playoff dreams last year, but the man was obviously hurting, and she couldn’t just turn off the nurse thing. It was who she was, ever since she forced her siblings to play hospital with her growing up.
She picked up the folding chair and carried it over to the sitting area, along with a cup of warm peppermint tea. She handed him the tea and set up the chair in front of him before sitting down on it. He looked at the Ice Knights–branded mug in his hand as if were a live grenade.
Of course, if she’d been throwing up as much as it seemed like he had, she’d be a little hesitant about drinking or eating anything, too.
“It’s peppermint tea,” she said. “It’ll help soothe your stomach.”
He brought the mug up close to his face and sniffed the swirling line of steam coming up from it. “You aren’t one of those touchy-feely alternative nurses, are you?”
“People have been using peppermint for eons to ease nausea symptoms,” she said as she took out the little spiral notebook and pen she always had on her during a shift. “If you want to skip it because it’s not a pill that came from a little brown bottle with a childproof cap, you can go right ahead.”
He brought the mug up to his nose and sniffed again. Then, he took a sip. He didn’t smile so much as grimace a little less. Fine. She could live with that.
“When did you first start experiencing symptoms?” She flipped open her notebook. Just because she didn’t have a patient chart didn’t mean she wasn’t going to keep track of symptoms and vitals.
“This morning.”
“Had you been feeling bad before that?”
“Nope.” He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the couch. “Everything was fine and then pow, I wanted to die.”
Sure, it could be the flu, but Fallon was starting to suspect something else. “Anyone around you been sick?”
“Not that I know of,” he said, as if he didn’t give a shit either way.
Fallon glanced around at the kitchen. It wasn’t so much clean and tidy as it was barren. No dishes in the sink. No bananas or anything else in the fruit bowl. Only a basket decorated with a golden bow and filled with tissue paper, ribbons, and muffins that was sitting in the mid
dle of the island like it had gotten lost on the way to Martha Stewart’s house.
She turned back to Zach, who was drinking the tea as if he hadn’t distrusted it in the first place. “Eat anything different than usual or from a new place?”
“I don’t eat out.”
“Where’d the muffins come from? Do you cook?” she asked.
“A woman brought them over.” He twisted on the couch, looking at the island behind it. “I had three.”
Fallon could practically hear the ding-ding-ding in her head, and she scribbled down “food poisoning” and the pertinent information in her notebook. “And how soon after that did you become nauseous?”
“A few hours.” He whipped back around, groaned—no doubt because of the quick movement—and closed his eyes. “Do you think she poisoned them? She did have a Cajun Rage tattoo.”
Besides her family, nursing, and the trio of women she called her best friends, there was nothing in the world Fallon cared about more than the Ice Knights. She wasn’t just an everyday fan. She was a superfan. She knew every stat and every factoid, right down to the fact that Coach Peppers had a sixth toe. And the Rage? There was no bigger rivalry in sports than the one between the Knights and the Rage. The Rage played dirty, and their fans were obnoxious.
She snapped her notebook shut. “You slept with someone with a Rage tattoo?”
“Well,” Zach said as he curled his lips upward into the signature smirk that had gotten him a huge endorsement deal, since it hadn’t been his playing in Harbor City. “We didn’t exactly sleep.”
What was it with dudes always having to pull out their metaphorical dick to show how big it was? Be it hockey players or the doctors she worked with, she was so done dealing with the male ego.
