by Avery Flynn
2
Flynn
The drive from Ten Pints to his driveway didn't take long. Snow Bay was too small of a town for it to take longer than fifteen minutes to get anywhere. Two stoplights and a right turn and he pulled into his driveway. Well, not his. It was his mom's when she came back in the summer for a few weeks. Most of the time she was living her dream life, traveling the globe with Frank, who recently retired after selling all twenty-five of his car dealerships. She'd offered to come back for the parade when the Cup arrived, but he'd told her not to worry. She'd been there to see him win it and that was enough for him.
"You grew up here?" Gillie asked.
He shook his head, keeping his face forward just as he had the entire drive. It would be too easy to give in to temptation otherwise. "A two-bedroom mobile home on the edge of town. I bought this place with my first contract money." He nodded his chin toward the single-story house with a drive-under garage. "I've never lived here, only visited."
"So Snow Bay isn't home anymore?"
Out of the corner of his eye he watched her fiddle with the seatbelt as her gaze quickly bounced from the house to the ATV parked off to the side to the trees to the huge boulder and the flowers planted around it and back again.
"That's New Orleans now." He had two years left to go in his Ragin' Cajuns' contract. They could trade him, but he'd have to have a real shit year for that to happen after being a pivotal part of winning the Cup.
"That must have been a little bit of culture shock." More fidgeting with the seatbelt.
He turned in his seat, realization breaking through his own walls. "What's with the small talk? Nervous all of the sudden?"
She started and folded her hands in her lap. "More like I don't want to get into the details while I'm freezing my ass off. Can we just go inside already?"
He glanced down at the dashboard temperature readout. "It's sixty-two degrees."
"Exactly."
He just stared.
"I'm from Texas and it's August," she huffed. "The only thing that should be this cold is my Coke."
Despite himself, he laughed. Cold at sixty-two degrees? She'd never make it come fall let alone when winter hit and everyone's backyard turned into their own personal mini ski-resort.
He opened his door. "Let's go."
With only the slightest hesitation, Gillie got out of his truck and followed him into the house. From her perspective it had to seem a little kitschy with all the black bear stuff everywhere. His mom had a thing for decorating with black bears, which put her in good company with a lot of people in the U.P. Bears were stitched onto couch pillows. Wooden bears stood on the counters holding bottles of wine. In the large landscape painting above the stone fireplace there were at least three more bears hiding in the foliage. The master bedroom and guest room had quilts featuring bears. There was even a bear in the main bathroom next to the toilet holding extra rolls of Charmin. Okay, maybe his mom was more into bears than a lot of folks.
Gillie did a three-sixty, taking in the place and he lost the battle to keep his attention off of her. Strands of blue peeked out from the ebony layers of her hair, but that wasn't what made his mouth dry and his cock wake up and say hello again. Just as the dark had hidden the new additions of blue hair, it had put everything else in shadow too. The exact reasons why he'd ignored his own better judgment when it came to his friend Marko's little sister were in plain sight. It wasn't just her body, although that was a pretty good argument on its own, it was the way she held herself—the way she seemed to say hello and fuck off just by standing still that had sucked him in way past the point of some good time sex. Okay, fucking amazing sex.
A half formed idea to finish what they'd started in the bar had him halfway across the living room to her before he pulled up short. She swung around to face him, something dark and hungry in her eyes and her fire engine-red lips parted. The temptation to follow through with what they both obviously wanted had him by the balls, but he refused to give in.
She'd almost taken down his career once, now she said she was here to save it. Yeah, right. And he had the Mackinaw Bridge to sell her.
"We're inside." He glanced at the thermostat. "It's a balmy sixty-nine degrees in here. Talk or get out."
She picked up one of the grizzly bear figurines from a bookshelf and fiddled with it. Nervous? Gillie? No fucking way. Her hand shook the slightest bit as she set it back down and then turned to face him, her casual nonchalant posture a little too forced. Yep. She was nervous. Before he could process that information, she started talking.
"I got a call from my old contact about a job."
"Old contact?"
Her chin went up a few degrees. "Someone I used to run with before."
Run with? That was a helluva way to phrase probable scumbag. "Oh, before you got arrested and I gave you a fake alibi that could have landed me in jail?"
The one thing in the world that mattered most to him—his career—had flashed before his eyes when he'd opened his door and found a Dallas police detective on his doorstep.
She had the decency to look ashamed—or at least do a credible fake of it. "Yeah, that."
For the tiniest fraction of a second, he almost fell for it. Damn, she was good—almost as good at the deke fake as Rage left winger Rod Fraser. The bastard almost got him every practice. But she'd burned him before—so much so that if he concentrated hard enough, he could still smell the singed hair. There was no way he was falling for her act again.
"All of this means nothing to me," he said, keeping his voice low and even. "I don't give a shit about you and I sure as hell am not going to be your alibi again. So, what does this job have to do with me?"
There it was. The twitch in her right eye—an involuntary dead giveaway that she knew she'd been caught. "The job is to steal the Cup while it's here in Snow Bay and hide it in your house where the police will find it."
He laughed, loud and relieved. This was her play? Her big move for reasons unknown? Hell, his old man had told better lies about why he finally wanted to spend time with his all-but-ignored son, who'd just happened to have hit the big time and scored his first multi-million-dollar deal. Flynn's belly hurt by the time he wiped at his laughter-watery eyes. Gillie hadn't cracked a smile. She'd looked more cheerful that night he'd seen her handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser.
"You're not serious," he said.
She met his gaze without a flinch or a twitch. "Afraid so, stud."
Not good. It was very fucking not good. He paced the length of the living room, shoving his hand through his hair as his mind went faster than a slap shot. A stunt like this would get him drummed out of the league. He'd be lucky to play on the Jamaican national hockey team, if they had one. There'd be jail too, but shit, who cared when there was no hockey? The only silver lining to this shit cloud was that Gillie'd turned 'em down. That was a pretty razor thin lining.
"So what did they do when you said no?" he asked, wandering into the kitchen for a much-needed beer.
Gillie followed him in, standing just inside the archway between the rooms while he grabbed two brews from the fridge. He made sure not to touch her as he handed her the long neck, but that was almost as bad. It let his memory fill in all the blanks for how it felt to touch her. It was like that moment between being almost sure he blocked a hard shot and the buzzer not going off, when the whole world was made up of anticipation and hope.
She took a long sip then set the bottle down on the counter and took on that too-casual stance again. "I said yes."
"What the fuck?" The question exploded from his mouth as he slammed his beer down hard enough on the counter for foam to erupt over the top of the bottle.
She didn't flinch. "If I didn't they already had another barn burner lined up for the job."
"Barn burner?" In his world that meant a high scoring game, but he wasn't dumb enough to think that's what she meant here. He'd been dinged by the puck a million times but his helmet hadn't cracked yet
.
"Hot chick." She took a long, unhurried drink.
He was that easy to set up was he? Yeah, when it came to rocket hot chicks and his dick, yeah, he probably was. What could he say, he came to it honestly. Just look who his father was. Of course, that didn't make him any less pissed off—especially not when the woman sent to screw him over had already done a very thorough job of that three years ago.
"So what, they figured I just get fucked before really getting fucked?" He stalked across to where she stood, invading her space. "Is that what you're here to do?" He ran a fingertip down the long column of her throat, over her pulse that was speeding like a Ferrari, across the line of her collarbone to the other side and then dipping an inch lower on the return trip. "Are you going to spread those perfect thighs of yours and take my cock?" Her eyes were dilated. His cock was iron. Perfect time to sink in the blade. "Is that what you are now, Gillie, a whore for hire?"
"No, you asshole." She planted her hands on his chest and shoved—hard—sending him back a few steps. "I said yes so I could help you. I can at least delay the process."
There was that twitch in her eyes again.
"If that's the case why are you so nervous?" he asked.
"Because I haven't done anything like this for years. My contact knows that. There's no way they'd let me go in without a shadow."
"Someone to pick up the slack if you fail?"
She nodded and took another drink before dropping her empty bottle into the recycling bin to her right.
And so all the pieces came together. "That's why you needed to put on a show at the bar, make your shadow think you were playing ball."
"Exactly." She nodded.
He didn't trust her, but he didn't think she was lying. That didn't mean he was partnering up with her on some crazy ass scheme though.
"I'm calling the cops." He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started searching for the Snow Bay Police Department's non-emergency number.
"And tell them what?" She yanked the phone from his grasp and shoved it in the back pocket of her tight jeans—as if he was too gentlemanly to touch her ass to get it back. "That your thieving sorta ex-girlfriend is here to steal a Cup so legendary that it has its own keeper who travels everywhere with it and that I'm doing it as part of a conspiracy to set you up to take the fall because some rich guy has a hard-on for your failure?"
That last bit set off the cool breeze up the back of his neck. "What makes you say rich guy?"
"No one else can afford me," she said, all fact and no opinion. "Look, I already have a call out to Marko. If we can make my contact think the job's taken care of, he'll call off the shadow. If we can't, Marko will help us nail the bastard behind it all."
"He can do that?"
Marko had always been a crazy dude ever since Flynn had met him years ago at a charity hockey game for the military and they'd formed a friendship—one that had only grown stronger after Marko left the military and settled back in Fort Worth while Flynn had been playing for Dallas. Which is why Flynn never would have messed around with Gillie if it had just been a quick fuck. Not that any of it mattered now, not when it came to her.
"You've known my big brother for how long?" Gillie scoffed. "Hell yes he can. And add to it that he has the B-Squad Security and Investigations team behind him now and he is officially a very scary mother fucker to have running against you."
One who usually stayed on the right side of the straight and narrow—unlike his sister. "Does he know about you?"
The eye twitch. "A little."
"Does he know about us?"
"Not at all."
The answer both relieved and annoyed him for reasons he wasn't about to dig into. "So why help me?"
She looked him straight in the eyes. No twitch. No casual body language. No bullshit. "I owe you."
Yeah, she did. Lying might come easy to her, but selling a story to the cops and telling them that Gillie had been with him the night a rich superman of the Dallas team walked into her home safe and found all her diamond necklaces, emerald earrings and more missing had been worse than letting in a soft shot from a player who usually rode the pine. So why had he done it? Because like an asshole, he'd thought it had been a one-time mistake for her. He hadn't known until it was too late that she'd been part of a crew for years and had suckered him in just like the marks she'd helped to set up. What a fucking waste.
"You should have gotten out of this kind of life while you still could."
Her sly smile turned brittle at the edges. "And then where would you be?"
"Right here." He swiped his beer off the counter and took a swig. "But probably with one of the babes from the bar who drove all the way to the U.P. for a chance to ride my cock."
He almost felt bad when she flinched just the tiniest bit, but he slammed the brakes down on that. Give her an inch and she'd take the whole ice rink. It's what she did. She manipulated people. The only way to deal with that was to dial up the dickery because whatever she was selling, he wasn't buying. However, he couldn't help but wonder what was in this scheme for her. Revenge? Money? Something else he was too dense to think up? There had to be something because there was no way in hell, Gillie Pike was in his kitchen promising to save him from career implosion. She didn't operate by the goodness of her heart any more than he did. They were both bastards like that.
Hips swaying in time with his heart pumping all the blood in his body straight to his dick, Gillie strutted over and snagged his beer. "You're a real piece of work."
"What?" he asked, telling himself to hurry up and kick her out before the bad ideas in his head turned into reality—but those weren't the words that came out of his mouth. "You're saying my big dick isn't worth the drive? You know better than that."
"Must have slipped my mind." She rolled her eyes and took a drink.
That he didn't believe. She might lie about a lot of shit, but she didn't fake orgasms and he'd given her more than enough toe curlers to have a permanent place in her memory banks. Again, it wasn't ego just fact. They were combustible together. He couldn't deny it since it was the reason why he'd crossed that line the first time and fucked his best friend's little sister.
As if she could read his mind, she got the pink flush to her cheeks that always happened when she got turned on. Her gaze dropped from his face to the outline of his cock pressing against the thick denim of his jeans and she licked her lips.
"Why don't I refresh your memory?" He hooked his fingers into the loops of her jeans and tugged her closer so her hip pressed against his aching dick.
She looked up at him, her hazel eyes dark with lust. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"That's the best thing about a good fuck…" He skimmed his fingertips across the ribbon of bare flesh above her waistband. "You can't think."
She set the bottle down on the counter, the move brushing her tits across his arm. "So you're offering to take my mind off things?"
"I'm a real sweetheart that way."
"Liar," she said as she rose up on her tiptoes, leaving a trail of fire everywhere her body touched his.
"Pot," he said, his mouth inches from hers. "Kettle."
This was an idiotic play, but the only one he wanted to make. He'd deal with reality tomorrow. Tonight he was taking his own advice and giving his logical side the night off. It didn't matter. The moment he kissed her, his brain was fucking useless anyway.
3
Gillie
Gillie had only caught a quick flash of a familiar shade of fire engine-red hair outside the kitchen window, but it was enough. Orlando had come to Snow Bay himself to shadow her. So, she'd maneuvered Flynn into kissing her and killed two birds with one stone: Orlando would believe she was doing her job and Flynn wouldn't notice the six-foot-five-inch redheaded hulk loitering outside.
It had been the perfect, simple solution except for one thing—kissing Flynn again was like being an alcoholic bellying up to the bar after aliens had invaded the planet. There was no w
ay she was going to be able to stop after just one.
His lips were hard and demanding as he deepened the kiss and molded her to his hard body. God, he was magnificent. Touching him like this was a rush, a desperate ride that her body prayed would never end. Each inhale and exhale changed the angle of the kiss, the firmness of his touch, and the fragile hold on her self control. His hands spanned across her waist, his long fingers curled around the loops of her jeans and his thumbs pressing against the initial swell of her hips. And her hands? They were everywhere on a seek and ignite mission of their own. Up the hard, muscular planes of his chest, across his broad shoulders, down his powerful back to the high, rounded curve of his athletic ass. If she was going to burn to ash in his embrace, he was sure as hell going to go with her.
Breaking the kiss, she trailed her lips across the hard stubbled line of his jaw and down the corded line of his throat. At the same time she brought her hands back around to the front and found the button of his jeans, fumbling against the metal in her attempt to free it so she could delve underneath. She didn't get the chance though. Flynn whipped her around and lifted her up and set her ass down on the counter with an unceremonious drop. One small step and he stood between her legs, the layers of clothing and inches of space between them enough to make her mewl in protest.
"Stop touching me." But as he issued the order in his panty-melting bass, he was licking and nipping along the exposed line of her collarbone and one hand was cupping one of her breasts, heavy with desire.
"I can't." She was impressed she remembered to breathe because touching him was so much more important right now.
He grabbed her wrists, encircling them with one hand, and raised them over her head. "You will."
The move brought his stiff dick in line with her core and she wrapped her legs around his lean hips, locking them at the ankles and yanking him close. It wasn't enough, this hard press of him against her, but it was close enough to make her vision blink out for a moment. The second of frozen stillness in his body meant he had to feel it too, that connection, that something that threatened to drown them whenever they touched. They'd fought it for so long before giving in. Even with all that had happened, she didn't regret it. She couldn't. And he didn't want her to touch him? He must be blocking hockey pucks with his head.
