Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(6)

And that was Gina in a nutshell. No matter how she used to deny it before she met Ford, Gina was a total romantic at heart, and it was no surprise she’d become a wedding planner. She was all about the happily ever afters.

Tess? Not even close.

“Honestly, Tess, you’re the best for keeping him from moping,” Lucy said. “If anyone sees him doing it at the reception, especially when Marti is nearby, please send up flares. The guy needs all the friends he can get because he is a mess right now.”

“He sure is playing like one,” Fallon, the resident Ice Knights superfan, said. “He’s distracted, and it shows on the ice.”

“Not everyone gets a Lady Luck,” Tess muttered.

Fallon rolled her eyes. “Don’t even. Zach turning his game around had nothing to do with me.”

“Well, either way, we Ice Knights fans salute you,” Gina said.

Tess’s brain was spinning. Things had just gone from her normal level of awk-weird to something approaching epic levels of oh-my-God-run-away awk-weird. She’d done something totally out of character for her and banged a guy she’d just met six ways from Sunday. Then—to make it even more uncomfortable—he was hung up on another chick, and they were all going to be at the wedding together.

There was no way this was going to be anything other than a disaster.

…

Cole was in hell, and they were playing the “Electric Slide.”

There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world for this—which was good because he was still footing the tab for the team. Sure, there was an open bar, but everyone but the rookies thought it was funnier to go to the hotel bar and not the wedding reception bar for their drinks. Assholes. Sure, they weren’t wrong, it was funnier, but they were still assholes. There was no way it could get worse.

“So.” Petrov drew the single-syllable word out into at least four. “You disappeared with the curly-haired chick last night.”

Obviously, Cole’s previous declarative statement was now rendered false.

Sliding his attention away from the dance floor and over to the man sitting next to him, he saw the center had ditched his bow tie, and he had a glass of top-shelf single malt in his hand and a shit-eating grin on his face. This was going to be worse.

Cole shrugged. “It was a dance.”

“Then a disappearance.”

Followed by some damn good sex and—oh yeah—the totally awesome move of waking up and calling the woman he was in bed with by his ex’s name. That had been a shit move even if remembering his own name when he first woke up was a challenge. He’d spent the past six months waiting for Marti to agree to give it another go—which she always did—and turning away every single opportunity to get it on with anyone else. Then he’d gotten weddinged. Something the quick-thinking center next to him wasn’t going to let him forget, so he might as well dig in and get chippy about it.

“You have a point to make, Petrov?” Cole asked.

“Just an observation and a hell-yeah for finally moving on.” Petrov clinked his glass against Cole’s. “I haven’t seen you with anyone in months, despite the efforts of some of our more creative fans.”

“I don’t need to move on from anything.” Eventually things would realign and go back to the way they had always been. Solid. Sure. Unchanging. Just the way he liked it. This was just a temporary glitch, not forever.

“You trying to tell me that nothing happened last night? Bullshit. I saw how you looked at her.”

“Nothing important happened.” Inwardly he cringed at what a dickhead he sounded like, but he kept that internal, covered under fourteen layers of ice. However, if he gave Petrov even a hint that it had been more, he’d never hear the end of it. “It was a nice time.”

Three nice times. He’d gone around and searched his room until he’d found the two torn-open condom packets on the dresser top and the one stuffed into the pocket of his suit pants from the time in the conservatory, just to double-check his memory that they’d been three nice, protected times.

The other forward on his line, Alex Christensen, had packed Cole’s wallet with condoms for, as he put it, “the premium opportunities a wedding offered.” Cole had figured it for the hazing it was. Using them had never crossed his mind until Tess talked him into doing the one thing he never did voluntarily—lose. What in the world was going on?

“First Christensen lines my wallet with condoms, and now you’re whispering in my ear about Tess,” he mumbled to himself before looking up at the god-awful fresco on the ceiling of the reception room that had been painted with a Greek god theme, never mind that they had Icarus flying away from the sun instead of toward it.

“Maybe we all think it’s time you tried a new path,” Petrov said, completely missing that Cole’s question had been rhetorical. “Ever think that maybe, even though Marti is one of the coolest chicks we know, you should just walk away after this breakup? It’s been six months.” He gestured toward the dance floor. “She seems to have moved on. Follow her lead. You’ve been ignoring the other women throwing themselves at you for months, but last night you fall in with Tess? Sounds to me like you’re ready to move on.”

Cole looked over toward the dance floor. He didn’t have to search to find her. Marti was dancing with that Wall Street guy, who looked like he couldn’t make up his mind between ogling her tits or stealing from a widows and orphans charity fund. Where had she found this prick? She was better than him.