I Pucking Love You (The Copper Valley Thrusters #5) - Pippa Grant Page 0,13

last year. Or Connor! I’d take Connor. There are like, zero pictures of him on the internet since no one ever cares about the backup goaltender. I’d take Ares, too, but it’s not like he can go in disguise, except maybe unless he disguised himself as Zeus, but if there’s a single person in the world who doesn’t know who the Berger twins are or who would still think either of them is single, I’d be shocked. Plus, again with the upstaging thing. There’s no way I could ask Ares.”

“You know the guys have practice on Monday morning, right? Sunday too. They still practice on their days off between games.”

“One guy can’t get a single day off to go support a friend in need? We can leave after practice on Sunday. They don’t practice all the way until night on a Sunday, do they?”

She winces. “Muffy, I—”

“I’ll do it.”

That voice.

I know who that voice belongs to, and it has my shoulders bunching up to my ears so high that if I were in a onesie like the baby, I’d have to pull my underwear out of my butt.

“What about Rooster?” I say to Kami like The Voice didn’t speak. “If I took Rooster, people wouldn’t be looking at me, and then I could be there for Veda?”

“I said I’ll do it,” Tyler Jaeger repeats.

If I don’t look at the wide arched doorway between the living room and the dining room, he doesn’t exist, and he’s not making the offer, so instead, I give Kami my best imploring please don’t make me answer him look.

She half-squints back at me with the universal looks of both what the hell is wrong with you? and also beggars can’t be choosers, Muffy. Maybe you should take your octogenarian criminal friend instead.

And then she stabs me in the back by turning to face Tyler straight on. “That’s so kind of you. Muffy accepts.”

6

Tyler

There’s nothing quite like a woman trying to look past you as if you’re not two hundred pounds of solid muscle standing right in front of her to make a guy realize there might be a reason for his complex.

His and his dick’s.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kami, but I think you should see a doctor if you’re accepting dates for me with ghosts,” Muffy says as she scrambles off her knees, making the pink bag slung across her body shift, clanking the contents inside it.

What does she have in that thing, coffee mugs?

Knowing Muffy, it’s more likely cans of silly string and Magic 8-Balls.

She’s in jeans, a Muff Matchers hoodie, a light jacket, and a layer of something that smells like panic, and she’s clearly not interested. “I need a real man in corporeal form to do this, but if you can’t help me, I’ll go—hey!”

Yeah, it’s juvenile, but I’m now holding her scrunchie high above my head while her hair flops out of its ponytail and frizzes to her back, except for the smoother portion that was held against her scalp. I point at her. “You. Me. Outside. Or we’re talking about last night in front of Kami too.”

“There was no last night.”

“Whatever, fish lady.”

Kami makes a noise between a cough and a snort, and I wonder if she knows about Muffy working at Cod Pieces, or if she assumes I’m making a vulgar insinuation about Muffy’s muff.

Whatever.

It works.

Muffy lifts her head high, bumps into me as she stalks through the wide doorway to the dining room, then through to the kitchen, where Murphy, Berger, Lavoie, Klein, and Frey are debating god only knows what over a cheese platter—yes, a cheese platter—and past them all to the back door.

Their idea of an intervention was stuffing me full of dairy and suggesting women I should hook up with to work off my frustrations.

The fuckers know. They know I love cheese, and they know my dick doesn’t work. I don’t know how Berger knew, but then, Ares is Ares.

He just knows.

And when he decides other people need to know, then other people know.

“Don’t do anything out there that’ll scare my dogs,” Murphy says as I follow Muffy.

“Your dogs will get over it,” Lavoie retorts. “Fixing Jaeggy takes priority over a moment of trauma for pampered pups. Or cows.”

Frey, who’s a real-life prince of a small country north of Scotland in addition to being one of the best right wings the Thrusters have ever had, smirks like he always does. The cheerful asshole has one of those faces stuck in a