I Pucking Love You (The Copper Valley Thrusters #5) - Pippa Grant Page 0,18

at me and taps her watch with her eyebrows raised in question. I point to a table and mouth I’ll wait and I have a meeting at the same time, which is most likely impossible to interpret, since I think I actually mouthed I’ll meet a waiting, which makes zero sense.

But since she’s a client and the reason I’m here, she speaks Muffy well enough.

She’s an engineering student in her third year at CVU, and she only works here as a manager because she’s worked here so long that she makes more than she would filing papers for the admissions office. The night manager quit unexpectedly while Lauren and I were having a meeting about potential prospects, and since I worked at a Cod Pieces in high school, it was easy to offer to help her out for a few nights.

And honestly? Making a little extra cash isn’t a bad thing. This job might be the only reason I make my student loan payments this month, hence why I’m not asking her if she’s found a replacement for me yet.

And fish and chips four nights a week?

I’m possibly here for this.

Okay, I’m definitely here for this.

Just like Tyler was last night.

Also, now I’m thinking about him again.

I’ll be your date, Muffy.

Why?

Why the hell would he do that?

Better question—who else can I find to take to the funeral so I can let him off the hook?

And why do I keep picturing Tyler stepping between me and my former classmates and professors, or whispering something in my ear that makes me laugh, or offering to bench press the casket when someone else’s date tries to prove he’s stronger than my hockey-playing, Aristotle-spouting, Pokémon-loving, one-night date?

Tyler would totally do that.

I’ve seen him.

Granted, he was being spurred on by his teammates and had had enough alcohol to flatten a non-hockey-playing person, plus, it was a fake casket at a Halloween party, but he did it.

Also?

He’s a professional hockey player with a super famous, billionaire party girl sister-in-law. Tyler’s in the gossip pages a lot. Everyone will know who he is. There’ll be zero doubt that I have an actual hottie by my side, and we do know each other well enough to sell the idea that we’re dating.

My client interrupts my internal musings by setting a powder-blue Cod Pieces tray on the table between us, and I pretend I don’t want to lean over and inhale the amazing scent.

You’d think a year of working here in high school would’ve ruined fried fish.

Nope.

Still love it.

I paste on a bright smile. “Hi, Brianna. Thanks for meeting me here.”

She’s twenty-five, also a freshman on campus with an undeclared major after recently leaving the Army, and worried she’s too stubborn and not feminine enough to find a man.

We could literally be besties, but it probably wouldn’t be healthy for either of us to continue to stew in our lack of direction in life.

Not that I’m lacking a direction.

I’m simply lacking actual skill at any direction I’ve tried, until a recent string of small victories with Muff Matchers that were entirely more difficult than they should’ve been.

Brianna sits, bends, and sniffs deeply over her fish, which is wrapped in foil stamped with Sir Pollock, the Knight Fryer, the franchise’s well-known cod mascot. “Oh, baby, come to mama. I missed you while I had to fit into a uniform.”

Confession: I slept with Tyler Jaeger because he looked at me the way Brianna is looking at her fish.

And not just once.

The looking part, I mean. Not the sleeping part.

Every time I saw him from the time Kami hooked up with Nick a year ago until Tyler and I got together at that secret club, he would look at me like he wanted to lick me from head to toe. And then he’d talk to me.

Hey, Muffy, had any cognitive stimulation lately?

You play Pokémon Go? Trade you Pokéballs.

Muffy, need your opinion. Does this shirt make my arm muscles look too big?

I still can’t believe that was the line that had me pulling him into the kitchen and hiding in the walk-in refrigerator before the chef spotted us the night Maren took me to the secret club.

Or that a guy with an actual six-pack took his shirt off for me, showing off his tattoos for me, hoisted me up against a shelf full of boxes of tomatoes, and then popped an actual boner that size for me.

Not that it got better after that—it didn’t, really, and I don’t know why I thought it