Page 73 of Body Check

She ducks her face, but I don’t miss the shit-eating grin that’s about as subtle as Bordeaux’s English faux pas.

“Sure, yeah, we’ll move on.”

Beaumont goes next, spouting off about some guy who once broke into his house during his rookie year with the Detroit Red Wings. “You think you’ve seen it all, honestly, until you come home one day to find a dude in a metal bathtub, fish heads all around him, holding up a sign that says, ‘You don’t deserve the ‘pus.’ And by pus, he was referring to octopuses . . . octopi?” Beaumont shakes his head, big shoulders lifting. “Whatever. Either way, he was pissed that we lost and he was naked, andthatis a sight I’ll never be able to un-see. Now all of you have to suffer with me—you’re welcome.”

Collective groaning ensues, just as Holly asks, “Anyone else wondering how all those fish scales feel against a man’s . . . sensitive bits?”

“Oh,c’mon, Mrs. Carter!”

“My balls are itchy just thinking about it.”

“Honestly, could be like a massage. I bet it’s a luxury in some parts of the world. Give a man a fish, and he’ll find some way to masturbate with it.”

The last one comes from Russell Allen, a right wing on our second line, and we all erupt in boos—and, if I’m not hearing shit, at least one fake-vomiting sprint.

“Gentlemen!” says Matt the Hard-Ass over the speaker system. “And two women—sorry, Carmen, Holly.Anyway, we’ll be starting our descent in approximately three minutes. One last answer for that commercial of yours, Ms. Carter. Perhaps the good Captain might do us the honor of responding to the question?”

As thoughthatwas subtle, by any means.

Matt, as his nickname suggests, is anything but subtle. Since my divorce from Holly, he’s been a routine figure on the sidelines, questioning what I did wrong that made a “good woman like her” leave me.

He’s not wrong in his assumption.

Good news, I’m on a mission to rectify the leaving bit.

Thwapping the cards along the center of my thigh, I drawl, “Just one story? Y’all are making this difficult for me to choose.”

Carmen and Adam inch down the aisle toward me, no doubt trying to keep me in frame and within earshot, considering that I sat myself in the very last row of the plane. Holly sits down opposite me, her petite body twisting so that she can keep me in her visual line.

Caving to the need to touch her, I stretch out my right leg—and softly touch her pink sneaker with my brown leather loafer. When she doesn’t pull back immediately, I stifle a satisfied grin.

“I’m gonna break protocol here—go for a story from my Cornell days, way before I was drafted to the NHL.”

Across the aisle, I catch Holly’s narrowing gaze, and I flash her a slow, shit-eating grin.

I loop one arm around the seat back in front of me, fingers tapping the side of the cushion. “I had this shitty car back then. A Chevy Silverado with the paint damn-near chipped off completely. We’d lost a game that day, not that I hadn’t done my best.” I pause, then jut my chin toward my teammates. “Hunt’s not the only one around here who knows how to score a hat trick. I’ve been dangling pucks since he still had acne.”

Amid my guys’ catcalls of “ooh, feel the burn!” and raucous laughter, I finger-salute our center, where he’s sitting three rows up. “Love ya, Marshey!”

He flashes me the middle finger.

I make a point of catching it like he’s blown me a kiss instead, then mime putting it in a slingshot and sending it into the crowd.

“Anyway,” I go on, “I’m beat, right? I’ve had my marbles rattled—especially since I subbed for a guy on the D-line during the third period—and I skipped out on all the parties to head back to the house and hit the sack. Only—”

“Jackson.” I feel Holly’s fingers prod me in the side. She’s moved in close, eclipsing any space between us, and I’d put good money on the fact that she’sthisclose from clapping a hand over my mouth to keep me from talking. She pokes me again, her body shielding the movement from view.

I one-up her, leveraging my size so that she’s standing in front of me. My palm skims the indent of the back of her knee, and I don’t miss the way she twitches at the contact.

And then sinks back into my touch.

God, I love how responsive she is.

“Only,” I repeat, my hand now on her quads, “there was this girl standing near my shitty-ass car, and she was standing there with a paintbrush. White paint, too, against the chipped blue of my car. ‘You S-U-C’ was written on my windshield in bold, block letters. I busted her before she managed to work theKon there too.” I squeeze the back of Holly’s thigh, and she releases the softest moan I’ve ever heard in my life.

So sexy, the sound is barely leashed as she looks back at me.

Her expression is set like she’d enjoy nothing more than to bash her camera over my head.

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