Page 75 of The Hockey Grump Saves Christmas

I unzip my jacket enough to reveal the head of the pig toy.

The delighted laugh that bounces out of her is unimaginably sexy.

“What’s so funny? Just letting him breathe.” And I know how it feels. Despite being fully in the open air, this proximity to Natalie makes my breaths come short and fast.

And if my lips don’t get to be on hers sometime soon they might shrivel up and die because there’s no other point to their existence.

“Here we go, folks,” Frankie calls back to us from the donkey’s head. “Trot on, Mabes.” Mabel takes a step and the sleigh lurches forward.

I lean into Natalie on the pretext of a whisper. “I could have just walked you back home.”

She playfully slaps my thigh with the back of her thickly gloved hand. Immediately my mind is thrown back to the giant bunny hands she was wearing that first night—the night she came crashing into my life like a wrecking ball disguised as a rabbit.

“This is tradition,” she says. “It’s fun. And it helps raise awareness of the donkey sanctuary for Frankie and her grandpa.”

On the basis of creating more space—and for absolutely no other reason whatsoever—I ease my crushed left arm out from between us and rest it on the back of the sleigh behind Natalie.

Did she move a bit closer to me or just breathe out? There’s so little room it’s hard to tell the difference.

“Your love of this town and its wacko traditions is really quite something,” I say.

“Have you never felt like that about a place?” Hervoice is quiet, barely audible over the crunch of the donkey’s hooves and the swish of the sleigh on the snow.

Have I? Maybe. “Do the Apollos count?”

“Of course. That’s kind of like a family, right? Just like Warm Springs kind of is.” She shifts to look up at me, the blue of her eyes clear in the streetlights as we pass them at the speed of a strolling donkey.

“Oh,” she says like she just remembered something. “Is that what broke your friendship with Wyatt when he moved to the Ironmen? Because you were pissed off he left the Apollos?”

My body tenses, the way it does when the dentist says, “Open wide.” Now is not the time or the place for that story.

“What makes you say that?” I ask as a delaying tactic while I try to find a way to change the subject.

“I looked up your and Wyatt’s names,” she says, “and found an article that said even though you only played together for two seasons you were one of hockey’s great partnerships. So it just occurred to me that when he moved to a rival team, you might have felt let down or betrayed or something.”

Betrayed.Now my insides are as tense as my outsides.

Does she have a sixth sense? Like animals that can feel a storm or an earthquake coming before it happens? Or is it that we have such a connection that she can somehow see into my mind?

I tear my eyes away from her and focus on Mabel’s tail swishing from side to side in front of us. “I didn’t feel betrayed byhim, no.”

I’ve never talked about this to anyone before. Not even my parents. I didn’t want to worry them.And I’ve always feared that if I discussed it with anyone else, they might sell me out.

Yet the same instinct that tells me exactly where the goal is without even looking up from the puck, tells me that Natalie would never betray me. She’s so unlike anyone I’ve ever met it’s like she’s from a different universe—a universe where the same wacky legend is acted out every year, where there are pigs instead of Christmas trees, donkeys instead of reindeer.

“Honestly, things were rocky before he moved,” I hedge. It’s a small step into the story. Small enough that I can still retreat.

“You fell out while he was still at the Apollos?” She dusts something off my shoulder, sending a frisson up the back of my neck.

“Yeah.” I empty my lungs, a white cloud hanging in the air for a second before the sleigh drags us through it.

“You don’t have to tell me.” Her voice is soft and warm. “If you don’t want to.”

Should I?

There’s actually one excellent reason to tell her—to clear my name.

Because right this second, the idea of Natalie thinking badly of me because of the tabloid stories she’s read, plus the things that Wyatt said, feels like the worse thing that could happen.

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