Page 75 of A Scoring Chance

“Do you like it?”

“Like it? It’s gorgeous. How did you manage all of this in an hour?”

I chuckle softly, resting my chin on the top of her head. My arms move around her waist before slipping my hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Beau. He was headed down here tonight to spend the weekend with Momma, since we had planned to have our date in the city.”

“You never cease to amaze me, Cooper Hendrix.” She leans back, her head dropping onto my chest.

“The same could be said for you, Ramona King. Now, are you ready for your lesson?”

“Lesson?”

“Skating lesson.”

“I don’t think that’s the greatest idea.” Her entire body tenses in my arms. I don’t have to see her face to know the pure panic in her eyes. “I’m so clumsy that I trip over thin air.”

She’s right. I stopped counting all the times I’ve had to save her from an invisible force causing her to trip or fall. There’s no rhyme or reason to it other than she’s just clumsy, but she’s never fallen. Not once, and I don’t intend to let it happen tonight either.

“Didn’t I promise I wouldn’t let you fall? Don’t you trust me?”

“I do.”

“Then can you try for me? If you hate it, just say the word and we can move on to phase two of your date.”

“Phase two? How many phases does this date entail?”

“Three. Maybe four.”

“And what might those entail?”

“Food and Desert.”

“And what is the possible fourth one?”

“You’ll just have to wait and find out, won’t you, Beauty?” I spin her around in my arms, planting a kiss on the tip of her nose. “Are you willing to try skating?”

Ramona’s eyes scan my face, searching for something before her head drops to my chest. She mumbles something too low for me to hear. “What did you just say?”

“I was praying that I won’t have matching bruises with Darius in the morning.”

“So, we’re skating?”

Beauty steps out of my embrace, plopping down on the bench beside us. “We’re skating.”

“It’ll be fun, Beauty. I promise. Just remember, if you completely hate it, we can forget this ever happened.”

I grab the bag Beau stashed here for me and unzip it quickly, pulling out my spare pair of skates from Momma’s house and a pair of white figure skates I snagged for Ramona earlier this week.

“Are those for me?”

“Of course. I can’t let you wear just any skates on the ice with me. I have a reputation to protect.” I wink, carefully removing her left shoe and sliding the corresponding skate onto it. “It fits.”

“You say that as if you were worried they wouldn’t.”

“Getting the right size skates can be tricky. With hockey skates, you need to buy about one whole shoe size smaller, sometimes a size and a half down. With figure skates—those arewhat these are—it’s usually a whole size. Alise said you had wide feet, so I went with a half size instead.”

“That sounds complicated.” She has a bemused look on her face. “How do you even know all of this? Are you some skating guru or something?”

“Or something.” I chuckle, sliding the other skate onto her foot and lacing them both up. “It was a lot of trial and error. I was Momma’s test dummy for everything hockey. By the time she got around to outfitting my youngest brother, Kyle, we had everything down to a perfect science.”

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