Page 19 of The Prince and the Puck
"So these team dinners, what is the purpose exactly?” I asked.
Declan pulled out my chair for me and I sat, John Samuels on one side of me and another player I hadn't met yet directly across from me. Though I had asked the question to Declan, John leaned in.
"The idea is to help us bond. So that we gel as a team on the ice and off the ice."
“And does that work?" I asked. I thought about the dinners I’d had with other operatives to work for the King’s Guard. Generally those dinners were full of one-upmanship andsuspicion. There were usually cherry opportunities on the line, we all knew it, and no one liked to lose. It was part of what made a good agent, that sense of competition and the desire to kick anyone's ass.
"I don't know," said the guy sitting across from me. "They did make me like you better, Sammy.”
Declan leaned in. “Not everybody was a big fan of the new goalie when he stepped up last year,” he explained. “Harry here was a big Mizzoni groupie.”
“I wasn’t a groupie,” the man Declan had called Harry said indignantly. I guessed he must be Harry Foranian, one of the centers on the team. He went on, trying to explain. “Mizzoni was just, he was like…”
"You had a poster of him on your wall like all the rest of us did,” said Declan.
"Yeah, because he was a legend,” John said.
Declan whispered in my ear again sending a shiver across my skin. “Mizzoni was totally a legend. I had a poster of him too. Retired last year.”
“All right you two, let’s get your drinks and food ordered and get on with it,” the coach yelled from his end of the table. Coach Merritt, though clearly good at his job based on the team’s record, left a bit to be desired in terms of congeniality. He had been welcoming enough initially, but it was clear he wasn’t excited about my presence here, which made it even harder to do a job I had no idea how to do in the first place.
Declan and I ordered sodas and food, having come in behind the rest of the team. And as soon as we finished ordering, the coach began yelling again.
“All right yahoos, we leave day after tomorrow for North Carolina. You know we’ll be facing the Vikings, and those guys are pretty damn good. They’ve got that aggressive forecheck, and last time they pinned us deep and forced bad turnovers.Their wingers—especially #17—love to crash the net hard, so our D needs to box them out early and clear those rebounds. And watch their center on the power play—he’s got that quick one-timer from the right circle, and we gave him way too much space last game. We tighten up, play smart in our zone, and keep our heads up on the breakout, and I know we can take this one.”
Declan and the rest of the team were cheering and nodding as the coach delivered this confusing jumble of terms and directions, but they all seemed to understand what he was saying. The part I was focused on was the travel.
I knew Declan would be traveling with the team during the season, and it worried me. There had been one attempt on his life already, and the team schedule was public knowledge. It would be much easier to get to him in some unguarded hotel somewhere than it would be here where I had eyes on him at all times. For a moment, I forgot to play the demure PR rep, and words were coming out of my mouth before I had thought them through.
“What kind of security do you guys use while you travel? And where will you be staying?”
Every single head at the table turned to look at me and half of the mouths dropped open. Oops.
“Security?” The coach asked, tilting his head at me.
“Yeah, I mean… I just wonder how you deal with all of the fans?” I scrambled trying to cover my error in some way that might relate my security question to public relations.
“Well I guess you’ll be finding out,” the coach said. “Since the owner told me in no uncertain terms that you were going to be traveling with the team.”
I had suggested to the king that I would need to travel with the team, and he had told me he would make this request to the owner. However, the owner had not liked the idea, and I had thought that it wasn’t happening. It was something I hadintended to worry about when the moment came. Now that the moment was here, it seemed that there was less to worry about.
“Oh, right. Sure. That’s good.” I was not sounding entirely professional.
“Now that we’ve got the PR side of things buttoned up, let’s talk about strategy against the Vikings.” The coach continued.
For the rest of dinner, the team discussed their last few games against the Vikings, naming certain players, and using several very colorful descriptions of their abilities. It had never occurred to me that a hockey player might skate like a turnstile or a Dollar Store Gretzky, but evidently those were things that were possible.
When the game talk had concluded and all the plates had been cleared, the coach got up and left rather unceremoniously. He probably said goodbye to the players sitting next to him at the table, but he didn’t wish anyone else a good evening. Things were done very differently here in Wilcox than they were inside the palace, that was for sure. I glanced at Declan to see how he handled the lack of etiquette, but he’d been in the states for a long time now, surrounded by athletes, who obviously didn’t put as much stock in the rules of society as those he’d been raised with did.
“So,” John Samuels asked me. “How’s it coming? The whole making the Wombats a household name thing?”
I was about to speak when Declan spoke in my place. “It’s going to be awesome, man!”
I glanced at him and he winked at me, sending a shiver that I did not want down my spine. Knowing that Declan felt something for me, or at least was attracted to me, had only made my job more complicated. Because his attraction, coupled with my own undeniable attraction for him, could be explosive. I didn’t need the prince winking at me, fake dating me, or otherwise complicating my efforts to protect him andconvince him to come home. And this somewhat unwarranted faith he seemed to have in my public relations abilities was also unsettling.
“She’s putting together this really amazing movie, you guys,” Declan said.
“A movie?” Mario Solamentes asked, looking suddenly interested.
