Page 7 of My Pucking Enemy
But when she asks him about his wife, he shuts her down, saying, with a slight edge, “Oh, family is personal, Bailey.”
“I can respect that—you’re a very private guy.”
It’s ridiculous, the ease with which he manages to dodge any question about his sister, wife—anything to do with his personal life, he instantly shuts down.
“So, what do you think?” a voice says.
I snap my laptop closed so fast, I feel like a teenager looking at porn. Uncle Vic stands to the side, and when I look up at him, he glances suspiciously at my screen.
“Do you have the film from last year?” I ask, rising smoothly and avoiding any questions about what I was just doing. “I want to start studying up on the other teams.”
He nods, and just before he leads me away, I feel a prickling on the back of my neck.
When I turn, I see Luca McKenzie—the last guy on the ice—casually bouncing a puck on his stick…and looking right up at me.
I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge, so I raise a hand to him, giving him a cheeky smile and tilting my head.
To my surprise, he raises his hand back, but it feels less like a wave and more like a signal—a warning.
“You coming?”
I snap my gaze away before Uncle Vic notices me staring and hurry up the stairs with him, feeling Luca’s probing gaze on me the entire time.
Luca
“Comeon, don’t be a chicken!”
“Me not getting in the water has nothing to do with being a chicken,” I say to Sloane, keeping my eyes closed against the sun. “It has to do with not wanting to swim.”
She tries to splash me, but the water only reaches my feet. “You’re no fun!”
“Mhm,” I say, wiggling my toes, “refreshing.”
“You’d better be careful,” a deeper voice sounds to my left, and I open my eyes for a second, glancing at Callum as he sits inthe sun lounger next to me. “Or she’s going to get out the water guns.”
My best friend isn’t wrong—Sloane would resort to drenching me with a water gun if it meant I might get in the pool. But even that wouldn’t convince me to swim today—I’m too busy thinking about Wren Beaumont.
“But don’t you think it’s a little weird that there’snothingabout her online?” I ask, and Cal groans loudly the second I start the sentence. He already knows where it’s going.
He’s the only guy on the team—well, maybe with the exception of Maverick Hawkins—who would dare to groan at something I said.
Cal kicks his feet up onto his sun lounger, pops on a pair of sunglasses, reclines in his seat and says, “Aren’t you bored of this yet, man?”
“It’s my intuition, Cal. Something is telling me she’s not who she says she is. And theparolething.”
“Maybe you misheard that part,” Cal says, pointedly, “when you were eavesdropping on her conversation like a creep.”
“I was not—”
“She worked with the FBI,” Sloane interrupts, and I sit up. She has her arms braced on the edge of the pool and is staring up atme. Her golden hair is slicked to her head, a shade darker wet. “Maybe they had to scrub her from the interwebs when she went undercover. Maybeparoleis a code word.”
“Wren worked as a consultant,” I scoff back, “which means she wasnotgoing undercover. And maybe parole is just a word that means what we think it means.”
Cal plays along with his wife, gesturing at me with his beer bottle. “Maybe that’s just what theywantyou to think.”
“You guys aren’t taking this seriously enough.”
“Taking what seriously?”
