A Bear Goal
Authors: Anya Nowlan
A BEAR GOAL
PUCK BEAR BRIDES
BOOK 3
BY
ANYA
NOWLAN
A LITTLE TASTE…
“Hey, I hit harder than both of them, so you really want to go about insulting my family here, wiseguy?” she asked with a quirk of her brow, giving Heath the closest thing she had to an evil eye.
“Yeah? I wouldn’t mind seeing you get a little hot and bothered, I think,” Heath quipped back.
She held her breath, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t run the joke into the ground like she thought he would. But of course he did.
“Or a little bit ‘Heathed,’ if you know what I mean.”
His grin was so wide and self-congratulatory that Sable couldn’t do anything but groan and shake her head at him, wanting to choke the living daylights out of him and, oddly enough, climb him like a tree at the same time. It was becoming a real bother, honestly, because the more she looked at him, the better he looked. She loathed it.
“Really, that’s what you went with?”
“Hey, don’t knock it until you try it,” he said with a flourish, sweeping his hand along his toned, muscled body.
Her eyes tracked the motion, and she might have gulped a little when her eyes reached his crotch, shooting back up again quickly. He didn’t miss it, ordering two more shots to fill the awkward silence.
Copyright © 2016 Anya Nowlan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Bear Goal
Puck Bear Brides
Book 3
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of
Anya Nowlan
. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Sable
“Oh come on!” Sable screamed, banging her hand against the Plexiglas partition that kept her from flinging herself on the ice and showing these
amateurs
how it was
really
done.
“Sable! Calm down! It’s just the first game,” Heather said with a laugh, tugging at her San Diego Predators jersey in a feeble attempt to get the fiery Latina to sit down.
“Did you
see
what that Locklear bastard did to Cayman? How did he not get a penalty for that shit?!” Sable huffed, crashing down into her seat and running a hand through her wavy, auburn hair just as Heath Locklear came surging by where she was sitting, wearing the most frustratingly smug smile she’d ever seen. “The ref must be blind.”
“I’m pretty sure you always think that when it comes to any mistake made against the Predators,” Heather huffed, rolling her eyes as she scrolled through some sort of a news feed on her phone. “Now calm your pretty ass down before Caleb or someone else comes here and makes you do that personally. Do we really need another scene like the one we had in North Dakota?”
Sable threw her friend a withering look, but a huff and a sip from her drink later, she was placated enough to focus on the game once more. For some reason, her eyes stayed with Heath, one of the best snipers in the league and the main reason for her chagrin at the moment, far longer than she would have liked.
It was the last third of the first game between the San Diego Predators and the Shifter Grove Shovelers—ridiculous name, by the way—and the series of three would decide which team would end up going to the National Shifter Hockey League Eastern Conference Playoffs. The Predators had worked hard all season to get to this point, and Sable as their supply line manager was more than a little invested in seeing her team succeed.
It also didn’t hurt that her two stepbrothers were grinders for the team, a particularly vicious duo known for their underhanded tactics, speed, and precision when they needed to take someone out fast and clean. Though frankly, if it were just because of them, Sable would have been perfectly fine with seeing the whole team go down in flames.
Cocky bastards. Heath’s too fast for them. But if they can’t catch him, we’re toast,
she thought morosely, watching the game unfold in its intricate pattern.
“You know what grinds my gears?” she started, not bothering to glance at Heather to make sure that she was still in the conversation, because at that very moment James “Wall” Lagerfeld plowed into the Shovelers’ team captain, Cannon Wright, and gloves were being thrown off.
“Everything, as of late?” Heather asked dryly, looking up from her phone just in time to witness Cannon getting crushed against the ice by a haymaker from Wall, and then Heath and one of the Shovelers’ defenders, Memphis, going at him like rabid dogs before they could be split up.
It wasn’t a particularly friendly game. No wonder, of course, considering how much was on the line this time. It was just a best of three and the next two games were going to be on Shifter Grove ice, where their new ice rink had been opened up to the public only a week ago. No one enjoyed playing games that meant this much on foreign ice, and the Predators were all in to win this night.
Sable cringed as Cayman plowed into the scene like a freight truck, almost taking out the referee. If they kept that up, by the end of the game there wouldn’t be anyone on the ice because both of the teams would be sitting in the box, thinking about the decisions that had led them there.
“Ouch,” Sable murmured, watching Heath deck Wall as easily as he had done to Cannon a moment ago, catching herself admiring just how fast and hard the Shovelers’ sniper could throw a punch and dance away on the ice before anyone could catch him.
Fast for a bear,
she thought mildly, allowing another glance at her werewolf stepbrothers, twins as they were, wondering if they were going to figure out how to stop Heath before it was too late.
“Anyway,” she started again as the ice was getting a quick clean from the blood that had splattered on it and the teams were split up and told to behave themselves for what must have been the seventh time that evening—no one was going to listen. “What gets me is
why
does Coach Jefferson keep this lineup? I mean obviously Cayman and Caleb aren’t keeping up with this bastard Heath, so why screw with our chances? Put more offense on the ice, see if we can push through. Frustrating.”
“And here I thought we were going to have an actual conversation,” Heather remarked, having to almost scream to be heard over the roaring crowd as the players took the ice again.
“About?” Sable asked, popping a few Milk Duds in her mouth, though her hands were moving automatically at this point and she didn’t spare a look at the box of candy either.
What if she’d miss something on the ice? That wouldn’t do!
“You know? The elephant in the room? Or the tiger shifter in the room, I guess.”
Sable snorted at that, rolling her eyes now even though her stomach clenched slightly and she could feel the makings of a cold sweat dappling the back of her neck. Oh no, she had no interest in talking about that particular topic. Not tonight. Not any night.
Which was probably why she was there, yelling her head off and getting angrier at the players and the refs than any fan should, even one that lived and breathed hockey like Sable did.
“Nothing?” Heather coaxed, getting echoing silence in return, or at least what passed for it when twenty thousand people crammed themselves into the stands and whistled, booed, and cheered along with every pass or minor confrontation on the ice. “Okay, but you know this is all going to come out of you in one gigantic bad idea at one point, right? It’d be so much easier to just vent. You know, have a drink or ten, cry into a pillow, eat some ice cream with me, and tell me just how the big bad tiger hurt you.”
Okay, so that deserved a glare.
Sable twisted herself in her seat, about to give Heather a piece of her mind, but right then, the large, bulky form of Caleb Lynderly got rammed into the partition right in front of Sable, her stepbrother’s face twisted against the glass as he rolled down along it onto the ice. Sable’s eyes were wide as platters and she jumped up immediately, peering down to see if he was okay, sending her candy flying between the seats.
“Shit,” she hissed, her surprised gaze meeting the laughing eyes of Heath Locklear straight on now.
The bastard had the gall to wink at her and make a damn hand-gun motion at her after having wiped out her brother right in front of her.
“This one’s for you, baby!” he said with a wide grin before skating off as Caleb brushed himself off and got up, pure murder flashing in his eyes.
“That motherfucker!” Sable said incredulously as she stood there for a moment, shaking her head at the audacity of the bastard. “You see that? He got away with it again. This ref is totally bought off.”
“Or maybe he was too busy clearing up the other fight your beloved brother managed to stir up and didn’t notice?” Heather muttered, shaking her head.
“Whatever,” Sable grumbled, the tension of discomfort unraveling quickly while a whole different kind of heat took its place, pulsing through her.
She chose to believe it was anger and not at all the sexy-as-sin look that she’d received from the Shovelers’ sniper. Biting down on her lip for a moment, her brows knit in irritation, she banged on the glass once more with her first and then sunk into her seat with something more akin a growl than anything else.
“I’m going to have to give that guy a piece of my mind after the game is over, you know.”
“Which one? Cayman or Caleb?” Heather asked, only mildly paying attention because apparently Purseblog was
far
more interesting than one of the single most important games the Predators would play that season.
Well, truth be told, to a woman who only got dragged to these things because Sable didn’t want to go alone, then that wasn’t too far from the truth. With Sable’s crazy schedule and Heather’s job as a personal assistant to a certain A-list star who was not to be named—and whose name may or may not have rhymed with Bryan Breynolds—they barely had a chance to see one another despite living together. A two-and-a-half-hour game of hockey was usually just what they needed to get all their gossip out of the way and for Sable to also pretend like she was keeping up with what was going on with her team.