Puck Bear Brides: Complete Series (BBW Werebear Paranormal Sport Romance Boxed Set) (22 page)

“Hey, that’s unfair,” Heath said, gasping as if she’d shot him in the chest as they sat facing opposite directions, their snowmobiles parked next to one another. “I’m an
opportunistic
puck donkey, thank you. Get your terminology straight. It could save lives.”

“Whose lives?”

“Those of my adoring fans. You wouldn’t want to gravely wound them with your hateful comments, right?”

“Oh, of course I wouldn’t. Because that’d be bad,” Sable said, nodding with a serious look on her face before breaking out in a laugh. “Fine, opportunistic. I’ll pretend to live with that.”

“Fantastic. We’ve reached an agreement. See how easy it can be? And I had to basically drag you along on this little date of ours,” Heath said with a chuckle, though he bit his lip a second later.

Stupid.

“So this is a date, huh? I thought we were simply ‘friendly people from rival camps’ going to ‘pound some powder’ together. What happened to that?” Sable asked, the sweet tint of mockery in her voice grating at him as much as it was honey to his ears.

“Isn’t that what you say when you ask someone out on a date in California?”

“No, we make up some lame excuse about going to try out the new artisan taco truck and implying that they could or could not join us, if they wanted to, or whatever.”

Shaking her head, Sable took her gloves off so she could run her fingers through her hair before tying it up in a ponytail. Heath watched, practically mesmerized. He still hadn’t figured out what it was about that woman that got him so hot and bothered, but whatever it was, he was loving it. She kept his attention better than hockey could at times, and that was something he never thought he could claim about anyone.

It was ten kinds of weird and he couldn’t get enough of it.

And the fact that he still hadn’t kissed her since San Diego was driving him up a tree. Or it would have, if they hadn’t been on a stretch of barren snow.

“I like our way better,” Heath said, smirking.

“Personally, I might prefer surfing to this, but I guess I can settle.”

“Nonsense. There is no settling when it comes to Heath Locklear. You’ve been
blessed
with my magnificent presence. No surfing could compare,” he said, putting all the fake swagger he could into his voice.

It was a gamble. He was half-expecting to find a helmet flying in the general direction of his head. It was a small mercy that it didn’t; he wasn’t on the market for another concussion just then. The headache he’d gotten from trying to talk her into coming along in the first place had been hard enough to handle.

It had taken two whole days of bombarding her with silly jokes and making conversation on SassyDate before he could get anything near to a commitment out of her. Luckily, he’d been clever enough to figure out what it was that was keeping her from saying yes immediately, because based on the night at the Hamiltons, she clearly had at least
some
interest in seeing what kind of trouble a hockey star and a sassy girl with too much lip on her could get themselves into.

It was her brothers she was worried about. Or, stepbrothers, as she kept correcting him.

It wasn’t an unfounded reason. Heath had no doubt that the Lynderly twins would bust his head open like a coconut given the chance, and that was even before they would come to find out that he was hitting on their sister. While Heath was sure that their protectiveness had less to do with wanting to see her safe and more to do with staking claim to their family, it was still a real enough issue to take into consideration.

Neither the Predators nor the Shovelers needed that kind of drama at the moment.

“Sure. I’ll take you surfing next time you’re in Cali and then we can prepare, hmm?”

“Oh, fishing for a second date already? Man, you work fast, Miss Lynderly. I like it.”

Heath grinned even wider when he saw the slight blush cross her cheeks, making her look almost girlish in her modest embarrassment. He had to imagine that Sable wasn’t the kind of woman to be caught off-guard too often, and the fact that he could do that to her made him feel a tiny bit smug. It could only mean that he was getting under her skin, just as she had gotten under his.

“It’s getting late though. I think we need to go before we can’t find our way back.”

“Oh, scared of a little darkness?” Sable taunted, turning on the engine of the yellow snowmobile and putting on her gear again. “I thought Heath Locklear was fearless.”

“Just worried about you, baby,” he said, plopping on the helmet and the goggles with gusto. “Race you,” he called, turning on the engine and taking off when she was putting on the last glove.

“Asshole!” she yelled after him, but Heath knew that she was going to throttle hard and probably be on his tail in a few seconds.

That was what he liked about her so much, that tenacity. She wouldn’t give up. It meant she had to get the last word in every conversation and that she’d probably be horrible to play board games with, but he loved it all the same. Though why was he considering playing board games with some girl he’d originally just wanted to fuck again was a whole other matter entirely.

The path down the mountains took slightly longer than he’d expected, because the steep downward paths were getting treacherous as the light fell, and as much as Heath liked winning, he also liked making it back home alive. Even more than that he was worried about Sable’s safety, which was something that surprised him more than he could put into words.

Heath had always had some anger issues. Bursts of emotion that spilled out of him like a tidal wave all of a sudden and would make him see red, go berserk. He’d found an outlet for it in hockey like some shifters did in military service or dangerous jobs, but it only took him so far. He’d always had that edge to him, making him hover at the very tip of going from glad to mad, from safe to fucking ballistic. But around Sable, all of that seemed to mellow out and he liked the way it felt.

When they finally made it down to his truck and loaded up the snowmobiles on the trailer—his first purchase when he’d realized just how much snow there was in the mountains at the right time of the year—it was already dark inside and both of them were freezing. Heath hopped into the car and cranked up the heater as Sable climbed in on the passenger side, their helmets tossed on the floor and Sable blowing on her hands for warmth.

“It’ll just be a second,” he said. “Truck needs to warm up a little. What do you think, dinner at the diner?”

“You don’t think that’s pushing your luck, Shoveler? I can count at least two Predators who will take it as a personal insult to see you hanging out with me.”

“Please. I’m not afraid of your brothers,” Heath scoffed, unzipping his jacket a little as the cabin started warming up.

“Oh yeah? So who are you afraid of then?” Sable asked with a cocked brow.

Heath paused, frowning slightly as they locked eyes. He had a dozen good quips about how he wasn’t afraid of anything, or possibly “a ghost,” but none of those felt like it would fit the moment. In a flash of what must have been insanity, he reached out and took her cold hands into his big, gruff paws. He blew on her hands and rubbed them between his palms, trying to warm them up.

Her nose was pinched red by the cold and so were her cheeks now, but her lovely chestnut eyes sparkled with surprise and something else he couldn’t quite decipher. Whatever it was though, it wasn’t bad.

“I’m afraid we’ll play the last game and you’ll disappear again. I don’t want that to happen.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. She looked cute as hell, surprised like that and he could commiserate—he was confused as all hell too. But then she shied away and Heath frowned. Had he said something wrong? He reached a hand out, putting it on her wrist.

“Hey, talk to me here. What’s going on?”

“I… it’s dumb. I had a breakup. It wasn’t pretty,” she muttered.

“And what does that have to do with me?” he asked, maybe a bit too sharply.

It was only because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her company because of some douchebag ex. What’s a bear got to do to get a chance around here?

“He was a hockey player too. A real douchebag.”

“So a lot like me?” Heath asked with a wry smile.

“Maybe. Are you a douchebag?”

“I wouldn’t be for you,” he said in earnest, making Sable crack a smile.

“Right. You know he humiliated me on national television? After a game with the Seattle Timberwolves a month ago, I was standing next to him while he was giving an interview and he told the interviewer point blank that there was no one special in his life and he was fucking his way through the East Coast. I was in the fucking shot, man, staring up at him like he’d taken a pistol and gotten me right between the eyes.”

“Oh, right. I think I remember that. You dated Mackey, right? He’s a douchebag,” Heath confirmed.

“That’s all I’m saying,” Sable sighed.

His insides twisted, thinking of her getting hurt like that. For a hot second, all he wanted to do was to go out to Seattle and beat Mackey’s ass into the ground for doing that to her. That fucktard. But Heath took a few calming breaths and then looked back to Sable.

“I won’t be like that. I promise.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you, just like that?”

“What do you have to lose?” he asked with a grin. “You’ve already been dumped on national television, could it really get any worse?”

“Smartass,” she scoffed.

She glowered at him, but the moment felt right and he knew he’d kick himself if he didn’t go for it now. The little smile on her lips gave him hope she wouldn’t knee him for what he was about to do.

So he leaned in and he kissed her, praying to the spirits above that she’d just kiss him back.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sable

When he kissed her, it felt like a fireball passed through Sable, starting from the top of her head and then shooting out from the bottom of her feet. It was like San Diego all over again, but three times as hot and she couldn’t exactly pinpoint why that was, but she didn’t exactly care that moment either.

I shouldn’t be doing this,
rung through her head, a silly notion that she quickly discarded because, well… fuck that noise.

She had a hot hockey bear to do horrible things to and she intended to get to that before her silly brain caught up with her again. Heath seemed to be thinking much the same way, because her tongue had just been shoved into his mouth when his hands were already on the zipper of her winter jacket, pulling it open while throwing his seat back.

The smooth and efficient way he made that move with the seat told Sable that he’d either been thinking about doing that since she got in the truck with him that morning or otherwise he was far too well versed in the inner workings of the seat mechanics of a Ford F-150. She chose to believe the former and climbed on his lap without a second thought, throwing off her jacket while he shrugged out of his as well.

It was a flurry of hands and laughs as they tore one another’s clothes off, only parting to stop their kisses when a shirt or a cardigan needed to come off someone’s head. By the way Heath was looking at her, he was more than willing to rip off her clothes with his teeth if he had to. A couple of moments later she was grinding up against him, her pussy soaking through her panties as she dry-humped him like they were teenagers in his dad’s stolen Cadillac.

It sort of felt like it, too. A little forbidden, a bit frowned upon. The star of one hockey team and a girl who kept the Predators at her fingertips because she controlled their supply lines. The two sides that shouldn’t meet.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets, but it was close enough and it felt hot.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Sable murmured through a grin as Heath nipped at her lower lip, undoing the clasp on her black sports bra and tossing it over his shoulder into the back seat.

“Yeah? You think so?” he asked, kissing her chin and then sucking one of her nipples into his mouth, twirling his tongue around the swollen nub stuck between his teeth in a maddening way. “You want me to stop?” he asked, his words muffled slightly by what he was doing.

“Only if you want your leg broken by the next game. I can kick
really
hard,” Sable gasped, arching her back.

Heath chuckled through that but he did as he was told, two hands on her tits now, kneading them and letting them fill his rough palms. Sable reached down between them, loath to put any distance between their bodies, but it was for a good cause, ultimately. She undid the button on his pants and then the zipper, shoving her hand in and grasping his cock through his boxers. He hissed in a breath and she loved the strained growl he gave as she started jerking him roughly, no gentleness between them.

Heath coiled his hand into her hair and yanked her head down, kissing her roughly. She purred into the violent motion, kissing him raw and hard and loving the way he seemed to be incapable of getting enough of her. That matched how she felt so damn well. She stroked him even harder and desperate hands peeled back the pants, Heath raising his hips so she’d have better access.

“Take your pants off,” he said, his voice low and dark, and his eyes flashing brown for a moment before returning to the comforting, dazzling green.

She could see the beast lurking just below the surface, the tension and the power oozing off of him and bathing her in its presence. Sure, there were a lot of similarities she could draw between Heath and Mackey, the tiger ex who as far as Sable was concerned should have been thrown into the ocean and left there, but whatever excuses she made for herself, one thing was true: Heath was better. Or badder. Or whatever, she couldn’t get enough of him and all she knew was that she needed his cock inside of her right now.

Consequences be damned.

This has happened before, Sable. You fucking remember it.

She did. And she didn’t care.

Sable wiggled into her own seat and kicked off her boots and then her pants, Heath helping her a little as she struggled for leverage in the tight space. His free hand was on his cock, stroking that monster length of his, and she couldn’t take her eyes off of the way his palm rasped over it, flicking at the base of the head and teasing her with it. She wanted it inside of her. Now.