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And my second of curiosity left me with no time to move.
“Just coming in to grab an apple—oh!” She stopped mid-reach and her eyes volleyed from Bash to me and back to Bash.
A smile spread across her face as she picked up a piece of fruit and tossed it, catching it while her eyes stayed locked on me. “I see why you needed to know the logistics of dating a fellow employee.” She crunched into the apple, winking.
Bash and I exchanged a look, and he nodded, letting me take the lead. My mind raced. I couldn’t tell her about Mac. I wanted to, desperately. We had a connection that I wanted to shout to the world, but she just caught me making out with another man.
Putting my arm around Bash, hoping the touch would silently convey I wanted to say so much more than this, I smiled back at Julie. “We’re still in the early days of figuring out—”
“Mums the word.” She zipped her lips and took another bite.
“Thanks, Julie,” Bash said, rubbing my lower back.
I ached to go back five minutes when his hand was directly against my skin and the promise of more danced between us. Coughing, I straightened up and motioned to the coolers.
“I better let you get back to work—”
“Oh, don’t stop that deliciousness just because I walked in.” She shook her head and grabbed an orange, waving her half-eaten apple at us. “I’m leaving.”
She sauntered out of the room, and Bash and I waited, not breathing, as the kitchen door swung wildly from her departure.
Once the kitchen door stilled, we burst out laughing.
I covered my face, groaning. “I feel like we’re teenagers who just got busted—”
“Julie’s kind of like the team mom.” Bash gave me a stomach-flipping half smile. “So, in a way, we were.”
He pulled me against him and kissed my forehead. “We can be more careful if you’re worried about someone catching us.”
“It’s not that I’m worried about someone knowing you and I are seeing each other—it’s just—”
“More than that?”
“More than that,” I repeated, relieved and annoyed to talk about Mac so abstractly. “I’ll sit by someone else on the plane so people don’t ask questions.”
“If you don’t sit with me, you’ll be sitting alone—”
“Why?”
“The players are superstitious about who they sit with. It changes occasionally as trades are made or luck runs out, but rarely.”
“What about Mac?”
Bash smirked and grabbed both handles of the cooler, hoisting it effortlessly into his arms. “Lightning has dibs on him.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged and led us out of the kitchen. “I stopped trying to understand hockey players a long time ago.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Emily
The team filed past me as they got on the plane. Half of them waved to the camera. The other half were already in full-on travel mode—headphones on, neck pillows affixed, flip-flops, and mussed up hair, as they gave the camera a brief nod.
I moved each clip into my to edit folder as I waited for the last few stragglers. The fans would love the enthusiastic ones just as much as the aloof players that thought their middle name was Smolder.
Our social media accounts were going wild with the new content. Numbers quadrupled in the first week and Coach Locke became one of my biggest fans—he followed the Evergreens accounts on every platform and was the first to comment on new posts.
