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“Hey, Cupcake,” she greets me, her voice sweet and musical and entirely too loud to be calling me that. “Looking good out there.”
“I’m sorry,” Sanchez snorts, skating up behind me. “Cupcake?”
I groan, narrowing my eyes at Lila, who looks like she knows exactly what she just did. “Really?”
“What?”
She winks at me, and for reasons beyond me, I feel the innocent gesture as if she reached out and touched me. Me suddenly acting nervous around her just because we made a formal agreement to spark some rumors makes no sense. The only thing that I can fathom is the added microscope it’s putting me under, even if it’s a slightly more positive one.
“Cupcake played great,” Jankowski coos.
“Oh,” Jack snorts. “I actually just decided I am going to like this whole thing between you guys.”
I roll my eyes. “So happy everyone’s on board.” I arch a brow at Lila. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know.” She shrugs, giving me another sweet smile. “Being seen. Perpetuating rumors. That sort of thing.”
I take a quick look around, and sure enough, there is more than one phone pointed in our direction. “Looks like it’s working.”
“Anything for the team,” she laughs.
I turn my head again when I see a flash go off somewhere to my right. “I can’t wait to see whatever the internet is going to be saying tomorrow.”
“You’d better get used to it,” Lila hums. She leans over the railing, hanging between my arms—which are reaching up, hands clasped there—and extends her arm until her finger closes in on my nose, giving it a boop. “We’re the talk of the town, Cupcake.”
It’s little more than a brush of her fingertip against the tip of my nose, but I feel the heat of it spread through my face in a way that surely must show on my fair skin; am I embarrassed or amused? I don’t allow myself to consider anything else I might be possibly feeling about it.
“Perfect,” I mutter.
Jack scoots closer to his sister as Sanchez and Jankowski start arguing about some play they didn’t quite get down during practice, looking between us pointedly. “You tell him about the play day?”
I cock a brow. “Play day?”
“Dee’s thing. She got it going a few years back. We do it every year now at St. Michael’s.”
It takes me a second to place the name, but only a second. Jack and Lila didn’t spend more than six months at that orphanage before their aunt got full custody after their parents’ accident, but I have to imagine it was long enough to leave an impression.
“What is it?”
Lila looks almost shy for the first time since seeing her again, her cheeks turning a sweet shade of pink as she reaches to tuck a stray tendril of hair behind her ear. “It’s nothing too crazy,” she says. “Just an event I pitched a few years ago that stuck. The kids really love it.”
“She’s being modest,” Jack tsks. “She worked her ass off organizing it. Still does. Every single year. She put together this huge fundraiser when she got back to the States, right? Raised enough money to get the kids a bona fide hockey rink built behind the orphanage. Every year, me and some of the guys take the day to run drills with the kids, play around, you know, nothing too crazy. Dee always comes out with her shit and teaches them how to bake something. The ones who don’t want to play, that is. It’s always a huge hit.”
Lila still looks embarrassed during Jack’s praising speech, but I feel a swell of pride coursing through me. Everything about what he just told me sounds exactly like something my Lila would do.
My Lila?
I mentally rear back. Where the hell did that come from?
“That’s really great,” I tell her, meaning it. “Seriously, Lila. It’s amazing.”
Her blush deepens, her teeth pressing against her lower lip, accentuating the fullness of it and drawing my eye for a second longer than is appropriate.
Without my consent, there are flashes of images in my head of that same soft mouth touching me in places that are entirely inappropriate. Those same teeth biting into my skin. They’re so quick and so vivid, I don’t even have the time to mentally kick my own ass over them.
I tear my eyes away when she finally speaks.
“The kids really love it,” she says quietly. “And I love doing it. The guys always seem to have a good time too. I was thinking that it would be a good place for you to be seen. I mean, if you’re not too busy. I don’t want you to feel like you have to—”
