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PROLOGUE
JULIUS RAMON (AKA ZAMBONI DRIVER)
In my experience, there are three things that can really get pro hockey players riled up:
Getting checked from behind,
Anyone touching your goalie — even the most accidental brush can get a whole bench on the ice with fire in their blood, and...
Falling in love.
Hockey players are a special breed. They’re fiercely loyal, utterly fearless, and at least a little bit unhinged. You have to be, to voluntarily participate in a sport where the odds of being injured are better than fifty percent per thousand hours of play.
The truth?
These guys don’t care. They don’t worry about the future, they don’t internalize the risk. They’re in it for today, for now. They play for their brothers on the ice, and they protect and defend them like family. Because they are family.
And when a woman edges her way into one of those fiery hearts?
Anything can happen.
But if the woman is worth the risk, and if she can take the heat, then the hockey player’s net of ride-or-die protection will be cast wider to include her. And she’ll be part of the family too.
Right winger Sly Remington was high on my list of least likely ever to fall in love. The guy protects his heart the way he covers his goalie (even though Stephano Mizzoni is more than ready to defend his own honor if it comes to it.)
But I’ll be honest...
Sometimes it’s the ones you least expect to fall who take the biggest hits when love comes around.
CHAPTER1
SLY
COASTER, PUCKS - BOTH ROUND. WHATEVER.
“Hey, hey, there. Not without a coaster, man.” Stephano Mizzoni lifted my beer and slid a little round cork puck beneath it on the bar top.
“Sorry, Mom,” I quipped, catching Rock Stevens’s eye and sharing a laugh.
“Don’t you have any doilies you could put down, Mizzoni? I think my butt’s sweating onto your barstool here,” Rock added.
Mizzoni didn’t crack a smile. Instead, he stepped between us, looking at us with murder in his gaze. “When you are the first in your family to own more than a shoebox, you come talk to me about how you want to take care of your things,” he says, his voice low and threatening.
I clapped him on the back and picked up my beer. “No big deal man, and the place is incredible. I don’t blame you for wanting to keep it pristine.”
He nodded, his shoulders loosening visibly.
Rock was still chuckling, but I shot him a hard look and he zipped it.
Mizzoni had just bought the place near Wilcox, and I had to admit, it was pretty insane. Two floors of glass overlooked a backyard pool, grounds that most national parks would envy, and an outdoor kitchen and bar nicer than most people had inside their homes. The bar was wood, but it had a glossy finish that suggested it wasn’t going to be marred by one cold beer can—especially since it was built to be outside here in Virginia, where the weather was far from perfect most of the time—but it was his call to keep us in line. And while every one of these guys pushed the limit now and then, it wouldn’t happen at a teammate’s new house.
I sauntered across the yard, enjoying the steamy heat of the early June evening and the knowledge that we had a couple months to enjoy before we retook the ice together as the Wilcox Wombats.
If you’re thinking it’s an unusual name for an American pro hockey team, you’re not wrong. But also, shut it. The name is distinctive, and getting on the wrong side of a whole hockey team isn’t advisable.
“Sly,” Chris Houstein called from one of the loungers poolside. “Where’s this month’s flavor?” Chris was a second-string winger, and while I loved the guy like I loved all the guys I played with, he had a big mouth.
He was sitting with Deck Gillespie and Tyler “Corny” Cornwall, soaking up the last rays of the day, margaritas in hand. I took the lounger to one side of the little group and kicked back.
