Tomboy

“Did you really have to put the ring in a muffin?”

She shrugged and winked at him. “It made me laugh.”

Becaus

e of course it did. That was his Fallon, always there to bust his chops just as much as she was there to have his back, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Acknowledgments

A huge thank-you to the readers who make all of my books possible. Without you guys, I wouldn’t be lucky enough to have the best job in the world. Y’all are my Lady (and Dude) Lucks. xoxo. I couldn’t have written Tomboy without the support of my editor Liz, who rolls her eyes at my pronouncements that this is my worst book ever and my promises to actually meet a deadline. Thank you, thank you, thank you, going out to the entire Entangled team for everything that they do behind the scenes. Y’all know exactly how to make an author look good. Thank you!!! A hug and a promise to Jenn at Social Butterfly that we will actually get to have that drink together. You amaze me with every book. Thank you! And, as always, I couldn’t do hardly anything without the support of my girls, Robin Covington and Kimberly Kincaid, and my family. All together, we’re probably about as loud the Hartigans, if not quite as much fun. LOL

And don’t worry, readers, there will be more Hartigans coming. We are just taking a short break for some hot hockey players. Get ready for the Ice Knights! Turn the page for a sneak peek at the first Ice Knights book, Parental Guidance.

xoxo,

Avery

Parental Guidance

Ice Knights 1

Just when Caleb Stuckey thought it couldn’t get any worse, his mom walked in.

Now, some people might think getting an ass-chewing by Ice Knights coach, Winston Peppers, and the team’s oh-my-God-our-players-fucked-up-again public relations guru, Lucy Kavanagh, was about as bad as it could get. They would be wrong. Having his mom join the ass-chewing party in Lucy’s office on the fifty-sixth floor of Harbor City’s Carlyle Building brought the entire shitstorm to a whole new level of misery.

Brittany Stuckey—AKA Britt the Ball Buster, according to some of her players—wasn’t just a state champion high school boys’ hockey coach and one of the handful of female boys’ hockey coaches in the country, she was also the Stuckey family titleholder for taking absolutely, 100 percent no shit from anyone. The anyone in this case being him. And fact that he was a grown man and a professional hockey player with the Harbor City Ice Knights meant nothing. He would, as she often told him, forever be her little Caleb Cutie—a nickname that proved a mother’s love blinded her to her offspring’s physical flaws—and she would probably treat him as such until the day one of them got hit by the number six crosstown bus.

He turned to Peppers, a man he thought would have had his back despite the video-recorded smack talk that had been blown all out of proportion. “You called my mom?”

“Yes,” Peppers asserted, not bothering to slow his pace as he marched from one end of the room to the other as if he were still in the locker room giving his team a what for in between periods. “Because she was a crucial part of this rehabilitation plan to fix your fuck-up.”

Caleb slouched down in his chair. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“Really?” Lucy asked from her seat behind her desk, snark dripping from her voice. “Do I need to play the video again? I can because every media site on the face of the earth has posted it. Bad Lip Reading even did a mockup of it.”

Yeah, and he would have laughed his ass off at anyone else who’d been caught running his mouth in public like an idiot. Objectively, it was funny. It wasn’t every day almost the entire first line of a hockey team bitched and moaned about the team, their playing, the coaches, and the quality of puck bunnies they banged. They’d sounded like spoiled assholes, which he totally admitted wasn’t 100 percent not the truth.

Fuck, the next words out of his mouth were going to hurt.

“Okay,” he said, avoiding eye contact with every person in the room. “It was dumb.”

“Dumb?” his mom said, how-in-the-hell-did-I-birth-this-idiot thick in her voice. “You told the entire world that the key to your sweet defensive moves was the number of puck bunnies you banged before a game—and on top of that, how you call them all honey so you won’t have to bother remembering their names!”

He flinched. Yeah, that was not a good look. He was a privileged asshole who—truth be told—had exaggerated both the abundance of babes in his bed and his lack of memory skills. Still… “I’d had some beers and was talking shit with my boys. And it should be noted that I did the right thing by taking an Uber instead of driving.”

His mom rolled her eyes. “That’s called doing the bare minimum to adult properly.”

The room went silent except for the mental buzz saw revving in his ears so vividly that he could smell the diesel fumes. He clenched his teeth hard enough that his jaw ached so he wouldn’t snap off a nasty retort at his mom. That wouldn’t get him anywhere. She hadn’t gotten where she was because she backed down from fights. He’d inherited the trait, but he’d learned that sometimes the best way to win was to appear like he wasn’t fighting at all. Guerrilla warfare. Psyops. Subterfuge. When it came to winning a war with his mom, those were the only ways to go.

Never mind that he was a twenty-eight-year-old professional athlete with a mortgage, a retirement plan, and a degree in sports management that he’d use to open his own company when it came time to hang up his skates for good. To his mom, he would forever and always be Caleb Cutie who’d fucked up again. It was fucking exhausting trying to meet Brittany Stuckey’s expectations, and he was so done with it.

Lucy, who’d been uncharacteristically watching the goings-on with her mouth shut, broke the tense silence. “Here’s what it comes down to, Stuckey. You embarrassed yourself. You embarrassed the team. You embarrassed Harbor City. This has to be fixed. You are going to have to change the narrative and give everyone something else to talk about besides what a dickhead you are—that is, if you want to keep playing for the Ice Knights.” She gave him a second to digest that bit of yes, it’s been confirmed you’re an asshole, and if you don’t fix it, you’ll be playing in the reindeer league at the North Pole. “And that’s why you’re going to give the media a story they won’t be able to stop talking about. You’re going to let your mom be in charge of your dating profile on Bramble, and you’re going to film video segments about each date.”

He couldn’t breathe, and a throbbing started in his head right behind his eyes. “That’s not gonna happen.”