Muffin Top

“Good.” She crossed her arms and gave him a don’t-fuck-with-me-again smirk. “Anyway, hasn’t anyone ever told you that nurses aren’t scared by anything?”

They hadn’t, but then again, if it didn’t have something to do with on-ice defensive strategies, he wouldn’t have been paying attention.

And how’d that work out for you, Blackburn?

“So, are you going to play nice now, so we can make Lucy happy and she can stop worrying about her clients and enjoy her well-earned vacation?” she asked as she walked to his bedroom door.

An invisible icy wave washed over him, the kind that meant the fates were sending him a big fuck-you on the no-more-throwing-up thing. “I don’t want to.”

Fallon snorted. “Welcome to the real world, where we rarely, if ever, get what we want.”

And then she was gone before he could accidentally admit out loud that he’d learned that lesson all too well.

He’d wanted parents who hadn’t embezzled all of his money, a hockey career that wasn’t marred by scandal, a town that didn’t hate him, teammates that didn’t look at him like he was nothing but trash, and to end the streak of shitty playing that had plagued him since the Ice Knights traded for him. But, most of all at that moment, he wanted to keep whatever was in his stomach in place. Cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck. Fallon Hartigan may be a pushy pain in his ass, but that didn’t make her wrong. He was most definitely not going to get what he wanted.

Propelled by a powerful sense of stomach-mandated urgency, Zach hustled to his bathroom to puke up his guts. Again.

This sure as hell wasn’t the life he’d dreamed of when he laced up his skates for the first time, back when he’d thought his parents saw him as more than just a paycheck.

…

A civilian would have bolted. However, when they said that nothing scared a nurse, they weren’t kidding. Plus, when one of her best friends called in an SOS, there was no way Fallon would say no. It would take more than Zach Blackburn dry heaving hours after his sponge-bath stunt to send her screaming for the exits.

And yes, that would be exits plural. The house he lived in was massive, if woefully under-furnished. Literally, it looked like the guy had just arrived in town a week ago instead of seven months—right in time to ruin the Ice Knights’ run for the playoffs last season. Not that Fallon was still bitter, but she was totally still bitter.

As any fan knew—and Fallon was a die-hard—the team had overpaid to bring Zach Blackburn here, and thanks to his shitty playing and piss-poor attitude, he was now known as the most hated man in Harbor City.

Fallon might live in working-class Waterbury, but the feeling on her side of the harbor was the same. Blackburn was a selfish player. He had a huge chip on his shoulder. He punched out fans. He ignored his coach. He didn’t talk to the other players on the team once they left the rink—and sometimes not while they were in it.

He also happened to be Lucy’s biggest client, which was not a surprise because she was the best crisis PR management bad-boy whisperer in town. That meant when Blackburn fucked up, Lucy magically managed to make it all better.

Except not this time.

Why? Because this time he needed a nurse. So here she and Zach were, in his kitchen sharing a moment of awkward silence—one of the many since she’d arrived last night after a long shift at St. Vincent Hospital.

She’d walked in the door of his gargantuan house, and he’d promptly puked all over her. She wished she could say that was the first time that had ever happened to her but life as an emergency room nurse usually didn’t work out that way.

Zach had one of those fancy kitchens where there was a cooking area, an island the size of her bathroom, an eating area big enough for a table for ten that only had a card table and a single folding chair, and a sitting area with a dark brown leather couch and a massive TV. He was sitting in the middle of the couch with a green plaid blanket wrapped around him. It would almost be comical, this hulk of a man with the dimple in his chin, the steel bar going through his eyebrow, and the hint of a vibrant tattoo on his forearm where the blanket had fallen away, if it wasn’t for the fact that his skin had a sweaty, pasty, been-puking-my-guts-up sheen to it.

Poor guy.

Okay, he was still the jerk whose selfish play ended the city’s playoff dreams last year, but the man was obviously hurting, and she couldn’t just turn off the nurse thing. It was who she was, ever since she forced her siblings to play hospital with her growing up.

She picked up the folding chair and carried it over to the sitting area, along with a cup of warm peppermint tea. She handed him the tea and set up the chair in front of him before sitting down on it. He looked at the Ice Knights–branded mug in his hand as if were a live grenade.