Hot Puck (Rough Riders Hockey 2)

“Huh. Sentimental.” She looked at the skates again, gave a nod. “Who’d have guessed?” And moved on with questions. “Do you have any allergies to medications?”

She huh’d away his two hundredth goal in the NHL? What did it take to impress this girl?

“One for one,” he said. “I’ll answer one of your questions, then you answer one of mine.”

“You’re forgetting the whole this-is-my-ambulance, you’re-on-my-turf-now thing.” She moved her hands in a circle, indicating the inside of the rig. Then asked again, “Do you have any allergies to medications?”

“No,” he answered. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Her hands dropped against the clipboard, and she heaved a sigh.

“No,” Gabe answered for her. “She doesn’t.”

Beckett started laughing.

“Hey.” Kennedy tried to shoot a glare toward the front of the vehicle, but she was grinning. “No ganging up allowed.” She returned her gaze to the clipboard. “Have you had any surgeries?”

“Torn right ACL, bad left rotator cuff. What are you wearing under your uniform?”

Kennedy rolled her eyes. Gabe was the one who burst out laughing this time.

“Dude,” Beckett called toward the front, “if you know the answer to that, we’re going back to the boyfriend question.”

“You two are hil-ar-ious,” she said. “Do you have any other medical problems?”

A slow, dark laugh stuttered past his lips. “I’ve heard some people consider an erection lasting more than four hours a ‘problem.’”

Gabe’s laughter rolled into another, deeper round.

“Okay.” She put her pen down, but she was grinning, and laughter shook her shoulders. Beckett liked the fact that she could lighten up after such an intense show of passion earlier. He got that. It was the same as his on-ice, off-ice personality shift. “We’re done. And, oh look, there’s the hospital. Lucky me.”

“You owe me an answer,” he said. “Do you always work the games?”

“Nope. I’m covering for someone tonight.”

“Bummer.” A true lick of disappointment irritated him. “Not a hockey fan?”

“I like hockey about as much as you like being pulled out of the game to go to the hospital.”

Gabe added, “Truth.”

That was a real bummer. “Did you watch tonight?” Beckett asked, hoping she’d seen some of his impressive plays.

“Nope, I was reading.”

Reading? Instead of watching hockey? He couldn’t even fathom the possibility. Especially not when she had one of the best views in the stadium. “You know a lot of people would kill to watch the game from where you guys stand.”

“So Gabe tells me.”

Beckett should cut his losses right here. She wasn’t his type, she wasn’t fawning over him, and she didn’t like hockey. Three strikes.

But after Gabe got out of the truck, he couldn’t keep himself from asking, “Do you feel the same about hockey players as you do about the game?”

Didn’t this make the most pathetic picture ever? Trying to chat up a chick who was barely tolerating him, while riding in an ambulance trapped in a neck brace, tied to a backboard?

But Beckett had always been a sucker for a challenge.

“I couldn’t say,” she said. “I don’t know any hockey players.”