Hot Puck (Rough Riders Hockey 2)

Red, red, red. Eden pushed into his thoughts.

Okay, his life was…mostly…fucking awesome.

11

Eden climbed into the passenger’s side of the ambulance, snapped her seat belt, and pulled the iPad onto her lap. She opened the report app as Gabe slid behind the wheel.

“Tori owes you big-time.” Gabe turned the engine over and started out

of the hospital’s parking lot. “We haven’t stopped all damn night. I’m starving. Want to hit Dairy Queen on the way back to the house?”

“Ice cream? At two a.m.?” Eden tried to tease, but her exhaustion ruined the effect. “Are you pregnant?”

“Come on. We haven’t even had time to eat. You’ve got to be starving.”

Eden gave up on the form, flipped the iPad’s cover down, and dropped her head back against the seat, eyes closed. Beckett appeared in her mind. Beckett in all his naked splendor. Beckett and those dark eyes that never stopped watching her, never stopped searching for ways to bring her pleasure.

And good Lord, the heights of pleasure that man could drive Eden to…

Heat flooded her pelvis, and her sex throbbed with both craving and discomfort. She was definitely still sore twenty-four hours after the most erotic and moving sexual experience of her life. And not once but all damn night. Eden hadn’t been watching the clock, but she’d bet that man had woken her every two hours for an hour of sexual exploration.

But it wasn’t the sex that made her heart tight every time she thought of him. That came when she remembered the way he teased her and challenged her. The way he kissed her afterward, long and slow, like savoring dessert after the perfect meal. Or the way he tickled her until she promised to sleep in his arms. Or the way he’d wake, find her out of reach, and shimmy over to curl his thickly muscled arm around her before settling again.

Yeah, those memories made her heart ache.

“I hope Tori’s father’s okay.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and checked for a new message. Eden had covered Tori’s shift at the last minute when her coworker’s father had gone into the hospital with heart trouble. But there were no new messages. “She hasn’t messaged you yet, has she?”

“She’d message you before she’d message me.” Gabe scanned the boulevard. “We’ve got Taco Bell, In-N-Out Burger…”

“Whatever you want, Gabe.” She opened her eyes and stared out at the dark streets. “My stomach could use something—”

Their pagers sounded.

“Motherfucking sonofabitch.” Gabe pounded his hand on the steering wheel. “Is it a full moon or something? I haven’t had a night like this in months.”

Eden was too tired to get angry. She dragged her pager into view and read with a heavy sigh. “Woman down.”

“How novel,” Gabe said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “I wish they could throw a little originality into it. Woman down, scissors up her nose, for instance. Or, man down, ax lodged in trachea.”

Even fried, Eden couldn’t stop the laughter from rolling out of her. “Stop. I’m too exhausted to laugh.”

Her abdominal muscles ached too, but that was all about what Beckett had put her through last night. She’d never looked at sex as a workout until Beckett.

“Just sayin’.” Gabe flipped on the sirens, and Eden read off the address and tapped into navigation on her phone.

“Oh, great,” Gabe said. “The last time I rolled on that neighborhood, it was for a gang fight with multiple victims. I’ve never seen so much blood. Would be nice to know if that’s what we’re rolling into now? Am I right?”

Yes, he was right, but Eden didn’t want to egg Gabe on tonight. Searching the map, she named off the best streets to take toward the incident. She was about to put her head back and close her eyes when her phone chimed with a message.

From Beckett.

Are you sleeping?

Her stomach jumped and twisted. It would be eleven p.m. on the West Coast. He’d probably finished playing his first game, and she found herself wanting to know how it went and who won. In the next second, she wondered if he’d hit a bar tonight and pick up another woman and take her back to his hotel room to give her everything he’d given Eden last night.

Of course he would, dumb shit. He’d probably been juggling multiple women at one time since he hit puberty.

She let out a breath and looked out the window, trying, unsuccessfully, to read a million things into the message. When she’d written the good-bye note without any indication she was interested in further communication, her head had been cleared of the sexual haze that had sent her to the bar in the first place. She’d seen their situation for what it was—a chance meeting, a spark, the opportunity to quench that desire. And her first step toward reconnecting romantically with men.