Page 5 of Hot for the Hockey Player (The Single Moms of San Camanez: The Vino Vixens #2)

Laurel lifted one boney shoulder in a half-assed shrug, her pencil moving across the worksheet as she completed her math homework.

Both my kids were smart, but Laurel was book-smart and math-smart to an almost freaky level.

She could recite the digits of pi to something like the hundred and forty-eighth number.

She also loved to read. The girl always had her nose buried in a book—and usually not a book appropriate for an eleven-year-old like The Baby-Sitters Club .

She was reading Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, Vonnegut, and Hemingway before her tenth birthday, and when I tried to get her to read something slightly more age-appropriate she argued with me—a lawyer—until I had to give up my case and agree that she could read them, but I had to vet them first.

“I think it has to do with his friends at school,” she finally said, her face scrunched up as she leaned onto her hand, her elbow on the table, and studied the math problem in front of her.

While I didn’t want her skipping a grade, her teacher and I agreed that she needed to be challenged more.

He gave her math homework from two grades above her—just for home—to challenge and stimulate her.

She didn’t want her school friends to know though, because that would just be fodder for teasing.

“What do you mean?” I picked up the flattened piece of chicken from the plate and started to dredge it.

“I think some friends at school were either bad-talking Mav, or maybe saying how awesome he was—I dunno. But anyway, Damon started to brag that he knew Mav. That Mav was like a big brother to him when we were kids—not that I remember him—and then that’s when he wanted to watch the games on television again.

And I think what prompted him to ask you for hockey tickets for Christmas. ”

“Which I only bought because I got a screaming deal, and you asked for books . Just books.”

“And I got the just books that I wanted. I am happy. Though, the game was fun to watch. I’m glad I went. I feel bad that Maverick was injured so badly and went out of the game after only playing for like two minutes.”

“Me too, honey,” I murmured, reflecting on Maverick recounting his injuries to me.

They were serious, and he spoke about them like they were no more than a scraped knee.

Back injuries were no joke and while I’d only ever slipped a disc once in my life because I refused to ask for help when moving an armoire, I’d been in a ton of pain just from that.

So I could only imagine what kind of agony he was in after something like that tackle.

And for sure, if I crushed my spine, I’d be hanging up my skates and finding a desk job somewhere.

Slamming her math book closed, Laurel stood up from the table, breaking me out of my trance. “I’m going to go read in my room until dinner.”

“Or, you could go find your brother and cousins outside and get some fresh air, you little hermit.”

“Who’s calling who a hermit? You never leave the house either,” she challenged, cocking a hip and giving me a look way too old for her age.

“I went outside to go to the grocery store.”

“And I went outside to catch the bus, for PE at school, and to catch the bus home.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. She narrowed her amber ones—identical to mine—right back.

“At least I have hobbies,” she added, layering on more cheek. “I read, I do watercolor. What do you do? Work, work, Pilates, cook, work, work, and occasionally drink wine.”

“Drinking wine can be a hobby,” I teased.

She rolled her eyes, exasperated with my lack of coolness. “Can I compromise and go read outside?”

Smiling at her shrewdness, I finally had to nod. “Fine. But put a coat on.”

“Damon only had to put on a hoodie.” Her tone was in mirth, so I just fixed her with a look.

She grinned and disappeared into her room, emerging a moment later with The Importance of Being Ernest tucked under her arm.

“Smells good, Mothership,” she said, coming over to press a kiss to my cheek.

Damon was already taller than me, and it’d only be a matter of a couple of years before Laurel was my height or taller.

Their father had been tall, but thankfully, height seemed to be the only genes of his that were seriously taking shape.

Oh, and Damon’s gray-blue eyes, but that was about it.

She dipped her pinky finger into the marinara sauce simmering on the stove and popped it into her mouth, humming in delight. Then she donned her Chelsea rainboots, winter coat, and grabbed a picnic blanket from the cupboard before taking her leave of me.

I finished dredging the chicken, then put it into the preheated oven to bake.

Then I got to work on preparing the Caesar salad, garlic toast, grilled asparagus, and rotini.

I loved to cook; the kitchen was my happy place, and feeding people was one of my love languages.

Particularly since—as my cousins liked to say—I wasn’t big on physical touch, words of affirmation, or compliments.

Fair enough. We couldn’t be perfect at everything.

The physical touch thing was also a trauma response.

I didn’t like to be touched unnecessarily, so I never assumed others did either.

But food? Food was my way of letting people know I cared about them.

It was how I expressed my love for others when I couldn’t get my mouth and brain to cooperate to say it out loud.

Even my kids were better at expressing their emotions than I was.

Mind you, we worked hard on that since they were little.

Just because I sucked at expressing myself didn’t mean I needed to pass on that failure to my offspring.

Normally, I would invite one or all of my cousins to have dinner with us, but Raina and Marco were having dinner with her new boyfriend, Jagger, and Naomi and Danica said they were going to just stay home and do their own thing for dinner tonight.

I never took offense to that. Just because we all lived on the same property and worked together, didn’t mean we had to do everything together all the time.

We’d just have leftovers … well, maybe not if Maverick was coming over and with the way Damon ate these days.

I unplugged my earbuds from where they were charging and popped one into my ear. I always kept one in and one out so I could hear if the kids needed me. Then I turned on my favorite kitchen playlist: a true crime murder podcast.

I added the anchovy paste to the tall, narrow blender jar for my Caesar dressing, just as the story was getting to the part where the abused woman and her best friend hauled her husband’s corpse, rolled up in a rug, out of the back of her minivan at a construction site in the middle of the night.

There was deep, wet concrete, and that’s precisely where they planned to dump the body.

I clucked my tongue. “Not smart, ladies. You want to bury the body three feet deep, no deeper, for optimum and quick decomposition. Preferably under a protected tree and across state lines. It’s not going to decompose that way.” I shook my head. “Amateurs.”

I hit the “on” button for my immersion blender, the salad dressing ingredients swirled together to make one delicious-smelling concoction.

I turned it off and scoffed. “No wonder you got caught. You need to burn your clothes and toss the weapon into deep, muddy water. Don’t throw it in the trash.

Ugh . It’s like you wanted to get caught.

” A snicker behind me had me spinning around.

“Hi,” said the incredibly handsome, smiling Maverick Roy, holding a bouquet of flowers. He stood between a ready-to-burst Damon and a smug-looking Laurel.

“Guess he’s fine, huh?” Damon said. “And he came here to see us.”

Even though I knew he was coming, I was still struck a little dumb seeing him standing there. Our meeting in the grocery store wasn’t a hallucination. “Hi,” I finally said, having to wrestle the cat away from my tongue. I shook my head and blinked a couple more times.

Did the kids notice my weird behavior? I was stumbling over my words, and Gabrielle Campbell never stumbled—over anything.

“He’s staying in a cabin at the brewery,” Damon said with excitement.

“Says you ran into each other at the store and you invited him for dinner as a surprise for me.” The look on my son’s face was reminiscent of him as a five-year-old at Christmas and he just opened up the firetruck he wanted so badly.

“He’s seeing Maz at Unger Wellness,” my kid went on.

“You mean Rolph Mazurenko?” Maverick asked, handing me the flowers.

My head bobbed as I tried to keep my eyes on his face and not on the way his long-sleeve Henley wrapped around his arms like a second skin.

I used the flowers as an excuse to busy myself, and showed them my back as I grabbed a vase from under the sink, filled it with water, and unwrapped the bouquet from the plastic.

“We just know him as ‘Maz,’ the PT god who also sells the best free-range eggs on the island,” I said, focused on plucking the extra leaves off the stems of the dark-purple mums.

Maverick snorted. “I’ll have to ask him if I can buy some eggs off him.”

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Damon said.

“It’s awesome.” The thundercloud that my son wore as a hat when he went outside to kick the soccer ball around, had been replaced by a big ray of sunshine.

I couldn’t remember the last time my moody man-boy, who really needed to wash his greasy hair, smiled like that, let alone had been so outwardly excited.

“Yeah,” I agreed, a lump at the back of my throat. “It’ll be so great to catch up with you, Maverick.” I set the vase, now filled with pretty plum and ivory chrysanthemums, on the island and met Maverick’s gaze.

He nodded, his blue eyes twinkling in a very disarming, flirtatious way. “It definitely will be.”

Thank god I made as much food as I did, because between Maverick and Damon, there weren’t any leftovers.

Maverick had a very healthy appetite when he lived with us—thankfully, his parents compensated my monthly payment for his endless hunger—but it seemed like that never-ending need to eat had only intensified.

“Still the best cook in the world, Mrs. Campbell,” he said, taking a sip of water. “This chicken parm is amazing.”

“Please, Maverick, call me Gabrielle. We’re both adults now, and while I haven’t changed my last name, I’m not a missus anymore.”

His gaze met mine and something heated flickered there. Then it was gone.

He regaled us with tales from his NHL career, and Damon ate up every word with starry eyes and a thousand follow-up questions.

“Barbier needs to get more than a five-game suspension,” Damon said, scooping more rotini onto his plate, then ladling marinara sauce over it.

“That’s ridiculous. If you’re out for the rest of the season—hopefully not—but if you are, and your vertebrae are crushed, he needs to be suspended too.

” The venom in my son’s tone surprised me, and for a hot minute, he reminded me a lot of his father.

Quick to anger about simple things. Things that had nothing to do with him.

Things he had no control over. But Damon wasn’t anything like Cyrus, and I knew that.

I made sure the gentle tingle of alarm bells going off in my head didn’t show on my face and simply took a bite of my garlic toast.

“Barbier is a known aggressor,” Maverick said casually. “I’m sure the five-game suspension won’t be all he gets. My coach and the team manager are looking into greater repercussions.”

“Barbier has taken cheap shots at you before,” Damon went on. “He’s a meathead. I’ve heard him give interviews. The guy can barely string two coherent sentences together.”

Maverick snorted and filled his mouth with Caesar salad rather than answer.

“So, besides rehab with Maz, what are your plans on the island?” I asked him, needing to take a sip of my water and hoping that it cooled off the heat in my cheeks.

Maverick shrugged. “Explore? Rest. Read?” He snorted again. “My Tbr pile is enormous.”

“I can recommend some books,” Laurel piped up.

“I doubt he wants Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice ,” Damon teased.

“Well, I had to read Pride and Prejudice in high school. So I think I’m covered there. Thanks though, Laurel.” He smiled kindly at my daughter before fixing his gaze back to me. “Do you guys need a hand around here?”

“Winter is pretty slow for us,” I said cautiously. “Mostly just keeping the liquor stores supplied on the mainland and getting ready for the spring and summer.”

Maverick didn’t seem deterred at all. “Not even some painting?”

“You could come to the school and meet my friends,” Damon said. “And then come over every day after school to play video games with me. My friends don’t believe that I know Maverick Roy. They’re going to crap their pants when they find out you’re on the island and that I actually know you.”

“I’d rather not be the cause of a bunch of teenage boys losing their bowels, but sure, I can come to the school. Sign some autographs or whatever.”

Damon lit up even more before reaching for the salad bowl and using the tongs to heap his plate with Caesar salad. “This is going to be so awesome.”

“So awesome,” Maverick mimicked. His gaze met mine again, and that raking twinkle was back, forcing me to look away.

Something told me his presence here wasn’t going to be as awesome for all of us. At least not my libido.