Page 83 of Hotshot
Except, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Don’t get me wrong, I loved being with Bess and Fred, but I wasn’t itching to go home. My mind was buzzing with ideas for this town. Wood Hollow needed new life and a purpose—better roads, better shops,better…everything. I couldn’t help thinking the mill could be part of that growth. Maybe.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “A couple of months.”
“You don’t sound happy about that.”
“I am. I’m just…” Failing at life, a.k.a. floundering as CEO, falling for a hockey player who’d be gone in a matter of days. I cleared my throat. “I’m fine. And I’m glad Max is doing well. Tell him hi for me.”
“Will do, Hank.”
I ended the call and glanced over at Emily who was motioning to me wildly. “What’s up, Em?”
“Lines one, two, three are for you. Glen Ackerman says you hung up on him, the saw thingy you had fixed is ready, and someone clogged the toilet in the men’s room. Again.”
Wow. Just wow.
Hey, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. We’d hired thirty more employees over the past few weeks, and things were running relatively smoothly. Dad was ecstatic and he was doing better health-wise. He’d improved to the point he was able to walk with a cane for short stints.
The general sense that things were progressing as planned made for pleasant conversations, but days like this felt like one step forward, two steps backward. It was frustrating. I was torn between wanting out and being afraid of what came next.
So I concentrated on the positive. I woke up with a sexy man in my bed. We fed the horses together, exercised them, stealing errant touches and kisses like newlyweds, then went to the house for breakfast before parting ways. Denny headed for the rink, I headed for Wood Hollow, and while we occasionally met for coffee or lunch at the diner, we usually waited till evening to see each other again.
He was busy with camp, and there were a fuckton of hockey players in town who’d wonder why he wasn’t hanging out withthem. I understood. I wasn’t in a position to ask for more, so I took what I could get and did my best to make every second count.
And to not get aggravated with interruptions like the arrival of Mason Trinsky, Denny’s teammate from Denver.
Trinsky was an enormous tatted human with a jolly demeanor and a lust for life. He was the type of guy who challenged strangers to drinking games, bought rounds for the entire bar, and told outlandish stories that made you simultaneously roll your eyes and laugh. He was a loveable goofball and a force on the ice.
Denny told me Trinsky was the guy who’d looked out for him and made him feel at home in the NHL. I’d expected to like him, but I hadn’t expected Trinsky to know much about me. I was wrong.
“Holy fuck! It’s the billboard cowboy!”
Oh. Right.
My smile dipped for a beat, but I shoved it into place, ignoring the curious patrons at the Black Horse, including a couple of mill employees.
“Hank Cunningham.”
“Trinsky.” He crushed my fingers, nodding as he studied me as if I were an endangered species he hadn’t counted on running into. “You are a fuckin’ celebrity, dude. Fuck hockey. Do you know who this is? This is the billboard cowboy!”
“Ah, that was a long time ago.” I thanked Bill for the beer he slid toward me and glanced at Denny.
His lips tilted at the corners and then…he winked at me. I was used to the constant yearning now—the head over heels, how did I get here, dizzy feeling whenever he walked into a room. The insta butterflies shouldn’t have been a surprise, but they were.
“Denny told me you were here,” Trinsky said, ripping me from my reverie. “The team freaked out at the selfie he took a few months ago. You’re a goddamn legend in our neck of the woods, dude. Like wow. Jakey baby, do you know who this is?”
Jake gritted his teeth and elbowed Trinsky in the stomach. “Don’t call me Jakey, asshole. And yes, of course I know Hank. His family owns the mill nearby.”
“Mill, shmill. No one cares about the mill. Trust me, they don’t care about it in Denver either. He stops traffic on I-70 on the daily. They talked about the billboard on a podcast I was listening to last week about the natural habitats of beavers and river otters and somehow, they brought up that billboard.”
“River otters? Really? What the fuck is a river otter?” a hockey player whose name I couldn’t remember piped in.
“It’s an otter that lives in the river, dumbass,” Trinsky huffed. “What the fuck else would it be? They’re little and cute and they hold hands when they sleep. Oh, and they’re super furry all over.”
“Like you?” someone called out.
“Well, yeah,” Trinsky countered.
Our section of the bar burst into laughter while the other half looked up to see what was so funny. I took the opening to slip to Denny’s side.