Page 16 of How to Puck Your Boss (L.A. Hawks Hockey #3)

Chapter Nine

P enny didn’t feel like that had gone well. It was partly due to Leon Alvarez’s open hostility and partly due to Thomas Lyle taking her aside at the door and explaining to her in quiet, urgent terms that she couldn’t tell players how many roosters she had slaughtered on a stage.

“It was only the one and Leon Alvarez asked!” she replied, defending herself. “Should I have lied?”

“Yes!” Lyle stated bluntly and brushed a hand impatiently over his short afro. “Because that’s exactly what we do in the executive suite: We lie when we don’t want to worry players and thus jeopardize their concentration.”

Hm, he probably wouldn’t approve of her sleeping with one of them either, right?

“That’s a morally questionable course of action,” she said, confused.

The general manager gritted his teeth, obviously annoyed.

“Yes. It is. And if you have a problem with that, I don’t know what your father was thinking letting you in here!

” He narrowed his eyes and rubbed his face.

“Penelope, you are nice and I’m sure you are extremely smart, but it takes more than that to lead a hockey team!

This idea of Darron’s to have you compete for the team is absolutely ludicrous!

He’s the boss. But if push comes to shove, I’ll choose your brother any day.

At least the players take him seriously and he has no problem lying to them if he has to! ”

Without another word, he abruptly turned and hurried into the hallway where Gareth had disappeared.

She watched him go, her jaw working back and forth.

Fantastic. The players didn’t seem to be the only ones who didn’t take her seriously.

Here was another problem she had to deal with – as if Jack weren’t enough.

The guy deliberately called her Persephone, but then stared at her the entire time as if he were going to throw her across the table and go down on her.

Okay, maybe she was projecting her feelings onto Jack, but he hadn’t taken the “forgetting everything” half as seriously as she had, and that was…

“Shit,” she whispered, putting a hand over her eyes. Maybe she should just give up, do what everyone expected and throw in the towel.

She had never planned to stay here forever!

She had believed that she and Gareth would share the team and that her brother would take care of things on-site while she could handle the charity work she still wanted to do.

That was now a pipe dream, plus all the stress of the next few weeks might not be worth it…

Coward , muttered a quiet voice in her head that sounded a hell of a lot like Jack, before a louder one added, “Do you need help, Persephone?”

She jerked her hand away from her face. As if she had conjured him up with the power of her mind alone, Jack was standing in front of her.

He had taken off his jacket, revealing the shirt underneath, which must have shrunk in the wash because no one in their right mind would buy something so tight. That was…sexually harassing her mind!

She had tried so hard not to look directly at Jack.

Now, however, she did, and realized with dismay that he had not turned ugly in the last week.

He hadn’t shaved for a few days, so blond stubble adorned his chin, and the mere fact that she was close enough to see that was inappropriate, considering their history.

So, she hastily took two steps back before putting on her best totally-cool expression, one that would have made any snowman laugh.

She wasn’t good at lying, and, while admitting to things, she was more hot than cold.

This was sadly obvious from how long she had been staring at him wordlessly.

She quickly cleared her throat and opened her mouth. “You…”

“I’m Jack. Jack West,” he interrupted, sounding overly patient as he smiled cynically. “Remember?” With dramatic flair, he placed a hand on his chest. “The guy you had the best night of your life with?”

Her face flushed and, shocked, she glanced left and right down the hallway. It was empty; no one had heard him.

“Well, first off, that was rather arrogant,” she hissed, annoyed. “And second, of course I had to pretend I didn’t know who you were! Why should I have known your name and not Leon Alvarez’s?”

“Because I’m the prettier of the two,” he suggested in disbelief. “And do I have to keep mentioning the four orgasms?”

“Shh!” she replied angrily and looked down the hallway again before grabbing him by the arm and dragging him into the thankfully empty room behind her. “My goodness, I don’t remember you being so exhausting.”

“And I thought you didn’t remember anything,” he said sourly.

“That was the deal!” she reminded him, surprised. “To forget. We agreed to forget.”

“Yes, but the deal didn’t include behaving stiffly or unnaturally in each other’s presence.”

She widened her eyes in disbelief. “You should talk! Who was boring holes into me the entire time? And then that stupid question. As if it was important what I did for a living before I ended up here.”

He shrugged and folded his arms in front of his body. “It only seemed fair now that you know what I do for a living.”

She raised an eyebrow. “All I know…” she said in a lowered voice. “…is that you acted extremely strangely, and you have to change that if we don’t want to be found out.”

He sighed theatrically. “Yeah, I think it’s going to be harder than I thought. I didn’t realize a week ago how much you could piss me off.”

“And I thought the great Jack West didn’t get mad. Didn’t you say you were proud of your control?”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “Oh, I am. You wouldn’t want to be a participant in this conversation if I had no control.”

She snorted before saying in the most disinterested voice possible, “Empty threat. You know what I think? You have a problem with me being your boss now.”

He blinked at her, irritated. “Well, yes!”

“Because you’re used to having the upper hand and it’s a problem for your ego,” she concluded.

Jack stared at her for a few moments. Then, he asked quietly, “Are you high?”

She blinked. “What? No. I know I dress like a hippie, but…”

“Penny, I don’t care if you’re in the executive suite or not!

” he quietly interrupted her, leaning forward almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t care if you’re richer than me, if you’re smarter than me, if you’re more sophisticated, or even better at mini golf than me.

I’m not angry because you’re a woman who occupies a higher position than me.

I’m angry because forgetting doesn’t mean treating the other person like thin air.

It means treating the other person as if nothing happened.

With respect and a friendly smile, not a cold shoulder. ”

She swallowed. He was standing too close.

She felt his warm breath on her cheek. She inhaled his scent of pine forest and man, bathed in the pleasant warmth he radiated…

Naturally, he was right. And she would like to behave exactly as he had asked her to, but she couldn’t.

She had no control over her expressions, her feelings, or her body.

She had tried, but she had been unable to forget.

In fact, she had dreamed about Jack every night that past week: his lips on her neck, his fingers between her thighs, and his laughter in her ear.

There was plenty of other annoying, stressful stuff that should have infested her dreams, but Jack and his stupid grin and his stupid big hands had trumped all of that.

However, she couldn’t tell him that. It would give him too much power.

Make being his boss even more difficult.

So, she buried her thoughts and feelings, took a deep breath, and looked him straight in the eyes.

“Jack, could you please stop being so dramatic? It wasn’t that bad in there.

It’s not like I could make eye contact with all the players at the first meeting. Do you know how many of you there are?”

Jack snorted. “Of course,” he said, his sarcasm dripping so thick it practically coated Penny’s feet.

She rolled her eyes before smiling sweetly up at him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You should have an extremely easy time forgetting what happened because, if your teammates are to be believed, you don’t have sex during the season, anyway.”

Jack sighed heavily. “How did I know you would bring that up?”

“Maybe because it’s the stupidest rule – not to mention lie – I’ve ever heard?” she suggested kindly.

“It’s not a lie.”

She laughed. “You realize who you’re talking to, right?”

“Yes,” he replied softly, taking a step toward her, his eyes narrowed. He was so close now that her breasts were brushing against his chest. “And if you hadn’t come on to me like that, I would have stuck to my principles.”

She opened her mouth in disbelief. “ I came on to you ? Now who’s high? You admitted you were flirting with me. You wanted to know if I was single. You drove me home, you walked me to the door…”

“You invited me in!”

“Only because you were acting like that! It was the challenge. I myself wasn’t…certain at all.”

“Oh, you were certain,” he whispered against her ear, his lips brushing the sensitive skin behind it. “Your touches were certain and all the scandalous sounds that came out of your mouth were certain. Your whole body was certain it wanted exactly what I gave it.”

Her mouth went dry, her chest heavy as her abdomen tightened sweetly.

Oh God, he had to stop talking like that.

She took another hasty step back before bracing her hands against his chest, keeping him at arm’s length.

“Well, that was a week ago. A lot can happen in a week. And it’s not like I was totally unprofessional today. ”

“Unprofessional?” He rolled the word around on his tongue. “You’ll have to explain that to me. How can an expression be unprofessional?”

“By insinuating that he’s seen me naked before!” she blurted out angrily.

“But I have seen you naked,” he reminded her.

“So what? We barely know each other.”

“Well, in a biblical sense, we know each other very well.”

She rolled her eyes. “Obviously, the Saint , who everyone from the league only knows as a good guy, would resort to Bible comparisons.”

“Ah, I see you’ve gotten your hands on my file.”

It had been sent to her, yes. And she knew how to use Google.

“So what? The thing about you abstaining from sex during the season wasn’t in there.”

“Man, man, man. My name is always associated with sex.” He clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re obsessed with me and my skills in bed.”

That made her laugh. “I have to disappoint you. You won’t find any dirty underwear from me in your locker any time soon,” she replied calmly, raising her chin. “Although, I’m sure you get enough of those from elsewhere.”

“Ah, no. Actually, I get more bras.”

She snorted. “Of course. And I don’t want to hurt your ego, but the night wasn’t that memorable.”

Penny had expected a variety of reactions to that statement, but above all, anger and general annoyance. But he just stared at her stubbornly, his eyes expressionless, his lips pressed together, and his eyebrows slightly raised.

And then he said, “Did you really slaughter a rooster in front of hundreds of people?”

She groaned. Great. He ignored her direct attack on his masculinity, but he couldn’t get past the story about the dead bird?

“It was a statement,” she replied irritably.

“A statement of being crazy?”

Crazy . The word pierced her heart like a thousand pinpricks, just as it had for as long as she could remember.

Crazy Penny. Strange Penny. “Is that seriously Darron Clark’s daughter?” Penny. She’d heard it all before, but she’d decided ages ago that she was no longer going to justify herself for the woman she was. She wasn’t crazy or weird. She just wasn’t the norm.

“You know what? I’m leaving now,” she snapped, and this time, she didn’t have to make an effort to make her voice sound like it had been in the freezer.

She tried to push past him and out the door, but before she could turn the handle, Jack caught her wrist.

“You’re leaving this room…or Los Angeles? Because you never planned on staying long, did you?”

She opened her mouth, wanting to contradict him, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d confessed to him that she was a terrible liar.

“I thought so,” he replied quietly. “So. Do you want to go back to South America and forget what’s waiting for you here? Forgetting seems to be one of your favorite things to do.”

She yanked her wrist away from him, rubbed the spot that he had touched absentmindedly, and lifted her chin.

Yes, he would like that. Everyone here would like that.

Her parents expected her to give up. Her brother expected it.

The whole damn hockey team probably expected it.

It was a good thing Penny had never been great at living up to expectations.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said with dangerous calm.

“And if I were you, I’d stop provoking me, otherwise, I’ll sell you as soon as I own the team.

I know you think I’m sweet and kind, and a little crazy…

But I’m none of those things unless I want to be.

” And then she bumped her shoulder against his one last time as she walked past him into the hallway.

All those arrogant, powerful men could go to hell. She might not be the obvious choice to lead this team, but damn it, she was going to be the best.