Page 21 of My Pucking Enemy (The Milwaukee Frost #4)

Luca

“Don’t get sucked into anything Katie says,” I warn, drumming my fingers against the steering wheel as we turn down the road to my parents’ house. “She always drinks too much Bailey’s during the holidays.”

“…Katie is your cousin, right?” Wren asks from the passenger seat, and even knowing I shouldn’t, I glance over at her.

There’s nothing about her outfit that should make me feel like this. Her lumpy, ugly Christmas sweater is a far cry from the little black dress she was wearing for our date, but it’s having the same, weird effect on me. Making my skin hot, my eyes hot, my mouth dry.

Like Wren Beaumont gives me a fever.

After winning that game against the Wild, we went into our four-day stretch game free.

One of the many reasons I’m happy to be a hockey player and not in the NFL.

Four teams play today, and as much as I’m committed to my team as the next guy, I simply can’t imagine spending all Christmas day getting ready for, and then playing, a game.

Especially not for the guys with kids.

A pang rings through my chest, like it always does when I think about the plan I’d laid out with Mandy. According to that plan, she would be pregnant right now with our first.

Instead, she’s holding hands with a pop star. It’s less about Mandy and more about the question of whether or not I’ll be able to catch up. Be able to find someone else who would possibly want to have a family with me.

“Luca?” Wren asks, as we pull into the driveway, which is already practically full. We park behind Cal and Sloane and slide out.

“Yeah, my cousin,” I say, trying to blink away the weird feeling in my brain. “She’ll be the one trying to get you to drink spiked eggnog.”

“Well, lucky for me,” Wren says, bending into the backseat to pick up her bag of gifts, “I don’t drink any eggnog, so I should be safe.”

As we walk up the sidewalk—which is dutifully free of snow, salted, and dry—I file that little piece of information away into the growing space in my mind that’s dedicated to Wren.

Doesn’t like eggnog.

“Wren!” Mom says, opening the door and throwing her arms around Wren, who blinks in surprise and struggles not to drop her bag of gifts.

Dad appears, relieving her of the bag and taking his turn at a hug. Then my parents hug me, Dad patting me on the back in the exact way he’s done since I got tall enough for him to do it.

“Merry Christmas, champ,” he says, pulling back and smiling up at me, adjusting his glasses.

The house is already steaming, filled with the scent of a million things cooking in the kitchen and getting hot from far too many bodies in the house.

“You didn’t bring that sensor again, did you?” Mom asks, giving me a suspicious look.

“I just wanted you to be aware of the air quality in here,” I say, eyes darting to the living room where it sounds like Sloane and Katie are talking. “Probably wouldn’t be good for Sloane—”

Mom rolls her eyes. “We got those air purifiers. And we have a few windows open. Though your sister is not happy about that—she says it’s freezing.”

“It’s a million degrees in here,” I counter, pulling at the collar of my sweater, but she’s already moved on to Wren.

“Come in here with me, darling,” she says, to which Wren darts an unsure look at me and turns to trail after. Dad hands me the bag of gifts and motions for me to follow them while he heads back to the kitchen.

When I get into the living room, I find Katie and Sloane on the couch, their laughter dying out as Mom leads Wren to the Christmas tree.

“Here,” she says, picking up one of the long, slim rectangular boxes that Sloane and I have come to recognize as being clothes. “This is for you—sorry we couldn’t get it to you sooner!”

Wren opens the box, pausing when she finds a sweater that matches with the rest of us. Mom gave me mine a month ago at Thanksgiving, and I wonder how in the world she managed to get another for Wren on such short notice.

Then I see the place where Wren is stitched in over the heart, and realize exactly why she already had a small sweater ready. This one was supposed to go to Mandy, and Mom must have quickly undone the embroidery, adding Wren’s name instead.

Mandy’s voice, strained, pops into my head as if she were standing right there, “I just don’t see why they expect me to want to wear the dumb sweater. Like I gave away all individuality when I married you?”

“It’s just a dumb tradition,” I’d said, basically pleading with her on Christmas Eve. “Can you just wear it for the picture? Then you can take it off.”

Now, Wren bites her lip, looking up at my mom, and I realize there are tears in her eyes. Once again, she’s delivering the performance of a lifetime.

“Thank you,” she says, sounding genuinely choked up. When I glance at my sister, her eyes are wide, flitting between me and Wren, who’s already taking her other sweater off to reveal a snug white turtleneck underneath that makes my heart stutter.

“Thank you so much,” Wren says.

When I meet Sloane’s gaze again, she has a tissue out, and is dabbing under her eyes.

“Shit,” I hear her mutter to Katie, “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry today.”

“Oh, come on, girl,” Katie says, rubbing her back. “You have to set more realistic goals.”

I find Cal in the kitchen, working with my dad on the meal, and I fall into step with them. Cal and I are used to playing sous chef to my dad while the girls relax in the living room, and it’s easy to step into the cadence of it now.

“Wren, huh?” Cal asks, his eyes flicking to mine as we stand side-by-side, slicing carrots at a diagonal to be roasted with honey and cinnamon. I finish a carrot and toss it into the mixing bowl, glancing back at my dad to see if he’s listening.

This might be my chance to come clean to Cal. Or, if not to tell him the whole thing is fake, at least make it clear that it’s entirely casual.

But for some reason, I can’t.

“Yeah,” I finally bring myself to say, and Cal lets out a breath with a little laugh at the end like he’s been holding it for years.

“You know,” he says, still laughing and shaking his head, his brown curls bouncing with the movement, “I’m gonna be honest with you, man—Wren Beaumont makes a lot more sense to me than Mandy.”

I bite my tongue, thinking back to the day of my wedding all those years ago.

Sloane clearly had a problem with my bride, but never brought it up. Her and Cal found solace in one another, and then I think of everything that came out of it.

At the time, I was pretty pissed off, until I realized me being mad at them wasn’t going to make them stop being in love.

It also helped to talk to my mom, who said she’d always known Sloane was in love with Callum.

That she knew Sloane was throwing away her shot with a man who really loved her to make sure she didn’t ruin my relationship with my best friend.

And I realized I didn’t want that, even after all the lying and the other shit Sloane had done.

When we’re done prepping the food and everything’s in the oven, I move over to the drink cart, whipping up one for Wren and carrying it out to her in the living room.

She’s sitting in an armchair, chatting with Sloane and Katie. In her matching striped, green Christmas sweater and leggings, she looks impossibly soft. Something I want to rub against my cheek, like a commercial for bed sheets.

I hand her the drink, and she looks up at me with wide eyes, like it’s the first time in her life someone has brought her something unprompted. It makes me want to find her something else, bring her things like a cat dragging dead birds to her door.

The day goes on in a warm, happy blur. Wren is, somehow, perfect. She’s loud and bright, playing into jokes expertly, and it makes me realize just how much of a strain it was for me to have Mandy at my side before. Always quiet, the weight of conversation on my shoulders.

I took that weight because of what I was asking from her. Because of the contract.

But with Wren, I can relax, laugh along with the others at her jokes.

We eat dinner, and Wren gracefully dodges questions about her past. After, while playing through what feels like every game in the game cabinet, she and I are forced to be on different teams, everyone declaring it’s just not fair to play with us together.

“Luca used to take the dice with him to the bathroom when we were kids,” Katie says, gesturing toward Wren with her eggnog. “To make sure we wouldn’t play without him, wouldn’t cheat.”

“That makes it sound weird,” I protest as Wren laughs. “It wasn’t weird. They actually did cheat while I was gone.”

“Of course we did!” Sloane cries, face red from laughing. “We could never beat you—everything was so serious with Luca.”

Wren finds my hand under the table, squeezing it almost like she’s really my girlfriend, finding a way to show me that even as she makes fun of me with my family, she’s on my side.

And I squeeze hers right back. Maybe it’s method acting.

Later that night, Mom insists that Wren and I take the movie room together.

She and I lay on our backs in the dark, side by side and not touching, staring up at the ceiling, the air mattress beneath us shifting slightly with each breath, each movement.

Almost daring us to roll to the center and find one another.

Around us on the walls are movie posters my dad has collected since we were kids. This room still smells like new, rich leather, despite the fact that my parents moved to Milwaukee and bought new furniture almost three years ago.

My hands twitch to reach out and touch her, but I won’t. Every other minute, I open my mouth to say something, then decide not to.

It’s been a long day. She probably just wants to go to sleep. She’s probably already asleep.

Then, just when I’ve convinced myself that she really is asleep, Wren says, so quietly that I almost don’t hear it, “You’re really fucking lucky, Luca.”