Page 29 of My Pucking Enemy (The Milwaukee Frost #4)

Luca

The Sweetheart Train is exactly what it sounds like, and more. We’re greeted with champagne and strawberries, which reminds me of our first date.

Our first fake date.

But something happened in the parking lot, and it’s thrown Wren off her usual frequency. I watch her as we tuck into our little train car, sitting down across from one another, a small pine table between us.

“So, what’s the scenery?” she asks, her hands moving jerkily, a bit of her champagne sloshing up and over the side of her glass. I stare at the little droplet as it tracks a path down the cup, then pick up a napkin and hand it to her, watching as she absent-mindedly pats at it.

It’s like I can hear her heartbeat. Wren doesn’t normally get rattled like this—in fact, other than that night at my parents, I’ve never seen her unintentionally let her emotions come to the surface.

So, I’ve gotten good at reading her little tells.

Rather than crying when she’s sad, she just gets quiet.

Instead of yelling when she’s angry or frustrated, she starts picking at her fingernails.

And when anyone else might flush red with embarrassment or start to stammer, Wren turns up the charm, like her fight-or-flight just makes her even more socially capable.

But right now I’m seeing something of her that I haven’t before. She’s fidgeting, looking nervous, her eyes flying to the window despite the fact that there’s nothing out there but trees moving slowly past the glass as the train starts to roll along.

I open my mouth to ask if she’s okay, but I know her better than that.

Asking that would be too direct, and too easily avoided.

You can’t ask Wren Beaumont if she’s okay.

She’ll leave you at the end of the conversation wondering why you asked in the first place.

How you could assume she was anything other than okay.

So, maybe the truth is that Are you okay? isn’t direct enough.

“What happened in the parking lot?”

Her gaze flies to mine, and she blinks rapidly. For the first time since I met her, I see a little patch of red on her chest, a physical reaction to whatever is going on here.

“What?” She tries to deflect, but it’s a lot sloppier than what I’d usually expect from her.

I’ve spent hours talking to this woman, spent countless meetings sitting across from her and debating team issues. She’s gone toe-to-toe with a six-foot NHL forward, and never had a reaction like this.

Before I can try again, or press the issue, she opens her mouth, and I stop, giving her a chance to talk. If I’m honest, the way she’s acting is worrying me—what could have happened in the parking lot to make her act like this? Did she see something—or someone—that upset her?

“I’m sorry,” she says, dropping her gaze to her hands. “It’s embarrassing.”

“What’s embarrassing?”

“It’s not a fear of trains, exactly,” she says, laughing in a self-deprecating way and flicking her gaze up to mine. “But I just get kind of queasy on them, I guess. There was this one time in Germany, when…”

I stare at her, blood rushing in my ears.

She’s lying to me. I know she is. Six months ago, I would have jumped on this as an opportunity to learn more about her. I would have pushed, and if she didn’t tell me, I would have tried to figure it out on my own.

Just like when I followed her after work. When I hired that detective to compile information about her for me.

But now it’s not just that I want to know. It’s that I want Wren to be able to tell me. I want her to feel like I’m a safe person to talk to. When something happens to her, I want to be the first person she thinks of telling about it.

“…so, anyway. You get it,” she finishes.

“Yeah.” I flash her a smile, watching her eyes skip over my face, knowing she’s reading the tiny lie here behind my expression.

I wonder if it’s always going to be like this between us, both of us not quite getting close to the truth, and both of us knowing that’s the case, even without saying it. “I get it.”

“Okay,” she says, and when she smiles, I know she’s hearing what I’m really saying. I get it. I get that she doesn’t want to share right now.

And I hope that, at some point in the future, she’ll want to tell me.

As Wren continues sipping on her champagne, the tension from the moment slips away and we ease into the date. We laugh and trade jokes, enjoying the breakfast course that comes out first.

“Okay,” she says, leaning back in her seat, resting a hand on her belly. “If I’d know this was going to be a bunch of eating, I would have brought my sweatpants.”

“Come on.” I stand up, setting my napkin on the table and reaching my hand down for hers. “Let’s go explore the train.”

She takes my hand, and we find a viewing cart that’s wide open to the freezing air. We stand at the rail for a minute, my arms wrapped around her shoulders to try and keep her warm, but have to come back inside when she starts to shiver anyway.

It’s another thing added to my mental catalog of her. She’s always shivering, always wrapping her arms around herself. When we’re at my place, she turns on the fireplace as her first action inside the front door.

Gets cold easily.

“It feels like Christmas,” she says, when I hand her a hot chocolate from the refreshments cart and follow her to one of the window seats.

As we move north, snow-covered evergreens pass by the windows, the snow on their needles sparkling in the sunlight. I wonder if it will compound, if we’ll see more snow as we make our way through the bulk of Wisconsin.

“I bet you miss Colorado, don’t you?” Wren asks, turning to me suddenly. I glance out the window, watch the trees, shrug a bit.

“Sometimes,” I say, taking a sip of my hot chocolate.

“But I think it’s more about missing childhood than missing the state itself.

I grew up there, my parents loved it there.

Cal and I became best friends living on that street and in that state.

So, yeah, sometimes I miss it, but I think that might be more about the people. ”

“You’re telling me you don’t miss the mountains?”

“There are some people who act like the mountains are deities,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I’m not one of them.”

“You miss them.”

“Do I wish the sky didn’t feel so wide open sometimes? Sure. But what else does Colorado have that Wisconsin doesn’t? There are a lot of lakes here, too.”

She laughs, leaning forward and pressing a finger to the middle of my chest. “You’re trying to convince me that you love Milwaukee and Wisconsin because you convinced your entire family to move here, but you don’t actually love it here. You just love playing for the Frost.”

My heart thuds loudly in my chest, and my blood feels thick. The thing about Wren is that sometimes she points out things you haven’t even admitted to yourself just yet.

I catch her hand, pulling her finger away from my chest and holding her there for a minute, searching her eyes. “I thought we weren’t doing serious confessions today.”

“It’s not a confession.” But her gaze drifts down to my lips, something calmer and more serious in her eyes. “It’s an observation.”

I hum, thinking for a second that I could try and figure out what was in the parking lot today that spooked her. But I won’t, because I get the feeling it’s a lot more serious than whether I miss Colorado, and whether I would ever want to move out of Wisconsin.

I’m almost thirty. It’s not like I’m going to be in the NHL for the rest of my life, and I’m not particularly interested in coaching. Sometimes, especially during the off season, I have thought about my plans post-Frost.

“Sir? Ma’am?” We turn together to find a server in a white shirt and black slacks smiling at us, a bottle of wine in her hand. “The couple on the other side of the cart wanted to gift this to you.”

She pops the cork, pours the glasses, and when she leaves, Wren picks up the little white card, reading out loud from it, “You remind us of being young and in love.”

When she sets the card down, Wren flicks her eyes up to me, and smiles briefly, before bringing the wine to her lips.