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

Luca

“Come on, don’t be a chicken!”

“Me not getting in the water has nothing to do with being a chicken,” I say to Sloane, keeping my eyes closed against the sun. “It has to do with not wanting to swim.”

She tries to splash me, but the water only reaches my feet. “You’re no fun!”

“Mhm,” I say, wiggling my toes, “refreshing.”

“You’d better be careful,” a deeper voice sounds to my left, and I open my eyes for a second, glancing at Callum as he sits in the sun lounger next to me. “Or she’s going to get out the water guns.”

My best friend isn’t wrong—Sloane would resort to drenching me with a water gun if it meant I might get in the pool. But even that wouldn’t convince me to swim today—I’m too busy thinking about Wren Beaumont.

“But don’t you think it’s a little weird that there’s nothing about her online?” I ask, and Cal groans loudly the second I start the sentence. He already knows where it’s going.

He’s the only guy on the team—well, maybe with the exception of Maverick Hawkins—who would dare to groan at something I said.

Cal kicks his feet up onto his sun lounger, pops on a pair of sunglasses, reclines in his seat and says, “Aren’t you bored of this yet, man?”

“It’s my intuition, Cal. Something is telling me she’s not who she says she is. And the parole thing.”

“Maybe you misheard that part,” Cal says, pointedly, “when you were eavesdropping on her conversation like a creep.”

“I was not—”

“She worked with the FBI,” Sloane interrupts, and I sit up. She has her arms braced on the edge of the pool and is staring up at me. Her golden hair is slicked to her head, a shade darker wet. “Maybe they had to scrub her from the interwebs when she went undercover. Maybe parole is a code word.”

“Wren worked as a consultant,” I scoff back, “which means she was not going undercover. And maybe parole is just a word that means what we think it means.”

Cal plays along with his wife, gesturing at me with his beer bottle. “Maybe that’s just what they want you to think.”

“You guys aren’t taking this seriously enough.”

“Taking what seriously?”

All of us turn and look at the sliding door to the deck, where Astrid—Sloane’s best friend—and Grayson O’Connor—our goalie—are stepping through, wearing their swimsuits. Astrid looks at us all curiously, while Grayson is still trying to get the sliding door shut behind them.

“Astrid!” Sloane calls. “Come get in the pool, please!”

“Luca is still obsessing over that new strategist,” Cal says to Grayson, who looks at me with a little more deference. I’ve got a few years on the guy, and he respects my position as captain, unlike my best friend.

“What’s wrong with her?” Grayson asks. “She seems pretty nice.”

Astrid slides into the pool while Sloane yells, “No! Don’t ask him that!”

But it’s too late—I’m already fixing him with a look.

“What’s wrong with her? Probably nothing.

But there is a lot wrong with the circumstances of her being hired.

No online qualifications. Other than this story about working with the FBI, no history.

Nothing online about her, a hometown, where she came from—nothing.

How do we even know that she’s telling the truth about the FBI thing? And I heard that she’s on parole.”

“I mean, Vic hired her, right? So she’s probably fine.

And she told me she watched one of our games from last year,” Grayson says, setting down his towel on a lounger and heading for the pool.

“Asked me if I was experiencing any mental health problems. She seems pretty perceptive. Maybe she’ll be good in the role. ”

Last season, he’d fostered two girls after his best friend died.

It seriously weighed on him, and his performance suffered.

I would never tell him as much, but it definitely had something to do with us not coming home with the Stanley Cup.

The two girls just went back to live with their biological aunt less than a month ago.

“Sure,” I mutter, rolling my eyes when Sloane makes a gesture at me like, see? Wren knows what she’s doing! “No offense, Grayson, but a monkey could watch the games from last year and pick up on your anxiety. That does not make her some sort of genius.”

“Here’s my take, brother,” Sloane says, standing in the middle of the pool and cupping water in her hands. “You are threatened by her.”

“Threatened?” I scoff, shaking my head. “She’s like, barely five feet tall.”

“One, she’s definitely taller than that—you’re just physically freaky. And two, I don’t mean that she’s going to beat you up. I mean you don’t like people saying she’s smart because it threatens your smarts.”

My eyebrows are so high I worry they might disappear into my hairline.

Sloane turns to Astrid, whose short black hair is also now plastered to her head. “Astrid, do you concur?”

“Sure, seems solid to me.”

Sloane looks back to me with an expression that says See? doctorate in psychology agrees with me.

“I am not threatened—” I start, prepared to keep listing out the things about Wren that are putting me on edge. But once more the sliding door opens, and I stop.

When I turn, I expect it to be Maverick Hawkins and Ruby, his wife. Maverick might actually be on my side with this—he’s the only other person who might be as guarded and suspicious as me, with the stuff he’s gone through.

But it’s neither Maverick nor Ruby.

It’s a woman in a little red bikini, holding a tote bag on her elbow, her strawberry blonde hair twisted up into a knot on the top of her head. Her long, tanned legs shimmer in the sun like she’s rubbed herself in glitter. She’s wearing white sandals, and her toenails are painted pink.

Wren holds herself like she doesn’t care who looks. Like she wants everyone looking at her. My eyes travel of their own accord, taking in the smooth slope of her neck, the little dip of her clavicle, the little bows on her bikini top, the gem sparkling in her belly button.

Too late, I realize I’m staring and rip my gaze away.

“Wren!” Sloane calls, splashing a bit and waving her over. “You made it! Please tell me you’re interested in playing mermaids with me.”

“Not hard to miss a house like this,” Wren says. Although her eyes don’t cut to me, I feel her recognition in the way she gives me a wide berth, moving to the other side of the pool to set her things down. “And that depends—what kind of lore are we working on? I’m not good at holding my breath.”

I fight for Sloane’s attention while Wren turns, shrugging off her loose, open cover up. Once Sloane’s eyes meet mine, I make a face at her that says You traitor.

Sloane makes a face back that says, Stop being weird!

“I should probably get the meat going,” Cal says, clearing his throat and getting to his feet. I glance between him and my sister—as much as I want to stay here and keep an eye on Wren, I also want a second to talk to Cal privately.

“I’ll come with you,” I say, getting to my feet and following him inside. The air conditioning swallows us up, sending goose bumps over my skin, and I lean against the counter as he starts to pull meat from the fridge.

“Are you going to start talking about Wren again?”

I glance over my shoulder to make sure the sliding door is firmly shut. “I know you guys think its overkill, but I’m telling you there’s something off about her. It wasn’t just that nothing came up, man, there was this weird headline—”

“Luca. You keep saying this is our season, right?” Cal cuts me off knocking the fridge shut with his elbow. “So, stop focusing on her. You need to have your head in the game.”

I open my mouth to say something, but he turns and walks toward the front door instead of heading back out. Confused, I start to follow and ask, “Where are you going?”

“Oh,” he says, realizing why I’m confused. “I’ll use the grill out front. Meat smells have been making Sloane sick lately.”

“Oh.” We push through the front, and I hold the screen open for him. “That’s right—I keep forgetting.”

“Yeah,” Cal laughs, but as he starts to lay the meat down on the grill, something cautious moves into his expression. “About that.”

“About that?” I glance back at the house, despite the fact that I can’t see my sister through the walls. “Is everything okay?”

“She’s fine, everything’s fine,” Cal hurries to say. Then, clearing his throat, “But I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Something like a mix between trepidation and dread rises up inside me. That phrase can never really be good, I think. And if there was a time I really wanted to hear it, it was years ago, when Cal first got involved with my sister behind my back.

The two of them drank so much they didn’t remember their quick wedding the night of my bachelor party, their drunken legal union. And when they found out months later, and it was too late to get an annulment, they kept it from me. Sloane promised me they were just friends.

Everything—my intuition—told me that wasn’t true. I could tell there was something going on, but I trusted her. Trusted both of them, even though the marriage and hook-ups weren’t the only things they lied about.

We’ve since made up. But after that, it’s been harder for me to trust people, especially when what they say goes against my intuition.

“Luca?” Cal asks, and I blink at him, realizing I spaced off, not answering him.

He has something he wants to talk about.

Nodding, I cross my arms and sink back against the wall, looking at him like, go ahead, then.

“Well,” he goes on, nervous. That can’t be good.

“I’ve been thinking about taking a year off. ”

I blink at him. What does he mean? A year off? It’s a joke, so I laugh. “Okay. Good one.”

“Seriously, Luca.” He closes the lid to the grill and turns to meet my eyes. “Even just with Sloane being pregnant, I already feel like I’m missing so much. And once the baby is born? I want to be home. I want to be there for it, not traveling every week and watching the video of his first steps.”