Page 1 of On Thin Ice (Calgary Mounties #1)

Chapter One

I'VE GOT THIS

Lincoln

JULY

There are several things in life I excel at.

First up, we have hockey. Well, that’s just a given.

You don’t get to be on the starting line of a Stanley Cup winning team if you’re not at the top of your game.

I’ve been in the league for over a decade and am one of the most sought-after players there is.

Because of that, I make a lot of money. Like…

a lot. It’s actually obscene the amount of money I make.

No one needs to make this much money. But I get to do what I love, so I guess I’ll accept the millions my agent negotiates for me at each contract renewal.

Second, we have my stellar personality. No, really. I love having fun and make sure everyone around me is having fun, too. Even if they really, really don’t want to. I love hard and I play hard. And I make no apologies for that. What you see is what you get with me.

Third. Well, that’s also pretty simple. I am excellent at making my super quiet and introverted best friend do things he doesn’t want to do.

See point two. Seth has pretty much just accepted his fate as the reluctant sidekick on all my misadventures.

And he should be happy about that, because that’s how he met his fiancée.

He would never have met Kylie, the bubbly Australian, if I hadn’t forced him out of his comfort zone and dragged him off on a tour around Europe when all he wanted to do was mope at home after a pretty shitty end to the season.

Fourth is my ability to get along with pretty much anyone.

In this industry, you have to deal with so many different personalities and if you fire up easily, that’s a surefire way to tank your career.

Or at the very least, be labelled as difficult or an instigator.

That’s fine for a D-man, but when you’re one of the alternate captains with pressure to make sure the team stays cohesive, you kind of have to play peacemaker in the locker room more often than not.

Some might say I’m too easygoing, but it works for me.

But right now, points three and four are being severely tested.

“Seth, I get that you aren’t looking forward to standing up in front of this many people, but seriously, you’re about to marry the woman of your dreams. And besides, you play in front of tens of thousands of people several times a week.

Surely you can handle this when it’s all your loved ones.

This is just ridiculous,” Adele Wilson says, her hands firmly on her hips while she stares down the six foot four hockey player who is currently pouting about having to be the centre of attention for the next several hours.

She looks so much like her cousin, the bride to be, that sometimes it’s hard to believe they aren’t twins, with their long brown hair and tanned skin.

But while Kylie has green eyes and is all soft curves and smiles, Adele is petite and super grumpy.

Well, she has been lately, anyway. And right now, Seth should be quaking in his expensive shoes to have those dark brown eyes telling him he needs to man up.

She’s dressed in her red bridesmaid dress with her long hair coiled up on top of her head.

I can smell her delicate perfume from where I’m standing next to Seth in one of the penthouse suites of the resort in Tahiti they’ve booked out for this wedding to take place.

With guests from both North America and Australia, they’d decided to go somewhere in the middle.

I may have gotten involved with the planning process and made sure that it was the most expensive and stereotypical Tahitian experience ever.

But that’s what happens when you let the Best Man with a track record of enjoying the finer things in life do the planning that the groom has actively avoided.

Kylie also sucks at organising anything, so it’s basically been me and Adele calling the shots.

Which has been working mostly fine until this exact moment when Seth has finally had enough and just wants to grab Kylie and get married on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no one else present.

Maybe we did go a bit crazy with the events leading up to the ceremony, but there are people from all over the world here, and they deserve a good holiday as well. We’ve been on boat tours, gone parasailing - we even made sure that there was surfing so that Kylie and her family could get their fix.

So what if we’d packed their schedule so tight that Seth and Kylie have barely seen each other in the four days we’ve been here? That’s what the wedding night and honeymoon is for.

I’d had great fun planning everything during last year’s offseason, but once the season started and work took over my life again, most of the planning fell on Adele.

Well, technically Kylie, but seeing as she can barely organise her everyday life, Adele took over.

And it’s turned Adele from a bubbly, happy-go-lucky person to a super-stressed-out mess.

“Adele… Why don’t you go get a glass of champagne and find Ben? Leave the Seth wrangling up to me,” I say after a tense and silent moment, while Seth eyes her with a mixture of desperation and stubbornness.

Not sure who I’m rescuing from who here, but I need to save someone and this wedding before it goes completely off the rails.

“Ben is being weird. I’d rather not find him, if I’m honest,” Adele says, sighing. She reaches up to run a hand through her hair, apparently forgetting that it’s in a rather elaborate up-do, and immediately gets her engagement ring caught in her curls.

“Shit,” she wails, pulling her hand away along with several strands of hair.

“Okay, well at least go check on Kylie. I’ve got this,” I reply, deciding to leave the subject of her fiancé being weird alone.

I can only handle one crisis at a time right now, and trying to work out why Ben is acting out of character is not something I can handle on top of everything else.

I had noticed it myself, but as I only really see our old school friend every few months when he comes to visit from Vancouver, I can’t claim to know him well these days.

It could be completely normal for him to cling to his fiancée and monitor her every movement…

Probably not, but again, bigger problems right now.

Adele levels me with a glare, and I have to wonder how Seth hasn’t crumbled under that level of pissed-offness in the last ten minutes.

“You better make sure he gets his ass up that aisle in an hour, or I’m coming for you next, Lincoln O’Malley.” She turns and strides out of the suite, her flashy gold Louboutin’s clicking across the tiles.

I salute her back. “Fucking terrifying right now,” I mutter, before turning to face Seth, waiting until the door slams shut before changing tactics.

“I get that this is all outside your comfort zone, buddy, but Adele did have an excellent point amongst all the crabbiness. You can more than handle this. So, let’s start with getting that bow tie sorted.”

Seth sighs, raking a hand through his hair while the ends of the bow tie hang limply on either side of his neck.

It was the bow tie that set him off. It seems like trying to tie the damn thing was the final straw on his rather frayed nerves, and I’d stupidly called Adele in here to help him tie it.

Rookie move.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Linc,” he says, turning back to the mirror to stare at his reflection mournfully.

“Break it down for me. What can’t you do? Aside from the bow tie.” I cross my arms and widen my stance while I look at him in the mirror, settling in for the pep-talk portion of the afternoon.

Although we act like brothers, our reflections are vastly different.

He’s a few inches taller than me with dark brown hair, brown eyes and a permanently serious expression, while I have blond hair, blue eyes and a playful smirk.

We’re both broad across the shoulders, and after years spent in the gym and on the ice, there isn’t an ounce of fat on either of us.

Pure muscle, baby.

“It’s just all too much. I’ve barely seen Kylie for longer than twenty minutes since we got here, and everyone needs something from me. Are you sure you can’t just go find a ship captain to get us out of here and we can get married by ourselves?”

I shake my head. “No can do, brother. For one thing, Adele would very likely turn into the demon from the Exorcist and haunt your ass for the rest of your life. And as much as you are feeling overwhelmed, I know you want to give Kylie the perfect day. Everyone you both love is here and can’t wait to celebrate with you.

You guys went through a lot to get here. ” I remind him, not that he needs it .

They truly went through a lot to be together, with Kylie uprooting her life in Australia to move to Calgary, leaving behind the friends and family that were her entire world to take a chance on the hockey player who asks nothing of anyone.

Never one to ask people to do anything for him, it had taken almost losing her for him to admit that he needed her in his life and ask her to stay.

But once they sorted that out, they’ve become the couple that most people wish they could be like.

I say most people because while I am a hopeless romantic, the idea of settling down with one person for the rest of my life fills me with dread.

It doesn’t help that the last few people I slept with turned into stage five clingers set on bagging themselves a hockey player.

First there was James, who turned out to be a rabid Mounties fan and kept showing up at every game with his friends, telling them all we were together.

We weren’t, and it took seeing me kissing someone else for him to get the hint, but not before he threw a drink in my face.

Then there was the entertainment reporter, Samantha, who was a drunken one-night stand that I ended up needing to get a restraining order for her to take the hint.

And, while the threesome with Declan and his wife, Elena, was one of the wildest nights of my life, if the truth of that ever got out, my career would be toast.

I normally save all my wilder shenanigans for out-of-town hook ups with people who don’t know who I am.

But I’d gotten swept up in the moment after we’d crashed out of the playoffs last season and fallen into bed with the very hot CEO of one of the teams biggest sponsors and his trophy wife.

It had been a while since I’d been someone’s first same-sex encounter, and I guess my ego did all the thinking after that.

Probably shouldn’t have let them film it, but hey, it would damage his own career just as much as my mine if it got out.

So, I’m pretty confident it will never see the light of day, other than for their own personal enjoyment while they relive the night they hooked up with the hot hockey player who blew their minds (their words, not mine, but I’ll happily claim that title).

Needless to say, I will be sticking with watching my friends settle down while I avoid all human contact for the foreseeable future and force myself to think with my upstairs brain for a while.

Seth sighs, lifting the ends of the bow tie again. “Fine.”

I watch him for a few minutes while he struggles with it, before finally cracking it. Walking out of the room, I set off in search of one of the other bridesmaids.

“Tara. I know you’re on maid of honour duties, but can I please steal you for a few minutes to sort out Seth’s bow tie?” I ask, finding Kylie’s best friend with a breast pump attached to her boob in one of the bedrooms of the bridal suite.

“Uh… Can it wait a few minutes?” she asks in her cute Australian accent.

It’s good to see that neither of us finds it weird that I’m standing here while her boob is out. But given I’ve seen her with a baby’s head attached to said boobs several times in the last four days, we’ve both just accepted the natural progression of our friendship.

“Depends. How quick can you be with the tying? I need to get him downstairs for photos before he has a complete meltdown and kidnaps the bride to get married in the middle of the ocean.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Um… okay…”

I let out a puff of air. “Yeah. He’s not handling the pressure particularly well, which is very out of character for him, but I’m giving him a pass on account of the fact that this is the first time he’s done this.”

She clucks her tongue. “Yeah. Kylie has been jittery all morning. Don’t you guys have to wear suits all the time, though? How come you can’t do it?”

I shrug. “We usually just do suits without ties on game day. The penguin suits are more for fancy charity events, and we have people dressing us for those.”

“So many comments I can make right now, but I’m not touching the fact that you overpaid hockey players can’t dress yourselves. Why don’t you just forego the bow ties if it’s just stressing him out? Kylie won’t care.”

I ignore the jab about our inability to dress ourselves and consider her suggestion. There really isn’t any reason that I can think of for Seth having to wear a bow tie, other than it was in Adele’s wedding vision.

“I’ll go tell him to nix the bow tie. If you can tell Adele it was your idea? Ok, bye!” I flee the room, ignoring her protests.

It probably isn’t fair running away from a mother tied to a breast pump, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

“Okay. We’re going bow tie free,” I declare as I walk back into the room Seth has been hiding in.

He tosses it aside immediately. “Thank god.”

I pull my own silk tie off as well. If he doesn’t have to wear the bow tie, then I’m removing the noose from around my own neck.

“I’ve only been saying that for the last hour,” Dean Thomas pipes up from the corner where he’s been sitting, scrolling on his phone since we all got dressed.

The burley goalie has been exactly zero help today, and I’d actually forgotten he was even sitting there. I certainly don’t recall him suggesting nixing the bow tie, but whatever.

“If anyone asks, this is all Tara’s idea. I’m too scared to tell Adele,” I say, checking the time on my Rolex. “Alright, let’s get this party started.”

Seth flicks me an uneasy look. “And you’re sure I can’t-”

“No. You cannot disappear into the ocean. So, let’s go.”