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CHAPTER 16

LIZZY

DON’T DISCOUNT THE BUTT.

For the next few days after returning from North Carolina, I spent a lot of time with Joey Baxter, John Samuels’s fiancée. She was fun and energetic and, she introduced me to some of the other wives and girlfriends. For some reason, very excited about my PR assignment for the team. John himself was already a PR draw, given that he was the youngest starting goalie in the FHL.

“You know, wombats are actually super interesting,” Joey said one night as I sat across the table from her at the Teakhouse, a scotch in front of me. Declan and John were reviewing tapes from the North Carolina game, hoping to overcome whatever issues had flagged them and led to the loss. I’d slipped a tracker onto Declan’s truck, and could see that he was still at John’s house, which had been part of my original security evaluation when I’d arrived. It was as secure as a private home could be. I hoped John used his security system when he was home. Or at least locked his doors. People could be so careless.

“What do you mean by interesting?” I asked, sipping my scotch.

Joey leaned her head to one side, her eyes widening. “Oh my gosh, there’s so much.”

I scrunched my nose at her. Wombats had really never crossed my radar prior to this assignment. As far as I knew, they were some sort of exotic marsupial native to Australia. I hadn’t come across any in my lifetime, and I still didn’t understand how a Virginia-based hockey team had come to be named for such a strange animal.

I supposed having a new friend meant I should humor her quirks. Maybe affection for marsupials was one of Joey’s. “Why don’t you tell me about them?”

“Well, for one thing, they are adorable.”

Joey pulled out her phone and showed me a bunch of images of squat, fat, furry animals with big dark noses and very long claws. I had to admit, they were cute. They looked kind of snuggly, and one video seemed to suggest they could be trained to do laundry.

“They are cute,” I admitted. “But cute does not necessarily mean interesting, Joey.”

“Right. But how about this? Did you know that their poop is cube-shaped?”

“Why would I know that?”

“Well, it is. And wombats use their cube-shaped poop to build towers, mark territory, and attract mates.”

She was giving me a look after this statement that told me I should be extremely impressed by animals who build towers out of their own feces, but I was struggling to feel much of anything about this odd fact. Maybe a vague sense of disgust.

“Fine, I have more.” Joey smiled and then gave me a look that seemed to say she was very determined to sway my opinion of wombats.

I waved my hand for her to proceed. “By all means.”

“Wombats. Have. Killer. Butts.” She pronounced every word of this statement with exaggerated emphasis and then stared at me.

“Excuse me?”

“Killer butts.” She waited, saying nothing else.

“Joey, I’m gonna need a little more.”

“Their butts are how they kill predators.”

A raft of images came to mind as I tried to imagine how these small, fat, furry creatures could kill anything with their butts. But I didn’t have to consider the options for long because Joey was pulling up a video on her phone. Moments later, I watched as a big, fat wombat fled from a fox. It dove into its burrow and then squatted down, waiting for the predator to stick its head inside. When the silly fox did, the wombat did the craziest upward twerk I’d ever seen and smashed the fox’s skull against the roof of its burrow.

As it did this, Joey yelled. “BAM!” A nearby couple shot us dirty looks as the woman leaned across the table to blot the man’s sleeve with a napkin after he’d been startled enough to spill his drink.

“Wow,” I said. That was actually very impressive. I had never considered how wombats might take on predators, but now I had a healthy respect for them—and for the power of the butt in general.

“OK,” I said to Joey. “That is super impressive. But it doesn’t actually help me with my mission to gain admiration and awareness for the Wombats hockey team.”

Joey thought for a moment, one finger against her bottom lip, her blond hair waving around her shoulders in a way that made me somewhat envious.

“Wait a minute,” Joey said, her eyes widening. “I have a great idea!”

“Anything would be great at this point.” I’d considered Declan’s desire to make a movie, but lacking any kind of production knowledge or filmmaking expertise, and being a one-woman show, I didn’t think that was going to be possible.

“A butt calendar!”

I stared at her. “A what? Who would want a calendar full of wombat butts?”

“Not that kind of wombat butt. Think about it, these guys—our Wombats—they have incredible physiques, right?”

“Right...” A blush tried to climb my neck, but I willed it back down. Thinking about the corded muscles on Declan’s forearms, or the very prominent bulges of his biceps would serve no purpose at this moment. And I was not going to let myself think about the prince’s butt.

“So, haven’t you ever seen one of those firefighter calendars?”

I guessed that I had, though there weren’t a lot of things like that in Murdan. “I think so? They make those to raise money for the stations, right?”

“Exactly. It would be like that. Wombats are famous for their butts, so we can play on that and make our guys famous for their butts too,” Joey said.

I wasn’t sure I totally agreed with the statement that wombats were famous for their butts, since I’d literally just learned about this, but I let her go on.

“So what do you think? Can we make our Wombats famous for their butts?”

It wasn’t a terrible idea, now that I gave it a little bit of thought.

“Clothed, though, right? Like, not totally naked?”

“Of course,” Joey said. “We could sell them at all the games and give the whole thing an extra dose of PR magic if we used all the proceeds to help some kind of charity. And we could do a huge push on social media.”

As a member of the King’s Guard and someone fairly focused on security, I did not spend much time on social media. I did, however, understand that social media was probably necessary in a public relations effort.

I didn’t want to reveal to Joey that I knew almost nothing about PR, but I asked her the question on my mind anyway.

“Social media… What would we do there?”

Joey assumed her thoughtful pose for a moment longer, sipping her wine and looking upward, as if all social media problems could be solved by something hanging from the ceiling of the Teakhouse Tavern. Then she said, “I’ve got it! Wombat wisdom.”

Again, Joey delivered her idea and then waited, as if I would immediately understand the importance and genius of it. And again, I did not.

“Gonna need more.”

“Well, you of all people now know that wombats are super interesting. What if each calendar image that we share on social media is accompanied by one of these awesome facts—wombat wisdom? And we could also share facts about the player whose butt is being profiled in each post.”

Joey looked extremely excited about this, her eyes were glowing, and she was practically bouncing on her stool. I wasn’t certain that the palace would be excited about me being responsible for revealing the prince’s butt on social media alongside facts about marsupials.

When I didn’t answer immediately, Joey started talking again.

“Come on, Lizzy, it’s a great idea. Why don’t we run it past John and Deck and see what they think?”

I wasn’t opposed to running the idea past the guys, but as far as I could tell, the prince was no more of an expert at public relations than I was. He would likely be very little help, and he seemed to have a rather goofy sense of humor, which would probably mean that he’d think this was a great idea.

I was fairly certain the king would not think this was a great idea. More importantly, I did not see how taking pictures of hockey players’ butts would help me convince Declan to return to his place as heir in a timely fashion.

Joey was on her phone again, furiously poking at the screen and continuing to bounce around in her seat like whatever she was looking at was so exciting she could hardly contain herself.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said, looking up at me. “I just had an idea. And you’re not gonna believe this.”

I was already having trouble believing the previous conversation, let alone the fact that I had agreed to the whole butt idea. I could hardly wait to find out what this one would be.

“What is it?”

“Well, you know I work with animals, right?”

“Yes...”

“Well, I remember hearing about an exotic animal rescue nearby. It’s a place where people who have illegal exotic pets surrender them, and they live out their days being taken care of and fed.”

“OK...”

“Wombats are exotic.”

Joey clearly thought I was following her line of thought. I was clearly not.

“And?”

“And someone in West Virginia had an illegal wombat as a pet, and they recently surrendered it to the exotic animal rescue here. Maybe the team can adopt it!”

My mind reeled. Joey wanted us to adopt a wombat? “What would we do with a wombat?”

“Do you even have to ask? It could be our mascot!” Joey’s eyebrows did this little dancing thing, moving up and down toward her hairline, that told me she was even more excited than she had been about the butt calendar idea.

“A mascot?” I asked.

“A mascot is the ultimate PR move,” Joey said. “Wombats are adorable, as we have already established, and having an actual wombat at games would be such a media draw.”

“OK, how do we get this wombat?”

“You leave that to me,” Joey said.