Page 42 of Flirty Pucking Wolf

We joke about Mac being able to read minds, and he swears he can’t, but it’s spooky how much he knows.

“Yeah, but…”

“No,” Mac says firmly. “You start thinking this shit and it’s going to screw you up. Everyone hits rough patches. There’s a bunch of shit hitting the fan all at once—trying to make the playoffs, you having to compete on the dance show, me and Bedard getting into relationships…”

I’m startled when he says this. Shocked when Bedard nods in agreement.

“Dude,” our team captain says, “it’s not just you dealing with changes and worrying it’s affecting your game. You also have the other teams placing a bounty on you. They aren’t doing that because you’re dancing with Sophie. They’re doing it because you are so important to us on the ice and how it’ll impact us if you aren’t playing.”

I swallow thickly. It’s nice to hear these words from my teammates, men I respect and care about.

“But…” I say again.

“But we are a team,” Bedard says insistently, with Stone nodding in agreement. “Our success does not rest solely on your shoulders. As important as you are, everyone is important. We all have our roles. And we’ve all slipped sometime during the season. It’s a shit show when it’s a bunch of us at once, but that’s not your fault. You’re not getting any time off. When you’re not skating, you’re dancing. You’re doing everything you can. Give yourself a break.”

I appreciate his kindness, but I’m not dancing for me, I’m dancing for Sophie. I can’t let temporary weakness undo what Sophie’s been working toward for a lifetime. Nodding, I throw a card down on the pile to move the game along.

* * *

Waking in my own bed with Sophie in my arms is a heaven I never knew existed. We arrived home at dawn and fell into bed. I’m going to miss the peace I find holding Sophie. Hockey doesn’t press sleepy kisses on my pec or wear the cutest pink plastic eyeglasses I’ve ever seen. Swallowing the lump that forms in my throat whenever I think about my time with Sophie ending, I press a kiss to the crown of her strawberry-scented hair.

“Hmm…” She nuzzles into my chest. “Good morning.”

“Did you sleep okay?”

She answers me by snuggling deeper under my covers and running her toes along my calf. I yelp because they’re like five little ice cubes against my skin. Her giggle isn’t like tinkling bells. It’s like an asthmatic piglet and that makes me laugh as I wrap her in my arms and roll on top of her. Gone is the sleepiness in her ocean-blue eyes. All I see now is hunger.

Brushing her hair off her forehead, I run my fingertips down the side of her face. “You are so beautiful.”

Her impish grin invites me to kiss the corner of it. “You’re okay, I guess, boyo,” she teases. “Are you okay?”

I press my hard cock against her center. “You tell me.”

She smirks and raises her hips to rub against me. “That part working was never a question. How are your ribs and other bits?”

“Sophie, everything’s working as it should be. I think limbering up before we start dancing is a good thing, don’t you?”

Her low, sexy chuckle rubs her tank-top-covered breasts against my bare chest with delicious friction. I start kissing behind her ear—that always makes her gasp. When I reach the spot where her neck and shoulder meet, the urge to give her a mate mark is overwhelming. It’s what wolf shifters in the old days did to claim their mate, but modern wolf shifters don’t do it anymore. Even if we did, I can’t do it. I can’t claim a mate, especially not Sophie. It wouldn’t be fair to Sophie to claim her as my mate when I can’t give her what any female wolf shifter would want for her life.

My desire to make love to her is still there. It’s always going to be there as long as I live. But I can’t right now. It’s going to reveal too much of my heart, and I can’t do it. I give her neck the tiniest nip as a salve to my soul before rolling away.

“Sorry,” I say. “I can hear Mac and Miranda moving around, and it’s just weird.”

Sophie props up on her elbow and looks down on my face with a furrowed brow.

“You better not start getting performance anxiety on the dance floor too, Trevor.”

I roll my eyes. “Your brother has been watching us dance for weeks. I’m used to that. But I don’t thinkthisbrother wants to hear us boinking, and I don’t want to have to look him in the eye over a plate of eggs, knowing the delicious things I just did to his little sister with him in earshot. It’s a respect thing as much as it’s a self-preservation thing.”

With a big sigh, Sophie rises from the bed, giving me a great view of her pert ass cheeks peeking out from the little shorts she wears to sleep in. I almost regret the slight fib I just told. I don’t want Mac to hear what we do, but I added extra soundproofing to my room when I was renovating the apartments, so they’d have to be pressing their ears up to the door to hear anything. But I can’t trust myself to make love with Sophie and not claim her. Not this morning.

She dresses in dance clothes then pulls joggers and a T-shirt out of my dresser and tosses them at me.

As my head emerges from my shirt, I ask, “Are we practicing here, or do we have to be filmed?”

“Practicing here and being filmed. Logan is going to help us. Tonight’s the full moon, so if we can get the part of our dance in shifter form filmed tonight, it’ll be awesome.”

Sophie walks to the window overlooking the field between the barn and the trees. “Can we use the field?”

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