Page 14 of Ice Princess

“Mom, I’ve got practice,” I whisper in my mother’s ear, hoping that’ll be my ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.

But my card is rejected.

Mom frowns at me. “Gunner, you promised you’d be at my disposal to help with the event today. Is hockey worth more to you than your mother?”

I flinch. How am I supposed to win an argument like that?

“Come. Sit here.” Mom plunks me down next to Victoria and then runs away grinning like a child who just dropped a Mento’s mint into a shaken soda bottle.

“Hey, Gunner.” Cecilia wiggles her fingers at me.

Her sister giggles. “Hi, Gunner. I’d be happy to fix you a plate?”

Victoria’s smile turns brittle at their offers.

I sigh from deep in my chest, already feeling a headache. How much longer do I have to put up with this?

Suddenly, I hear a chair scrape against the ground and the entire table snaps into silence.

I look up and my entire skeleton jumps inside my skin when I see Rebel wrapping her delicate hands around a chair. She taps the back of the chair twice with a pink-painted fingernail. The wind picks up and stirs the hem of her long, pink dress.

Smiling breezily, she tilts her head and asks, “Is this seat taken?”

CHAPTER

FIVE

REBEL

If looks could kill,I’d be dead five times over.

In fact, I’m pretty sure if looks were a pickup truck with four-wheel drive, the Lady Luck Society would ram me down like an armadillo crossing the road, stop, put their car in reverse and run me over again.

Not one woman around the table is happy to see me dragging out a chair and preparing to sit.

“Darling,” the leader of the Ladies and the highly respected matron of the Kinsey family herself—Carol Kinsey gives me a tight, polite smile, “I’m afraid that one’s taken.”

“That’s fine.” I grab a chair from a nearby table, drag it over and fall into it.

Carol Kinsey has the most polite cold shoulder in town, but she can’t hide her distaste totally. Her mouth tightens like someone forced her to suck on the ripest lemon they could find.

Twitters of disapproval rise from the others.

I toss a saccharine-sweet smile at each of them, but my confidence falters when I see Gunner at the table. With his tattoos and dark hair, Gunner looks like a vampire prince inthe middle of a bright, colorful flower field—albeit a poisonous flower field.

I dismiss him with a flick of my gaze. No matter how quiet and edgy Gunner wishes to be, he is—first and foremost—a Kinsey. And by birth, he has a seat around this table, whether he likes it or not.

I, on the other hand, have no birthright whatsoever. Everything I have, I’ve worked hard for and now, I’m ready to work harder than I ever have in my entire life.

“I like sitting at the table with you ladies,” I tell Carol Kinsey. “It almost makes me want to do this more often.”

My words are a poison-tipped arrow with one target. I know the threat will bother them.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Marjorie White spits. The woman has dark hair and a perpetual scowl etched into her face. That scowl gets deeper, and more wrinkly whenever she sees me.

Her dislike for me started when her eldest son, Buddy, rented an entire restaurant just to ask me out.

I said no.

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