Page 47 of Goalie and the Girl Next Door
Bailey, for her part, just laughs. “You don’t know how much I’ve heard that tonight.”
I shrug. “Touché. It’s a pleasure toseeyou,” I say with extra emphasis. She might not get the joke, but we’ve been wondering for weeks if this so-called Bailey was an actual person or a convenient figment of Carson’s imagination. He would bring her up when it suited the moment. But not only is she real, she’s delightful.
“Now that we’ve cleared that up…” Carson, starts but then he looks at me with a smirk that immediately makes my stomach jump.
Because Carson has heard me talk about Marcy in those early days. Too much. I may have described her as “scary smart with a perfect mouth and the ability to melt steel with her sarcasm—a woman I have to win over.” Which means Carson is also connecting dots.
I shoot him a look. The universal male signal for:
Don’t. You. Dare.
He raises both eyebrows like,What? Who, me?
I subtly shake my head. One sharp motion.
He tilts his head innocently and I narrow my eyes.
He smirks. I widen mine slightly.
It’s a silent battle of eyebrow archery.
Marcy watches us, arms crossed, head tilted. “Do you two need a whiteboard?”
Bailey bursts out laughing. “I was just about to ask the same thing.”
Carson claps a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll have to forgive us. Too many practices and we communicate mostly through interpretive dance now.”
“That was interpretive dance?” Marcy deadpans.
“Trust me,” I mutter, “you don’t want to see the actual choreography.”
Marcy turns to Bailey. “Can you read them any better than me?”
Bailey shrugs. “Not even a little.”
Carson chuckles. “It’s true. And Clément here? Real romantic. You should see the way he?—”
My elbow finds his ribs before he can finish.
He grunts, laughs it off, and nods to Marcy. “Pleasure meeting you, Miss Fontaine. If you ever need someone to interpret more hockey-player nonsense, I’m fluent.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says, but I hear the coolness enter her voice again.
They disappear through the doors, and I turn to find Marcy watching me with a look that’s somewhere between amused and suspicious. “You’re not buying the interpretive dance excuse, are you?”
“Not even a little.”
“Thought so.”
She studies me. “What did you tell him?”
I give her my most innocent smile. “Only that you were a deeply respectable woman who terrifies me a little.”
The corners of her mouth turn down and my stomach drops. I can’t tell her that at first I thought of her as a mission, a game to be won. That would only push her farther away.
I may have just survived a cupcake choking incident, nearly kissed her, and physically blocked an incoming couple flying through doors…
But the disappointed frown on her face is the worst thing that could’ve happened tonight.
