Pinkie Promise (Carter Ridge Book 1)

“Well,” I growl through gritted teeth as I smash the puck into the top corner of the net for the tenth time this practice session. Our goalie, Austin, gives me a come on, man look from behind his helmet and he drops his arms dejectedly to his sides. Tanner snickers as we reposition ourselves on the ice, already knowing where I’m going with this. “I gave her my number.”

“And she’s clearly been blowing you up all week,” he says dryly, his eyes sliding over to mine. “What’s her name, again?”

I give him a go fuck yourself smirk because, yeah, I don’t know her name yet, and then Coach sounds his whistle – the worst thank you gift that a player ever got him – and we shoulder-bump it out as we make our way off the ice.

I’ve managed to keep my mouth shut about my one-sided cheerleader situation but it’s been five days since I slipped my digits into her cute romance book and the silence is starting to make my quads tense up. If she liked me she would call. It’s as simple as that.

We clip on our blade guards and trudge down the narrow corridor to the locker room, pulling off our helmets and shaking out our hair. I drop down onto the bench and splay my thighs, giving myself a second to recoup before I start stripping for the shower.

“Do you know what classes she takes? ’Cause I don’t recommend stalking her at cheer practice,” Tanner says as he rotates the combination into his locker and pulls it open.

I let out a low groan and mumble, “Don’t give me ideas.”

“Did you invite her to the Halloween thing tomorrow?” he continues, pulling off his jersey and unfastening his shoulder pads.

I nod as I begin to take off my boots. I played way too hard during our rink-time today and this time it had nothing to do with defending the players on my team. I’m just stressing the hell out about a chick who isn’t interested.

“Maybe she’s playing hard to get,” Tanner offers, pulling out his phone and scrolling through a very, very, very long list of contacts. He finds the one that he’s looking for and taps on her photo, turning the screen in my direction. “Like this one. I’ve been waiting for a text back for three fuckin’ years.”

I stare at the picture and then give Tanner a look. “Tanner. Aisling O’Malley has a boyfriend.”

He gives me a grin before I get back to removing my gear, knowing about Aisling O’Malley’s situation because I have classes with her brother. Tanner chucks his cell back into his bag, and I head over to the stalls with my towel because my muscles are dying for some heat relief. I squeeze into one of the cubicles and immediately hit the tap, swallowing down a grunt as the spray scolds the valley between my shoulders.

This is what I need, I think to myself as I brace one palm on the wall and run the other through my hair. Get on the ice and sweat her out of your system. Doesn’t matter if she doesn’t show up tomorrow. Getting signed is what’s important.

I hose myself off, knot my towel around my hips, and then I walk back to the benches where Tanner is waiting for me. We’re two of the only guys on the team who were born and raised in Carter Ridge, going to the same small town high school despite having different economic home lives. Tanner’s parents are low-key rich as fuck, hence the pricey SUV that he unlocks when we get out onto the lot. He also doesn’t have that many siblings, whereas I’m the oldest of six.

Our other roommate Caden is leaning against the SUV’s side panel, his cell to his ear as he says something in a hushed voice. He has black hair, thigh tats, and he’s built like a tank. He’s also only twenty. He’s living with us even though he’s a sophomore because he has a girlfriend from home and he fucking hated his freshman year. At least when he’s living with Tanner and me the passage of chicks in the apartment is much more discreet.

“I’m heading to my parents’ tonight, and I’m gonna be working in the garage until late tomorrow,” I say as Tanner pulls off onto the main road. My dad is a mechanic and my mom owns the local diner, so I usually spend Saturday in the workshop and Sunday in the diner’s back office.

“You still coming tomorrow night?” Tanner asks as he indicates.

“Yeah, but it’ll be close,” I say, wondering if I’m even going to have time to shower the car grease off my fingers before heading to the corn maze. Then I think of the girl that I may or may not bump into and with a little more steel in my voice I finish with, “I’ll be there.”

Tanner snickers as he takes the turn at the junction and he mutters a dark, “I bet you will.”

*

Every year on the outskirts of town, Carter U hosts a big Halloween party out in the corn fields. Tanner and I have been sneaking into it since we were fifteen, so we’re more than well acquainted with the set up.

I lift the beer bottle to my lips and take a seat in the open-air booth, scanning across all of the pumpkins and the hay bales to see if the girl that I’m looking for has arrived yet. If she’s going to be showing up at all.

I just have a lot on my plate right now.

Hell if those words didn’t make my jaw clench tight. She seemed so serious when I saw her at the wash, even when I was trying to keep it light and teasing. What’s got her so stressed?

I’m about three-quarters of the way through my beer when I catch sight of something in my peripheral vision. The fuzzy halo. The bunched white leg-warmers. The tiny pleated ‘skirt’ that makes my jaw drop to the table.

“What the hell?” Tanner shouts, and my eyes flash over to him. It takes a second for me to realise that I just poured the rest of my drink on him.

I set the bottle on the table and run a hand through my hair. Then I curse because, yeah, I do still have black car oil all over my fingers.

“Am I hallucinating?” I ask, jerking my chin in the direction of the cheer squad.

Tanner follows my line of sight and suddenly he no longer cares about the beer on his shorts. “Jesus,” he grunts, getting to his feet so quickly that he knocks over every other bottle on the table.

“That’s what I thought,” I say, and suddenly the whole team is in motion.

She senses us before the other girls do and her eyes widen the second that she sees me. Smile-creases cut into the sides of my cheeks as I look her up and down, taking her in.

After a beat of hesitation, she bolts straight to the back of the pack.

I shake my head as I round her squad and she stops her little jog after a couple of laps.

She mutters something frantic under her breath and then looks up at me with her big sparkly eyes.

“You found me,” she says, her voice slightly breathless.

“Yeah I found you, because I have fucking eyes,” I tell her teasingly, flashing her a grin before I give her outfit another little once-over.

“I see you didn’t wear a costume,” she says, as she takes in the fact that the whole team came in our hockey gear. The guys also have war-paint smeared on their cheekbones, which works great for me seeing as I was already covered in oil from my hours under the hood of a customer’s truck.

I jerk my chin at her halo and say, “I see you didn’t either.”

Her cheeks flush pink as she realises what I’m implying. I fold my arms over my chest, satisfied as hell.

“You really didn’t need to wear all of that…” She gestures vaguely in the vicinity of my arms. “You know, your shoulder pads and stuff.”

I give her a confused look. “…I’m not wearing shoulder pads,” I say to her.

Her pupils immediately dial out and it’s so damn sexy that a grunt rumbles through my chest.

“Wanna do the maze?” I ask her, rolling a shoulder backwards in the direction of the lit-up corn fields.

For the first time ever I hear her laugh, and something warm immediately spreads through my chest.

“Seriously?” she asks, curiosity twinkling in her eyes. “Isn’t that, like, for kids?”

I feel my neck get hot and I glance over to where Tanner is dog-tailing Aisling O’Malley. Although this set-up is for Carter U students only, I guess that the maze is kind of childish – which is probably exactly why it was our favourite part of this night back when we were fifteen. But I didn’t have a girlfriend when I was fifteen, so I hadn’t had to think about how mature I needed to be acting.

That realisation makes my neck get even hotter because, having never had a girlfriend, how mature exactly am I supposed to be acting now? Am I supposed to just… jump right in? Because if she wants to, I can get real mature real quick. I glance back down at her and let myself imagine doing just that. Laying her on my mattress and getting down to work.

“Uh…” I rasp, scratching roughly at my stubble. Then I swipe a hand across my forehead, worried that she’ll be able to see what I’m thinking. “We don’t have to do the maze,” I say hoarsely. “We could, uh, we could just–”

“Pairs, right?” Tanner says loudly, clasping a hand around my shoulder. “First team to reach the middle gets, I don’t know, seven minutes in heaven or something. Hunter’s going with you,” he orders to the angel in front of us. Then he tips his head to the side. “I’ll be going with her.”

“Uh, no you will not,” Aisling says, rolling her eyes as she breezes right past him.

Tanner stares after her for a long beat and then his eyes trail down to the girl that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about all week.

“She’s cute,” he murmurs, way too fucking loud.

“Christ,” I groan as I hear her little laugh again. “I’m gonna grab another beer,” I say to her as we start to pull away from the group. “You want something?”

She stares at my chest for about twenty seconds before looking back up at me and saying, “N-no, I’m not thirsty.”

I grin. “Right.”

I grab a beer and then gesture with my chin for her to lead the way, pissed at myself for not scrubbing ten layers of skin off my hands before I came here tonight. No way can I touch her little angel outfit when my fingers are charcoal-grey with damn engine fluid. I look down at her perky ass and swallow back a groan.

“Thanks for coming tonight,” I rasp as she leads the way into the field, my eyes raking over her hips as they tick from side to side.

“You’re welcome,” she laughs, “but no way when we win this thing are you getting seven minutes in heaven with me.”

I choke on my beer and then swipe my palm down my jaw as I try to decide which part of that bollocking I enjoyed the most: the fact that she’s so competitive she’s certain that we’ll reach the centre first, or the fact that she remembered the line that Tanner threw out to us and is bold enough to put me in my place about it.

My eyes burn into hers when she glances back at me over her shoulder. Or maybe she’s just checking that I’m still here with her.

Don’t worry, baby. I’m not going anywhere.

I clear the gravel from my throat as she picks which direction we’re going to walk in next and I say, “You’re real confident. I like that.”

Then we walk in silence for so long that I’m starting to think that she didn’t hear me. Or that all of the glances and the blushing were in my head and she isn’t into me at all. Or that maybe she’s bringing me further into the maze to get some more finite revenge on the door-to-the-forehead situation.

My eyes settle back down on her sexy behind and I drain the rest of my beer in one long pull.

“What else do you like?” she finally asks me.

My eyebrows rise because I hadn’t been expecting that question, but hell if I’m not about to take this opportunity to state my intentions loud and clear.

I give her an appreciative once-over and say, “Long hair. Big eyes. Short as fuck.”

She flashes me a happy nose-scrunch and something heavy twists in my gut. I’ve stepped so close to her that my pecs are almost pushing into her back as I finally demand, “Tell me your name.”

She stops in her tracks and I bite hard into my fist when my hockey shorts brush up against her skirt for half a second too long. I take two big steps backwards, almost crashing into the handful of students who are taking the same path as us.

She turns around to face me and crosses her arms over her chest, head tilted to one side as she makes me sweat it. She doesn’t need to. No other chick has ever made me wait two weeks to find out her damn name.

“Fallon,” she says with a small smile.

My chest practically doubles in size.

“That’s beautiful,” I say, stepping forward, and she takes that as her cue to begin walking me again.

“You drink a lot of beer?” she asks me, not rude but with a slightly worried edge to her voice. Understandably, probably because she doesn’t want to be in the middle of a corn maze with a guy she doesn’t know when he has an unspecified amount of alcohol pumping through his system.

I don’t want to mention that I only picked up this beer so that I’d have something to occupy my big dirty hands with, so instead I say, “When I’m with the guys.”

“You aren’t with the guys right now,” she points out, sending me a look.

Fuck. True. I change the subject. “What do you wanna win if we reach the centre first?”

“When we win,” she purrs. “What can you give me?”

I grunt hard and start ripping the paper off the bottle. “Uh,” I rasp, trying to think of something normal that I can offer her. I’m convinced that she didn’t mean to say that provocatively but my brain is immediately in the fucking gutter.

I look down my torso and an idea snaps into place.

“Come to my game,” I blurt out.

She slows down her speed and then readjusts her halo. Fuck. “Are you… offering me, or telling me?” she asks with a knowing laugh.

I hunch down a little so that she’s not snapping her neck to just get a look at me and I say, “I’m offering you, Fallon. Do you wanna come to one of my games?”

Her eyes get a little wider before dropping completely. Her lashes cast shadows on the warm apples of both her cheeks.

So damn pretty.

“Um,” she says nervously. “What’s the date? Of the game, I mean! I’m not saying th-that this is gonna be a date.”

My palms are starting to sweat. We can call it whatever you want, baby.

“Next Friday,” I tell her. “Our first home game of the season is next Friday.”

Her expression glitches and my stomach instantly drops. That’s a ‘no’ if I’ve ever seen one.

“I can’t make that day,” she says, looking almost embarrassed. “I have… work on Friday.”

I look at her for a prolonged moment, trying to figure out why there’s a slight tremor in her voice.

“But… maybe I could come to another one?” she suggests. “To your second home game?”

“Yeah,” I grunt, even though I feel like I’m missing something. I pull out my cell from the side of my boot and say, “Give me your number.”

When I see her raised eyebrow I add on a rough, “Please.”

As she begins tapping her digits into my phone a hand thumps hard on my back and I turn to see Tanner standing right behind me. He’s looking down at Fallon, a blank but determined look on his face.

Sensing him, she glances up as she hands me back my phone. I snicker when I see the book emoji that she’s typed in next to her name and we momentarily share a secret smile over her little taunt.

“Your roommate’s looking for you,” Tanner says to her.

Fallon’s expression turns briefly concerned. “Why? What’d you do to her?”

Tanner’s eyebrows rise. “…Nothing,” he says slowly, his eyes narrowing for a beat. “But she said that your team is heading to a sorority house or something. They’re waiting for you.”

I try not to look too pleased about the fact that they aren’t going back to Frat Row tonight.

“Okay,” Fallon says, equally dubious. She sucks in a breath and then turns her big eyes on me. The heavy muscle in my shorts thickens like a motherfucker. “I guess I’ll… maybe see you at one of your games,” she says, laughing a little as we share a smile.

“Rink-side, Fallon. Your tickets are gonna be rink-side.”

I pretend not to hear Tanner’s mumbled “ah Jesus.”

“Okay,” she says, her voice breathless as we watch each other. “Bye then… Hunter.”

I run a hand down my jaw. Hearing my name on her lips is my new favourite thing in the world.

“Bye Fallon,” I rasp, soaking in every last second of her.

“And bye Tanner,” Tanner says obtusely, staring at her as she brushes between us, but she keeps her sparkling eyes on mine until she disappears around the corner.