A Groom of One's Own: A Sweet Marriage of Convenience Hockey RomCom (Appies Hockey Romance) by Emma St. Clair

Author:Emma St. Clair [Clair, Emma St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Create If Writing LLC
Published: 2024-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

The third period ends with me scoring twice more. I’m flying. No one can touch me. Or stop me. Despite the other team singling me out—probably just because of the proposal—I barely register them. And my guys don’t like that and give it back just as hard. Maybe harder. I’m somewhere above it all, and though I don’t allow myself to look up at Bailey, knowing she’s there is enough.

My blood is still singing from her kiss, an electric current humming beneath my skin.

Just after the buzzer, I finally glance over to see Bailey practically pressed up against the glass, my mom beside her. Both of them screaming, jumping up and down, losing their minds.

One more thing about all this that feels right—Bailey with my mom.

The biggest wrong thing, maybe the only one, though it’s a biggie, is the fact that really liking Bailey means I’ve severely messed up the timeline of things.

It calls to mind a memory of Mom, sitting patiently with me at the table in the one apartment we had where the heat barely worked in any room but the breakfast nook, where it blasted like a commercial oven. For hours she tried to help me remember the order of operations, something that just would not stick in my mind. It simply didn’t make sense why brackets, which in sentences seem to include something extraneous, would get priority in math.

With Bailey, it’s like I’ve skipped the starting point and gone straight to addition, which was last. No, wait—was it subtraction? Either way, I’ve jacked up the order of operations. And I’m not sure how to undo it.

“Forget something, lover boy?”

As we enter the locker room, Van presses an object to my chest with the force of a punch, his grin wide.

It’s the ring box.

The one I never removed from the puck. Never gave to Bailey.

Because I actually never got around to asking her to marry me.

Worst. Proposal. Ever.

Van must take in the shift in my face, which probably looks something like a seven-year-old sugar-crashing hard twenty-minutes after chasing a candy bar with a soda. He gives my shoulder a squeeze meant to be comforting but is actually painful and says, “No worries, man.”

“If she says yes without looking at the ring, it’s for real,” Dumbo adds.

Van and I exchange a look. That’s what it might normally mean. But in our case … it does not.

Only the guys at Felix’s the other night have any idea what’s really going on. I didn’t fill them in on how we got from point A to point proposal less than a week later, but I’m assuming they connected the dots. I think the rest of the team shares Malik’s belief that I was already seeing someone and just kept it quiet. Until it got very, very loud.

“A ring is sort of important in the typical engagement process,” Alec says, grinning.

Like anything about this is typical. Still. I’m glad for his comment, which is so very Alec. It allows me to unclench the fists I didn’t know I was making, one hand gripping the ring box.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.