Mistletoe Face Off: A Christmas Hockey Romcom by Kate O'Keeffe

Author:Kate O'Keeffe [O'Keeffe, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wild Lime Books
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Holly

NHL's Clarke Faces Off with Journalist in Yuletide Film Feud.

Love Actually in the Penalty Box?

Finding it hard to concentrate, I stop reading the headlines, watching the memes, and generally reliving Harry’s and my latest public argument. The goal was to keep the audience engaged, and by the looks of things, our latest fight was a runaway success. #SantaFeud is even trending.

It’s everything we planned it to be, thanks to Abby Sinclair’s brainchild and Slippery Stephen’s eagerness to get one of his journos out there, and by association, the paper.

Arguing with Harry is fun. Him picking the topic of rival Christmas movies—even though I will never in a million years agree that Die Hard is the best Christmas movie ever made—was nothing short of genius. It's the kind of topic people can get super impassioned about without it really meaning anything.

And then, when it ended and we went our separate ways, I shocked myself by agreeing to go out with Harrison on the basis that I would prove to him he couldn't resist dancing to that Pointer Sisters’ song Hugh Grant gets down to in Love Actually.

Why the heck did I do that?

Sure, I was swept up in the moment, enjoying our banter and the sheer ridiculousness of our argument. More than that, I enjoyed the way he gazed at me intently as though I was the only woman in the room.

A woman he wanted.

And then there was that moment when he fed me some of the chimney from the gingerbread house. It was so intimate and sweet that it made my heart thud and heat bloom in my cheeks. It was a moment. An intimate moment.

His wit is both infuriating and impressive in equal measure. In my time as a sports journalist, I've interviewed many athletes, but none have kept me on my toes quite like Harry can. Combine that with the disarming way he is with Macy, this tough, burly hockey player who turns into a gentle giant around my daughter, and I’ve got a serious case of the feels for the guy.

As in all the feels.

It’s as though in spending all this time with him I’m getting to see behind the curtain of his macho hockey pro persona, and I can't help but want to see more—even though my past is screaming at me that getting close to another pro athlete is simply too dangerous to even consider.

Look at what happened last time, my past says. Marriage over, left literally holding the baby, trying to make ends meet just to survive because Phil doesn’t have the decency to send us more than the barest of minimums each month.

It is not a pretty picture.

I’m not saying Harry and I are going to get married, and he'll leave me the way my ex did. That's taking the way I feel about him several leaps down the road of commitment. But even at this early stage, I'm scared to get involved with him, knowing from bitter experience how this could turn out.

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