Felicity (aka Ms. Bad Taste In Men)

It is a falsehood universally spread across the globe that a single woman in possession of a house, a job—sort of—and boobs must be in want of a dickhead to fuck with her brain.

Or possibly I just have terrible taste in men. And horrible luck in the genetic pool, because my brother is also currently ranking pretty high up there among the biggest assholes on the planet.

And that’s my official explanation for why there are currently several hundred—possibly thousand—pornographic sugar cookies piled all the fuck over my grandmother’s teeny strip of a front yard.

That’s right.

An entire mountain range of sugar cookies printed with dicks erupted on Gammy’s patch of dried-up lawn and are spilling over onto the cracked sidewalk and her beloved gardenia bushes.

And did I mention it’s raining?

Pouring.

Buckets.

In waves. With some gusts of wind that are spreading the wet sugar scent all up and down the street of attached 1960’s townhomes.

I’m going to be shoveling soggy-ass dick cookies from now until Christmas. And I don’t even want to contemplate what the sugar and dye in the frosting will do to Gammy’s grass. Never mind the gardenias.

“At least the rain’s washing the dicks off,” reasons Kami, ever the optimist in my group of friends.

“This is one of those times you should be offering to slip one of us a couple syringes of horse tranquilizer,” replies Alina, ever the pragmatic voice of reason.

Maren, ever the environmentalist who’s probably calculating the diabetic coma the worms in the ground will soon be suffering from, shakes her head. “You only need one to take out Doug.”

“And one more for Nick,” Alina adds.

“Nick?” Kami says. “This isn’t Nick’s fault.”

As far as Kami’s concerned, nothing is ever my brother Nick’s fault.

In this case, she’s wrong. Which I know without a doubt because Doug Dobey, the last in my string of bad exes, texted me. You and your dickhead brother better watch your fucking backs.

And a picture of the dick cookies—pre-natural washing on Gammy’s patch of grass—accompanied the threat.

Not that I’ve shared that with my friends. They’d freak out. Honestly, a girl gets herself a harmless stalker once, and suddenly every ex-boyfriend and disgruntled coworker is something her friends flip over.

Alina waves her full wine glass toward the soggy disaster. “This has Nick’s name all over it. Remember when Felicity broke up with The Churd and Nick all but took out a billboard eviscerating him?”

Okay, so maybe they have a point when you put my brother into the equation. He does have a way of rubbing people wrong.

Specifically, my ex-boyfriends.

“But if you take Nick out, the Thrusters suffer,” Maren says. “I’m all in favor of teaching him a lesson. After our boys bring home the cup. They’re already down Ares. We can’t risk losing Nick too.”

While my best friends argue over whether my brother—hometown hero goalie for Copper Valley’s pro hockey team—deserves punishment for his assumed role in the mountains of soggy dick cookies polluting Gammy’s lawn, I take another swig of cheap red wine from the bottle that didn’t explode all over the kitchen ten minutes ago when I was carrying it in from the carport. Fucking loose strap on my reusable grocery sack. Fucking weak bottle.

Fucking cork that shot a hole through the window over Gammy’s sink.

Which is oddly the lesser of my problems, since my three friends arrived minutes ago for our weekly Sunday afternoon wine and whine and asking about the new decorations on the front lawn.

Where all the neighbors—and their children—can see.

“Gammy’s going to kill me,” I mutter.

Kami slips an arm through mine. “Oh, honey,” she whispers in that voice people use in funeral homes and psych wards.

“Ghosts can’t kill people,” Maren says in that voice people use when they’re talking to stupid people.

Alina grips her own wine glass tighter and lifts her eyes toward the ceiling. “If any ghost can, Gammy’s ghost could.”

I told you she was the pragmatic one.

A red, souped-up Jeep Cherokee squeals to a stop at the curb behind Maren’s Bolt, which means Nick himself has arrived.

I’d lock the door, but it wouldn’t matter. Since Gammy left the house to both of us, he has his own key, and even if he didn’t, he could break the door down. And even if he couldn’t by himself, the overgrown ogre of a hockey player with him could.

Ares Berger. The Force. A tank on skates. Silent as a mime. Intimidating as hell. I’ve heard he can lift an entire car with just his pinky, and I honestly believe it.

The guy gives new meaning to big scary hockey players.

And I like hockey players. I’ve been around them my entire life. I’m related to two.

Hockey players don’t scare me.

Ares Berger?

He turns my insides to jelly.

“Fuck on a fuck sandwich,” I mutter.

“Fuck? No fuck,” Alina says, very clearly enunciating each word. “It’s his fault. Let him clean up the dick cookie soup.”

Fantastic plan.

It ignores one small detail.

The part where Nick wasn’t supposed to know I moved into Gammy’s house. Because as soon as he figures that out, he’ll realize I’d moved in with Doug a few months back. Which wouldn’t be a big deal—Nick’s lived with girlfriends before too and knows better than to go double standard on me—except Doug still has a shit-ton of my stuff that he won’t give back.

Which also wouldn’t be a big deal, because I’m going to get it all back after work tomorrow—I have a plan—except again, as soon as Nick finds out—which will happen approximately three seconds after he smiles at Kami, because he’s such a dog and he totally uses her ridiculous crush on him against all of us all the time, damn him for his chiseled cheekbones and the green Murphy eyes—he’ll go bang down Doug’s door and most likely make everything worse before I can solve it the easy way.

Okay, not the easy way, but my way.

Which doesn’t involve dick cookies.

“Do not look at him, do not talk to him, do not so much as breathe in his presence,” I warn Kami.

Her pale eyebrows wrinkle and her cheeks go pink, which makes me feel like a heel, because these three women are the sisters I never had.

“I’m not that bad,” she whispers.

“You really are, sweetie.” Alina takes her by the shoulders. “And we love your honesty. It’s just that now isn’t exactly the time for it. Let’s go get another bottle of wine.”

“From the kitchen?”

“From the store.”

“Take my car,” I call to them.

“Already grabbed your keys,” Alina calls back from the kitchen. Since she’s barely had two sips of wine, and also because the biggest moment of her entire career is coming next weekend, so she has too much to live for to risk drunk driving, I’m good with this plan.

Maren is frowning as Nick and Ares make their way around the obscene soggy mountain and climb the rickety steps in the rain. Nick’s over six feet of hockey ego, dirty blond hair, and misguided intentions. Ares is—well, he’s Ares, and he makes Nick look like a wuss.

“He’s out for the rest of the season, isn’t he?” Maren says.

I force myself to look at Ares. He shouldn’t be out in the rain in that air cast.

Also, his crutch is leaving holes in the dinky patch of yard. Which is really more like a decorative strip of grass. Not that the size of it mattered to Gammy.

Just that it was green. The greener the better. I swear she fed it green water when we weren’t looking.

It’s most definitely not green right now.

It’s brown and wilted and now a little holey. Aeration is good for grass, right? Seriously, Gammy, aeration is important.

“I’m hoping he’s only out a couple months,” I tell Maren.

“No insider information?”

I wish. All I have is educated speculation based on what the news is reporting. “Not a word.”

Nick flings open the screen door. I take a wide-legged stance and refuse to let him in. The chill November wind slices through my shirt and turns my nipples to ice cubes. Ares gives me a half-terrifying, half-bland look that suggests he could pick me up and move me if necessary, even while he’s injured, and I suppress a shiver, because I honestly kind of think he could move me with his eyeballs alone if he wanted to.

Pretty sure they call him the Force for a reason.

But his air cast is mostly protected from the rain now, and I refuse to let either of these two men think they can get to me—give an inch, and they’ll take six hockey rinks, fourteen football fields, and a fricking mountain range of dirty cookies—so I don’t budge.

“You moved in with him, didn’t you?” Nick says with a scowl. “Why didn’t you tell me you moved in with him?”

“Because you’re an overprotective shithead who overreacts to everything.”

“I do not.”

I point at the Soggy Dick Cookie Range. “And you send my exes little presents that somehow always manage to come back on me instead of on you. Hope you brought a shovel.”

Maren cough-laughs.

“Hey, Ares. How’s it going?” I add.

Ares’s dark brow twitches over his hooded blue eyes, and his wide lips tip up at the corners. He could be a lumberjack if he traded his hockey stick for an ax, covered his “And then there was Won” T-shirt—don’t ask, I have no idea—with a plaid flannel button-up, and let that scruff on his cheeks and neck grow out more.

Not that I’ve contemplated Ares as a lumberjack.

Much.

He nods to me.

“I didn’t have anything to do with that,” my lying-ass brother says with his fake-innocent wide eyes while he jerks a thumb at the cookie peaks of horror.

Probably because he knows if he admits it, Maren will mention the Mound of Indignity on her Thrusters fan blog. Maren, Alina, Kami, and I all met at Chester Green’s, the downtown bar named after the greatest Thrusters’ defender of all time where all the biggest Thrusters’ fans—and yes, the puck bunnies—hang out. Kami and Alina are just huge fans, but Maren could’ve been a hockey sportscaster if she hadn’t gone the environmental engineering route.

And the problem with having a hockey-obsessed blogger friend and a brother in the pro hockey business is that they don’t always see eye-to-eye on what’s blog-worthy.

“Don’t you need to go get some wine too?” I ask her, because I know he’s not going to confess while she’s standing there.

“I’m good,” she replies.

“How about you show Ares where the cheese is?”

Now I’ve got her. Unrestricted access to the Thrusters’ injured power forward? “Sure. You like brie, Berger? Got some fresh mozzarella too.”

Ares’s brows knit together.

Nick claps him on the back. “He likes the kind that comes in wrappers.”

Maren and I share a look. My friends haven’t gone the vegan route like I have, but I know they’re all horrified that anyone calls the stuff in wrappers “cheese.” It technically has milk products in it, so whatever it is, I don’t tend to eat it either.

“I’ll call Kami and Alina. They’re headed to the store,” she says. “Wine?”

“Milk,” Ares counters.

Maren shoots me a look again, and a silent hope he doesn’t mind almond milk passes between us. “You got it, big guy. This way. Felicity, I’ll sell you out in a hot minute if you put Nick on the IR too.”

Translation: Hurt him bad enough to earn him a spot next to Ares on the long-term injured reserve list, and I’ll tell the entire world it’s your fault.

Which would ruin my chances of ever getting a spot on the Thrusters’ physical therapy staff, so even if I wasn’t also a diehard Thrusters fan secretly thrilled to be related to one of their hottest players—and by hottest, of course I mean talented, not hot-hot, because gross—I still wouldn’t hurt him.

And he knows it.

Dammit.

Once we’re alone, Nick thrusts his hands through his dark blond hair and paces from the small alcove and into the modest living room where Gammy’s floral couches continue to make the room smell like her. You know. Like Ben-Gay and moldy gardenia perfume. Also, I swear there are three new rows on that blanket she was knitting when she died. I haven’t wanted to get close enough to confirm my suspicion.

“You should’ve called me,” Nick says. That muscle’s ticking in his square jaw again.

“So you could get mad and send Doug a few hundred dick cookies?” I reply pointedly.

“Thousand,” he mutters, his face going a respectable pink.

“You sent him one thousand cookies printed with your dick?”

He doesn’t meet my eyes.

So several thousand cookies.

No wonder Doug’s pissed. Not that dumping the cookies on Gammy’s yard in retribution is justified either—there are at least six hundred dumpsters between his apartment and here that he could’ve used instead—but that’s overkill.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I whisper-shriek.

“He hurt you. And it wasn’t my dick. I got it off the internet.”

I tap a foot.

While I’m a little relieved—it was a rather hairy, unsightly penis—that’s not the point.

His face has the decency to go ruddier. “And I might’ve had one too many drinks when I ordered them.” He mumbles some other excuse I don’t catch, and honestly, I don’t want to.

“The next time you interfere with my relationships, I’m giving Maren all your love letters to Ella Jameson.”

He freezes beside the wall of shelves holding Gammy’s bobble head hockey player collection. “You don’t have those old things.”

“Oh, but I do.” Maybe. I think. I’m pretty sure I can find them in my parents’ attic, because I remember Mom and Ella’s mom laughing over them one afternoon last summer. And I can psychologically terrorize him all I want without fucking up my chances of getting hired by the Thrusters someday. They’ve turned me down as their Zamboni driver six times, plus they weren’t interested in using me for either my accounting or marketing degrees, so I’m back in school studying to be a physical therapy assistant.

This one’s going to work.

I’m sure of it.

“Don’t try me,” I warn Nick.

“You still should’ve called. We could’ve helped you move your shit.”

“And dipped his toothbrush in the toilet and rubbed Icy Hot into his briefs and hidden raw shellfish on the top shelves of his cabinets.”

Why, yes, my brother has helped me move out of ex-boyfriends’ places before. Why do you ask?

“If he can’t handle that, then he wasn’t man enough for you anyway.”

“I’m done talking to you about this. And you’re cleaning Soggy Cookie Mountain. Understood?”

He waves me off. “We’ll get to it.”

“Gammy’s ghost isn’t pleased.”

“Ssshh!” His gaze darts to the kitchen, where I swear I just heard Ares grunt the word moo. “Don’t freak him out.”

“Who?”

“Berger. I told him he could move in here.”

“Wha—what?”

Nick clamps a hand over my mouth and drags me to the staircase beside the door, where we have a furious whispering match.

“He needs a new place to stay—”

“What what?” I repeat. “Why?” Since being traded to Copper Valley in the pre-season, Ares has been living with another of the team’s newest acquisitions, an honest-to-god prince from some small country north of England. “Manning’s penthouse is huge. Just because Gracie’s moving in permanently—”

“He doesn’t want to be the third wheel.”

“Did he say that?”

Nick tilts a look at me.

Right. Ares never says anything. The one time I got a glimpse at a text conversation on Nick’s phone, it was one long conversation solely of weirder and weirder gifs.

Some things you can’t unsee.

“Then how do you know he doesn’t want to live there anymore?” I whisper.

“Would you want to be the third wheel with those two?”

I don’t want to be anyone’s third wheel. Right now, I don’t even want to be anyone’s second wheel. I’m off men.

For real this time.

“He seriously can’t find anywhere else to live?” I’m whispering so softly I can barely hear myself, because while Ares freaks me out and I’m not at all comfortable with this plan, I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

“That ankle hurt much?” Maren asks Ares in the kitchen.

“Orange,” he answers.

And now my brother, sender of dick cookies, is giving me the shame on you frown. Because it’s not exactly a secret that a bunch of people wonder if Ares can even tie his own skates.

“He’s family,” Nick chides.

The whole flipping team is family. And even I can’t argue with that. They’re like family to me too.

Even when Nick was playing for other teams, I tracked the Thrusters religiously and could rattle off every one of the players’ stats.

And I’ve applied for all the open jobs I qualified for even before Nick was drafted.

“Also,” he adds, his voice going even softer, “he’s not exactly cooperating with doctor’s orders.”

My heart skips a beat. “What do you mean?”

“Tried to lace up for morning skate today.” Nick winces. “His ankle’s ugly. Coach chewed him up one side and down the other, and Berger just sat there, staring at him like he was going to eat him. Took six of us to get him out of the dressing room.”

The news is reporting a high ankle sprain, which will have him off the ice at least six weeks, if not more, depending on how bad it is. He took a bad hit in Florida late last week.

“He needs to stay off it.” I don’t have to tell Nick, but I can’t help myself. I just did eighteen months worth of PTA school, and now I’m doing my clinicals to finish the degree. I could draw you a diagram. “He can’t start rehab if he doesn’t stay off it and get the swelling down.”

Nick’s now smiling while he nods.

I know that smile.

I don’t like that smile.

It’s the Keep talking, Felicity, because you’re right, and you know you’re right, and I’m going to wallop you upside the head with a terrible plan once you’re good and worked up about knowing how to treat ankle injuries.

“What?” I say.

“You want to work for the Thrusters, right?”

Fuck.

I don’t say it out loud, but my brother knows me, and he probably knows I’m already salivating and that my pulse is racing harder than a freaking horse. His grin gets broader. “I told Coach you’re a fucking miracle worker. You keep Berger off his feet so he can start rehab late next week, and we’ll get you an interview.”

“Because you can’t put in a good word for me without me babysitting Ares Berger?”

“Half the team have family in sports medicine. You prove you can handle Berger, you’re proving you can handle anybody. I’m doing you a favor.”

Were it anyone other than Ares Berger, I would be kissing his feet right now. “How am I supposed to babysit him while I’m doing my clinicals?”

“Take him with.”

Even if Bring An Injured Hockey Player To Work Week was a thing—which it actually should be, since I have two weeks left on a rotation at a physical therapy rehab clinic specializing in sports injuries—there’s one key point Nick’s missing here. Several, actually, but most importantly—“How the fuck am I going to make him get into my car all by myself?”

“Mint on a stick,” Nick says without hesitation. “He loves those things. They—Ow!”

I twist his ear, because he can still play with a sore ear, and I know there’s no way I can refuse this opportunity.

Even if I have no freaking clue how I’m going to pull it off. “If he gets weird—” I whisper.

“He’s not weird. He’s just quiet. And he has to fucking get better because we need him on the ice. Also, he likes your dummies. Laughter’s the best medicine. Do it for the Thrusters.”

“That’s not fair. And they’re puppets, not dummies.”

He smirks. “You’re the one who had to show off with the monkey.”

Oh, fuck. The monkey. Last I saw Ares off the ice, at Manning’s place, he had an honest-to-god emotional support monkey sitting on his shoulder. Not his, but the monkey had taken a liking to him, and I’m pretty sure the monkey’s original owner has left the country without her emotional support pet. “The monkey is not moving in too.”

Nick goes pink and his eyes cut to the door. “That’s between him and Frey. I’m staying out of it.”

Fuck.

He brought the monkey.

“I can’t live with a monkey,” I whisper-shriek. “I’m already living with Gammy’s ghost!” No need to mention how freaking adorable the monkey is. Last time I saw him, I left dreaming about babies. I’m too young to be craving babies.

“We couldn’t leave him behind,” Nick hisses back. “He saw Ares packing up, and he started crying. Have you ever tried to tell a crying monkey no? It was like I was trying to take away his best friend. He had to come. Besides, you got along fine with him the night you made him talk.”

“He wasn’t my roommate then.”

“I swear, Felicity, I’ll put in an extra extra good word for you.”

Dammit.

There’s no denying the thrill in knowing this could be my chance to get in with the Thrusters.

Hockey’s in my blood. My dad played, though he retired before I was old enough to remember. Nick plays. Mom covered all the local sports for the Copper Valley Post and was one of very few women sports reporters at the time when I was growing up. I gave up my virginity to one of Nick’s teammates when I was seventeen, because he was flipping hot, and no, that wasn’t my last hockey player.

Even Gammy loved hockey. As evidenced by not only her bobble head doll collection, but also her jersey collection and that little black book I’m pretending I didn’t find in her nightstand.

I want to work for the Thrusters. I love the Thrusters. I’d do pretty much anything for the Thrusters.

Even if they never pay me.

So I guess I’m getting a roommate.

And apparently a monkey.