If you love big, bad, spider-fearing hockey heroes, tough-as-nails heroines hiding her soft side, and one night stands gone sideways, read on for an excerpt of Pippa Grant’s first hockey romance, …

Chapter 1

Zeus Berger (aka the biggest, baddest, most spider-fearing mother pucker in the NHL, except for maybe his twin brother)

Coconuts are itchy. I should’ve gone for the watermelons.

But it was a bitch and a half getting that last-minute private fitting at Madame Cosette’s anyway, and the woman probably would’ve had to stitch three bras together and then nailed the damn contraption to my shoulders to get it to hold without losing a melon, so coconuts it is.

Besides, it’s the heels that are gonna be the bigger problem. Damn good thing I have ankles of fucking steel.

And my minidress is stretched to max capacity over the coconuts anyway. It’s also in danger of showing my other coconuts, if you catch my drift. And there’s definitely a drift—or is that a draft?—on my other coconuts.

A wolf whistle echoes through the swanky private clubhouse where I’m strolling in with my twin brother on one side and my brother from another mother on the other. A passing server drops a tray of champagne. Conversation stops. And a bunch of stuffy golf pricks gape at us like we’re a mutant alien circus freak show crashing their million-dollar wedding reception.

We’re three dudes with more money than God, more muscles than all the Kardashians’ bodyguards combined, and more fun than cotton candy and roller coasters.

And this is no wedding reception. It’s a chance for pretentious rich asses to brag to each other about who gave more money to whatever foundation is sponsoring this Pro-Am golf tournament for charity.

Ares is scowling, squinting around the room like he’s looking for the dumbass prince who was stupid enough to bet me ten grand I wouldn’t show up tonight dressed like a chick. Chase is on his phone, snickering like he’s not half a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than me and Ares are.

I swipe his phone from him and shove it between my coconuts. “Quit sexting my sister in public.”

“I was posting that picture of you getting dressed to Facebook,” he replies. “Ares, fetch the phone.”

Ares grunts. “Shut your face,” he tells Chase.

I slap my brother on the shoulder. “Lighten up, bro. I make this shit look good.”

“Hate to break it to you,” Chase says, “but your sister actually makes a better woman.”

“You saying you wouldn’t tap this?”

“Saying she gives a better blow job.”

He easily ducks my fist, because the fucker’s known me too long. Plus, my heart isn’t in taking him out. Chase is good for my sister, and he’s a damn good friend to boot. Not that I’ll ever tell him that to his face. Again.

Ares quits scowling enough to snicker too. “Girls don’t hit,” he tells me.

“You gonna let him talk about Ambrosia like that?”

“I know where he sleeps.”

People think Ares is dumb because he doesn’t talk in big words. But he’s one of the smartest fuckers I know, in his own way.

Only dude in the world as big as me too, but in these heels—special ordered Mablanoks something or others—I’ve got him by four inches.

“Gentlemen.” A half-british, half-ice king voice intrudes on our private party before we reach the food table. Never met the dude in person before—all our shit-talking happened over the phone—but I’ve seen his picture and I know his stepsister. “And… I’m sorry, madam, it seems I’ve missed your name.”

Like Chase, he’s tall and beefy enough for a regular dude—comes from some friggin’ cold northern Atlantic nation with enough sheep for his own harem—but Ares and I are towering over him too.

“This is Ambrosia,” Chase offers. “I have terrible taste in women.”

“Lick my tits,” I say to Chase before I grab the fucker and rub his face between my coconuts.

Ares grins.

Chase pinches my ass and I let him go. Two more servers do an about-face and scurry away with their trays of little vegetable appetizers that apparently pass as food at these things.

“You can call me The Goddess,” I tell the prince.

Manning Frey’s royal features split into a grin as he rocks back on his heels. Where I’m in a girdle, size 18 fuck-me pumps, and coconuts, he’s in some tan suit and white shirt getup that was probably picked for him by some royal ninny. “Overselling ourselves, are we?”

I like the fucker already. Not because he owes me ten grand, but because I’ve got a feeling he’d be a good companion in his own coconut bra and minidress if we wanted to crash another snooty function tonight. “Not if a pansy-ass like you passes as a prince. I’m still taking home the hottest girl here tonight.”

He juts his chin up, grin going wider. “You’re going to get a woman. While you’re dressed like that.”

Yeah, I know what it looks like. Me and Ares, we’re the biggest mother puckers to ever strap on skates and wield sticks in the NHL. I’m sprouting a five o’clock shadow before I’m done shaving every morning. Each one of my thighs is the size of one of those European sissy cars. Solid muscle too. My ma calls us big-boned. My sister calls us overgrown apes. I make one ugly-ass woman.

“Damn fucking right,” I tell Prince Manning anyway. Because you don’t get to be the biggest, hairiest, most feared badass on the ice by owning up to your shortcomings. No, I bear my teeth at those fuckers and take them down. If you ain’t got your balls, you ain’t got anything. “I’m gonna make her switch sides, then when we get back to my hotel room, I’m gonna make her switch back, and I’m gonna rock her fucking world.”

“As completely wrong as that sounds, I’ve seen him do it before,” Chase says.

Ares grunts an agreement, even though both of them know I’m full of shit and I know they’re each looking forward to watching me fail. I share a look with my twin.

You’re such a fucking dumbass, his says, because he knows it’s biologically impossible for any woman in this stuffy, exclusive clubhouse to seriously be attracted to me like this. I flunked biology, and I still know it too.

Two words, my look replies. Endorsement. Dollars.

I don’t give two shits if I score a chick tonight. I score plenty, on and off the ice, and everyone knows it.

The other thing everyone knows?

Zeus Berger doesn’t back down from a challenge. And I smell a challenge coming on.

“Care to put some money on that?” Manning says, right on time.

“Double or nothing,” I reply. Win or lose, no man will ever say I didn’t put my heart in it. And I’ve got my winning personality on my side. I might be ugly, but I’m not out.

Ares snickers again.

“Go on and pick the girl,” I tell Manning. “Wouldn’t want you to think I planned this.”

He rubs a hand over his dark blond beard while he scans the room. “I’m beginning to see why Willow speaks so ambiguously of you.”

“That means she only half-likes us,” I translate for Ares. “Probably intimidated by our awesomeness.”

“Or the fact that you threatened her fiancé with a ten-pound wheel of moldy cheddar,” Chase muses.

“Fucker needs to put his foot down with his mother.”

“On that, we’re in complete agreement,” Manning says crisply. He stops and nods toward the wall of windows overlooking the golf course with the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west. “Her.”

I squint, because that half of the room is backlit by the light glaring in. “The chick who just shoved her finger into Levi Wilson’s beer bottle?”

Ares perks up. “Boy band Levi?”

“Aw, shit, Bro’s gonna be pissed she missed this,” Chase mutters.

That’s right—my sister is a boy band ho. Got a thing for Levi’s old band, Bro Code—which she swears is a total coincidence, considering Chase has called her Bro since we were kids, a nickname she claimed to hate until she realized how much she liked Chase.

“Not the beer bottle-finger,” Manning says. “The woman with her.”

I shift my attention from the woman trying to shake a beer bottle off her finger while obviously stuttering apologies to the world’s reigning pop rock god, and a familiar beat takes up residence in my pulse.

Long, dark hair. Tall. She’s built—not heavy, but not turn-sideways-and-she’d-disappear slender either. She’s in pants that accentuate her curves and a no-nonsense blouse that can’t hide her rack. Even in the backlight, there’s a feline grace to her movements as she efficiently grabs her companion’s arm, neatly twists the stuck bottle off her friend’s finger, and hands it back to Levi Wilson.

I do love me some feline grace.

And even though she has the bearing of a woman much smarter than my usual type, there’s some stirring over my southern coconuts that suggests I might be about to start a bigger scene.

These rich mofos would shit a brick if I popped a boner in this dress.

Heh.

But while I’m damn proud of my Neanderthal heritage—gets me a big paycheck on the ice every year, and sponsorships for everything from deodorant to car jacks off the ice—even I know the quickest way into a lady’s pants isn’t always showing her the goods. So I tell Jupiter to cool it down there—what? You’re damn right both me and my junk are named after kings of the gods—and nod to Manning. “You’re on.”