Charming as puck, p.1
Charming As Puck, page 1
CHARMING AS PUCK
PIPPA GRANT
Copyright © 2019
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever, including the training of artificial intelligence, without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All text in this book was generated by Pippa Grant without use of artificial intelligence.
Pippa Grant®, Copper Valley Fireballs®, and Copper Valley Thrusters® are registered trademarks of Bang Laugh Love LLC.
Editing by Jessica Snyder, HEA Author Services
Cover Design by Qamber Designs
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
Sneak Peek at I Pucking Love You
Pippa Grant Book List
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Charming as Puck
A Hockey / Best Friend’s Brother / Friends Without Any More Benefits Romantic Comedy
He could charm the panties off of a nun…
Nick Murphy. Hockey god. My best friend’s big brother. My friend-with-mindblowing-benefits. The best thing to happen to my nether regions since my subscription to the toy of the month club. The man I’ve been secretly in love with for years.
And total ass.
I am so done with him.
Except there’s one small problem.
Now that I’ve cut him off, his hockey game is in the toilet. He’s convinced I’m his good luck charm, and he wants me back. But only for his game.
I’ll be strong. I will. I’ll resist.
Asses don’t change their stripes.
Or do they?
This plan would be so easy if the man wasn't Charming as Puck…
Charming as Puck is a romping fun romance between a hockey player and his sister's best friend, complete with farm animals, birthday parties, and Berger Twin sightings. This romantic comedy stands alone with no cheating or cliffhangers and ends with a pucking awesome happily ever after.
1
Nick Murphy (aka a hockey god on the verge of being demoted back to mortal status)
Kami stayed over. That’s weird. I must’ve drunk too much last night. Or she did.
Actually, is she still drunk?
She doesn’t usually lick my ear. Or sleep in my bed. We don’t do breakfast together unless it’s some god-awful early morning meeting demanded by my sister, in which case we pretend we’re just the same old friends who don’t bump uglies, because Felicity would fucking kill me.
However, risk of death aside, if Kami’s up for something this morning, I could get on board.
My dick’s already showing off.
My eyes are gritty. I definitely had too much to drink last night. I barely remember Kami showing up at all after the game. It was our season opener, at home, our first regular season game after winning the cup last year, and it was fucking brutal.
We won. Of course. But it was still brutal.
“Lower,” I tell Kami, my voice ragged in my throat, angling my head, because being licked is nice, but if she’s going to lick me, she could go for somewhere better than my ear.
“Mmmooooooooo,” she answers.
She licks my ear again, reaching the tip of her tongue right into my ear canal, and I lift a heavy arm to guide her face.
And then I freeze.
She’s…furry.
Like a smooth kind of furry, but still furry.
And I’m king of morning breath, but she smells worse than my sister after one of those vegan wheatgrass garlic avocado smoothies she likes to drink.
“Kami?” I rasp out.
“Mmmooooooo.”
I touch her lips, which are wet and sticky and thick.
My eyes fly open.
Kami has brown eyes.
The eyes staring back at me are brown.
Except these brown eyes are huge.
And set behind a thick fuzzy brown snout, beneath a rigid brow line, with ears sticking up where I expected to see morning bed head.
“Fuck!”
I trip over the tangled sheets while I leap up, my head swimming. The cow watches me with those calm brown orbs. “Mmmmoooooooo,” it says again in its baby cow voice.
Shit shit shit. “Ssshhhh,” I hiss at it.
I can’t decide what to think first. My head’s pounding. I’m going to fucking kill my brother-in-law, who is absolutely behind this, unless Kami’s a shapeshifting cow, which isn’t possible, even when I’m hung over.
Also, after the duck incident, if I get caught with another unapproved animal in my condo, I’ll get kicked out of the building.
I don’t have time to move. The season’s just starting. My parents would move me, but I’m thirty-one fucking years old. My parents aren’t going to move me.
Especially since if they did, they’d probably move me into their house, and that’s not happening.
I might be playing in my home city, but I will not move in with my parents.
I fumble in the dim light, looking for my phone. “Don’t shit in my bed,” I tell the cow. “I’ll get you out of here, just please don’t shit in my bed.”
My phone’s not where it belongs. It’s not by my bed. It’s not on my dresser. It’s not in the bathroom.
My pants.
Maybe it’s still in my pants.
Where are my—fuck.
My pants are under the cow. Which is still lying on my bed.
It moos at me again. I fist my hair and stare at it. “Get up,” I tell it.
It stares back.
It also doesn’t move.
Or moooooooove, I can hear my teammates saying.
This would be hilarious if it was anyone else’s apartment.
I grab one pant leg and pull. The cow sniffs at my dangling dick. I shift out of the way, because I’m not into getting my family jewels licked by a freaking baby farm animal.
I’d wonder where the fuck Ares found a baby cow, except I, too, know a thing or two about delivering unexpected livestock to apartment buildings.
And the fucker just one-upped me.
For a quiet dude, he’s fucking evil. He better never put a baby cow in Felicity’s bed or he’ll wake up strapped to the underside of an elephant halfway around the world.
I tug and pull on my pants, the cow gives an indignant baby moo, and finally, my jeans come free.
Without the phone in the pocket.
I press my palms into my eye sockets and think.
There was the game.
Vegas scored on me twice. We still won, because Ares and Frey and Lavoie were on fire, but I shouldn’t have let Vegas score. Not that second one anyway. The first—nobody could’ve stopped that biscuit. But the second was an easy shot to block, and I flubbed it.
I skipped Chester Green’s with the team afterward. Haven’t been in a mood to hang with the bunnies at the bar since charm school last season. Opened a bottle of Jack at home instead. Texted Kami because I shouldn’t drink alone.
She showed up with that wide, borderline innocent smile. I was buzzed. She teased me about it. Said she wouldn’t take advantage of me in my compromised state.
Turned on The Mighty Ducks.
I fucking love that movie.
I talked her out of her pants before the Ducks won their first game, and—and that’s where my phone is.
Next to the bottle of Jack I finished in the living room after Kami left.
The baby cow stares at me, those eyes bright and friendly and asking for love.
I trip into my jeans and head for the living room. The sun’s telling me I need to get my ass in gear and over to the rink for morning skate before long. I snag my phone off the end table by my leather sofa, and I don’t think twice as I dial a video call.
Kami’s soft brown eyes come into focus, along with that wide smile. Way smaller than the cow’s eyes. Sweeter too. She’s always sweet. “Morning, sunshine. You feeling okay today?”
“How do I g
She wrinkles her brows at me. She’s walking somewhere—the buildings behind her make me think she’s heading to her clinic—and her brown hair’s tied back in a ponytail that’s whipping in the wind. “A cow out of your bed?” she repeats.
I flip the camera on my phone so she can see forward and march into my bedroom, watching the screen while I center my bed and the cow for her. “Yeah. A fucking baby cow in my fucking bed.”
She nods thoughtfully. “Huh. That does appear to be a calf. Happy birthday to you too.”
“It’s not my fucking birthday. It’s a fucking prank. Can you take care of it?”
Her expression goes still. “Can I…what?”
“Get it out of my condo. It’s an animal. You’re an animal doctor.”
Silence.
Even her expression is silent, which is odd, because Kami’s expressions are always big and loud and…and expressive. Not because she’s loud. She just likes things.
She’s an optimist.
Yeah.
She’s an optimist. Cheery. She makes loud, happy faces.
Fuck, I need to quit drinking.
“I said, happy birthday to you too,” she says.
I squint at the phone. Since when does Kami talk in code? In the months we’ve been banging behind my sister’s back, the only code we’ve ever used is I’m calling it an early night.
Plus, this is hardly the first time she’s gotten a call to take care of an animal at my place. Hell, half the team has her on speed dial.
Which might be my fault.
“I get it,” I say. “I deserve this after the donkey thing, but I have to get to morning skate, and we’re hopping a plane to New York after the game tonight, and I don’t want to come home to a dead baby cow. I’ll pay whatever it takes. But it—”
“Fine. Whatever. I’ll take care of it.”
I freeze.
I know that tone.
That’s pissed off woman tone. And yeah, it’s probably rude of me to call her first thing in the morning like this, but we’re friends. I’d help her get a cow out of her place if I had time, but during the season, it’s hockey first. Always.
“Thanks, Kami. I owe you one.”
“No, Nick. You owe me nothing. In fact, you can consider this a goodbye present. Because this little arrangement we have? It’s over. I’m done.”
She disconnects, and I’m left staring at my official Copper Valley Thrusters photo on the background of my phone.
I don’t know what just happened, but I have a feeling it’s worse than waking up with a baby cow.
2
Kami Oakley, aka a birthday girl on the edge
Anger and I aren’t friends. I hate anger. It’s ugly and it’s vicious and it makes me do awful things.
Things like stalking into Nick Murphy’s apartment with specially formulated calf grains and hay when I’m supposed to be giving Mrs. Okeson’s new kittens their first exam and checking on Mr. Wilder’s elderly boxer-lab with the failing kidneys.
I know, I know. Anger wouldn’t inspire most people to haul calf grains.
But anger has inspired the stalking. With extra-heavy pounding of my feet against the fancy carpet. And some flaring of my nostrils. And that thick wad of crumpled, frozen dreams clogging my chest.
I like to think I usually stride happily. With a bounce. And a smile.
Today, it’s all foot-slaps and scowls and what the hell have I been thinking?
And as I shove my key into his lock, I’m listening to my phone ring a number that anger has also inspired me to call.
Because I’m done.
Just so damn done.
“Muff Matchers, how can we match your muff today?” my cousin says cheerfully while I push into Nick’s condo.
“Muffy, it’s Kami. I need you to find me a husband.”
There’s silence, both on the phone and in the apartment, where a brown calf is blending in with the leather sofa across from the hockey-man-size television hanging on the wall over the gas fireplace.
And she is utterly, perfectly adorable.
“Kami as in Kami Oakley? My cousin Kami? The Kami who already told everyone to save the date for her wedding to Nick Murphy this Christmas?” Muffy asks.
“Quit holding last year’s drunken Thanksgiving ramblings against me. And yes. That Kami.”
“Wow,” she says at the same time the calf moos at me.
Despite probably not being more than three or four months old, the calf is already working those big cow eyes to her advantage, using them to ask for someone to love her. As if I couldn’t with those twitching brown cow ears that she hasn’t grown into yet and her soft muzzle and that cute little baby moo on top of everything.
Fresh anger surges through. She should be on a farm. With her mommy.
And she probably would be if Nick hadn’t started the farm-animals-in-the-apartment game when Felicity fell in love with one of his teammates a year ago.
“Don’t you worry, Sugarbear,” I tell her. “I’m going to find you the best new home ever. After I figure out where you came from. And you are not going to be ground beef. But until I can find a place, you need to stay here for a few more hours. I recommend pooping on the bed if you need to do it again.”
I wince, because I’ve spent a lot of time in that bed with Nick driving into me until I shattered like spun glass on marble.
Though last night it was on the couch.
Where the cow is now.
I blink back the angry tears stinging my eyes.
Nick Murphy might be an ass, but he knows how to use his equipment.
And I was an idiot to think he could’ve ever seen me as something more than an easy lay.
But not anymore.
“Ground beef?” Muffy says, and I realize she’d actually gone silent. “Pooping on the bed? What—who’s Sugarbear?”
“The calf that I agreed to get out of Nick’s condo this morning.”
“Oh. This is all starting to make sense. I can give you the friend and family discount, but I have to add the over-thirty surcharge.”
“The what?”
“Sad fact of being a woman. You’ll be harder to match now that you’re the big three-oh.”
Of course she remembers my birthday. “Fine. But I want a rush job. And don’t cheat me, or I’ll charge you the old-cat surcharge the next time you bring Rufus in for his shots.”
“He’s three!”
“That’s like seventy-six in cat years.” Okay, it’s not. But I’m mad. At everything. Except the cow.
“Ooooh, I get it.” I can hear Muffy nodding. She inherited the loud nodding gene from Aunt Hilda. “He forgot your birthday, didn’t he?”
“Can you do the rush job or not?”
“I’m gonna match your muff so hard and fast, you won’t know what hit it.”
“Oh, gee, add a muff punch while you’re at it. That’ll go great with the knife twisting my heart,” I mutter.
“Okay. Let’s do this. New file, Kami Oakley…”
While keyboard keys click on the other end of the phone and Muffy breathes in my ear, I give the calf a quick once over. I don’t work with large animals, even if I’d love to live in the country and have a small farm of my own, but she seems reasonably healthy. Especially with that mess she left on Nick’s rug. Both messes, actually. Kidneys, intestines, and colon are all apparently in perfect working order. And she’s clearly interested in the grains, so that’s good.
