Dear Roomie (Rookie Rebels #5) - Kate Meader Page 0,2

espresso went spilling across the counter in a muddy mini-wave.

“Oh, shit!” She clamped her mouth shut, then opened it slightly, just enough to murmur, “Sorry.” There was a reluctance about that apology.

This woman was a rebel at heart.

“I startled you.”

Blinking, she seemed to shake herself from a dream, or a nightmare where Reid Durand, the NHL’s poster boy for assholes terrified her with a general query about her well-being.

“No, not at all. Well, yes, you startled me.” She threw the cup in the trashcan beside the bar and wiped the counter down. “It’ll just be a second to re-do it.”

“It’s fine, take your time. You’re on your own here today?”

“Yeah, my manager stepped out for a moment to get some nickels and dimes from the currency exchange. Abolish all cash, that’s what I say!” Chuckling softly, she met his gaze. “Most people pay with credit cards these days anyway, but there’s always someone with Benjamins burning a hole, I suppose.”

Deftly she worked the machine as she talked, more at ease than before. Obviously this was her natural state, an easy way with strangers. Good for someone who worked with the public.

Thank God he had skills on the ice. He’d never survive in customer service.

“You were talking to someone on the phone earlier?”

She flushed, and Reid’s sex-starved brain was filled with lurid images of her pale skin blooming in places unseen. “You heard that?”

“The whole state heard.”

She bit her lip, an astonishingly attractive gesture that hit him right in the gut, or rather somewhere lower. It had been several long, lonely months.

She leaned toward him, the movement making her shirt gape, giving him a view of abundant cleavage. Her name tag read: Kennedy. “Sorry for inflicting that drama on you. Lodging problems. And sorry for leaving you hanging out here. And then spilling your drink. Just sorry all around.”

“That last part was my fault. For making you jump.”

Straightening, she placed the cup under the hot water spigot and started to pour. “Yeah, it was your fault now that I think of it. You’re usually such a grouch that the question about my state of being scared the bejesus out of me.”

“A grouch?”

She sleeved the cup, topped it with a lid, and placed it on the counter. “Are we going to pretend you’re not usually doing your I’m-too-important-to-be-nice act whenever you come in here, Reid D?” That was the name he usually gave, though not today. Either she remembered or she recognized him from TV. “I’ve never seen you be pleasant to anyone except Mia.”

So he wasn’t at his most charming when he came in here. Unable to enjoy the fakery of the social contract, he rarely made a good impression. His mother had despaired of his grim schoolboy photos. Reid objected to being told to smile by anyone, even professional photographers.

Unsure how to respond—and he was never unsure, but now was doubting his entire life strategy—he passed over the dig about his attitude.

“You’re friends with Mia Wallace?” Mia was a hockey player, sister to Vadim Petrov, captain of the Chicago Rebels. On occasion, he had run into her here with that plastic woman who was always making eyes at him.

“More like acquaintances. I walk her dog and make her coffee.”

“You walk dogs?”

“Sure do. You looking for a dog walker?”

He shook his head, feeling a hollowness in his chest that made no sense. “I don’t have a dog. I travel too much to be able to keep one.”

“Sorry to hear that. Sounds like you could do with the company.”

That was quite the assumption. Not incorrect, but quite the assumption all the same. He had the strangest urge to ask her out for a drink he couldn’t have and a meal he couldn’t eat that would lead to a fuck he couldn’t indulge in. This season was too important and a woman like this had the capacity to derail all his plans.

“You’re one of those know-it-alls, aren’t you?”

She touched her throat as if to say, who, me? and followed up with a cute kick to the corner of her lips. Really fucking cute. Damn. “I’m just excellent at giving advice. Ask anyone here and they’ll tell you I’m a whizz at it.”

“Hmm. So what kind of advice do I need?”

Those silver eyes took inventory, but he got the impression she wasn’t seeing what everyone else did: Canadian hockey player, the oldest Durand boy, the crank who hated small talk.

Well, look at him now.

This woman saw something else, maybe something he couldn’t see for