Free Icing the Puck (New York Empires Book 2) by Isabo Kelly, Stacey Agdern, Kenzie MacLir

amazed her.
    He held her a little tighter as she wobbled again. When she didn’t fall, she grinned up at him in triumph. His answering look sent tingles of awareness across her skin. She looked away quickly to concentrate on her breathing and on keeping her hands cool.
    “We got picked on a lot,” he said, his tone easy and relaxed.
    “You got picked on? Who would be stupid enough to do that?”
    She smiled at his bark of laughter. She might worry about the intensity of his emotions, but she did love hearing him laugh.
    “Connor and I were pretty gangly and awkward when we were kids—growing so fast our bodies had trouble adjusting and staying coordinated. There were a lot of clumsy moments. And Connor was… He wasn’t as outgoing as I was. The bullies tended to go after him first.”
    “And you jumped in to defend him,” she guessed. So he’d been like this his entire life, the one to jump into a fight to save a brother. The story explained a lot about him. “What happened?”
    He shrugged, as if it weren’t a bad memory. “We got into a lot of fights. Ridiculous fights that rarely resulted in anything worse than bloody noses, but it happened so often my parents knew they had to do something about it. Connor and I were so much bigger than the other kids, my parents were afraid we’d end up really hurting someone.”
    “But you were the ones being picked on! Why didn’t anyone stop the bullies?”
    “Oh, they worked on that part, too. Lot of suspensions from school handed out, that kind of thing.” He waved away the bullies as if they were nothing. “But as far as my parents were concerned, what Connor and I really needed was an outlet for our energy. And maybe something that would help us adjust to our lanky bodies. My dad thought skating, and hockey, might do the trick. Give us a team sport, a safe place to go, and a way to train some coordination into us.”
    She wanted to comfort the little boy that had to fight to defend himself and his twin brother. Before she could consider how to do that, though, the balance she’d managed to maintain for a full five minutes abandoned her and she slipped again.
    She clung to Brody like a life line as he wrapped her up in arms, pulling her up flush against his chest. This close thoughts of kid bullies fled. All she could think about was how good he smelled, how near he was, how easy it would be to kiss him.
    A group of teenagers skated past just then, hooting and whistling. “Kiss her! Kiss her, dude!”
    She winced and felt her cheeks heating. Brody just smiled as he helped her regain her footing.
    But before she could put any distance between them, he leaned in close and said, “I think those kids had a good idea.”
    He kissed her softly, just a gentle brush of lips, but she felt the contact all the way through her body, tingling along her nerves, sparking very dangerous heat.
    She resisted the urge to melt against him, to take the kiss deeper, only because her hands inside her gloves were feeling a little too warm. The reminder that she still hadn’t mastered control of her fire had her easing away, reluctantly.
    They made their way in slow, shuffling increments to the exit when the announcement came up that their session on the ice was coming to an end. She continued to cling to him around the edge of the rink. For balance she told herself. Not because she desperately wanted to stay in his arms.
    As they laughed and stumbled to the break in the wall—and freedom from the demon ice skates—Ann realized she was in deep with Brody now. She liked him. A lot. And it was getting harder and harder to resist doing something about those feelings.
    She still couldn’t invite him up to her apartment, though. She wasn’t ready for sex, despite being more than a little desperate to take Brody to bed. Their goodnight kisses left her reeling, almost drunk with need, and she wanted him more than any other man she’d ever met.
    She’d only risked sex twice in her life,