Free A Bear Goal by Anya Nowlan

There’s a game to win here,” she said, her last few words urgent and hushed, as if she thought someone was going to overhear her and burn her as a witch on the stake for saying something so… anti-patriotic to someone on the opposing team!
    Heath frowned, and then his expression cleared when the realization of what she was telling him hit him. She was worried about him. The way her lips were drawn thin and her cheeks flushed with pink should have tipped him off immediately. Despite the rage still boiling inside of him, he smiled wide.
    “Calm down, will you?” she said, a bit flustered, before turning around and hurrying off before someone caught them talking.
    “Yes ma’am,” he whispered with a chuckle before turning his attention back to the game.
    Hell, if Sable was telling him to get it together, then who was he to deny her wish, right? The flame of anger turned into something much softer and more pleasant within him, heating him with a glow as he sat on the bench like a fool in love.
    But that was what he was, a fool and most definitely in love. It was that small gesture that had made everything click into place. He loved her. She was the one he hadn’t known he was looking for, and he’d found her at a hockey game of all places.
    I’m going to win this and then I’ll win her.
    Nothing was going to stop him now. When he got the signal that he was allowed back on the ice, Heath Locklear took the rink like a bat out of hell, grinning. The Predators wouldn’t know what hit them.
 

CHAPTER TEN
    Sable
     
    Where the hell are they? Sable wondered to herself, tapping her foot as her arms were crossed over her chest.
    She checked her phone for about the tenth time since the game, finding no message from Heath. The plan was to wait until Cayman and Caleb got on the bus and then tell them she’d be catching up in a car later, just to make sure that her destructive brothers were out of town before she went to talk to Heath again. The Predators were in no mood to joke around after their 4–3 loss to the Shovelers, sufficiently ending their bid for regionals and nationals as well.
    She’d been tiptoeing around the rest of the players, who’d changed with record speed after the final horn was blown and shuffled into the bus, morose and quiet. But she would have expected to find Cayman and Caleb to be right among their teammates, cursing and generally letting off steam. The fact that they were both missing and that Heath hadn’t hit her up on SassyDate yet was starting to get a little bit weird.
    “Coach, are we about done here?” Sable asked, seeing Jefferson milling around outside the bus, having a smoke. He looked like he wasn’t enjoying Idaho, the crisp mountain air, or anything else for that matter.
    “Just waitin’ on your damn brothers,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, taking a toke from his cigarette which was hanging lazily from the corner of his mouth.
    “I’ll go see what’s keeping them,” Sable said with a sigh, shoving her hands in her pockets and hunching her shoulders up against the cold.
    It was dark out now and it got real cold real fast in Shifter Grove that time of the year, even when packed into some warm clothes. Or it might have also been the chill of excitement that kept her buzzing and feeling either too much or too little, Sable wasn’t entirely sure.
    Stalking out of the parking lot, she went to round the corner behind where the team entrances were, the large, looming Shifter Grove Ice Arena almost ghostly now that most everyone had left. As soon as she stepped into view of the entrances, she skidded to a grinding halt.
    There, in the middle of the dimly lit area in front of the entrances stood a large, pissed off grizzly bear, staring down two werewolves. Werewolves who looked very, very familiar.
    Oh no they fucking didn’t, Sable thought, dread filling her up like ice in a cocktail glass.
    She burst into a run immediately, but there was a fair amount of distance