Free Closing The Gap (Dangerous Pasts, #1) by Colleen Charles

grateful that Lake didn’t have Summer’s more vivacious personality.  He normally dated her type and he found the refined and reserved Lake to be a breath of fresh air.  It had been many years since he’d had to work this hard to impress a woman, wanting to produce his best self just for her.
    Glancing backward, she scoped out the distance between the blue line and the net.  Didn’t she know it was about sixty four feet?   She couldn’t make that shot unless she put everything she had in her slight body behind it and she aimed dead on the net.
    “A shot from the blue line?  Are you sure you can make it that far?  Don’t you want to start a little closer, superstar?”
    Josh set four pucks up in a straight line around twenty feet from the net, confident that distance offered a good starting point.  She seemed much more stable after being on the ice for a half hour so he was no longer worried leaving her alone would cause her to fall.  He found that keeping her mind and body engaged relaxed her more in his presence.  If by a run of beginners luck, she managed a shot on goal, he planned to make a half-assed attempt at a save and let it blow past him.  Her smile lit up the arena so he found himself working to get one.
    Funny, he’d never cared much about smiles.  Once he got their clothes off, and then them off, he didn’t need to gaze at a woman’s face.  Unbidden, his dad’s words popped into his mind.  He needed to stop behaving like he’d been born in a barn.  Had he just listened to his head and not his dick in a situation involving a beautiful woman?  That was a first and presented a foreign concept to explore later when got back to his bedroom alone.  He drifted backwards and took his place in the net.
    “Ready?”
    “As I’ll ever be.  Here goes.”  She wound up and took a pretty stable shot, teetering on her skates.  It had the distance but arced wide and left of the net.  Like most rookies, she over-corrected and the second and third shots sailed wide right. 
    “This is your final shot.  Since our dinner reservations are in an hour, this should be the last one or we’ll be late.  Do you really want to back up and take it from the blue line?  Wouldn’t you have a better chance at actually making one if you stayed right there?”  His joking tone belied his true intent because a radical idea had sprung into his consciousness.
    “Bring it on, Adams.  I am not afraid.”  With one hand pressing into a curvy hip and the other clutching her stick, she looked super sexy giving him lip while tossing her long hair to the side.  Her taunting him that way brought him further assurance she’d loosened up over the course of the afternoon.  The time had come to nudge her even further.
    Lake tentatively skated on her own to the right side of the blue line and came in a couple of feet.  He slid the puck in her direction so she could prepare herself.  It caressed the ice and slid to a stop a foot in front of her outstretched stick.
    “What do you say we make this interesting?” 
    “Huh?” 
    “I propose a bet to commemorate your first true regulation shot.  We’ll leave the net open, so imagine that your team is losing by one in the last seconds and you need another skater from the bench.  The coach has pulled your goalie.  You pump up and fire a huge slap shot from the point.  If you make it, I’ll match your donation to Hope for Hounds of five thousand dollars.  If you don’t make it, I get a ... kiss.”  He kept smiling, praying and waiting for the possible shut down.
    She moistened her lips and then pulled her bottom lip underneath her top teeth.  What a sexy look that was.  He wondered if she ever wore that one in the bedroom.  Or the couch, or the shower, or the kitchen table.  A haze of innocence surrounded her and he knew the move was genuine and suffered no machinations of trying too hard.  The sexiest women were always the ones without a clue of their