CHAPTER 25
The Canadians showed up to be the opposition. Mostly polars and grizzlies that they’d all known and grown up with over the years.
They decided on positions and agreed to a few basic rules that included no permanent injuries before separating and heading to their team goals.
That was when Bo noticed them. How could he not when it was pretty much the entire town—Ursus County and the local Canadians—sitting around waiting for the game to start. He quickly scanned the crowd and saw Blayne standing by herself. He skated to the edge of the pond and motioned her over.
“What’s this?” he asked when she stood in front of him.
“Um . . .”
He took off his helmet and shook out his hair. “No ‘um.’ What is this?”
“They just showed up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m not sure I’m appreciating your tone lately.”
“My tone?”
“It implies I’m not being truthful.”
“Maybe we should ask the chief and my uncle about how truthful you are, she of the crocodile tears.”
“You’re enjoying that way too much.”
“I guess I kinda am. Besides,” he leaned down and pressed his forehead against hers, “I like that you have a devious side, Blayne Thorpe.”
Blayne grinned. “Your accent’s coming back.”
“What accent?”
“Now who’s not being truthful?” She stepped away from him and turned.
“No kiss?” he called after her as she walked away, catching everyone’s attention.
Blayne looked at him over her shoulder. “Did you have to yell that?”
“Is that a no?”
“Yes. It’s a no. No kiss for you.”
“Oh, come on!” everyone called out, startling Bo.
“You can’t leave him hanging like that!”
“Kiss him!”
“Go on and kiss him, cutie!”
Then someone began to clap and chant, “Kiss him! Kiss him! Kiss him!” And everyone joined in.
Blayne marched back over to him. “I blame you for this.”
“You’re the one getting to know everybody. If I had my way, we would have never left my uncle’s house.” He leaned down and added in a whisper, “Or my bed.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll still be there when we get home tonight.”
She reached up, placing her hands on his shoulders, and pulling him down until she could reach him while on the tips of her toes. Blayne kissed him and the whoops and catcalls faded to nothing more than background noise as he pulled her in close and kissed her back.
“They’re all staring at us, aren’t they?” Blayne asked when they finally separated.
“Pretty much.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m not shy.” She winked at him and headed over to the residents who had lawn chairs and benches out for everyone to sit on. Marci had saved a seat for her.
“You two are looking happy,” she said.
“Not as happy as Grigori was when he got home this morning.”
“Uh . . . um . . .” Flustered, Marci immediately turned back to the pond where the two teams were warming up. “This is very exciting,” she rambled on. “Very few of us have seen Bold Novikov play in years.”
“You guys don’t have a professional team nearby?”
“Only minor teams from other bear towns come this far north. The professional teams won’t come out here because we’re not very welcoming of other species.”
“Oh.” Blayne thought about that a moment. “But everyone welcomed me.”
Marci’s smile returned. “That we did.” She leaned in and whispered, “The whole town’s talking about how you handled Kerry-Ann. She’s usually real intimidating.”
“Is that because of her beady little eyes?” Blayne asked in a whisper. “Because with a little makeup, I could totally help her with that.”
Marci took Blayne’s hand between both of hers, “I am learning to adore you, Blayne Thorpe.”
His uncle, the only one anyone trusted to be ref of this game since he was too hard on Bo to ever ignore his mistakes, was about to drop the puck when they heard all the laughter. They briefly paused to focus over at the onlookers.
“Seems that tiny girlfriend of yours is fittin’ in pretty well, Bold Novikov,” Raymond remarked, obviously impressed.
“She does have a way about her.”
“It must be the dog in her, because wolves . . .”
Both teams sneered in agreement about wolves until Grigori leaned in and asked, “Are you two girls done talkin’ or should we forget all this and start braiding each other’s hair instead?”
Bo focused back on the game, doing his best to push Blayne out of his mind. Not easy when he could still taste her on his lips.
His uncle dropped the puck and Bo went for it, trying to get control of it. Bad move. What he should have done was remember how these impromptu pond games were played. If he had, that Canadian polar would have never been able to bash Bo’s skull in with his stick before skating off with Bo’s puck.
Blayne cringed when she saw Bo go down from that hockey stick to the head.
Looks like dinner tonight will be clear soups. Or straight intravenous feeding.
Bo slowly sat up, shaking his big head. Probably all that ringing in his ears was confusing him. But it didn’t last long. His head came up and he snarled, his gaze locking on the polar who took his puck and was busy trying to get past Bo’s goalie.
Bo got to his feet.
“Uh-oh,” Marci said to the woman beside her. “His tusks are out.”
“They’re not tusks,” Blayne argued. “They’re fangs. Like the mighty saber-toothed cat of yore.”
“Yore?”
“He probably got it from his ancient Mongolian ancestors,” Blayne added.
“I doubt it,” a sow sitting behind them said. “Saber-toothed cats were from a long-extinct subfamily of cats. Mostly from North and South America. Bold Novikov’s lion kin come from ancient China but I believe can be traced back to ancient Africa where the first . . .”
The sow’s lecture faded out when Blayne turned around and stared at her.
Grinning, Marci said, “This is my daughter, Rebecca. Did I mention she has her Ph.D. in paleontology?”
Now Blayne stared at Marci.
“Like ‘Jurassic Park,’ dear.”
“Ohhhh. Right.” Because that was a movie she’d seen. “Well, whatever. They’re fangs, as far as I’m concerned. Not tusks. He’s not a walrus.”
“Although he’s been known to eat walrus.”
Blayne shuddered. “Thanks for that, Marci.”
“Just involving myself in the conversation, dear.”
Right. Sure she was.
Blayne returned her attention to the game, but of course that was around the time she was hit with a splash of blood across her face and neck from whatever Bo did to some poor Canadian polar that got in his way.
Trying hard not to laugh, Marci reached into her large designer bag that was part traveling medical bag and part purse, pulling out a large white cloth.
“You,” Marci coughed back a laugh, “poor dear. Let me clean you off.”
It’s always nice to know that morbid embarrassment follows me wherever I go.
During a timeout, Bo skated over to the sideline where Blayne was waiting.
“Where did all that blood come from?” he asked.
She glared at him, but didn’t answer. Since she seemed relatively unharmed, he didn’t worry about it.
“Game’s going pretty well, huh?”
“Sure.”
She didn’t sound sure. “What? Say it.”
“It’s just a suggestion, but maybe you could . . .”
“Could what?”
“Let someone else get a goal.”
“Why would I do that?”
She rubbed her forehead with both hands. “Because it’ll be very cool to do and you have absolutely nothing to lose?”
“Except my puck.”
Her hands turned into fists, and he thought she might try pummeling him, but she looked off, took a breath, and tried again. “Only a truly confident man—”
“Is willing to be a loser?”
That time she did swing, hitting his arm and chest with those tiny wolfdog fists. And his laughing—not helping.
The truth was Bo had never willingly allowed anyone to get his puck, but Blayne did have a point. He had nothing to lose. But there was a bigger issue here.
“Will it make you happy if I do this?” he asked.
“Yes,” she hissed, frustrated. “It would make me happy.”
“Then I’ll do it.”
Blayne blinked, her fists unfisting. “Just like that?”
“Yep. I like making you happy.”
Her grin—worth any going-against-his-personal-beliefs moment this would cause.
“But don’t try this during an actual game where I’m getting paid millions of dollars to win,” he added, so boundaries were clear.
She laughed, heading back to her seat. “Like I care what you do at that dog and pony show at the stadium.”
Nope. He didn’t get her at all, but man did he like her.
Blayne returned to her seat, Marci watching her close.
“What was that about?” she asked.
“Just a little conversation. Nothing to worry yourself about.”
“Seems to me like you two are getting serious.”
“Getting serious about what?”
The sow dismissed her with a hand wave. “Forget I asked.”
“I will.” Kerry-Ann, who’d shown up once the game had started, held out a bag of popcorn for Blayne.
“This is going so well, isn’t it?”
“You were supposed to give me more time,” Blayne reminded her around a mouthful of popcorn.
“I had complete faith in your skills, Blayne Thorpe.”
“Uh-huh.” Just for that Blayne took another handful of popcorn. “I have a question.”
“And what’s that, dear?”
“All the stray dogs I keep finding. Where are they coming from?”
Both Kerry-Ann and Marci shrugged.
“Don’t know,” Kerry-Ann admitted. “We find ’em all the time. Figure they’ve been coming from one of the full-human towns. A few of the store owners wanted us to get a team together to hunt them down and . . . uh . . .” She studied Blayne a moment before finishing with, “Take them somewhere they could live forever in happy fields.”
Even if Marci hadn’t spit out her Sprite, Blayne didn’t buy that for a second.
“Contrary to popular belief, Kerry-Ann, dogs aren’t stupid. We know when we’re going to the vet.”
“Well, we didn’t do it, did we?” Kerry-Ann snapped. “It was just a suggestion anyway.”
“Uh-huh.” Blayne took more popcorn, now feeling fully entitled to the entire bag. “And what about the farmhouse?”
“What farmhouse?”
“The one near the beach. You have to get through Antarctic Minor to get to it.”
Marci chuckled. “She’s talking about the old Benson place, Kerry-Ann.”
“Gosh. No one’s lived there for years. Can’t get to it anyway from here because of the storms.”
“What are those anyway?”
“They’re the reason we don’t have any more covens running around Ursus County,” Marci murmured.
“They wanted to make the polars comfortable by making certain parts of the area cold year-round. Needless to say, that went badly.”
“Even the polars don’t feel like going through that freezing weather. It’s hell on their coats.”
“And the Bensons died without a cub of their own, so that house goes untended.”
“But it’s a beach property, right? You could sell that, couldn’t you?”
“To who? Full-humans? Remember, Blayne, they don’t know we’re here and we plan to keep it that way.”
“Well those dogs have to be coming from somewhere, and it needs to stop.”
“I have a few friends in the Humane Society who could look into it,” Marci told her. “I’ll call them and ask.”
Blayne pressed her shoulder into Marci’s. “Thank you. Dr. Luntz.”
“Oh, stop your foolishness, Blayne Thorpe. And duck.”
“What—”
The puck slammed into her head, sending Blayne flipping into the lap of Marci’s daughter.
“My fault!” one of the Canadians yelled from the ice.
Marci shook her head at Blayne. “Told you to duck, now didn’t I? You don’t listen, Blayne Thorpe.”
Bo went behind the goal, the entire opposition right on his ass. They’d been riding him for almost the entire game, knowing he was the one they had to stop. He hard-charged around, the other team’s winger coming at him from the front, their left defenseman at his back. The rest of Bo’s team moving in and the opposition’s goalie crouched and ready to block Bo’s shot.
Could he get through them all and possibly get the goal? Yeah. He could also get his head cut open in the process and end up spending the rest of the night icing his wounds and taking massive amounts of over-the-counter pain meds to get rid of what would be a monstrous headache rather than playing what had become his favorite game outside of hockey—Making the Naughty Wolfdog Squeal.
Using an overabundance of peripheral vision that gave him almost a 360-degree view of everything around him, Bo saw Raymond Chestnut push past the other team’s right winger. Where he was going, Bo didn’t know or care. Instead he yelled out, “Chestnut!”
The nearly eight-foot polar stopped on a dime and turned toward him. Bo swung his stick back—hitting someone in the face—then forward, the slap shot sending the puck away from the group and at Raymond. The polar blinked in surprise. He’d played with Bo throughout grade, junior high, and high school, and never once had Bo purposely shot the puck to anyone. He seemed so stunned that Bo was sure he’d let the puck go right by him.
Thankfully, he didn’t. Raymond halted the puck with his stick, spun, and sent it off—right past the goalie who’d only seconds ago realized that for once Bo no longer had the damn thing.
The puck sailed into the ratty net that had been used for every inside town game for the past forty years, the goalie diving in after it, his team piling on top of him, trying to help. It was a lost cause. The puck was in and Grigori threw up his arms and blew his whistle. The game was over and Raymond Chestnut had made the winning shot.
The crowd roared in approval, everyone coming off the bench and across the ice. Raymond shook hands and gave hugs while appearing stunned out of his mind. A polar sow threw herself into Raymond’s arms as did five cubs. It took Bo a second, but he eventually recognized Meg D’Accosta. Raymond’s girlfriend throughout high school and apparently his mate now.
“That was impressive!” Blayne smiled up at him, her hand holding an icepack to her forehead. “I thought you were going to not do it.”
“I’ll admit, it wasn’t easy for me. And how’s your head?”
“Oh, you know . . .” A sound like a shot ricocheted around them, and the bears and foxes all fell silent, focusing on Blayne.
Her cheeks bright red, she lowered the icepack and, except for the nasty cut still there, even the swelling was gone. Once again her bones had “snapped” back.
“It’s much better,” she muttered.
“I see that.”
“Huh,” Grigori said next to them. “And I thought the boy had the hardest head in Ursus County.”
Everyone laughed, and Bo pulled an embarrassed but giggling Blayne against him, hugging her tight.
“We’re all going to the Chestnuts’ bar for drinks,” Dr. Luntz said, her hand patting Bo’s back. “You’ll come with us.”
Bo shook his head. “I can’t. I’ve got stuff to do back at Grigori’s house.”
His uncle growled, and Blayne stepped away from him. “What stuff?” she asked.
He pulled the list out of his hockey pants and unfolded it. “Let’s see—”
Before he could read off the first item, Blayne leaped up and snatched the paper out of his hand, Grigori and Marci laughing.
Bo stared at his empty hand for a moment, shocked, before turning his gaze to Blayne. She held the sheet with two hands, and he could see the evil intent in her eyes.
“Blayne Thorpe, don’t you dare—”
Too late. She ripped the paper into shreds and tossed the shreds into the air. “It’s snowing!” she cheered.
Unlike before with his uncle, Bo didn’t have time to write a copy of this list. His precious, detailed, perfectly timed out list! How could she?
Bo skated toward her, and Blayne squealed and stumbled back from him.
“You’re not going to do anything crazy, are you?” she asked.
“That was my list.”
“It was too confining!” she argued. “You need to learn to live in the moment.”
“And you need a good dousing in Small Bear River.” He reached for her, but Raymond Chestnut swept her up in his arms and took off running toward town, the rest of the two teams right behind him, the town cheering them on.
“You want your wolfdog back, Bold Novikov, guess you’re going to have to come and get her!” Raymond crowed, everyone applauding in agreement.
Grigori stood beside Bo now. “The boys seem to have taken to your Blayne.”
“I don’t run after women,” he said, still pissed off about his list.
“You shouldn’t run after them. None of them deserve it.”
“Right.”
“ ’Course everyone in town knows that Blayne can put whatever she wants on account, in your name. And if you walk to town now, those boys can probably damn-near clean out Chestnut’s bar long before you get there.”
“And,” Dr. Luntz tossed in for good measure, “there is something about Blayne Thorpe that just screams, ‘Drinks for everybody!’ Don’t ya think, Bold Novikov?”
With a short, outraged roar, Bo took off running before the damn woman could put him in the poor house.