A Bear Goal by Anya Nowlan Read Free Book Online

of his head. It was a small mercy that it didn’t; he wasn’t on the market for another concussion just then. The headache he’d gotten from trying to talk her into coming along in the first place had been hard enough to handle.
    It had taken two whole days of bombarding her with silly jokes and making conversation on SassyDate before he could get anything near to a commitment out of her. Luckily, he’d been clever enough to figure out what it was that was keeping her from saying yes immediately, because based on the night at the Hamiltons, she clearly had at least some interest in seeing what kind of trouble a hockey star and a sassy girl with too much lip on her could get themselves into.
    It was her brothers she was worried about. Or, stepbrothers, as she kept correcting him.
    It wasn’t an unfounded reason. Heath had no doubt that the Lynderly twins would bust his head open like a coconut given the chance, and that was even before they would come to find out that he was hitting on their sister. While Heath was sure that their protectiveness had less to do with wanting to see her safe and more to do with staking claim to their family, it was still a real enough issue to take into consideration.
    Neither the Predators nor the Shovelers needed that kind of drama at the moment.
    “Sure. I’ll take you surfing next time you’re in Cali and then we can prepare, hmm?”
    “Oh, fishing for a second date already? Man, you work fast, Miss Lynderly. I like it.”
    Heath grinned even wider when he saw the slight blush cross her cheeks, making her look almost girlish in her modest embarrassment. He had to imagine that Sable wasn’t the kind of woman to be caught off-guard too often, and the fact that he could do that to her made him feel a tiny bit smug. It could only mean that he was getting under her skin, just as she had gotten under his.
    “It’s getting late though. I think we need to go before we can’t find our way back.”
    “Oh, scared of a little darkness?” Sable taunted, turning on the engine of the yellow snowmobile and putting on her gear again. “I thought Heath Locklear was fearless.”
    “Just worried about you, baby,” he said, plopping on the helmet and the goggles with gusto. “Race you,” he called, turning on the engine and taking off when she was putting on the last glove.
    “Asshole!” she yelled after him, but Heath knew that she was going to throttle hard and probably be on his tail in a few seconds.
    That was what he liked about her so much, that tenacity. She wouldn’t give up. It meant she had to get the last word in every conversation and that she’d probably be horrible to play board games with, but he loved it all the same. Though why was he considering playing board games with some girl he’d originally just wanted to fuck again was a whole other matter entirely.
    The path down the mountains took slightly longer than he’d expected, because the steep downward paths were getting treacherous as the light fell, and as much as Heath liked winning, he also liked making it back home alive. Even more than that he was worried about Sable’s safety, which was something that surprised him more than he could put into words.
    Heath had always had some anger issues. Bursts of emotion that spilled out of him like a tidal wave all of a sudden and would make him see red, go berserk. He’d found an outlet for it in hockey like some shifters did in military service or dangerous jobs, but it only took him so far. He’d always had that edge to him, making him hover at the very tip of going from glad to mad, from safe to fucking ballistic. But around Sable, all of that seemed to mellow out and he liked the way it felt.
    When they finally made it down to his truck and loaded up the snowmobiles on the trailer—his first purchase when he’d realized just how much snow there was in the mountains at the right time of the year—it was already dark inside and both of them were freezing. Heath hopped