Light the Lamp (7 page)

I kept going with my demonstration. “Then you add a few scoops of coffee grounds like this. Since we’re making a full pot, let’s try four scoops and see how it comes out. We can adjust on the next pot if it isn’t the right amount. And once you have it all set up, you flip the switch.” I turned the machine on, and seconds later the heavenly aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the apartment. “Piece of cake.”

“
Yeah,” Babs said. “Maybe for you.”

“
Start with making coffee and who knows what you’ll be cooking next.”

“
He’d better not be cooking anything,” Liam said, his tone light and teasing as he came around the corner from the end of the apartment opposite his bedroom. He had on sweatpants and a gray T-shirt, and he was rubbing a towel over his still-wet hair. When he saw me, he smiled.

He hadn’t shaved yet, which made me unreasonably happy. I’d loved the sensation of his scruff teasing my palm and my lips when I’d touched him last night.

My dad had never let his facial hair grow out, and both Chris and Ethan seemed to be following in Dad’s footsteps in that regard. I wasn’t sure if I liked it so much because it was
different
from the other men in my life, or maybe it was just because it seemed so very
Liam
. Either way, I didn’t want him to shave it any time soon.

“
He’s not,” I said as I met Liam’s eyes. “I showed him how to make coffee, though, so maybe he can start doing that sometimes.” I winked at Babs, and he blushed even harder than he had been before. I found him endearing and just as dissimilar from my brothers as Liam was, but in an entirely unique way.

Liam shot a look over at Babs and then returned his gaze to me. “As long as he doesn’t burn the place down.”

“
He won’t. I’m a good teacher.” That was what I’d wanted to do with my life, at least before my parents died—teach. I’d always imagined myself in a classroom full of kindergarteners. But then everything had changed, and I’d had to drop out of college so I could get a full-time job and support my brothers.

I didn’t regret it. Not even for a moment. But I did sometimes wonder how my life would be if my dad hadn’t tried to be a hero that day.

“
I can believe that.” Liam came into the kitchen and took a couple of pans out of a cabinet, setting them on the stove before turning on the burners. “Fix yourself a cup, and I’ll have breakfast ready by the time Babs finishes showering.”

“
I’ll take that as my hint to scram,” Babs said. He grabbed an orange from a bowl on the bar and headed in the direction Liam had just come from.

Liam opened the refrigerator and pulled out bacon, eggs, peppers, mushrooms, and a whole stack of other things. Once he set them down on the counter, he turned to me, his eyebrows knitted together in concern. “Did none of the clothes Sara brought fit you?”

I hadn’t even given those clothes a moment’s thought today. Or last night, either, since I had already been in the T-shirt Liam had given me and that had seemed reasonable for sleep. “I haven’t even opened the bag to see what’s in there,” I admitted, pouring a cup now that the coffee had finished brewing. I added sugar and cream, probably more than anyone else on the face of the planet would find reasonable, and stirred.

He lifted an eyebrow at me, taking out a cutting board and a knife. “You realize you’re almost naked and Babs saw you like that.”

He had a point. I glanced down at myself, suddenly self-conscious. I tugged at the hem of the T-shirt, but it didn’t seem to do any good. “Do you think I embarrassed him?” It seemed possible, especially since I’d never met Babs before. Maybe that had been why he’d kept blushing.

Liam put a few strips of bacon in a hot pan on the stove. They started popping and sizzling immediately. “I’m not worried about him; I’m worried about you. I don’t like anyone else seeing you like this.”

Anyone
else
, he’d said. Meaning he liked seeing me like this, himself. A warm flutter raced through my body to settle in my stomach.

“
I’m sorry,” I said, crossing my legs at the ankles as though that could do anything to cover me. I hadn’t thought about how little I was wearing until now, which seemed stupid of me. Just because Liam felt like he was harmless to me didn’t mean he actually was harmless. I had no way of knowing. “I wasn’t thinking.”

That seemed to be a problem for me more often than not. I just reacted to things instinctively and let the chips fall where they may. I took a sip from my cup and nearly choked on it because of the heated look Liam sent in my direction. It seemed like the more time I spent in his company, the more he was flirting.

And I liked it.

A fleeting smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Go see if any of it fits so I don’t have to hurt Babs for looking at you too hard. I’ll have breakfast ready soon.”

“
Okay.” I set my mug down. He met my eyes for the briefest of moments, causing goose bumps to break out all over my body and a shiver to race up my spine. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at him. “Liam?”

“
Yeah?”

I bit down on my lower lip, and his eye fell right on that spot. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

“
I hope you don’t stop flirting with me. It feels too good.”

He let out a groan that sounded pained, and I raced back into his bedroom and closed the door before I could think better of saying something like that.

 

 

I’d slept like
shit last night, but the lack of rest hadn’t really affected me as much at practice as it should have. I’d even scored three times in our shootout drill, which almost never happened for me these days. I couldn’t seem to score anywhere, whether it was in a game situation or not.

I really needed to avoid sleeping on the couch again, though, whether the lack of sleep had affected my play or not. A couch like that wasn’t really designed for anyone to sleep on it, and when you consider that I was six foot one and weighed 210 pounds, give or take, it wasn’t a good long-term solution.

Lucky for me, Babs didn’t seem to mind that Noelle was going to be sticking around for a while. When I’d shown up in Portland at the trade deadline, Babs had offered to let me stay with him, in the room Soupy had vacated, through the end of the season. Then I could deal with finding something more permanent in the off-season.

Even though there was a pretty wide gap in age between us, I’d taken him up on the offer. Having a place to go home to was always preferable to going back to a hotel room. As professional hockey players, we lived in hotels more than enough when we were on the road.

I’d been living alone on Long Island since Liv’s death, so it was nice to have someone else around, too. Someone to talk to. And now, having Noelle around would only help that more. Her presence was all it took to put me in a better frame of mind, to lighten my mood. So no matter how badly I’d slept last night, I wasn’t going to let Noelle sleep on the couch instead of me. She’d been sleeping in a car, for God’s sake, and I didn’t have a clue how long that had been going on. Weeks? Months? However long she’d been homeless, she deserved to be pampered, and sleeping in a real bed didn’t even come close to what I would call pampering.

Although, I sure as fuck had no intention of trying to convince her to share my bed with me. She was the first woman I’d felt such a strong attraction to since Liv—or really any attraction at all—and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Even though Liv would want me to move on with my life, to love again and be loved, I didn’t know if I could. It felt like I was being unfaithful just flirting with Noelle the way I had been so far, which was ridiculous. How could I be unfaithful to Liv when she was dead?

The sense that I was cheating wasn’t going to stop me from flirting, though. I couldn’t seem to make myself stop. Noelle was so different from anyone I’d ever known before. She fascinated me. Thank God she was flirting right back and enjoying it as much as I was—if she’d been honest with me this morning, that is. But that didn’t mean we needed to jump into bed together, so I needed to find somewhere to sleep other than on the couch.

“
We’ve never put anything in that third bedroom by mine other than a couple of boxes my parents sent to me,” Babs said. “You could have it. I can clear the boxes out.”

Now that we’d finished with practice for the day, he was in his stall and putting on his clothes. His was in the row opposite mine. When I’d joined the team, they’d put me next to Nicklas Ericsson, the top goaltender on the team and a fellow Swede. On my other side, they’d put RJ. Having Nicky and RJ on either side of me and Babs not too far away gave me a little sense of comfort within this dressing room. I knew those three guys and Soupy best out of all the boys on the team. I hadn’t been the new kid on the block since my rookie season, so it had been a long time since I’d felt like the odd man out.

I pulled a clean T-shirt over my head. “I guess I could find somewhere to buy a bed while I’m out shopping with her today. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to get something like that delivered on short notice, though.”

“
You need another bed?” Zee asked. Eric Zellinger, the team captain, had just come back into the locker room from the showers. He came over and stole RJ’s seat, since RJ was still tied up with the reporters in the media scrum. “Dana and I just decided to turn one of my guest bedrooms into a gym. We’ve got a full bedroom set that we need to find a new home for—hardly been used. It’s yours if you want it. We just need to find a way to move it from my house to your condo.”

Cam Johnson grunted. “That’s easy. I’ve got a pickup.” Jonny sat down in his stall so he could put his shoes on. “You and I can load it, and Babs and Soupy can help me unload it at their place.”

“
How the fuck did I get roped into this?” Soupy asked, but he didn’t sound upset.

“
Because Babs is still fucking half asleep after taking Katie to prom, and I don’t want to have to carry a bed all by my fucking self,” Jonny said.

“
I’m not half asleep.”

“
You’d be even more awake if you’d gotten her home earlier, dipshit.” That came from David Weber, Katie’s dad and the oldest guy on the team. He said it with a grin, though. Webs was always giving Babs a hard time, but I didn’t get the sense there was any real bite behind it. His daughter was in high school, and now she had leukemia. It was only natural for him to bark at young guys like Babs.

Babs turned around in his stall and busied himself with putting things in his gym bag. “We weren’t late,” he mumbled.

“
Doesn’t matter,” Jonny said. “Soupy’s helping.”

A few of the guys grunted, and that was that.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that the boys were so willing to help, even though I was the new guy on the team. They were my teammates now, and with every hockey team I’d ever been part of, teammates were more like brothers. Like family. They helped each other out when help was needed.

But I was still taken aback by how quickly they came up with a solution to my problem and chipped in.

Now I could feel better about convincing Noelle that she needed to stay with me without her assuming I was just trying to get her into bed.