“You always this confident?” he asks.
“Only around grown men who act like unsupervised teenagers.”
He laughs, low and warm, like he finds that charming instead of insulting. “Careful. You keep talking to me like that, and I might start to like you.”
“I’m not here to be liked.”
“Good,” he says. “I’m terrible at liking people anyway.”
I lift my chin. “Then this should work out perfectly. You stay out of trouble, and I stay out of your way.”
He steps just a little closer, enough that my heart does something embarrassing. “Something tells me you’re not great at staying out of anything.”
“Please,” I say, lifting a brow. “If trouble were a doorway, you’d run into it face-first and blame the architecture.”
His smile widens. “This should be fun.”
Perfect. My first assignment is a shirtless headache with a criminally good smile.
And I have no idea how I’m supposed to handle him.
Chapter two
Bryce
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say, watching Annabelle Hacker march out of the rink like she owns the entire building. Which, technically, she kind of does.
Five feet of attitude with a clipboard. A tiny, bossy thunderstorm wrapped in lipstick and executive authority. And apparently, my new babysitter.
Perfect. Just what I needed today.
I drag my eyes away from the doorway she disappeared through, but it doesn’t help. My brain replays every second: the unimpressed stare, the sarcasm, the chin tilt that said she wasn’t scared of me even a little.
Cute. Annoying. Cute again.
“Dude,” someone calls behind me, “your jaw is literally on the floor.”
I turn and whip my towel at Mason. He catches it and laughs.
“Shut up,” I say.
“She didn’t even look back at you,” he says. “Painful, man. Really painful.”
I pretend not to care, but the truth? I noticed. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blush. Didn’t do the usual giggle women tend to do when they spot me shirtless.
She looked at me like I was a problem she had to solve.
And I don’t know what that says about me, but it did something.
I push into the locker room, peeling off my pads. The chirping starts instantly.
“So,” Dex says, eyebrows dancing, “you met the boss’s daughter before the rest of us? Bold move.”
“She definitely hates you,” Eli adds as he strips the tape from his stick.
“She hates him enough to marry him someday,” Colby hollers from across the room.
“Not happening,” I mutter.
