Series: Rookie Rebels #4
Publication date: December 29th, 2020
Synopsis:
The next Rookie Rebels novel
Featuring Mia Wallace, Vadim Petrov's sister!
She's all grown up and ready to play...
She's got game everywhere but the bedroom. Enter the player who knows exactly how to grade her curves...
After a very public breakup and a viral post that declares him the villain, power forward Cal Foreman is taking a timeout from women and relationships to focus on hockey. When Chicago Rebels captain and old friend, Vadim Petrov, "volunteers" him to help train Vadim's sister Mia, Cal figures he can do a favor for a pal and get ready for the season with his new team. But the imperious Russian would slice a skate blade through Cal's internal organs if he knew what lessons Mia really wants.
Yeah, not that kind of stickhandling.
Hockey phenom and Olympics hopeful Mia Wallace needs help seducing the man of her dreams. That man is most definitely not Cal Foreman: notorious playboy, thorn in her side, and her brother's bestie. But surely a guy with his reputed skill set has a few tips on how she can nail her target--which makes him the perfect foreplayer.
Cal knows Mia sees him as merely the warm-up act in her grand plan to win another man, but as they spend more time together, he wonders if that's enough.
If they could be more.
And if he could convince her he's worthy of the starting line-up... in her heart?
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Excerpt
She took the phone back. "So I was reading this list of ways to snag a man in the fifties."
He exploded. "He's in his fifties?
"No, it was written in the fifties. As in the 1950s?" She tapped a few more times. "It's ridiculously funny, actually. One of the tips is to walk into a room with a hatbox--"
"Is that code?"
She laughed, full and melodic. His dick reacted predictably.
"I know, some of the stuff is crazy. But a couple of things struck a chord. Like stand in a corner and cry softly so he'll ask what happened."
"That's... ludicrous." And a genius move. No man would resist asking a woman why she was crying. He took the phone from her again. "You want to go in sounding like a sad sack? What else have we got? Tell him funny stories. Wear a Band-Aid. Ask his advice." He looked up and grinned, when inside he didn't feel like grinning at all. He felt like snarling, then punching out all these idiots who needed to be strategized into falling for a woman. "Ah, Mia, is this a cunny ploy to seduce me after all? Does this guy even exist?"
Something changed the moment he said it. Maybe the funny old notion that she might be plotting to seduce him, Cal, and not this other guy, who he fucking hated at this point because he wanted her to think of Cal this way. To work this hard to get him. To want him the way he wanted her.
The charge in the air was thick, electric, so when Mia laughed, he heard her nerves, and it strangely excited him.
"Of course he exists." She took a sip of her soda.
"But..."
"But, what?"
He tilted his head. "You don't sound so sure. All this advice-asking could be your way of finding out what works for me. Like asking for a friend but the other way around." His pulse was racing, not because he believed the nuts-and-bolts of this theory for a damn second, but because he wasn't alone in thinking about the possibilities. Of them.
It had definitely occurred to her, maybe a vague notion of what it might be like. To touch, to kiss, to want... a bolt of lust thrashed through him and knocked him on his ass.
"You're crazy, Foreman." It came out faint and unconvincing.
"Am I?"
"Would it work?"
"Would what work?"
Her voice was a whisper. "The cunning ploy to ask you advice about some guy?"
Sometime in the last sixty seconds, she had stepped in closer and he became vaguely aware of his thighs parting, accepting her into their embrace. An invite to get in good and tight against the part of his body that needed her so fucking badly.
"It might," he said, warming to the hypothetical situation. "You talk about all the things you might be able to do to win him. To seduce him. To make him yours. And all this time, you're really thinking of me. Of what might work to get my attention. And I'll tell you here and now, Mia..."
"What?" She licked her lips and his cock turned as hard as the granite countertop he was leaning against.
"I wouldn't need any games. No pretend crying. Or funny stories. Or wearing a Band-Aid. Or carrying a damn hat box. Because one look at you and I'd be all in. No seduction necessary."
Her eyelashes fluttered, inky, sooty frames for those lovely eyes, ones he'd happily fall into. Drown in. Die in.
The air zipped with the energy that always existed between them, a thick, drugging force of knowing and what he now realized with recognition. Of seeing inside someone's soul. He didn't dare speak in case he ruined whatever was happening.
"No seduction necessary?" The words were a ghosted breath on her lips, almost disbelief in her tone.
"None. No one should need to be tricked into kissing you."
"Hypothetically," she whispered.
He watched her mouth, mesmerized by the plumpness of her lips, the dark pink color, the slight quiver that invited him in.
"Hypothetically," he returned, his mouth so close to hers it would take an act of Congress to move him away. She would have to withdraw because he sure as hell was going nowhere. This was where he wanted to be.
Needed to be.
A small sound emerged from her throat, and with it some sort of plea. He took it as such and took her mouth with his.
Originally from Ireland, USA Today bestselling author Kate Meader cut her romance reader teeth on Maeve Binchy and Jilly Cooper novels, with some Harlequins thrown in for variety. Give her tales about brooding mill owners, oversexed equestrians, and men who can rock an apron, a fire hose, or a hockey stick, and she's there. Now based in Chicago, she writes sexy contemporary romance with alpha heroes and strong heroines who can match their men quip for quip.
