The entire bar is going batshit crazy for Hannah’s performance. She’s belting out “Bad Romance” and almost everyone is singing along, including more than a few of my wasted teammates. I find myself grinning like an idiot as I gaze at the stage. There’s nothing lewd about what she’s doing. No coy almost-stripping, no suggestive dance moves. Hannah throws her head back happily, her cheeks flushed and eyes shining as she sings, and she’s so beautiful it makes my chest hurt.
Fuck, I want to kiss her again. I want to feel her lips on mine. I want to hear that throaty noise she made the first time I sucked on her tongue.
Wonderful. And now I’m hard as a rock, splat in the middle of a bar teeming with my friends.
“She’s amazing!” Logan shouts, sidling up to me. He’s grinning too as he watches Hannah, but there’s an odd gleam in his eyes. Looks a bit like…longing.
“She’s a music major,” is the dumbass response I come up with, because I’m too distracted by his expression.
Thunderous applause bursts out when Hannah’s song ends. A second later, Dean climbs on the stage and whispers something in her ear. From what I can glean, he’s trying to persuade her to sing a duet, but he keeps touching her bare upper arm as he works the charm, and there’s no mistaking the flicker of unease in Hannah’s eyes.
“That’s my cue to rescue her,” I say before threading my way through the crowd. When I reach the bottom of the low-rise stage, I cup my hands around my mouth and call out to Hannah. “Wellsy, get your sexy butt over here!”
Her expression lights up when she spots me. Without skipping a beat, she dives off the stage and into my waiting arms, laughing in delight as I spin her around. “Oh my God, this is so much fun!” she exclaims. “We need to come here all the time!”
As laughter tickles my throat, I study her face to gauge where she lands on my incredibly accurate drunk scale. One being sober and ten being I’m going to wake up naked in Portland with no memory of how I got here. Since her eyes are sharp and she’s not slurring or stumbling, I decide she’s probably at about a five—tipsy but aware.
And maybe it makes me an arrogant bastard, but I love being the one who got her to this point. Who she trusted enough to take care of her so that she could allow herself to let go and have a good time.
With another brilliant smile, she takes my hand and starts dragging me away from the tiny dance floor.
“Where are we going?” I ask with a laugh.
“I have to pee! And you promised to be my bodyguard, so that means you have to wait outside the door and stand guard.” Those mesmerizing green eyes peer up at me, flickering with uncertainty. “You won’t let anything bad happen to me, will you, Garrett?”
A lump the size of Massachusetts lodges in my throat. I swallow hard and try to speak past it. “Never.”
20
Hannah
I can’t believe I was ever nervous about coming to the bar tonight, because holy moly, I’m having a blast. At the moment, I’m crammed in a booth next to Garrett, and we’re involved in a heated debate with Tucker and Simms, arguing about technology, of all things. Tucker won’t budge on his position that young kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch more than an hour of TV a day. I’m totally with him on that, but Garrett and Simms disagree, and the four of us have been bickering about it for more than twenty minutes now. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I honestly didn’t expect all these hockey players to have articulate opinions about non-hockey-related matters, but they’re a lot more insightful than I gave them credit for.
“Children need to be outside riding their bikes and catching frogs and climbing trees,” Tucker insists, waving his pint glass in the air as if to punctuate his point. “It’s not healthy for them to be cooped up indoors staring at a screen all day.”