Beauty and the Beefcake Read online

  Beauty and the Beefcake

  Pippa Grant

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Beauty and the Beefcake

  A vegan-friendly Hockey / Roommates / Opposites Attract Romantic Comedy

  There are two kinds of women in the world – those I can bang, and those I can’t.

  My teammate’s sister?

  She’s a can’t.

  I moved in with her to protect her from a nasty ex, not to be the next guy in line.

  She’s the brains.

  I’m the brawn.

  She’s the fruit.

  I’m the sausage.

  She talks too much.

  I don’t talk at all, if I don’t have to.

  Should be easy to resist her.

  But every minute I spend with Felicity is another minute she gets under my skin. She makes me feel like something more than a dumb puckhead with a big Zamboni pony. And it’s getting harder to remember why I need to keep my hands to myself.

  Beauty and the Beefcake is a vegan-friendly standalone romantic comedy featuring a hockey player whose vocabulary is the only thing smaller than a hockey puck, a book-smart but aimless ventriloquist with too many voices in her head, a dilapidated old house that may or may not be haunted, and no cheating or cliffhangers.

  Books by Pippa Grant

  Mister McHottie (Chase & Ambrosia)

  Stud in the Stacks (Parker & Knox)

  The Pilot and the Puck-Up (Zeus and Joey)

  Royally Pucked (Manning and Gracie)

  Beauty and the Beefcake (Ares and Felicity)

  Rockaway Bride (Willow and Dax)

  The Hero and the Hacktivist (Rhett and Eloise)

  Hot Heir (Viktor and Peach)

  Charming as Puck (Nick and…)

  Exes and Ho Ho Hos (Jake and Kaitlyn)

  And more…

  Keep in touch with Pippa Grant!

  Join the Pipsquad

  Get the Pipster Report

  Friend Pippa

  Like Pippa

  Hang with Pippa on Goodreads

  Find Pippa on BookBub

  1

  Felicity (aka Ms. Bad Taste In Men)

  It is a falsehood universally spread across the globe that a single woman in possession of a house, a job—sort of—and boobs must be in want of a dickhead to fuck with her brain.

  Or possibly I just have terrible taste in men. And horrible luck in the genetic pool, because my brother is also currently ranking pretty high up there among the biggest assholes on the planet.

  And that’s my official explanation for why there are currently several hundred—possibly thousand—pornographic sugar cookies piled all the fuck over my grandmother’s teeny strip of a front yard.

  That’s right.

  An entire mountain range of sugar cookies printed with dicks erupted on Gammy’s patch of dried-up lawn and are spilling over onto the cracked sidewalk and her beloved gardenia bushes.

  And did I mention it’s raining?

  Pouring.

  Buckets.

  In waves. With some gusts of wind that are spreading the wet sugar scent all up and down the street of attached 1960’s townhomes.

  I’m going to be shoveling soggy-ass dick cookies from now until Christmas. And I don’t even want to contemplate what the sugar and dye in the frosting will do to Gammy’s grass. Never mind the gardenias.

  “At least the rain’s washing the dicks off,” reasons Kami, ever the optimist in my group of friends.

  “This is one of those times you should be offering to slip one of us a couple syringes of horse tranquilizer,” replies Alina, ever the pragmatic voice of reason.

  Maren, ever the environmentalist who’s probably calculating the diabetic coma the worms in the ground will soon be suffering from, shakes her head. “You only need one to take out Doug.”

  “And one more for Nick,” Alina adds.

  “Nick?” Kami says. “This isn’t Nick’s fault.”

  As far as Kami’s concerned, nothing is ever my brother Nick’s fault.

  In this case, she’s wrong. Which I know without a doubt because Doug Dobey, the last in my string of bad exes, texted me. You and your dickhead brother better watch your fucking backs.

  And a picture of the dick cookies—pre-natural washing on Gammy’s patch of grass—accompanied the threat.

  Not that I’ve shared that with my friends. They’d freak out. Honestly, a girl gets herself a harmless stalker once, and suddenly every ex-boyfriend and disgruntled coworker is something her friends flip over.

  Alina waves her full wine glass toward the soggy disaster. “This has Nick’s name all over it. Remember when Felicity broke up with The Churd and Nick all but took out a billboard eviscerating him?”

  Okay, so maybe they have a point when you put my brother into the equation. He does have a way of rubbing people wrong.

  Specifically, my ex-boyfriends.

  “But if you take Nick out, the Thrusters suffer,” Maren says. “I’m all in favor of teaching him a lesson. After our boys bring home the cup. They’re already down Ares. We can’t risk losing Nick too.”

  While my best friends argue over whether my brother—hometown hero goalie for Copper Valley’s pro hockey team—deserves punishment for his assumed role in the mountains of soggy dick cookies polluting Gammy’s lawn, I take another swig of cheap red wine from the bottle that didn’t explode all over the kitchen ten minutes ago when I was carrying it in from the carport. Fucking loose strap on my reusable grocery sack. Fucking weak bottle.

  Fucking cork that shot a hole through the window over Gammy’s sink.

  Which is oddly the lesser of my problems, since my three friends arrived minutes ago for our weekly Sunday afternoon wine and whine and asking about the new decorations on the front lawn.

  Where all the neighbors—and their children—can see.

  “Gammy’s going to kill me,” I mutter.

  Kami slips an arm through mine. “Oh, honey,” she whispers in that voice people use in funeral homes and psych wards.

  “Ghosts can’t kill people,” Maren says in that voice people use when they’re talking to stupid people.

  Alina grips her own wine glass tighter and lifts her eyes toward the ceiling. “If any ghost can, Gammy’s ghost could.”

  I told you sh
e was the pragmatic one.

  A red, souped-up Jeep Cherokee squeals to a stop at the curb behind Maren’s Bolt, which means Nick himself has arrived.

  I’d lock the door, but it wouldn’t matter. Since Gammy left the house to both of us, he has his own key, and even if he didn’t, he could break the door down. And even if he couldn’t by himself, the overgrown ogre of a hockey player with him could.

  Ares Berger. The Force. A tank on skates. Silent as a mime. Intimidating as hell. I’ve heard he can lift an entire car with just his pinky, and I honestly believe it.

  The guy gives new meaning to big scary hockey players.

  And I like hockey players. I’ve been around them my entire life. I’m related to two.

  Hockey players don’t scare me.

  Ares Berger?

  He turns my insides to jelly.

  “Fuck on a fuck sandwich,” I mutter.

  “Fuck? No fuck,” Alina says, very clearly enunciating each word. “It’s his fault. Let him clean up the dick cookie soup.”

  Fantastic plan.

  It ignores one small detail.

  The part where Nick wasn’t supposed to know I moved into Gammy’s house. Because as soon as he figures that out, he’ll realize I’d moved in with Doug a few months back. Which wouldn’t be a big deal—Nick’s lived with girlfriends before too and knows better than to go double standard on me—except Doug still has a shit-ton of my stuff that he won’t give back.

  Which also wouldn’t be a big deal, because I’m going to get it all back after work tomorrow—I have a plan—except again, as soon as Nick finds out—which will happen approximately three seconds after he smiles at Kami, because he’s such a dog and he totally uses her ridiculous crush on him against all of us all the time, damn him for his chiseled cheekbones and the green Murphy eyes—he’ll go bang down Doug’s door and most likely make everything worse before I can solve it the easy way.

  Okay, not the easy way, but my way.

  Which doesn’t involve dick cookies.

  “Do not look at him, do not talk to him, do not so much as breathe in his presence,” I warn Kami.

  Her pale eyebrows wrinkle and her cheeks go pink, which makes me feel like a heel, because these three women are the sisters I never had.

  “I’m not that bad,” she whispers.

  “You really are, sweetie.” Alina takes her by the shoulders. “And we love your honesty. It’s just that now isn’t exactly the time for it. Let’s go get another bottle of wine.”

  “From the kitchen?”

  “From the store.”

  “Take my car,” I call to them.

  “Already grabbed your keys,” Alina calls back from the kitchen. Since she’s barely had two sips of wine, and also because the biggest moment of her entire career is coming next weekend, so she has too much to live for to risk drunk driving, I’m good with this plan.

  Maren is frowning as Nick and Ares make their way around the obscene soggy mountain and climb the rickety steps in the rain. Nick’s over six feet of hockey ego, dirty blond hair, and misguided intentions. Ares is—well, he’s Ares, and he makes Nick look like a wuss.

  “He’s out for the rest of the season, isn’t he?” Maren says.

  I force myself to look at Ares. He shouldn’t be out in the rain in that air cast.

  Also, his crutch is leaving holes in the dinky patch of yard. Which is really more like a decorative strip of grass. Not that the size of it mattered to Gammy.

  Just that it was green. The greener the better. I swear she fed it green water when we weren’t looking.

  It’s most definitely not green right now.

  It’s brown and wilted and now a little holey. Aeration is good for grass, right? Seriously, Gammy, aeration is important.

  “I’m hoping he’s only out a couple months,” I tell Maren.

  “No insider information?”

  I wish. All I have is educated speculation based on what the news is reporting. “Not a word.”

  Nick flings open the screen door. I take a wide-legged stance and refuse to let him in. The chill November wind slices through my shirt and turns my nipples to ice cubes. Ares gives me a half-terrifying, half-bland look that suggests he could pick me up and move me if necessary, even while he’s injured, and I suppress a shiver, because I honestly kind of think he could move me with his eyeballs alone if he wanted to.

  Pretty sure they call him the Force for a reason.

  But his air cast is mostly protected from the rain now, and I refuse to let either of these two men think they can get to me—give an inch, and they’ll take six hockey rinks, fourteen football fields, and a fricking mountain range of dirty cookies—so I don’t budge.

  “You moved in with him, didn’t you?” Nick says with a scowl. “Why didn’t you tell me you moved in with him?”

  “Because you’re an overprotective shithead who overreacts to everything.”

  “I do not.”

  I point at the Soggy Dick Cookie Range. “And you send my exes little presents that somehow always manage to come back on me instead of on you. Hope you brought a shovel.”

  Maren cough-laughs.

  “Hey, Ares. How’s it going?” I add.

  Ares’s dark brow twitches over his hooded blue eyes, and his wide lips tip up at the corners. He could be a lumberjack if he traded his hockey stick for an ax, covered his “And then there was Won” T-shirt—don’t ask, I have no idea—with a plaid flannel button-up, and let that scruff on his cheeks and neck grow out more.

  Not that I’ve contemplated Ares as a lumberjack.

  Much.

  He nods to me.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” my lying-ass brother says with his fake-innocent wide eyes while he jerks a thumb at the cookie peaks of horror.

  Probably because he knows if he admits it, Maren will mention the Mound of Indignity on her Thrusters fan blog. Maren, Alina, Kami, and I all met at Chester Green’s, the downtown bar named after the greatest Thrusters’ defender of all time where all the biggest Thrusters’ fans—and yes, the puck bunnies—hang out. Kami and Alina are just huge fans, but Maren could’ve been a hockey sportscaster if she hadn’t gone the environmental engineering route.

  And the problem with having a hockey-obsessed blogger friend and a brother in the pro hockey business is that they don’t always see eye-to-eye on what’s blog-worthy.

  “Don’t you need to go get some wine too?” I ask her, because I know he’s not going to confess while she’s standing there.

  “I’m good,” she replies.

  “How about you show Ares where the cheese is?”

  Now I’ve got her. Unrestricted access to the Thrusters’ injured power forward? “Sure. You like brie, Berger? Got some fresh mozzarella too.”

  Ares’s brows knit together.

  Nick claps him on the back. “He likes the kind that comes in wrappers.”

  Maren and I share a look. My friends haven’t gone the vegan route like I have, but I know they’re all horrified that anyone calls the stuff in wrappers “cheese.” It technically has milk products in it, so whatever it is, I don’t tend to eat it either.

  “I’ll call Kami and Alina. They’re headed to the store,” she says. “Wine?”

  “Milk,” Ares counters.

  Maren shoots me a look again, and a silent hope he doesn’t mind almond milk passes between us. “You got it, big guy. This way. Felicity, I’ll sell you out in a hot minute if you put Nick on the IR too.”

  Translation: Hurt him bad enough to earn him a spot next to Ares on the long-term injured reserve list, and I’ll tell the entire world it’s your fault.

  Which would ruin my chances of ever getting a spot on the Thrusters’ physical therapy staff, so even if I wasn’t also a diehard Thrusters fan secretly thrilled to be related to one of their hottest players—and by hottest, of course I mean talented, not hot-hot, because gross—I still wouldn’t hurt him.

  And he knows it.

&nb
sp; Dammit.

  Once we’re alone, Nick thrusts his hands through his dark blond hair and paces from the small alcove and into the modest living room where Gammy’s floral couches continue to make the room smell like her. You know. Like Ben-Gay and moldy gardenia perfume. Also, I swear there are three new rows on that blanket she was knitting when she died. I haven’t wanted to get close enough to confirm my suspicion.

  “You should’ve called me,” Nick says. That muscle’s ticking in his square jaw again.

  “So you could get mad and send Doug a few hundred dick cookies?” I reply pointedly.

  “Thousand,” he mutters, his face going a respectable pink.

  “You sent him one thousand cookies printed with your dick?”

  He doesn’t meet my eyes.

  So several thousand cookies.

  No wonder Doug’s pissed. Not that dumping the cookies on Gammy’s yard in retribution is justified either—there are at least six hundred dumpsters between his apartment and here that he could’ve used instead—but that’s overkill.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I whisper-shriek.

  “He hurt you. And it wasn’t my dick. I got it off the internet.”

  I tap a foot.

  While I’m a little relieved—it was a rather hairy, unsightly penis—that’s not the point.

  His face has the decency to go ruddier. “And I might’ve had one too many drinks when I ordered them.” He mumbles some other excuse I don’t catch, and honestly, I don’t want to.