Home Ice by Catherine Gayle Page A

went. They kept peeking over their shoulders at us, though, nearly tripping over their own feet because they weren’t paying attention to where they were going.
    And it felt good. I only hoped Paige liked it as much as I did. Because, now that I realized how much I enjoyed spending time with her and her girls, I didn’t simply intend to follow through with my promise to Sophie; I was starting to think of ways I could make other promises, as well.

    MATTIAS HAD TO be bored out of his mind. He’d brought us to the Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner. Since it was a Sunday evening and we were a party of six, we’d had to wait almost an hour before they had a table big enough to seat all of us together. The whole time we’d been waiting, my girls hadn’t been able to stop chattering.
    For that matter, they never stopped chattering, not even in their sleep, it seemed. I was used to it, but Mattias was a single man with no children. He spent his days surrounded almost exclusively by grown men, and I sincerely doubted their talk ever came close to the inanity that came out of my daughters’ mouths.
    By the time the hostess had seated us, the girls had already gushed over who was cuter among Austin Cooper, Blake Kozlow, and Axel Johansson (no need to add Levi into the mix, since everyone already knew he was the cutest of the cute); debated the likelihood that the four girls could end up married to the four cute hockey players; informed Mattias that they’d added Cooper, Kozlow, and Johansson to the brother-husband list (“It’s like sister-wives in reverse, and they’re all hockey players,” Izzy explained patiently upon seeing Mattias’s confused expression); and hatched a plan for the four of them to split up, travel to the various NHL cities around North America, and snatch the wayward brother-husbands who didn’t play in Portland. After hearing all that, I was exhausted. I could only imagine that he was rethinking his plan to take us all to dinner and trying to come up with a good excuse to get out of it.
    But he came with us, and once Sophie claimed a seat on one of the booth’s benches, he inched in beside her. The other three girls gave me giggling glances and piled into the bench opposite them, leaving me to take the final spot next to Mattias. He was so large that I had to be right up against him or else I’d be practically falling out of the booth. I did my best to calm my nerves as I slid in beside him. As if it were the most natural thing in the world he could possibly do, he put his arm around my waist, his hand resting on the curve between my waist and my hip, and drew me as close to his side as I could possibly be.
    His body heat was intoxicating, but nothing could have come close to his scent in terms of making me want to get even closer. He smelled like heaven, and it was all I could do to keep myself from burying my nose against his chest and sniffing my fill. It was a good thing the girls were here and we were very much in public, because otherwise I might be hard-pressed not to do my best to crawl up on his lap. That would be taking things way too far, way too fast, particularly since tonight was going to be it.
    Not that I’d gotten Mattias to agree to end things after this one date , but he had to see the reason behind it. His sister had Down syndrome. He understood, even if he didn’t want to admit it.
    “Balloon!” Sophie squealed, pointing toward a man making balloon animals a few tables away from us. Then she was bouncing on the bench, unable to contain her excitement. I hid a smile, hoping she would never lose her childlike enthusiasm.
    “Do you want him to make you something?” Mattias asked, chuckling.
    She was too excited to do anything more than nod, and I was impressed by her restraint in staying seated where she was. Under normal circumstances, I would expect her to crawl under the table, bumping her head and knocking into legs as she went. But with Mattias beside her, she stayed