Ah, the Friend Zone. That elusive place where friendship and romance are oxymorons. Also, that place to which you are sometimes relegated by a moron…Anyhoo, they say the best relationships are based on friendship, because once sexual prowess abandons ship, that’s all you have left. And if you can’t be friends when the fireworks fade, you’ve got nothing. However, you can yearn, you can dream, you can fantasize, but until the one you love opens the gate and sets you free, happiness will elude both of you. Lawyers, unfortunately, are more guilty of friend-zoning than most. We may be warriors in the courtroom, but when it comes to love? Not so much.

Kendall Jenkins giggled, tears welling in her eyes.

The sight of her best friend, Luke Jackson, skating across the ice in a dress, chasing a large bag of frozen peas with a hockey stick, was beyond absurd.

Kendall began taking photo after photo on her phone. This is hitting social media as soon as the game is over. When Luke’s blonde wig fell off of his head, revealing his sexy black curls, his dark blue eyes looked up at her and he shrugged his broad shoulders, his smile chagrined.

“I told you we should have died your hair,” Kendall yelled.

Luke yelled back, “One blonde in this arena is one blonde too many.” He smirked and pointed two fingers at her, then skated away.

It was all in fun, of course. The cross-dressing skaters were playing for charity. Luke’s team, the Chesfield Chicks—a team that consisted of lawyers from her firm, Chession Holloway, and Luke’s accounting firm, Field and Smythe, had decided to liven things up with a little cross-dressing. Other teams in the competition had shown up dressed as hot dogs, ballerinas, roosters, cans of beer, and blind mice. The teams were drawn from major businesses around St. Louis and had been given free rein with team names and uniforms.

Kendall looked up and smiled as her friend and mentor, Cari Holloway, and her husband, Ian O’Leary, sat down beside her.

“Are we winning yet?” Cari asked. She looked out on the ice and snickered. Then she nudged her husband, a native of Ireland, and said, “I would love to see that at a rugby game in Dublin.”

Ian leaned over and kissed her. “By now, they’d all be bloody, their dresses in tatters, love. But between the pokin’ and the pushin’, it’d be one hell of a game.” He smiled at Kendall and winked.

Kendall sighed and mock-shuddered. “God, that Irish accent makes my panties melt.”

Ian blushed and Cari laughed, taking his hand in hers. “Get your own Irishman, dear. This one’s taken.” She nodded toward Luke, who was currently on the ice, his face filled with fury, his skirts up around his waist. “Now that one is pretty hot. You know him?”

Kendall studied Luke. He was hot. Tall, dark, and handsome hot. It wasn’t like she had never noticed. God, they had been friends since kindergarten. However, even though she did feel a sizzling heat in her core whenever she was around him, Kendall had long ago been friend-zoned. And neither of them had ventured outside those boundaries.

Finally, Kendall smiled and shook her head. “Luke and I have been friends since he yanked my pigtails on the playground in kindergarten. We’re best friends. We know each other’s deepest, darkest secrets and have cried in each other’s arms multiple times when someone broke our hearts. I love him. But as a friend.”

Ian leaned forward, fixing the gaze of his ice-blue eyes on her. “Woman, sometimes it takes friendship to start the kettle burning. I can tell by the way yur looking at him that he means more to you than that. Sometimes, the best of friends make the best lovers. Look at me and Cari. She wanted nothing to do with me, so I forced meself to back off and become her friend. After I finally charmed the socks off of her, she gave in, and now she can’t keep her hands off of me.”

Cari flushed. “There’s no need to reveal our secrets, sweetheart. I’m sure the whole firm already knows the story of how you and your buddy, the Governor, tortured and manipulated me into throwing up my hands up in surrender.”

“And what a surrender it was,” Ian said, a smirk blooming on his genial face. He mock-whispered to Kendall, “The sex was epic.” He grabbed his wife and kissed her soundly, muffling her protests.

Kendall giggled. She loved Cari and Ian. Their love was so playful. Firm legend was that they had been deeply in love long ago, but others had torn them apart. When Ian ran into Cari again in St. Louis, she had wanted nothing to do with him. So he’d buddied up with the Governor—whose wife, Molly, was Cari’s best friend--to win over Cari’s teenage son, then finally reclaimed her heart. The Governor, Martin Dunning, and Ian had become such close friends that the press had dubbed them The MartIans, and took great delight in reporting their latest sighting.

Kendall glanced out on the rink and gasped. Luke was limping and being helped off of the ice. She grabbed her backpack and stood. Cari and Ian looked at her in surprise. “Luke has been hurt, I need to help him.”.

As she slipped past the couple to hurry off, she heard Ian chuckle. “That girl has it bad.”