Sin Shot: Vegas Crush #2

by Miller, Raine

  That earned me some happy smiles. I think she really had worries that she’d pushed me with the proposal at the game, but I assured her she was wrong. I have ways of convincing my woman that I love her. In the end, we both agreed a Vegas wedding was totally for us, but lying on a beach somewhere was what our honeymoon needed to be about.

  I need to get through this game tonight, because while I love hockey, I love my woman, too. And I just got her back, so I have some time to make up in the bedroom.

  After our fan experience event, we all head to the arena to suit up. The whole therapy and conditioning team is on hand, offering stretching, massages, and warm-up support. Pam's supervising therapist, Andy, tells me with a wink that if Pam gives me a massage today, we need to keep it PG. I decide to let it go, though part of me wants to clock him since he was obviously the one who shared that audio file with management. Dickhead.

  In pre-game, Evan and the offensive coaches decide that our play at the end of game six will be considered a fluke, so we devise a plan to get me to scoring range once more. We can only make it work once, and if we fail, we won't be able to get away with it again.

  When we skate out onto the ice, among on the pre-game excitement, the league's executives are on hand with the cup, which is on the display during the National Anthem. Max Terry is there, too, and as he welcomes everyone to game seven, he also says that it is his pleasure to award this year's Norris Defensive Trophy to one of his own.

  "This player has demonstrated a resolve this year that I haven't seen in a long time. Personal resolve, physical resolve, and team resolve. We would not be where we are tonight without him. I give you Georg Kolochev."

  I'm stunned. The Norris Trophy? Seriously? I swear I've died and gone to heaven.

  I go up and hoist the trophy, giving Max a hug and posing for pictures. And then it's time to play. The starting music plays and Coach Brown gives a few last-minute instructions as the ice is cleared.

  When the first period starts, there is literally nothing that can bring me down. Nothing that can stop me. I have my team. My career. A new trophy. And Pamela. I have her, and I couldn't be happier.

  So, when Evan gives the signal, the stars are aligned and I know I can't be stopped.

  Goal!

  Epilogue

  MY WIFE IS A HUGE FAN

  Three weeks later.

  Fripp Island, South Carolina

  So Pam found this destination wedding package to Fripp Island that is fucking amazing. We invited my parents and sisters to join us on our honeymoon for a beach holiday, after we’d had a few days to ourselves first. Well, not exactly with us, but nearby in their own cottage. We see them at the restaurants sometimes or when we feel like being social. They all absolutely love Pam, and she’s fit right in with my sisters like they’ve known each other for years. I think with her in my life, Irina and Zoya might finally be able to convince my father to allow them to come to Vegas for university. We’ll see how it goes, but the possibility is not as remote as it once was.

  Fripp Island is all about privacy and fun activities like kayaking and windsurfing, anything beach related, really. I’m improving at windsurfing every time I go out. I also like that the privacy means I can have time with my woman in a beautiful place and not have to worry about someone spying on us and spreading shit. We are one-hundred percent legal now regardless. Our wedding was a fun Vegas party with all our friends and families joining in the craziness. Pam’s mom couldn’t take two weeks away to vacation with us, but at least she was able to spend a few days here on the island with her daughter before she had to head back to work. I like her. She’s a tough lady, and I can totally see where Pam gets her independent streak.

  We're kayaking over to an adjacent smaller island to check it out a little later with couple we met at dinner the other night. James and Winter Blakney, also on their honeymoon, same as us. He's a lawyer and she's a social worker in Boston. I didn't tell them what I did at first, but then again, I didn't need to. Turns out they hold season tickets in Boston and already knew who I was long before we all ended up honeymooning on the same island. James came up to me, stuck out a hand and said, "My wife is a huge fan." Those were the first words out of his mouth. To which Pam replied, "His wife is a huge fan too," while tucked into my side and winking at them. Winter's expression turned immediately to horrified as she scolded, "Yeah right, that wasn't stalkery at all, James!" It was funny, and we all had a good laugh before introducing ourselves properly. They are a really cool couple, and we plan to connect whenever we're in Boston for a game.

  This morning while we were eating breakfast on the deck, we saw dolphins body surfing, shredding waves, having a blast. A few minutes later a mother deer and her two babies wandered into the grassy yard below our cottage. This place is a full-on nature nest. Pam has taken so many pictures that it'll take a year to go through them all.

  We've chosen to post some on social media. Nothing too invasive of our privacy, or of our families here on the island, but some fun pics of the two of us to appease the fans. After the proposal on the ice in game six, Crush social media followers became super-crazed, desperate for an official update on what happened with us. It was all over sports news around the world. We knew we had to give them something before things went sideways with the stalker-fans. Yeah, unfortunately they’re out there, and pretty much every player has dealt with one or two getting far too close for comfort at least once. There's a whole slew of stans trolling Crush players daily anyway. Realizing there was a wedding happening somewhere in the world with the hockey couple of the moment? We needed some professional help in dealing with all the attention.

  Lucky for us we know the right people—or more accurately, the right person. Holly came up with a brilliant plan to solve the issue. We picked out a bunch of pictures of the wedding and included my teammates in some of the shots, which Holly then made into a fun photo series for the official Crush media accounts. We also send her pictures from Fripp Island and answer one fan question each day, (rated PG of course) and she takes care of the rest.

  The team is off for the summer until the season starts up again in the fall. We spent the two weeks after game seven of the finals moving Pam into my place and speed-planning our wedding so we could have a long honeymoon lounging on the beach. So far, so good. I have another ten days to make love to my wife with only the sounds of the wind and the waves around us.

  Every. Chance. I. Get.

  I still love the fact I am her first. I fucking love that I was the guy who lucked out being the one to deliver her sin-shot. I ask her all the time if the wait was worth it. She just laughs and tells me I need to demonstrate my technique again so she can make an informed decision.

  When I'm not doing filthy things to my wife—in every position imaginable, in every room of our beach cottage—I coax her outside to enjoy the great outdoors with me.

  In her orange and pink bikini.

  Hot. Off-the-fucking-chain-hot is my wife on the beach in a bathing suit. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time drooling over my spectacular view. I also make sure she has plenty of sunblock on all that skin, so she doesn't get sunburned. I love taking care of her, but mostly I just love her and count my lucky fuckin' stars. There are a lot of them to count.

  Because loving Pamela Kolochev is my most important job of all.

  She needed me as much as I needed her.

  This is our truth. Eto nasha pravda.

  Crossover Book Connection

  Crossover book!

  The couple that Georg and Pam meet on their honeymoon have their own book. You can fall in love along with James Blakney and Winter Blackstone in FILTHY LIES. Turn the page for the first chapters of their book. Available NOW in Kindle Unlimited.

  Prologue

  Winter

  On the day I turned fifteen, I knew I loved James Blakney. There was a look in his eye that told me he'd finally noticed I existed in a realm beyond best-friend's-much-younger-off-limits-don't-even-think-about-it-
little sister. Call it womanly intuition, despite the fact I was barely qualified for being an actual woman at fifteen—and only in the biological sense—but still, I knew my own feelings.

  I shared those feelings with no one.

  James came to my birthday that year. To the gathering at Blackwater on the island where my family summered and vacationed as often as my father could convince my mother to spend time at the old estate perched on its coast. We were in the pool playing chicken fights when it happened. Wyatt was carrying me on his shoulders while Lucas carried Janice Thorndike, and the two of us squared off. Janice was one of those people we were forced to tolerate because our parents were close. She was a manipulative attention whore most of the time, and it being my birthday didn't change that one iota. Why she would go out of her way to humiliate someone who was much younger than her, and during their birthday celebration no less, was beyond me.

  But she did.

  Janice yanked on the tie at my neck that held up my bikini top and announced to all within shouting distance to have a look at my tits when it fell down. I was mortified to the depths of my soul as I frantically tried to cover back up after jumping from Wyatt's shoulders into the water. Awkwardly struggling with my chest submerged, I turned away from everyone and pulled myself together as best I could through hot tears. I think my brothers were either too freaked out or oblivious to what had happened, because neither said anything to me as I made for the edge of the pool to leave. Maybe they figured I didn't want any more attention drawn to myself—which I most certainly didn't—but a little compassion would have been nice too. Brothers can be stupidly dense.

  It was James who met me at the steps with a towel and told me Janice was a jealous bitch who wished she looked as good as I did without her bikini top.

  "You saw?" I asked him on a sob.

  His striking greeny-brown eyes burned right into me before he answered. "You have nothing to be ashamed of, Winter, and you didn't do anything wrong. You can't help that you're beautiful and sweet." The way he looked at me told me we'd moved beyond our big brother/little sister relationship in that moment. It wasn't him being pervy with me either. It was simply James being my champion when I desperately needed one.

  "Thank you," I mumbled, still mortified that he'd seen my boobs, but strangely aware the incident had given me the gift of James Blakney's attention at the same time.

  "Don't let this ruin your special day, Win. You are perfectly lovely in every way," he said before grinning at me in a way that could only be described as a tiny bit wicked. My skin pebbled along with my nipples, as I stood there like a mute. James winked as he took a swig of his Sam Adams before going back to his group of friends on the grass as if nothing had ever happened.

  And just like that I fell in love with him.

  Not even my twin sister, Willow, was privy to the innermost secrets of my heart concerning James Blakney. Within the safety of my dreams he was mine alone, and I didn't have to share him with anyone else. Or be humiliated because I'd set my sights far too high on a man who could never possibly be interested in a young girl like me. And that right there was the division between us. James was a man at twenty-three, and I was merely a girl at fifteen. Those eight years spanning between us was gargantuan—far too great of a distance to cross over.

  Then.

  But I'd always known him. James had been around and in my life for as long as I could remember. He met my oldest brother, Caleb, at St. Damien's when they were ten years old, and they'd been friends ever since. I was two. Willow and I went to St. Damien's eight years later when it was our turn to be shipped off to boarding school—our twin brothers, Wyatt and Lucas, five years before us. In the Blackstone family, children were schooled away from home because it built character and toughened them up for the real world. Even though the "real world" was so far removed from our lifestyle it was laughable. Things like: twenty-year-old mothers who worked the streets so her children could have food and a place to sleep; or homeless vets struggling with wartime PTSD manifested in drug abuse and suicide were the real world.

  Those things just weren't the "real world" examples my parents referred to.

  Boarding school was only one of the many requirements that came with the territory of growing up rich. James understood completely because he'd been raised in much the same way. The Blakneys owned a beach retreat on Blackstone Island not far from my family's ancestral estate, Blackwater, and so our time had been spent at the same gatherings and social functions for as long as we both could remember.

  As the years went along, I loved James from afar, watching him grow more serious…and more cynical. I think his fiancée dumping him at the altar five years ago to run away with a senior partner in his father's law firm had a lot to do with the change in his personality. Leah Rawlings turned out to be a money-hungry bitch who'd left a trail of destruction in her wake. She broke my James's heart. And she did it publicly in a way that was cruel and unnecessary, and on the day they were to be married. With the guests already arriving at the church. I'll never forget the look on James's face when Caleb led him out of there.

  Crushed.

  I didn't know all the reasons for his devastation at the time. It was more than just Leah leaving him hanging at the altar. Worse than that, I would discover in time.

  I couldn't have known all of the machinations that went on behind the scenes in our world when I was barely nineteen years old, but I'd learned enough to know a lot of it wasn't nice.

  Despicable was a much better adjective.

  James had been twenty-seven when he found out there were many secret deals and plenty of depravity in plain sight if you knew where to look.

  I think the discovery of just how depraved was part of my interest in choosing social work at Boston University. I wanted to live my life differently than the people in my "social" circle. I didn't desire to be impoverished, but I didn't desire to waste my money on frivolous excess either. I wanted to use it to help make a difference for people who desperately needed someone to care, and had no one.

  No one at all.

  After his wedding-that-didn't-happen, I heard that James stayed drunk for about a month before pulling himself back together. With fierce resolve to overcome the betrayal of those who'd done him wrong, a mask descended over his handsome face. James lost his carefree manner and the easy smile he'd always had for others, and most importantly, in my mind, for me. He became more closed off, and far less engaging after Leah worked him over.

  I missed the old James terribly at first, but I didn't have many encounters with him during the years I was an undergrad at BU. I was busy being a student, and James was busy separating himself from his father's firm. There was drama over that decision at the time. I remember my parents discussing it, but in the end, James made his own stamp in the legal community, establishing himself as the go-to guy for contract law in New England. James R. Blakney & Associates, P.C. was retained by my dad for Blackstone Global Enterprises as soon as James had set up on his own. Nothing had changed with Caleb heading up BGE since Dad's death. In fact, James probated his will—a complicated undertaking for anyone faced with settling the billion-dollar personal fortune our father left to us—and he handled it without a blip. On top of being a close family friend, James knew the conditions of my trust fund. He knew what was required for me to gain access to it before my thirtieth birthday, too. He was the one who'd explained it to my sister and me at the reading of the will. Lucas and Wyatt had nothing to worry about given they were twenty-nine when Dad passed away.

  It's fair to say I hated Leah. Not so much for being with James in the first place, but for wounding him and leaving him a changed man. For that reason, she was on my unforgivable sinners' list. Because I was not confident he was as capable of forgiveness and goodwill toward people who grieved him as he might have been in the past. Which was what worried me the most, because now I've done something to hurt James. Something that could make him hate me, even though it would kill me inside if he
did.

  I stole from him.

  I took advantage of James in a weak moment. I knew it was wrong, and yet I didn't care as I crossed over a dangerous line with him. I indulged nearly a decade's worth of craving to experience the magic of being loved by James Blakney. Loved? Probably more like fucked. It was done lovingly, so I didn't care. Carelessness indeed. I knew the risks and took my chances anyway.

  Still, it was so very wrong of me to let it happen, because the circumstances were too close to how Leah betrayed him. My betrayal was even worse, because the ripple effects would be felt by many.

  And now?

  I'd have to face up to the consequences of what I did.

  To James.

  To us.

  To our unborn child.

  One

  James

  Three months earlier.

  Boston

  There was one reason and one reason only why I was at my father's law office today. The woman who birthed me. My mother asked me to see him, so I agreed, even though I'd rather take a swim in the Charles River. That I would prefer immersing myself into a polluted-as-fuck body of water to meeting with my dad, spoke volumes.

  The truth? I loved my mother, but I couldn't say the same about my father. Harsh as it was to acknowledge, pragmatism told me I wasn't the first son to feel this way about a parent. History was filled with examples.