Centered (Gold Hockey Book 9)

by Elise Faber

  “Liam,” she murmured.

  “No pressure,” he said, releasing her hand when she tugged back.

  “It’s not—” She shook her head. “I’m not normal. I’m not a typical woman who’s going to melt and bat her eyelashes and tell you what you want to hear.”

  “Good thing I don’t like normal.”

  Mia sighed. “I don’t think—”

  “Don’t think,” he said. “Just take some time not thinking and let’s just have fun and ride slides and eat pancakes—or, well, egg-white omelets.” He reached out and squeezed her hand. “This doesn’t have to be heavy or intense. We can just do . . . this.”

  Quiet.

  A long moment of quiet as intense brown eyes studied him. He told himself to keep being patient, to let her come to her own decision, but when she started to shake her head again, when he knew, instinctively, she was going to cut this down before it even started, and he couldn’t keep quiet.

  Liam knew he didn’t want to let this woman go.

  She was a puzzle. She was smart. She was beautiful.

  He’d be a fucking moron to let that just walk away from him.

  “It’s okay to have fun,” he said.

  Solemn chocolate eyes. “You wouldn’t say that if you really knew me.”

  “I—”

  The waiter returned then, setting their plates in front of them, asking if they needed anything else, but Liam barely heard him. Because he might not have pushed learning about her upbringing, but he needed to understand what she meant—

  “I’m not going to talk about it,” she said.

  Cool words. Challenge in that gaze now.

  And he knew if he pushed, she would get right up and walk out of the restaurant. Leave her omelet, leave him, and not look back.

  That pissed him off, was beyond infuriating.

  Except . . . he hadn’t earned the right to demand anything from this woman. Not one fucking thing. Trust took time to build, and they weren’t even at one full day yet. So, he stifled the urge to push, to find out what had made the shadows fill her eyes, understand the pain that deepened the lines around her mouth.

  Instead, he held tight to his patience.

  “Okay,” he said, not-so-smoothly changing the subject. “Critical question number two is: What do I have to do to get you to come on that slide with me again?”

  Her shoulders had crept up with each word, but by the time he finished the question, they’d relaxed, her lips curving, her eyes rolling. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Fine.” He dumped the container of syrup on his pancakes, mixing it with the whipped cream that was smothered on top. Then he picked up his fork and scooped a forkful into his mouth. Sweet baby Jesus, sweet and sour, acidic and creamy, his taste buds did a happy dance because that was absolutely fucking delicious. “Then what do I need to do to get you to try a bit of this ambrosia?”

  Mia made a face. “It looks like it’ll give me diabetes.”

  “I’ll try a bite of yours.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be a trial for you, considering your diet.”

  He gave her innocent eyes. “But it’s my Cheat Day.”

  “I don’t like sugar, Liam.” She took a dainty bite of her omelet. “Exposing me to more of it isn’t going to make me like it more.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “I was thinking it was like iocaine powder.” He took another huge bite, chewed, and swallowed. “You just need to slowly build it up in your system until you start liking it.”

  “Did you just try to slide a Princess Bride reference into our conversation?”

  “Maybe.” He lifted a brow. “All right, sugar aside, please tell me that you’re in the camp that likes The Princess Bride?”

  She scoffed. “There are people who don’t like it?”

  “Heathens,” he confirmed.

  “I can’t believe it.” She put down her fork and tucked a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail behind her ear. “How can anyone not like it? That movie is an absolute classic. ‘No more rhyming and I mean it.’”

  “’Anybody want a peanut?’” he dutifully finished.

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “Exactly. So many good things. ‘Is this a kissing book?’, ‘As you wish!’, ‘Twue Wuv.’ There’s so much pop culture in a tiny, two-hour package.”

  Movies. She liked movies. She liked romcoms. Well, or at least the best romcom ever.

  Liam smothered a grin, filing away the insight. “Have you read the book?”

  “Uh, yes,” she said, the ‘duh’ unspoken but still audible to his ears.

  “What’d you think?”

  “The book is always better,” she said, stating it like the fact it was. “But that movie damn near approached perfection.”

  “Speaking of book-movie adaptations, what did you think of . . .” He named a big-name blockbuster that had recently come out. The book had been a worldwide success, and the movie was highly anticipated.

  “I haven’t seen it yet.” She sighed. “I want to, but I didn’t get to the theater last weekend.”

  He resisted the urge to crow in triumph. She might not like sugar. She might not break or bend the rules, but Mia had at least one vice—and it was movies. “I haven’t seen it either,” he said. “I guess that means you have to come with me. I don’t play on Friday.”

  Her eyes widened, but she didn’t shrink into herself or back down. In fact, her expression shifted to considering. “I don’t have classes on Friday nights.”

  He knew that.

  He’d memorized the schedule taped to the door of her studio.

  “So you’ll come with me?” he asked. “I hate going to the movies by myself.”

  Narrowed eyes on his. “You won’t talk during the film?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, adding and meaning it with every fiber of his being. “Number one pet peeve is people who talk during movies.”

  That earned him a smile. “If you’re lying—”

  “I’m not, J.B.” He grinned at her. “Come with me? Please? I’ll even spring for popcorn.”

  “I don’t eat popcorn.”

  Why didn’t that surprise him?

  Liam sighed.

  She giggled. “But I’ll still let you buy a bucket.” A beat. “So long as it’s a Cheat Day.”

  Damn. He hadn’t thought of that.

  And Mia knew that, because she giggled again, a light sound that made him feel about ten feet tall. “Friday it is, Sweet Cheeks,” she said. “And maybe I’ll get some popcorn for myself just to torture you with.”

  He laughed.

  She laughed.

  Then they finished their meals, chatting about favorite movies, discovering that more often than not, they had the same likes and dislikes. She was pretty and fun when she relaxed, with a self-deprecating edge that tempered her barbed wit. He liked her, liked her more with each minute he spent with her.

  So much so, that by the time Liam paid and walked Mia back to her studio, he was half in love with her already.

  So much so, that when he waved goodbye through the glass after somehow finagling her into giving him her number, he knew he’d be counting down the minutes until he could see her again.

  So much so, that he sent her a text the moment he sat down in his car.

  Too much?

  Probably.

  But just as he could tell that Mia needed to have a little fun, he also knew that she needed care.

  And he was going to give it to her.

  He shoved his feet into his skates, taking a few minutes to make sure the laces were perfectly tightened.

  Too much would create something called skate bite, and it was brutal. It made the tops of the feet ache and burn, long after the skates were loosened to the proper tightness. Liam spent too much time with these blades strapped to his body to not have them just perfect.

  So, not too tight.

  And not too loose—because they wouldn’t give him enough support to sprint and
change direction.

  It was the Goldilocks syndrome of skate tying.

  But thankfully, he’d been on the ice since he was just over a year old. First, with his dad holding him up as he just walked across the ice in the tiniest pair of skates imaginable. Flying by the time he was three. Fearless. Fast. The product of a hockey dynasty.

  Ha.

  Perhaps culmination was the proper term.

  Either way—the ruin or realization—it meant that Liam had twenty-four years of skate tying experience—minus a few years, he supposed, before he’d learned how to do tie them himself.

  Some might even say he was an expert.

  He grinned, thinking that Mia would have had a pert comeback to that statement, just on principle.

  “It’s nice to see you smiling.”

  Blinking, he glanced up, saw Brit was looking at him. “Sorry, what?” he asked.

  She bent, tying her own skates. “You’ve seemed a bit—” A shake of her head, words cut off. “Never mind me. I’m being nosy. The guys have corrupted me.”

  Max, one of their defensemen, who’d been around the league, and the Gold, for years now, snorted and shook his head. “The guys have corrupted you?” he asked. “The guys? You’re the nosiest of them all.”

  Blane was in the next stall down on Liam’s other side. “That’s a fine distinction in this room.”

  Brit straightened, pointed a finger at Blane. “Hey! I grew up with you, but you’re older. So, if I’m nosy, then I learned those skills from you.”

  “Whatever you say,” Blane muttered, standing and shrugging into his jersey.

  “Words a woman dreams to hear,” Brit quipped.

  A flash of a smile from Blane. “I know. Mandy”—his wife and one of the Gold’s physical therapists—“tells me that frequently.”

  “The question is,” Liam said dryly, “do you listen?”

  Quiet descended.

  A long, uncomfortable silence that had Blane, Max, and Brit staring at him like he had two heads—or maybe that he’d overstepped, he realized with a sinking sensation. He was the newcomer here, hadn’t yet earned the right to tease or poke fun. Picked up just a few weeks ago, he definitely hadn’t been contributing to the scoresheet.

  A black hole. A weak spot.

  The words, in a familiar hard voice, pounded through his brain.

  Liam opened his mouth, apology on the tip of his tongue.

  “Holy. Shit,” Brit breathed. “You made a joke. I don’t believe it.”

  Max started laughing. “Come on, he’s not that bad, just a little quiet.”

  “I didn’t say he was bad,” Brit said. “I just said he made a joke, and it’s awesome.”

  “I don’t believe you used the word awesome,” Max said.

  “Okay, so maybe I didn’t use that exact word—”

  “You didn’t,” Coop, their star forward, chimed in from a few spots down. “End of story.”

  Brit scowled. “You—”

  Max grinned. “Because I think you actually said—”

  “Ah!” Brit jumped to her feet, one skate tied, the other with the laces dangling, and reached out, pretending like she was going to strangle him.

  Liam fussed with his laces, even though they were already perfect.

  The nudge on his right arm had him glancing up again, seeing that Blane had sat back down and was looking at him with a gaze that said he saw more than Liam had intended to show.

  Fuck, he was a mess.

  “It might have been a mediocre joke,” Blane said lightly, flashing a smile that had gotten him more than a few endorsement deals over the last years, “but I am glad you made it.” His voice dropped. “Have you settled in okay? You’ve seemed—”

  Liam held his breath, waiting for the derision to sink into Blane’s tone. He’d heard enough of it over the years to know that it always did, and that even though someone might seem nice off the ice, in all of the media the various teams did, mean still crept through in the off the record moments.

  “—sad,” Blane finished, which was pretty much the last adjective Liam had expected to hear. “Is everything okay home-wise? I know making a transition to a new team, a new state can be tough.”

  Words.

  They were hard sometimes.

  He stared at Blane, trying to reconcile what the other man was saying with his expectations of what he’d thought he was about to hear. The Gold had a reputation for being like a family, for being a group of teammates who looked after one another. Except . . . Liam hadn’t really believed it. He’d played on teams who were supposed to be like family, and fuck, if they had been family, it had made his own semi-dysfunctional one look like the Brady Bunch.

  He’d assumed the Gold was like that.

  Creative marketing on the surface.

  Plenty of fucked up beneath.

  “Sorry,” Blane said, leaning back. “I’m getting to be as bad as that crew”—he nodded at Max and Brit, who were still bickering over something, though it sounded now like the argument had shifted from Liam to a playlist of some sort. Coop was mostly watching them fight, adding the odd comment here or there.

  “It’s horrible,” Max moaned. “The whole playlist.”

  “You know the rules,” Brit said. “The fastest gets to pick.”

  “All well and good when you’re always the fastest,” Coop said, tone dry, though there was amusement in his expression.

  “Them’s the rules,” she said.

  “And who made the rules?” Max asked.

  “Anyway,” she said, waving a hand and ignoring him. “My point is that the song makes me run faster.” A beat, lips twitching. “Thus, it has to stay in.”

  “You don’t need to run faster,” Max muttered. “You’re already too damned fast as it is.”

  Blane sighed and shook his head. “Sometimes I feel like I’m back in peewees,” he grumbled, but his lips were twitching. “Still, I hope you’ll forgive my next bit of nosy-as-fuck, but joke away, man. No one is too big or important for it here. Don’t worry about hurting feelings. Just be you.”

  “I—” Liam stopped, not quite knowing what to say. He wasn’t a rookie. He’d been around the league a while, and though—obviously—he’d never quite found his place . . . Blane seemed to know that.

  Cool.

  He was the pathetic guy everyone felt sorry for—

  Enough.

  The word was harsh enough through his mind that he jerked slightly.

  Fuck, was he just going to keep doing this? He’d spent the previous morning with a woman who was rigid and unflappable at first glance but had so many deeper emotions beneath the surface—fearful but soft, scared but determined, fragile but not breakable. Yet, she’d let him push her outside her comfort zone, had taken steps to do it herself.

  So, was Liam really just going to play it safe and do the same old shit?

  Stay in the same cycle? Piss away what might be his last months as a professional hockey player?

  Fuck. Just . . . enough.

  He missed loving the game from the moment he stepped on the ice. He missed joking with his teammates. He missed the rush that came from making a good play or seeing a linemate score. He missed the relief that overpowered the demands of his lungs, his heart, his mind when he hauled ass back to stop his goalie from facing a two-on-O. He missed . . . the sport.

  And if he was only going to have a few months left then, for the first time in years, he wanted to make those months count. He was less scared of fucking up and more scared of never getting back what he’d lost. Because one thing was clear, this half-life, this playing on the fringes and just barely hanging on, wasn’t enough anymore.

  “Anyway, I know the room is a little different with Mike and Stefan retired now. We’ve tried to keep the vibe the same.” A shrug. “We all play better when we’re relaxed and messing around—off the ice, that is. Loosens that hold on our sticks enough to focus on the system, on being creative and improvising rather than being so scar
ed to make a mistake that we’re robots more than artists.”

  “Robots more than artists?” Brit said, on the other side of Liam, suddenly tuning in to their conversation. Her voice was incredulous. “Blane”—she clamped a hand to her chest—“oh my. You’re a poet.”

  Max and Coop snickered.

  Blane rolled his eyes, but he was smiling . . . especially when he locked gazes with Liam for a heartbeat before reaching up and balling a sock, launching it at Brit’s head.

  Since she was prattling on about poetry while sharing smirking sentiments with Max, she didn’t see it coming.

  “Hey!” she exclaimed when it nailed her in the temple.

  Liam snorted, biting back a grin.

  At least until Blane pointed at him and said, “He did it.”

  “I—”

  But before he could muster more than that syllable, Brit picked up the sock and threw it back at Blane, who caught it easily. “Don’t worry, Li,” she said. “I wasn’t joking about growing up together. I know how that one’s”—narrowed eyes at Blane—“dirty ass socks smell. Fuckers could rouse the dead.”

  Blane launched the sock back, but Brit saw it coming this time, and thus caught it easily. “Ha!” she said. “All that glove hand practice does me good.”

  She wound up again, and Liam found himself interjecting again. “Maybe we should take that glove hand onto the ice,” he said. “Practice starts in five.” He nodded at the clock that hung over the door.

  Brit made a face. “Fine,” she said, tossing the sock back to Blane. “Be reasonable, why don’t you?”

  Blane snorted, shoving the sock ball back into his shoe. “That’s in short supply with this team.”

  “Hey!” Max said.

  “Pot meet kettle,” Coop added, getting up and heading to the door.

  Liam saw why a second later, when Calle, one of the team’s assistant coaches and Coop’s wife, poked her head in through the doorway and called. “Let’s hit it, boys!”

  “Shit,” Brit muttered, dropping to her knees and buckling her leg pads with the same rapid efficiency that Liam had used on his skates. Years and years of muscle memory that ensured they’d be fastened exactly right. After, she stood and started strapping on her chest protector as he was working on his elbow pads.