by Elise Faber
Breakout
Gold Hockey #6
Elise Faber
BREAKOUT
BY ELISE FABER
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.
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BREAKOUT
Copyright © 2019 Elise Faber
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-946140-40-1
Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-946140-39-5
Cover Art by Jena Brignola
Gold Hockey Series
Blocked
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Backhand
* * *
Boarding
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Benched
* * *
Breakaway
* * *
Breakout
* * *
Checked
Contents
Gold Hockey Series
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Gold Hockey Series
Gold Hockey
Also by Elise Faber
About the Author
Because sometimes you’ll find a person who’s worth being inside your armor.
Don’t be afraid to let them.
Prologue
PR-Rebecca
Now that was a fucking photo op.
Blue and Anna, young lovebirds, had their hands pressed together, only a layer of glass separating them, her big burly hockey player telling his fiancée he loved her.
The hockey blogs were going to eat this shit up.
“Instagram,” she murmured, fingers flying across the screen of her iPad, cropping and trimming the video into a short and snappy GIF.
Blue would hate it.
But Rebecca didn’t give a damn.
This was—no pun intended—solid Gold shit.
She slapped on a filter, one that emphasized the Gold’s logo on Anna’s beanie, then posted the video.
“Fucking. Perfect,” she said, eyes glued to her screen as she began scrolling through the rest of the camera angles and making her way to the ice. Her DSLR hung around her neck, ready to capture any high quality stills the press might miss in their effort to document hockey, rather than what was really important, at least from her perspective.
The story.
What made people care.
What turned them into lifelong fans.
What went viral.
And Blue and Anna would go viral.
Maybe Brit and Stefan, too, helmets tossed to the ice, arms around one another as they kissed full on the lips.
And all of that at center ice, music blaring, lights flashing. It was—
“A fucking perfect hockey fairy tale.”
Shaking her head, because she knew firsthand that fairy tales didn’t exist outside of rom-coms and occasionally between alpha sports heroes and their chosen mates, Rebecca slipped through the corridor and stepped onto the Gold’s bench.
Lots of dudes in suits—of both the boardroom and the hockey variety—were hugging.
On the ice. Near the goals. On the bench.
It was a proverbial hug-fest.
And she was the cynical bitch who couldn’t enjoy the fact that the team she was with had just won the biggest hockey prize of them all.
“I knew you’d be like this.”
Rebecca turned her focus from Brit, who was skating with the huge silver cup, to the man—no, to the boy because no matter how pretty and yummy he was, Kevin was still a decade younger than her—leaning oh so casually against the boards.
“Nice goal,” she told him.
A shrug. “Blue made a nice pass.”
And dammit, the fact that he wasn’t an arrogant son of a bitch made her like him more.
She nodded at the cup. “You should go have your turn.”
“I’ll get mine,” he said with another shrug.
She frowned, honestly confused. “You don’t want—”
Suddenly he was in front of her on the bench, towering over her even though she was wearing her four-inch power heels. “You know what I want?”
Rebecca couldn’t speak. Her breath had whooshed out of her in the presence of all that sweaty, hockey god-ness. Fuck he was pretty and gorgeous and . . . so fucking masculine that her thighs actually clenched together.
She wanted to climb him like a stripper pole.
“Do you?” he asked again when her words wouldn’t come. “Want to know what I want?”
She nodded.
He bent, lips to her ear. “You, babe,” he whispered. “I. Want. You.”
Then he straightened and jumped back onto the ice, leaving her gaping after him like she had less than two brain cells in her skull.
The worst part?
She wanted him, too.
Had wanted him since the moment she’d laid eyes on the sexy as sin hockey god.
“Trouble,” she murmured. “I’m in so much fucking trouble.”
One
PR-Rebecca
“Oh my God, this is the best thing ever,” she moaned, letting her head drop back onto the table.
Off-season made for good perks.
“If you stopped wearing those torturous death traps, I wouldn’t need to do this.” Mandy pointed to Rebecca’s heels, which her friend had stolen then tossed haphazardly on the floor, despite the fact that they cost more than her rent . . . and considering she lived in San Francisco, that was saying a whole hell of a lot. Her friend had commandeered her, probably because she was bored and with the season more than a month from getting underway, her training suite was sadly empty.
Hence the thieved heels and stern order for Rebecca to hop on top of the leather-covered table.
“Girl,” Rebecca declared, moaning again when Mandy’s firm fingers slid up to her calves. “If there’s one thing I’m never going to turn down, it’s a foot massage. They are the only surefire way into my panties.”
“Ew.” Her friend broke into peals of laughter. “But noted. Been a long time?”
Rebecca sighed and flopped an arm over her face. “Long enough for me to re-virginize.”
Fingers dutifully digging into the tense muscles, Mandy said, “I know there’s plenty of guys sniffing around.”
“I’m not interested in men.”
A pause, long enough for Rebecca to move her arm and glance up at Mandy. “What?”
“Is there something I missed?”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “I’m straight—well, there was that one time in college, but that’s not the point.”
“Um.”
“Everyone experiments.”
“Um.”
“And anyway, my point was that men are unreliable and pathetic and useless.”
Mandy’s fingers stilled. “Um.”
“Stop with the um’s,” Rebecca said. “It’s true.” Well, aside from Stefan and Blane and Mike and Blue and Max . . . Okay fine, so perhaps it
was more about her shitty choice in men and less about the opposite sex. Not that she was going to admit that. Nope. No fucking way.
“Why’d you stop?” she said, less about the massage and more about stopping herself from blurting out a retraction—or maybe it would be an amendment?—to her previous statement.
Mandy smirked, hands moving again. “So, those are some strong feelings.”
“Well, strong feelings come from strong personal experience,” she muttered, then because she might spin stories as a career but couldn’t peddle bullshit to her friends, added, “And I’m not saying your man is that way . . .”
A chuckle. “Just the rest of them?”
She grinned. “Exactly.”
“How’s the baby?”
Mandy’s expression softened, gorgeous brown eyes turning to melted chocolate. “She’s amazing.” An adorable frown that competed with her little girl’s cuteness. “And growing way too fast.”
“Blane showed me that video you took of her the other day,” she said. “And while she is too stinking cute, I wholeheartedly agree.”
“The one with the unicorn?”
Rebecca nodded.
“That girl is going to keep us on her toes.”
“Just as it should be.”
Mandy’s smile flashed, full and bright, and they spent another few minutes chatting, Rebecca getting the best foot massage ever, before she forced herself up from the table, slipped her protesting feet back into her heels, and waved goodbye.
“Stop wearing heels!” Mandy called as she pushed out of the PT Suite.
“Never—oof!”
She ran into a brick wall.
Or rather into a hockey player built like a brick wall.
Also known as . . . Kevin.
He raised a brow, one half of his mouth curving into a smirk that told her he’d overheard at least part of her conversation with Mandy. “Foot massage?”
“Spying?”
“I see you, babe, and I pay attention.”
She narrowed her eyes. “If paying attention means eavesdropping.”
And speaking of bright smiles flashing, Kevin’s took her breath away. She knew it was comprised of six fake teeth from a puck gone awry in his rookie season, but he wasn’t like some of the other guys who often went around sporting their gaps. He’d gotten those chompers repaired, and he was all that much hotter for it.
“Not gonna apologize, babe.”
“I’m not your babe.”
“God, you’re fucking pretty when your eyes spark like that.”
Her heart fluttered, but never one to allow herself to be thrown for a loop, Rebecca lifted her chin and pushed by him. Never mind that her thighs quivered and her pussy clenched. Never mind that she wanted to roll around in the spicy scent of him.
Nope. No way. No how.
“You forgot the part about useless and pathetic,” she called over her shoulder.
And then she strode away, heels clicking on the floor, hips swaying perhaps more than was necessary.
“Babe.” He caught her arm.
She teetered on her heels, not because he’d yanked or pushed or even grasped particularly hard.
Because he’d never touched her before.
Three years with the team.
Not one moment of contact.
And this . . . simply wrapping his fingers around the bare skin of her upper arm, calloused tips brushing along the inside of her bicep and making her shiver, and Rebecca threatened to turn stupid.
She’d been stupid before.
She couldn’t afford to be stupid now.
“Let. Go.”
He dropped his hand then lifted it again and steadied her when she immediately wavered on her feet.
“You okay?” he asked, brows drawn down, framing his gorgeous gray eyes.
The touch, the steadying, the gray eyes, and the concern on his face were the entire fucking problem. But fuck it all, she was a grown woman and she hadn’t made it this far in her life by being a weakling, so she shook him off, stepped away, and lifted her chin.
“Fine.” She started walking again. “Later.”
Kevin caught up with her—not hard considering his legs might as well have been twice the length of hers. “Go out to dinner with me.”
Not a question. And perhaps phrased like a request, though his tone screamed anything but. So, eavesdropping, contact that made her knees wobble, and now orders phrased as requests.
But still orders.
She circled back to the grown woman point she’d just been making to herself.
Because she was grown, and Kevin was not.
Thirty-four was leaps and bounds from twenty-four.
Ten whole years. A fucking decade, an entire generation. He’d been potty-training when she’d been in high school. Going to prom when she’d been getting divorced.
So, no.
The boy in front of her wasn’t going to give her orders.
He stepped in front of her. “Bex. Dinner.”
She rolled her eyes, moved around him. She had to dodge a very irritated-looking Gabe, the team’s doctor, and the other Rebecca, or Nutritionist Rebecca, as the team had dubbed her, because she was in charge, as one might guess, of the players’ nutrition program. They were having a heated discussion about something, but since Nutritionist Rebecca’s conversations tended to trend that way, she kept moving and turned the corner.
Their conflict was easier to ignore than the two-hundred-pound elephant chasing her.
Especially when he said in that sexy voice of his, “Chicken?”
Her feet slid to a stop, heels click-clacking until silence filled the hall. Slowly, she spun to face him. “What did you say?”
That smile flashed again. “I asked if you were too chicken-shit to go on a date with me.”
Red behind her eyes before her training took over—personal, business, who knew? For her, both of those worlds were the same. She had the team. The team was her life, and there wasn’t room for anything, anyone, else in it.
That included twenty-four-year-old men.
And so, Rebecca unleashed a smile of her own.
Her shark smile.
Kevin, to his credit, didn’t retreat like many a man before him. His expression smoothed out, caution entered his gaze. But his mouth didn’t abide that caution.
“Burgers or pizza, sweetheart?”
Her vagina perked up. Fine, it had already been perked; it was on edge, practically ready to take over her brain and good sense and force her body to launch itself into Kevin’s arms.
Instead of doing that, she spun back around and kept on walking. “Goodbye, Kevin.”
He didn’t stop her this time, but just before she turned the corner, he called. “I’m a professional athlete, babe. I don’t stop when I see something I want.”
“Put your hard work into something else, little boy.”
Silence, and she breathed out a relieved breath when the door leading to the parking lot came into sight. Freedom.
“I’d rather put something into you, baby.”
Rebecca froze, fingers on the handle, for a long moment before she was able to get herself into motion again.
Damn. The little boy was good.
Two
Kevin
It wasn’t a trial to be sitting across the table from a beautiful woman.
Tall, gorgeous blue eyes, smile that was both mischievous and warm. In fact, the only problem with the entire scenario was the fact that the woman who he was sharing a meal with wasn’t the one he’d had a flame for since the moment he’d laid eyes on her.
Namely, because if he held a torch for the woman across from him, he’d be a fucking pervert.
His mother reached over and fixed his hair.
Kevin was twenty-four.
Twenty-four.
And he still let his mom fix his hair.
Because she’d been through enough in her life that he wouldn’t ever deny her something so simple and small, e
ven if she made him feel ten years old in the process.
“I still can’t believe you took the Cup to the Island on your day.”
She was referring to the fact that the team had won it the previous season, and tradition allowed for each of the guys—and girl—to spend a day with the huge trophy. Sometimes players took it home, others for a pool party, or maybe more notoriously to clubs or wild parties that involved keg stands—the last of which was no longer allowed because the Cup had been damaged. But Kevin hadn’t wanted to do any of those things. In fact, he could think of nothing else but taking it to the Island, plunking it down on that rocky beach in front of the cabin, and cracking open a pair of beers.
One for him.
One for his dad . . . that his father could no longer drink.
He forced a smile, a pang echoing across his heart, but it was an old pain, more bittersweet than agony after all these years. His dad would have been proud, Kevin knew that, and winning it all was the dream he’d held on to from the moment he’d first watched a live hockey game at the age of five. To have the Cup his for a day was fucking amazing, and to be at the Island where the memories of his father were the strongest was its own special brand of remarkable.
It just couldn’t be everything he’d imagined.
Because his dad hadn’t been there.
“What’d you think I would do?” he asked his mother lightly.
She didn’t miss a beat. “Fill it with beer and have a drinking contest.”