by Elise Faber
She gasped in a breath, sobbed louder.
And he was getting frantic. Tears were one thing, but this hysterical crying was something else. She was going to make herself sick.
Stefan’s father—no, Pierre—knelt next to them.
“Let me,” he said.
Stefan snorted. “Just go. You’ve already done enough.”
His mom cried harder.
“Shh . . . Mom. Come on, it’ll be okay.”
A firm hand on his shoulder had him glaring up at Pierre.
“You smell like you took a bath in a keg,” his father said harshly. “Go shower and leave your mother to me—”
Stefan shifted, pulled his mom closer. “I’m not—”
“I’ve only seen her like this once before, son,” Pierre said, “but I know what she needs.”
The sound of Pierre’s voice seemed to soothe his mom. She quieted a little, slumped against Stefan, even as tears still continued to pour.
That slight calming was enough to make Stefan waver.
“Come on, son,” Pierre coaxed. “Let me do this for her.”
He was about to refuse, just on principal. But then Pierre put his hand on his mother’s back, and she reached for him, turned to crawl into his embrace.
A jagged pulse of pain—of jealousy—lanced Stefan’s heart before he managed to tuck it away. If his father was what his mother needed . . . he could suck it up.
Pierre ignored Stefan when he crossed to the dresser to grab some clothes and went into the bathroom to shower.
By the time he came back out, less than ten minutes later, his mother was sitting on the floor, her back against the mattress, her face red and splotchy.
But she wasn’t crying.
She glanced up when Stefan came into the room, her eyes flicking between him and Pierre, who was holding up the far wall. His father looked totally together and distinguished, despite the wrinkled and tear-stained suit jacket.
“We need to talk,” his mother said without preamble. “It’s time you had the whole truth.”
And that was when the bottom fell out of Stefan’s world.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
“Your sister died when she was two years old,” his mother said.
Stefan staggered, barely made it to the mattress before his legs collapsed.
“I was newly pregnant with you, not even eight weeks along. I was so tired.” His mother shook her head. “Pierre was traveling for business. I hadn’t even told him the good news, wanted to do it in person.”
Agony was stitched into every syllable of the words, and his subsequent pain was a punch to the gut. He wanted to take it from his mother, to help her—
She pressed on.
“Between Sophia’s teething and the hormones, I was barely making it through the days. I was nauseous all the time, exhausted.”
Stefan scrambled to comprehend, to understand. Because . . . he knew the other shoe was about to fall.
“Then I fell asleep one day while Sophia was napping—”
He sucked in a breath. Dear God, what had happened?
“She woke before I did and I guess I didn’t hear her. Or maybe she didn’t call out for me that day.” Diane swallowed, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t know. I only remember hearing the crash and seeing her fall down the stairs.” Her breathing hitched, but there were no more tears. “Sophia died in the hospital not even a week later. She’d hit her head, and the doctors couldn’t get the swelling down.”
Stefan sat very still, trying and failing to keep the images from his brain.
Of a child falling, his mother devastated, and his father—
“Where were you?” He turned, wished he could shoot fire from his eyes at Pierre. “During all of this—”
“Your father came back,” Diane said. “As soon as I called him, he was on the next flight home. But the moment Sophia was gone, so was he.” She paused. “I hadn’t even told him about you.”
Stefan flinched back, the words almost a physical blow to his senses.
His father hadn’t known?
He hadn’t abandoned Stefan—
No. Just his mother, who’d been ravaged by the death of her daughter.
The information didn’t change his view of his father. Pierre was still a selfish, unfeeling bastard. “It doesn’t matter. He left.“
His mom rose and sat next to Stefan on the bed. “Yes, your father left,” she said, “I didn’t know where he’d gone. There were no cell phones then, no Internet to track or emails. I tried leaving messages at the hotels I saw on our joint credit card statement, but then he stopped using the card.” A pause. “And then I had you.”
He stared into his mom’s eyes, the hurt welling inside him, threatening to overtake everything.
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
Diane stared down at her hands for a long moment. “There is really no good excuse except that it was so much easier for me to pack it all away. To box up the pain and never feel it again.” His mother pressed a hand to her stomach. “It hurt so much to lose Sophia, but then you were there. My bright, sweet boy. And it was just the two of us.”
She touched his cheek, and Stefan knew that he could never fault her for not telling him.
His mother had sacrificed so much for him, so to be hurt because she’d kept such a thing to herself? A private, shattering pain she’d been forced to endure on her own?
He could allow her that secret without a shred of anger or resentment.
“When your father didn’t come back, I moved into a smaller place. I’d given the big stuff away—Sophia’s furniture, clothes, the car seat and stroller,” she said. “The rest I packed up . . . and I just never found the strength to open it again. It was so much easier when I didn’t have to look at the reminders of how I’d failed her—”
Her voice broke, and Stefan bent to wrap her in his arms. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”
She sniffed. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. I kept it from you.”
He pulled back and put both hands on her shoulders, holding her in place until she met his eyes. “I understand why.”
Her chin dipped down to her chest, and a long slow breath escaped her lips. “Thank you,” she murmured.
“It’s not your fault, Diane,” Pierre said. Stefan stiffened. He hadn’t heard his father come over, had forgotten he was in the room at all. “And I should be the one apologizing.”
Stefan opened his mouth, ready to retort, but his father beat him to it.
“I’m sorry,” Pierre said, a guileless expression on his face. “I failed as a parent . . . as a husband.” He reached out, touched Diane’s shoulder. “I have so many regrets when it comes to us. Yes, I was crazy with grief, but that’s no excuse. What I did was unbelievably weak—both with S-Sophia and then later with Stefan.”
Diane turned to face him, her eyes dry but the sorrow evident. “It’s not your—”
Pierre shook his head. “I’m not looking for absolution or forgiveness.”
“Then what?” Stefan said.
His anger toward his father wasn’t red-hot any longer—more like a cool burn—but he sure as hell wasn’t willing to just let this go. Putting aside that fact that Pierre had left his mother during her darkest moments, what he’d done when Stefan was a teenager—
For Christ’s sake, it had almost ripped both of their lives to shreds.
“You can’t go back,” he told Pierre. “Not after all this. Too much time has gone by.”
They all fell quiet, and Stefan could hear every damn breath, every freaking rustle of clothing. There was a tension swirling within him, tighter and tighter, until it threatened to burst.
“I don’t want to go back,” Pierre finally said. “I understand that we can’t, that we may never have the kind of relationship we might have had. But . . . I would very much like to move forward.”
Brit had said much the same thing, so m
uch so that it was impossible for Stefan to ignore the similarities.
Except, he didn’t want to move forward, dammit. He wanted to stay in his own peaceful world, to not have every buried memory uncovered and exposed to the world.
Yet when his mother said, “I’d like that, too,” Stefan found he didn’t have the strength to disagree with her.
****
The next morning, Stefan walked into the arena. They still had a few hours before their scheduled practice, but he’d seen Brit’s car in the lot and hadn’t been able to resist pulling in.
A few members of the media called at him for a picture, but Stefan ignored them. No doubt, he and Brit would make the news.
Their relationship was still going strong, at least if one believed the media.
Which clearly proved the press didn’t know a damned thing.
There hadn’t been any fallout, any reports of their breakup, partly because the team had been travelling a lot, and partly because Julian’s injury had made it so the press was much more focused on Brit’s skills and the Gold winning—actually winning games—than following them around and documenting Brifan—the honest-to-God term the media had dubbed for their coupledom.
Of course, if they found out the dirty details of their so-called relationship’s inception . . .
Thankfully, that hadn’t happened.
Instead, Susan had gotten her press. Brit had gotten her dream. And he—
He shook his head. He didn’t know what he’d gotten.
His inner conscience called bullshit on that one.
Which was why he was at the arena in the first place. Because Brit was there.
He walked down the hall, barely noting the pictures and closed office doors as he passed by. There was nothing like the smell,—disinfectant, IcyHot, eau de Hockey. Nothing like the almost-revenant quiet.
It was as close to a religious experience as he got.
People had accused him many times of being distant. But Stefan wasn’t that. He felt. He sympathized, raged, hurt.
But what he didn’t do was punish himself, the last six weeks aside.
When things went to crap, he typically cut ties first. It made things easier, kept his heart more intact. Usually, it was less painful.
Not with Brit.
He’d said goodbye so many times in his life—to teammates, to coaches—left them behind while he’d gone ahead, enduring the cool slices of jealousy, of things changing in an agonizing, irrevocable way he couldn’t control.
Keeping relationships superficial eased that transition.
But it was impossible to cut ties with Brit. He couldn’t. She was a teammate and . . . the truth was he didn’t want to.
Forget the deception. Fuck the lies. Brit had said she’d cared about him, and Stefan knew it was the truth. She’d trusted, showed him her weak spots, her soft, feminine side. He knew her well enough to recognize that those shared times hadn’t been fake.
No matter what she’d told herself. No matter who had forced her hand.
Finally, he understood that their relationship had been real. Special.
And, idiot that he was, Stefan thought what he’d said the night before might have ruined that.
He had accused her of putting obstacles between them.
Well now, he’d thoroughly succeeded in topping that, both by insulting her and her relationship with Blane, and then by jabbing his fingers into the open wound that was all that remained of their relationship.
He sighed as he slipped past the locker room and into the arena.
The crack of sticks, plural, surprised him. Brit and Frankie were there, which he’d expected—she and the goalie coach usually did an extra practice together on non-game days.
So, no, that wasn’t the surprise. What made his jaw drop open was that Stewart was on the ice.
He loosed a slap shot that Brit stopped handily then laughed when she ribbed him, “Next time put something on that, will you?”
Stewart laughing? Stewart spending extra time on the ice?
Since when?
Except . . . now that he thought of it, Stefan couldn’t ignore the fact that Mike Stewart had been working hard to become part of the team. He hadn’t missed a practice, had gone to more outside events than even Stefan.
He’d even seen Mike at a charity function, which the defenseman typically avoided like the plague.
Had he changed? Really, actually changed?
Frankie called, “That’s good for now, Brit. Cool down and see Mandy so you’re ready for this afternoon.”
She skated off the ice, Frankie following suit. They both nodded at Stefan as they walked by, but there was a distance in Brit’s eyes that made his gut sink . . .
Then twist into knots as Stewart stopped in front of him. “Hey,” Mike said.
“Hey,” Stefan responded.
And silence.
Stefan started to move away.
“I—uh, wanted to talk to you,” Stewart blurted.
Stefan looked at him in surprise. “Talk?”
Stewart shrugged. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’d joke about it being a girl thing, but I don’t want Brit to kick my ass.”
Stefan chuckled, and it felt rough, underused. But it also felt good. Really, really good to laugh after the last twenty-four hours of his life. “She probably would,” he agreed. He waited a beat then asked, “What do you want to talk about?”
“I had some shit happening in my life,” Stewart said. “Things that were really screwing with my head. They’re better now, and my goal is do right by the team, but I wanted to say”—he hesitated—“I’m sorry. For all of it. The snark. The not trying. The general asshole-ness.”
Tension Stefan hadn’t even realized he was holding onto loosened, made it so he could breathe a little easier. If Stewart was saying that, making that big of a change . . . maybe he could too.
Mike glanced up, a slightly guilty look in his eyes. “And also, thanks for helping me with the ladder-drill-from-hell.“
Stefan shrugged, feeling a little uncomfortable with the absence of Mike’s snark. “I’d say it was my pleasure . . .”
“Yeah. No,” Stewart said. “The words my pleasure should never come out of your mouth when referring to me.”
Stefan snorted. “Yeah. Okay.” He tilted his head in the direction of the hall. An idea had come to him suddenly, a way to make things right. “We good?”
“We’re good,” Stewart said. “Well, almost. There’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I know where the pictures are.” He fussed with the finger of his glove. “I want to get them for Brit.”
Hope and respect swept to life inside of Stefan. He didn’t ask how Stewart knew about the pictures when not another soul seemed to. That piece didn’t matter. Brit’s happiness was more important.
He nodded in agreement. “Yes. Along those lines, I’ve been thinking, and I have an idea.”
Stefan had a number programmed into his phone that he hadn’t used yet. He scrolled through his contacts, selected the name, and dialed.
It rang once before the man on the other side picked up.
“Dan,” he told Brit’s brother. “I need your help.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Brit
Brit drove home from the afternoon practice wanting nothing more than a bath. Hours in Stefan’s presence had grated, and his words from the previous evening were on repeat in her brain.
“Why don’t you fuck him too?”
She stepped out of the stairwell and into the hall then promptly cursed under her breath.
Apparently, a bath wasn’t in her immediate future.
Susan and a gorgeous blond woman—who looked vaguely familiar—were waiting outside her apartment door.
“Hello,” she said, stopping in the hall and not bothering to unlock the door. She sure as hell didn’t want Susan inside, and the bitchy
pout on the other woman’s face didn’t particularly strike Brit as friendly.
“We need to talk. Now,” Susan said without any of the usual pesky formalities, like “Hello” or “Good to see you.”
“I think we’ve had all of the conversations we need to have,” Brit said and tried to move past her.
“Not quite.” Susan glanced around the hallway, gaze stopping pointedly on the five other doors dotting the walls. “And this isn’t exactly one you want to have here.”
“Fine,” Brit snapped. “You can come in. But you’ll say your piece and leave. I meant what I said before. I’m done.” The blond woman snorted, and Brit glared at her. “Why are you here?”
“I’m here,” the woman said, “because I’m critically important to your career. So invite me in and offer me a glass of wine.”
For the love of all that was holy.
Brit unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Sit,” she told them, gesturing to the cute little sofa she’d picked up at a used furniture store.
“This is . . . cozy,” Susan said. “Jessica? Isn’t it just darling?”
Brit ignored the jab. Her apartment had made her happy from the first moment she’d walked in. She’d painted the walls a cheerful blue, filled the space with mementos she’d gathered over the years.
It was delicate. It was feminine.
There wasn’t a single detail of hockey.
Well, there were a few drawers crammed with awards she’d won over the years, but the rest of the space was hers alone. Just a woman carving out her own niche, reveling in a space that was hers alone.
Alone.
The word sent a wave of pain through her, but Brit dutifully shoved it away and walked into the kitchen.
She snagged three beers—because, if nothing else, her mom had engrained it in her to be polite to guests—and went back into the family room.
“Here,” she said, handing them two of the beers. Susan gave the bottle a disgusted look and promptly set it on the coffee table then elbowed Blondie, who begrudgingly followed suit.
“You wanted to talk,” Brit said, taking out her cell phone and setting it on the table, “so talk.”