Almost. There was always the thought of him lurking at the back of my mind, but soon he was no longer front and center.
With the season underway, it didn’t take long before my life was overwhelmed with responsibilities surrounding the team. We started the regular season with an abysmal record of eight straight losses in October, including one against my former team, the Portland Storm. I’d never seen so many pucks get by me in such a short amount of time.
I’d been sure we would be horrible, and we absolutely were. The team was slow to catch on to Spurs’s system, and we were all still getting to know each other and how to play together. It didn’t help that only two of our top six forwards would legitimately be considered top six forwards on any other team, and the two guys who made up our best defensive pairing were far better suited as a third and fourth D. Admittedly, some of those guys had the potential to grow into the type of players who would suit their current roles, but looking at us now, it didn’t seem likely to happen any time soon. To call us mediocre would be a gross exaggeration. At this point, we didn’t even belong in this league.
We couldn’t keep the puck out of our own net, and we could hardly score. The good part about that was that it meant I wasn’t experiencing too many heart attacks every time the fucking war drums started up in home games. The bad part about it was that, instead of trying to get their shit together and play like a team, almost every guy on the ice was trying to prove his worth by fighting.
It was the same kind of shit you’d expect to see in the minor leagues. When a guy couldn’t hack it, he thought he could increase his value in the eyes of the decision makers by standing up for his teammates or some other shit like that, regardless of whether there was any good reason for the fight. Hell, even Zee—a guy who was typically as coolheaded and businesslike as possible out on the ice—fell prey to it in a game against the Blackhawks, picking a fight with Andrew Shaw. Yeah, Shaw was always willing to drop his gloves, but that wasn’t the point. There was no reason our captain needed to get into it just to spark the team. But he did.
We finally earned our first win of the season in a home game in November against the Oilers. Yeah, the same Oilers who were only one step ahead of us in the standings. If we’d been any other team in the league, that one was a game we’d simply expect to win and then move on.
Life wasn’t very good on the hockey front, which was exactly what I’d expected. At home, things were drastically better.
For one thing, Tallie and I had decided that no matter what the team and my mother-in-law might want, we weren’t going to play their game anymore. We went out when we wanted to, but we weren’t going to put ourselves on display. If the gossip pages wanted to focus on us, they were welcome to, but we weren’t intentionally giving them fodder any longer. Because of that, we were spending a hell of a lot more of our time at home, enjoying each other and truly getting to know one another.
She was still visiting Kade almost every day. She kept giving me updates on him, reporting on his progress. The program he was in was designed to last twelve weeks, so he wasn’t getting out any time soon, but he was making progress. I knew that for a fact because I’d given in and accompanied her to see him a couple of times. Kade was still surly and sarcastic when I saw him, but I would expect no less.
But there were definite improvements. I was beginning to see hints that the brother I remembered from when we were growing up together might still be in there, that maybe he wasn’t fully lost to addiction. There were just enough of those hints that Tallie even had me hoping for the best again, something I’d thought to be well in my past. In fact, there were enough improvements that I’d been thinking about asking Carrie to bring Kaylee down for a visit, after talking it over with Kade’s doctors.
The group of WAGs here were a lot different from the ones I’d been around in Portland, for the most part. This group wasn’t close. There was no cohesiveness, no matter how much Dana and Tallie tried to wrangle them. They were still putting together some plans for an annual charity event, but the women were all bitching and fighting about it instead of working together as a team. Tallie was getting close to Dana and a couple of the others, but for the most part, she was keeping her distance. I couldn’t say I blamed her, and in fact, I was glad she wasn’t getting too involved with most of them. The last thing she needed while she was finally starting to assert herself and make her life what she wanted it to be instead of what her mother had decided it should be was to get tied up in a bunch of cat fights.
Tallie had started her cooking class and was using me and her security guards as taste testers for her homework. I loved coming home and finding her puttering in the kitchen, hair drawn back and some cute apron or another tied around her waist. I’d bought her a few early on with sayings like “Requires Constant Supervision” or “Dinner is Ready When the Alarm Goes Off.” While I was gone on a road trip, she’d apparently bought a few of her own. Now she was wearing ones that said things like “Caution: Extremely Hot” and “I Keep the Best Snacks Under My Apron.”
She had to have a massive stash of aprons hidden somewhere because every time I saw her in one, it was new. I started to look forward to discovering what her apron would tell me, and I bought her more every time I saw something interesting when the team was on the road.
One day in late fall, when I returned home from morning practice and a pregame meal with the guys, I found Dennis monitoring things from his car in front of the house. I waved to him on my way in. Good thing he wasn’t inside or I would have had to kill him, because I walked through the garage door to discover Tallie in nothing but an “I Don’t Have a Dirty Mind, I Have a Sexy Imagination” apron and a skimpy piece of lingerie. She spun around, whisk and bowl in hand and a sexy grin on her face. She raised a brow.
“Want a taste?” she asked, holding out the whisk toward me. It was covered in whipped cream, but the only thing I wanted a taste of was her.
I moved in to kiss her, but she flicked her wrist and sent some of her whipped cream flying from the end of the whisk. It landed on my nose. She laughed.
“Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?” I dragged a hand down my face to clean it off. Some ended up on my lips. I licked. It tasted amazing, but not as good as she would once I got my hands on her.
“Yes.”
I made another move to grab her, but she was faster than me. She dropped the whisk, dug up a handful of whipped cream from the bowl, and smeared it all over my face. I kissed her anyway, both of us laughing as we ended up covered in the stuff.
It didn’t take me long to get her naked and on the counter, my head between her legs as I got a taste of what I really wanted.
She’d always been responsive, but lately her sensitivity was off the charts, especially when I played with her breasts. I must have been learning better how she reacted to my touch, pushing all the right buttons. Either that or she was becoming more aware of her own body and the things she liked. It had to be one of the two because I couldn’t come up with any other good reason for the way she responded to my efforts these days.
She came twice with me eating her pussy before I turned my attention to those amazing breasts. I kneaded one and suckled the other, alternating my efforts back and forth between them. It didn’t take long before she was crying out and climaxing again, from nothing more than that.
We moved the party to the bathroom and made love in the shower, and then she came to lie in bed with me during the time I should have been taking my pregame nap. Needless to say, that day there wasn’t a lot of napping going on.
That night, I earned my second win of the season. I told Tallie her sexy whipped cream act had been behind my performance, hoping she’d take that as a hint. Not that she needed a hint. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.
Not long after that, the team left for a brief road trip with stops in Minnesota and Winnipeg. I got my third win of the season against the Jets before we came home a few days later.
“Who’d
you bang during naptime this afternoon?” Tallie teased me when I called her after that game.
“Just me and my hand and a picture of you,” I replied. “What did you make today?”
“Brownies. Kade swore he could smell them on me when I visited him this afternoon.”
“Too bad you can’t take him any. He’s always been a sucker for chocolate.”
“That was probably torture for him, then,” she said.
“Maybe. You know, Kaylee’s just like him when it comes to chocolate.” I wasn’t sure why I’d said that. It only served to bring the topic up again at a time when we’d been having a good conversation, otherwise.
But Tallie didn’t turn the discussion around on me. “I’ll have to remember that whenever I finally meet her,” she said. “These came out really good. I’m sure I can duplicate it.”
We kept going from there, talking about life and all the things that had gone on in our day, eventually making our way back to the flirty, sexy, bedroom talk we’d started with. It always seemed to come back to the sexy talk lately, and I was more than all right with that. In fact, the longer we’d been together, the more I wanted her, and it was about a hell of a lot more than just sex. I wasn’t just falling in love with Tallie. Not anymore. I was one hundred percent in love with her, and I knew there was no going back for me.
I’d told her once, in front of her father, that I wanted our marriage to be more of a permanent union than the original year we’d agreed to. She still hadn’t given me any sense of where she stood on that other than telling me she loved me, too. I needed more than that, and I had a plan formulating in my mind for how I would go about getting a firm answer about our future.
It would have to wait for a bit, though. I needed more time so I could work out all the details. In the meanwhile, life kept going as usual.
Following our first practice after returning to Tulsa, Razor trailed me to my place. He wanted to look at a few houses in the area since he still hadn’t bothered to buy a place of his own. He’d been living in various local hotels the whole season, completely moving out every time we went on the road and moving in again—always in a different hotel—when we returned. That got old fast, although it had apparently been working for him in terms of getting women to date him and then easily moving on when he was done. And he was always done a lot sooner than they were. Setting down roots and buying a house might slow his roll, but that would probably be better for him in the long run.
When we came through the door, Tallie turned around, smiling. This time, she was wearing an apron that said “Me” across her breasts and “Mini Me” over her abdomen. She blushed when she saw us. I wasn’t sure if it was because she hadn’t been expecting anyone else to be there for her announcement or if she was nervous about what I thought.
I was too stunned to figure out what I thought. “You’re pregnant?” She was on the pill, and we’d been diligent about using condoms ever since that first night. Nothing was completely effective, though, other than abstinence. We’d both been aware of that before we’d ever taken our relationship to a physical level. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that she was pregnant, but it had stolen my ability to think beyond, “You’re serious?”
Tallie nodded, one hand on her belly. “I didn’t want to tell you until I was absolutely positive.”
“You’re positive? Really positive? How long have you suspected?” A thousand other questions raced through my head, keeping my feet rooted to the floor and my jaw gaping open.
Tallie being pregnant could definitely explain her added sensitivity that I’d been noticing. But she hadn’t started to show at all, and I hadn’t noticed any other symptoms that would give her away. And since I was out on the road as often as I was home, it would be easy for me to not realize she’d missed her time of the month.
She ducked her head. “A couple of weeks? I did a home test, but I didn’t want to trust that. I wanted to see the doctor first.”
“That’s…” Amazing didn’t even begin to cover it. I was completely lost for words.
“Good job,” Razor said, pushing past me to kiss her on the cheek. He rolled his eyes in my direction. “Maybe he’ll be less cranky as a daddy than he is as a newlywed.”
“Not likely,” she said, chuckling. “You know babies wake up at all hours of the night, right?”
I loved listening to her tease my teammate even if I was the butt of the joke. It meant she was starting to feel at home being part of my life. It gave me hope that she would agree when I asked her to make our marriage permanent.
And I had to get her to agree to that now. Tallie was having my baby, and I’d be damned if we weren’t going to be one big, happy, slightly dysfunctional family.
I HADN’T INTENDED to tell anyone but Hunter that I was pregnant, especially since I wasn’t positive how he would take the news, but since Razor had been there, we decided to go ahead and fill in the rest of the team.
Hunter was planning to tell the guys before a home game against the Rangers, so I’d decided to tell the other wives I was close to after the game—another loss—while we waited for our husbands to join us in the wives’ room. Not that there were many women up there who would give me the time of day, since according to most of them I was nothing more than an ignorant Southern belle who didn’t know the first thing about the holy grail that was hockey.
But they weren’t all like that. Dana Zellinger, Christiane Ackerman, Arianne Duclair, and I had formed a bond. Dana and Christiane were both mothers, too, and Dana was currently pregnant, so I knew they would be a lot of help for me as I navigated the waters of my first pregnancy without the aid of my own mother.
I still hadn’t talked to her after everything Daddy had revealed to me. She hadn’t made any effort, and neither had I. Why would I want to talk to a woman who had only been using me to get what she wanted my entire life? A woman who’d used me as leverage against my father, who was the only person in my life for years who had loved me just as I was? I couldn’t come up with a good reason, so I decided it wasn’t worth my time to make contact, not even for pregnancy commiseration or advice.
The four of us settled into our usual corner of the room, well away from the snooty women who only wanted to gossip. Christiane’s teenagers were looking after Dana’s toddlers—“Practice,” she’d informed us, since her oldest had gotten his seventeen-year-old girlfriend pregnant—so we would hopefully have a bit of uninterrupted talking time before our guys were ready to collect us.
I was just about to fill them in when there was a commotion at the door leading into the corridor.
We all turned to look out of curiosity. I’d just barely gotten a glimpse of Lance’s face, eyes wild, features contorted with rage, gun raised, when Nathan flew at him. A shot rang out. Dennis rushed at me, knocking me to the ground.
There were screams. Lots of screams. My vision blurred.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! All the blood.” It was Dana.
Something crashed. Might have been me. No, wait. I was already down. Must have been something else.
Couldn’t breathe. Chest hurt.
Someone took my hand. Big. Warm. Held on tight.
Everything else was cold.
I wanted Hunter.
Then there was nothing.
SPURS CAME BACK into the locker room just before I was about to leave. “Listen up!” he said loud enough that everyone would hear him over the regular postgame chatter. It took a few moments for the talk to die down, but gradually everyone realized something wasn’t right. The look on Spurs’s face was one of calm panic, if there was such a thing. The other coaches and the trainers filed in alongside him, each of them bearing a worried expression.
I dropped back down to the bench at my stall.
“Something’s happening in the building,” he said. “Not sure what, exactly, but security is locking us down in here until further notice. No one’s leaving this room until we’re given the all-clear.”
“What abo
ut our families?” Zee asked immediately. “Our wives and kids? Are they being locked down, too?”
“Gary’s doing everything he can as we speak to be sure they’re safe.”
That wasn’t good enough for me. Tallie wasn’t right by my side, and Lance was still out there…somewhere. I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. I hadn’t thought about him in a while. He’d been keeping a low profile, but he was always lurking at the back of my mind. Spurs was still talking, filling everyone in on whatever he could, but I pulled my cell out of my pocket and called Tallie’s number.
It went straight to voice mail.
Maybe her battery was dead. She got really bad service in the BOK Center. It was always low when we left games. That was probably it. I was determined to convince myself that was the only reason her phone would be off.
Razor caught my eye from his stall, directly across the room from me. He raised a brow in question. He knew all the shit that had gone down with Lance. All of the guys knew some of it, but Razor knew everything. For some reason, I was starting to like the asshole and tell him things, not that I could explain why. He had a habit of growing on people.
I shook my head. He’d know what that meant.
“Zee,” Razor shouted, interrupting whatever Spurs was saying.
Everyone turned to stare at him.
“Call Dana. Hunter can’t get Tallie to answer.”
Zee nodded and dug out his phone, and one of the coaches moved to turn on the big-screen TV at the front of the room.
“So to sum up what’s going on,” a reporter said as they showed a shot of the arena from outside, “shots have been fired at the BOK Center following tonight’s Thunderbirds game.”
My blood froze in my veins.
“We’re still working on getting all the details. They’re coming in piecemeal, but here’s what we do know. One or more gunshots were fired in one of the luxury suites or another room on that level. There is at least one injury, but we don’t know more than that at this time. We don’t know the severity of the injury. Police and arena security are working together to determine if the one shooter they have in custody is the only shooter or if they were working with someone else, and while that is being determined, the entire building is under lockdown.”
[Tulsa Thunderbirds 01.0] Bury the Hatchet Page 24