Playing Dirty

by Taryn Leigh Taylor

  “It’s no big deal. You’re not so bad,” he relented, and it was Lainey’s turn to smile. “I mean, I know getting saddled with this place wasn’t what you were expecting. And that there’s a complicated history to it. I’ve got a dad, too. I know how it can be.”

  Lainey’s lips twisted at his assessment. Complicated seemed too bland a word to describe her relationship with Martin Sillinger. “I doubt that.”

  “No, I definitely have a dad. I mean, I can bring in a family photo if you want.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Ha ha. I know you have a dad. One who’s incredibly proud of you, I’ll bet. You’re going to be a lawyer. You’re doing the family proud. Well, I mean, you would be if you shaved off that awful goatee.” Lainey couldn’t help but slide in the jibe.

  Now it was Darius’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “My brother—” Lainey frowned, paused. The word had come out so quickly, so naturally, that it startled her. She’d never called Brett her brother before. It usually grated just to hear other people say it.

  “He plays hockey professionally. He made it to the big show and Martin could barely make the effort to congratulate him. What chance did I have?”

  Darius sighed. “Look, Lainey. The truth is, I didn’t know Martin that well. Obviously, I know nothing about what kind of dad he was. But let me show you something.”

  “You know I’ll have to fire you on the spot if you expose yourself to me.”

  Darius stood as he shot her a withering glare. “You have a gift for fucking up nice moments, you know that, right?”

  Lainey curtseyed when she got to her feet, but followed Darius past the bar and around to the hallway by the bathrooms. He stopped at the photo wall, and Lainey braced herself before she followed his gaze.

  She hated the wall. Had since the first time she’d walked into the bar.

  She didn’t want to look at smiling photos of her father throughout the years.

  The ones where he was younger reminded her of the good times—birthday cakes and hockey practices—all the things they’d done before the drinking had gotten bad and the fighting had started. The ones where he was older, when he was all but a stranger to her, were painful in a different way. She’d taken to keeping her eyes down when she needed to get cleaning supplies or use the bathroom.

  But today she made herself look.

  “The day I got hired, Martin brought me back here and pointed out three photos to me. The first one was the one of him meeting Wayne Gretzky.”

  Lainey rolled her eyes, a bitter laugh escaping. “His pride and joy.”

  “The second,” Darius continued, “was him and your brother the night Brett got drafted by the Storm.”

  Lainey looked at the photo, realized she never had before. She was struck by two things. The first was how incredibly young Brett looked. It was a lot, to achieve your dreams at eighteen. A lot to handle. A lot of chances for things to go badly if you didn’t have anyone around.

  The second was that, while Martin was beaming at the camera, Brett’s attention was on Martin. Even in that moment, probably the greatest moment of his young life, Brett still couldn’t fully enjoy it without approval from the man beside him.

  “And the third was that one up there.”

  Lainey followed the direction of his finger to find a framed, yellowing newspaper article that she recognized. Speaking of looking like a kid...the photo had that slightly blurry look of black-and-white newsprint, but she looked young and intense in her US jersey. The headline read “Local Hockey Player Makes National Squad.”

  She bit her lip, concentrating on the pain. She’d had no idea she’d made Martin’s wall of fame. And though she fought it, there was a warm spot in her heart. He’d cared. At least a little. At least for a moment.

  “I’m not saying that Martin was father of the year. But he was still your dad.”

  She nodded. He was her dad. And while this small gesture wasn’t enough to untangle her thorny feelings about her family history, it did make her realize one thing. She wasn’t that different from Brett after all, because she, too, craved the approval of the man who’d raised her, at least for the first ten years of her life.

  “You liked him, huh?”

  “Martin? Yeah. He was a good guy. Customers liked him. Always quick with a smile or an opinion about sports. Way more go-with-the-flow than you,” Darius said pointedly as they headed back to the bar.

  “So much for our truce.”

  “Please don’t tell me that because I was nice to you once, I have to be nice to you all the time now, because if that’s the case, fire me and put me out of my misery.”

  “Actually, I was trying to figure out what it would take to get you to quit. I’ll be keeping the ‘force you to be nice to me’ card in my pocket for the future,” Lainey assured him. “Now go get your apron on and get to work. The bar opens in twenty minutes and I’m not paying you to stand around.”

  They shared a smile as Darius got to work, but Lainey’s grin faded as she glanced around the Sportsman. Usually when she thought of her dad, his life after he left her...there was so much hurt and pain wrapped around it.

  Now things looked different.

  Martin Sillinger had been a person, with a business that was doing okay, staff who kinda liked him, customers who kinda missed him. He’d been the villain to her for so long that this abrupt shift in perspective gave her vertigo.

  He was just a man who’d lost his hockey career to an injury and had struggled to fill the hole. If anyone could empathize with that, it should be her.

  Much as she hated to admit it, maybe Martin had built something good here. There was a sense of community she hadn’t expected at all.

  Ever since she’d left Portland for good, there’d been a piece of her, an agitated, furtive piece, that was always looking over her shoulder, always on edge. That part of her had quieted since she’d been back. She didn’t feel as lost anymore. And she liked it.

  * * *

  SINCE THEIR HEART-TO-HEART, Lainey and Darius were all work and no insults. She figured they’d get back to normal once the awkwardness had passed but in the meantime, the night was going smoothly. Game time was in an hour, so they’d put the pregame shows on the TV, and the bar was starting to fill up with fans eager to see who the Storm would be playing in the next round.

  When a tall man wearing a ball cap over his dark hair walked through the door, face shadowed with heavy stubble and hands shoved in the pockets of his black field jacket, Lainey wasn’t fooled by his attempt at anonymity. Cooper tucked his big frame into an empty table in the corner of the bar and returned Lainey’s smile when their eyes met. Anticipating his order, she grabbed a glass of ice water and headed over.

  She was almost there, her smile growing with every step, when the sound of her name on the television froze her to the spot.

  “In case you haven’t read Sports Nation’s latest headline, they broke the news earlier that Cooper Mead, PWR Athletics brand ambassador, is dating Elaine Sillinger, and if that name rings a bell, it should. Not only is she the half sister of Mead’s fellow Portland Storm defenseman, Brett Sillinger, but you might also remember her from that time she scored on her own net and cost America a gold medal. So as the Storm advance in the playoffs, let’s hope, for Mead’s sake, that tendency isn’t contagious.”

  The world stopped as Lainey glanced up at the television. The footage felt unnecessary—it was already burned into her brain. She didn’t need to see it to know exactly what was about to happen.

  She stood facing her goalie on the right side of the net, number 42 emblazoned on her American jersey as she watched her defensive partner fight for the puck behind the net. The girl on the Canadian team won the battle, flicked the puck out in front of the net and Lainey got her stick on it. Even now, she didn’t know why she’d rushed,
why she hadn’t angled her body more, why she hadn’t backhanded it out of the zone instead. For some reason that remained a mystery to her no matter how many times she’d relived this moment, a combination of adrenaline, nerves and bad aim had conspired when she’d shot the puck, and instead of banking it off the boards and behind the net the way she’d intended, it flew straight into the bottom corner, putting the Canadians ahead by a goal with forty-three seconds left on the clock.

  Everything went hot, her skin tingling as though her body were trying to spontaneously combust, but she’d screwed that up, too, and now she stood there, awash in a fire that wouldn’t take. She was unaware that the glass had tumbled out of her hand, but the spray of cold water against her feet and the crash of the glass shattering across the floor registered distantly, as though she’d watched it happen to someone else.

  She hurt. Her whole body, her whole being, ached with that familiar throb of acute shame—the one she’d spent three years trying to numb. But all this time, it had just been bubbling under the surface, churning and roiling like lava in a volcano that was just waiting to erupt. And erupt it had, leaving the emotional equivalent of Pompeii in its wake.

  This was the moment her nightmares were about. This was the moment she’d dreaded since the goal that shook America.

  “Turn it off. Dammit, turn it off!” Cooper’s voice echoed in her brain, and then he was there, arms around her, and his touch pulled her back to the present. She could feel people’s eyes on her, hear the din of whispered voices as the bar patrons put the footage and her reaction together, shared their findings with their tablemates.

  “No. It’s game night. Leave it. I just... I need to get out of here. I need to go home.”

  Aggie was already rushing over with a broom when Cooper put a hand on Lainey’s back and guided her into the short hallway that led to the staff exit, which was good, because despite her declaration, she was having a hard time moving.

  “Lainey—”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s in the past. Or at least it was.” She gestured behind her, toward the site of her latest humiliation, the image of her, standing alone and dejected in a crowd of players around the American net, still burned onto the screen of her mind.

  Lainey buried her face in her hands even though she was far too hollow for any tears to come out. Like a fool, she’d let herself open up again, make friends, joke with patrons and banter with staff.

  This was the price of being close to people. Eventually, you’d let them down.

  She’d known Cooper meant trouble for her the second he walked up to the counter, but instead of shutting him down and remaining detached the way she should have, she’d flirted back. She’d opened up. And now her life was a burning pile of wreckage again. Everything she’d built back up was smoldering around her feet.

  Because she’d let him in. His fame was her downfall—she’d known it would be, but she’d gambled anyway. And lost.

  He slid his arms around her, tried to comfort her, but she twisted out of his embrace. The hurt look on his handsome face was her penance. “Lainey, please...”

  She shook her head, stopping his words. “This is why I brought breakfast back to the hotel. But then we went to the bookstore, and when you invited me for dinner... I knew I shouldn’t have gone out with you.” Lainey ducked into the small office and grabbed her purse, taking a moment to steel herself against Cooper’s magnetic charm, reminding herself that not resisting him in the first place was the reason she was in this mess now.

  “I don’t want to live the life you live—cameras everywhere, pictures in the paper and the gossip blogs. I’ve been through this all before, and I can’t do it again. The first time nearly broke me. I won’t do it again, not even for you.”

  The tears she’d thought beyond her trailed down her cheeks as she whirled around and strode the final three steps of the hallway and escaped out into the parking lot.

  11

  COOPER FLICKED AIMLESSLY through channels, stretched out on his couch in sweats and a T-shirt, trying to distract himself. It wasn’t working, because there was nothing on. But thanks to the playoff curfew, it was too late to go out, even if he’d felt like it. Which he didn’t. Because the only place he wanted to be was the one place he couldn’t go: with Lainey.

  He couldn’t get that goddamn television footage out of his head.

  He’d seen it before, of course. It had been played incessantly after it had happened. The goal that shook America.

  In fact, Cooper had been in Vancouver, but playing for Canada, and while he’d crossed paths with some of the women on the American team in the village and at the rink, Elaine Sillinger hadn’t been on his radar. In fact, if he was honest, while he remembered the incident and the resulting media shit-storm, her name had never registered on his consciousness. He’d been focused on his team’s performance, on his own stake in the games.

  It was weird to think that something that had barely meant anything to him had left her life in shambles.

  He knew, to a lesser extent, what it was to be haunted by the play that went wrong—he had a number of those himself, although none as burned into the national conscience as hers.

  He wasn’t sure when it had started, this need to make sure she was okay. But when he’d reached for her, intending to comfort her, she’d shaken him off. And the dismissal was a blow. Lainey certainly didn’t want his comfort. Hell, she didn’t want him at all.

  Cooper flicked the television off and stared up at the ceiling of his living room. It was only 11:00 p.m., but he could already tell his insomnia would be in full force tonight.

  The ring of his phone startled him, and he reached behind his head and over the arm of the couch to grab the device from the side table. A glance at the screen made him sigh. It was Golden. Of course it was.

  “How’s my favorite client? You are dominating the news cycle, my man.”

  “Yeah. I’m on top of the world.” Cooper ran a hand through his hair with a bitter laugh. “They talked about my personal life on a hockey pregame show and identified me not by my team or my position, but as fucking ‘brand ambassador’ for PWR Athletics.” He shook his head. “I mean, how did they even know Lainey and I...”

  Cooper trailed off, feeling like a moron. He should have known. He should have fucking known. “You did this.”

  Golden didn’t ask for clarification, and that was enough.

  “You fucking traitor.”

  “What choice did you leave me? The meme tided them over for a while, but some goddamn dive bar in Portland isn’t the image PWR is going for. At least hooking up with a disgraced Olympian will get the gossip mags reprinting photos of your former relationships and remind people you used to hang out in the most exclusive clubs in New York.”

  Cooper couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I told you about Lainey as a friend. Don’t you give a shit about anything but the bottom line?”

  “We’re not friends, Mead. We’re business partners, and you weren’t keeping your end of the bargain, so I did what I had to do. Because the bottom line is the only thing that matters to me. PWR drops you, it makes other sponsors start to question you, too. Do you get that, Mead? It’s a ripple effect.”

  “Well, how’s this for a ripple? You’re fired.”

  Jared’s bark of laughter was obnoxiously condescending. “You’re not firing me.”

  “Actually, Golden, you’re right. I’m not. First, I want you to tell PWR Athletics I’m done. And get me the fuck out of that Lone Wolf contract, too. Then you’re fired.”

  There was silence on the line as Golden realized he was serious.

  “You’re not going to find a better agent than me. No one can make you the money I can. I hope your piece of ass was worth tens of millions, because that’s what you’re giving up if you fire me.”

 
Cooper bolted upright on the couch, muscles coiled, hands fisted. “You say anything like that about Lainey ever again and I won’t just fire you, I will end you, you son of a bitch.”

  He swore again as he hung up the phone. It took all his willpower to drop it on the couch instead of chucking it against the wall. Cooper ran his fingers through his hair and got to his feet. Jared Golden was an asshole of the highest order. Cooper knew it. He’d always known it. Jared had been the first agent to dangle promises of shiny things in front of his teenage eyes, and Coop had bitten, because the last thing he needed was a bunch of legalese that he couldn’t read. He’d believed Jared Golden when he’d told him he couldn’t do any better.

  For the first time, he realized that he might’ve been wrong. Maybe he could do better. For Lainey’s sake, he had to try.

  Cooper paced the length of the room, trying to burn off the anger simmering in his body, the desperate need to punch something. But he was in the playoffs. Hockey was all-important right now. He couldn’t afford to bust up his hand in a childish tantrum.

  The phone rang less than ten minutes later, and Cooper’s grin was feral. Maybe yelling at Golden some more would help him let off some steam.

  But when he picked up the phone, caller ID confirmed it wasn’t Jared. Instead, it was the last person he’d expected to hear from, and surprise drained some of the pent-up rage from his system.

  “Lainey? What’s—”

  “Yeah, this guy at your door in the fancy suit won’t let me up to see you because he says I’m not on the list.”

  Something about her voice wasn’t quite right. It was too mellow, and the words ran together at the end. Cooper frowned. “Are you drunk?”

  “I’m not drunk. I am tipsy. I’ve had a bad day, no dinner, and two and a half beers. Sue me. But first tell Pete here to let me out of lobby jail.”

  “Yeah, okay. Put him on.” Cooper tried to digest the circumstance at hand as he waited for Lainey to hand the phone to the night doorman. After a moment of muted shuffling and some muffled chatter he couldn’t make out, a man cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “Hello?”