In the Zone (Portland Storm 5)

by Catherine Gayle

  The crazy thing was, I knew he was right. I didn’t simply hope he was right or wish he could be right. That was absolutely the truth of it. Gina Martin, whoever she was, wished she could be in my shoes, and she was acting out in the only way she knew how—by attacking my physical appearance in the hope that it would change the way people saw me.

  The brilliant part of it was that it didn’t do a darn thing to alter how I saw myself. I met Keith’s eyes—his were dark with concern—and I gave him a wink and smiled. “I guess I’ll just have to go out there and show her why Devin asked me to do it instead of her.”

  He lifted his brows in question.

  “I’m fine,” I assured him. “Really.”

  “You’re sure? Because I wouldn’t mind going out there and teaching her a thing or two about how she ought to treat other people.”

  “You can’t drop your gloves with a woman,” Shane said, laughing. “And you aren’t even wearing any.”

  Now that they were reassured that I would be all right, they gradually made their way out of my dressing room. Devin headed across the hall to his own so he could get ready. Tanya went back out to solve yet another last-minute costuming disaster, dragging Shane with her. Then Keith and I were finally alone.

  “You’re not upset?” he asked, trailing a finger along my cheek, his eyes boring into mine as though searching for a deeper truth.

  I shook my head. “I don’t care how Gina Martin sees me. I don’t even know who she is, so why does it matter? The only thing I care about is how you see me and I how I see myself.”

  “And how do you see yourself?”

  “Not as a fat bitch, I can tell you that.” I laughed, but his expression remained serious. “No, I see myself as a lucky bitch. Because I’m the one you love, and I’m the one who gets to love you.”

  His lips curled up in a seductive grin. “I can agree with the lucky part, but don’t you dare call the woman I love a bitch.”

  “Deal. As long as you’re willing to do something for me later tonight,” I added on second thought.

  He cocked up a brow. “And that would be…?”

  “I think Allison and Jacob might need to make a return appearance.”

  “A little role playing? I like how you think.”

  “Does Jacob own handcuffs? Allison has a few fantasies that he might be able to help her out with.”

  Keith groaned. Then he kissed me, the kind of kiss that would have lifted me off my feet if I’d been standing. And I realized he had lifted me right up out of my makeup chair and into his arms. He held me to his chest, never breaking the kiss, and I sighed.

  I wasn’t worried about breaking his back; I was only worried about how soon he would put me down again. I didn’t want this feeling to ever end.

  MY DRESSING ROOM was filled to bursting with people, everyone holding flowers and offering me their congratulations and generally stroking my ego. I only had eyes for one of them, though—Keith.

  He held the biggest bouquet of them all, two dozen red roses, and he had a sinful look in his eyes that I would have jumped on if we weren’t surrounded by a crowd approximately the size of an army battalion.

  “You were amazing,” he whispered in my ear, dropping a kiss on my cheek. Well, not just a kiss. His tongue flicked out and licked my earlobe, sending a series of shivers skittering up my spine. “Tell me, does Allison have any fantasies involving blindfolds?”

  A few more people pushed through to gush over me, and I shot Keith a warning glare. He winked and backed away, making sure I knew we had unfinished business.

  Nearly half an hour had passed before the crowd in my dressing room cleared out enough that I could actually change into my street clothes. I was exhausted, but it was the good sort of exhaustion, the kind that meant I’d worked hard at something that mattered to me. When I opened the door and went out into the hall, it was to find Keith in the middle of a stare-down with Val, of all people. What the hell was he doing here? Tanya, Shane, and Devin were all standing nearby, passing tense glances between them.

  I stepped fully into the hall, placing myself squarely between Keith and Val. Waves of heated anger were radiating off Keith, blasting into me with a force like a car crash. “What’s going on?” I asked slowly, reaching down with one hand to take Keith’s, using my touch to reassure him, to calm him.

  Val lifted a perfectly sculptured eyebrow, a derisive expression I remembered well, and he shrugged. “I just come to tell you congratulation,” he said. Once, I’d found his Russian accent insanely sexy; now it just reminded me of times I would rather forget.

  “What I heard you saying a minute ago was nothing even close to congratulations,” Keith grumbled.

  “I am amaze the bitch dance so good,” Devin put in, waving one arm through the air and copying Val’s accent and mannerisms like he’d been studying to play the part. “How she can still move all that fat?”

  Keith’s hand tensed in mine, and out of the corner of my eye I could see him flexing the other into a fist. I squeezed the one I held to keep him from doing anything.

  “I’m sure it does amaze you,” I said as calmly as I could. “Anything that doesn’t easily fit into your tiny head tends to be more than you can grasp.”

  “Oh snap!” Tanya said, whipping her hand in a Z pattern and snapping her fingers.

  I had to fight not to laugh out loud. This wasn’t a time for laughter, though. It was time to put Val permanently in the spot he belonged in my life—the past.

  Or better yet, out of my life completely.

  “Brianna,” Val said in the same sickeningly placating tone he had always use with me right before telling me the reason I couldn’t have the things I wanted was because I was fat, or because I wasn’t trying hard enough, or one of a thousand other reasons. It was never because he was an ass, though. At least according to him.

  “Don’t start with me, Val.”

  “Baby, you know you need—”

  Keith let out a menacing growl behind me, and I pinched his arm to let him know I had this under control. “I know I don’t need anything more to do with you,” I said. “I know my life is so much better without you in it. And don’t call me baby. I’m not your baby.”

  Val took a step toward me, a cocky smile pasted on his face. “Right. You too fat to be my baby. I need a sexy girl on my arm. You stay with him,” he added with a sneer in Keith’s direction. “He’s ugly, like you.”

  Keith tried to push me to the side. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he wanted to bash my former partner’s face in. I couldn’t let him do that, however much I might like to see it. I elbowed Keith in the ribs, probably harder than was necessary, but I wasn’t finished there. I closed the distance between myself and Val, pulled back my arm, and punched him square in the nose hard enough that I drew blood.

  Val pulled both hands up to cover his face. “You bitch!”

  “Yeah.” I grinned. “I’m a very lucky bitch to be rid of you.” With that, I took Keith’s hand and led him out to the parking lot, and I put everything to do with Val behind me.

  WITH THE SHOW in the past, I was able to get back to life as usual—or at least my new version of life as usual.

  Devin and I started working on choreography for The End of All Things almost immediately. Both of us had busy schedules, so we ended up working together at some crazy times, but we managed it. We were due to film it at the end of January, so there wasn’t any time to waste.

  Devin’s show had been a resounding success, with people talking about it throughout the dance community. He decided to make it an annual event—and a charity event, to boot. After getting to know a few of the Storm’s players through me and Keith, he’d thought it would be great to donate the money raised to the Light the Lamp Foundation. That meant he and Liam Kallen were going to partner together in the venture in future years, maybe making it into a week of performances and drawing more people to it through the hockey community.

  Classes started back up at
Rose City now that the holidays had passed us by, and so much of my time was spent teaching various ballroom dances to my students. Cole kept coming when he could—I had to bump him up to the next level of classes, though, because he was learning too fast—and every now and then Keith came, as well. Shane probably would have, but he had to go back home to his life in Nova Scotia.

  I went to Keith’s games whenever they were in town and I wasn’t scheduled to teach classes. I was pretty sure that Tanya was going behind my back and arranging my schedule so that I’d have most of those nights off, but I wasn’t going to complain about that sort of interference. Actually, I really appreciated it. I would never ask for that sort of preferential treatment, but I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  The more time I spent at his games, the better I was starting to understand hockey. That wasn’t saying a whole lot, still, but it gradually made more sense. I was at one of those games in mid-January, against the Columbus Blue Jackets, sitting in the owner’s box with Dana and some of the other players’ wives and girlfriends, when my heart pretty much stopped beating. One of the Blue Jackets had hit Vladimir Berezin hard from behind.

  “Blatant boarding,” Dana muttered to me. Then, before I knew what was happening, Keith had tossed his stick and gloves in the air and was pummeling the guy like his life depended on it.

  I’d seen a few fights in the games I’d come to but never one as intense as this. The Columbus player was bigger than Keith and he clearly knew what he was doing when it came to fighting; he gave back as good as he got. By the time the linesmen broke them apart, both their jerseys were peppered with blood, and it was still trickling down from a cut over Keith’s eye. They escorted him off the ice and down the tunnel, with all of his teammates banging their sticks over the boards in support. Babs slapped Keith’s butt as he passed by and one of the coaches did the same to Keith’s shoulder.

  “He’ll be all right,” Dana reassured me. “They’ll take him back, and Doc will stitch him up, and he’ll probably be back in the game in the third period.”

  “Trust me,” Rachel added. “Brenden gets hurt all the time. He’s a skating disaster out there, but he’s always all right in the end. It probably hurts us to see it more than it hurts them.”

  They were right, it seemed. He came back out in the third, acting as though nothing was wrong, even though I could see a long line of stitches and the ugly bruising over his eye whenever the Jumbotron gave us a close-up of his face. I cringed every time I saw it, not because of his appearance, but because of the pain I knew had to be associated with it. Almost subconsciously, I clenched my right hand into a fist and released it, remembering the pain I’d had for a couple of days after punching Val in the nose.

  The fight seemed to have sparked the Storm’s bench, though. They turned up their attack, really pushing the pace for the rest of the game. In the end, they beat the Blue Jackets by a score of five to two.

  The moment that Keith stepped into the owner’s box a little while later, I was on my feet to see the damage firsthand. I reached up to gingerly touch the red, swollen flesh.

  “Not a big deal,” Keith said, a grin turning up the corners of his mouth. “I’ve had worse.”

  “But not while I was around to see it.”

  “No, not while you were around. I’ll still be fine, though.”

  I nodded, trying to convince myself that he was telling me the truth over this. He hadn’t flinched when I’d touched him. That was a good sign, at least. “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  “Because no one messes with my teammates and gets away with it. Any of the guys would have done it, but I was closest. We take care of our own around here.” He took my hand to lead me out of the arena, and I waved good-bye to the other women. “I’d do the same for you, too, you know. Well, if you’d let me. No one messes with my girl.”

  I laughed at that. Keith and I’d had a long argument over the fact that I’d prevented him from beating Val to a bloody pulp, choosing to do it myself. “You’d better not start a fight with anyone over me,” I said.

  “Like you’d let me.” He let out a long, beleaguered sigh. “They’d better not give me a reason to.”

  “You’d do it for Shane, too, wouldn’t you?”

  “In a heartbeat. He’s my brother.”

  And I thought that maybe now, Keith realized that was mutual. It was a two-way street. He knew that Shane loved him, that he didn’t hold anything from the past against him.

  We didn’t talk much the rest of the way down to the parking garage. A few fans stopped us in the concourse and begged Keith for autographs, congratulating him on the fight. When we got in his car and he started the engine, Keith turned to me.

  “Your place or mine, tonight?”

  “How about your place…every night?”

  He’d been trying to convince me to move in with him ever since Shane had gone home, but I’d been resisting. For some crazy reason, I was still trying to take things slowly with him. There wasn’t much point to that anymore, though. Nothing about our relationship had ever been slow or normal. I didn’t know why I was trying to make it that way now.

  “Yeah?” A slow smile crept over his lips, and he took my hand after he’d put the car into gear. “You mean it?”

  “As long as we can make sure Richie is comfortable.” I wasn’t really worried about Richie, though. We’d already had a trial run at Christmas, and he’d come out of it just fine.

  “I’ve got a few ideas on that,” Keith said, launching into his plans of converting a few of the rooms downstairs into a cat sanctuary, complete with multiple hidey-holes and paths up high that the cats could use to travel from room to room. He talked for several minutes, outlining detail after detail, and it seemed as though he was going to keep going until we got to his house.

  “Keith,” I finally interrupted, laughing again.

  “Yeah?” His voice almost squeaked, as though he was nervous about what I was going to say.

  “You’re unreal, you know that?”

  He grinned. “Does that mean you’re moving in?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know...” I teased. “That whole cat-pathway thing seems like you’re trying too hard.”

  “Oh, really?” He exited the highway and turned at the light. “I thought it sounded like fun. And a great way to torment Pepper, since she wouldn’t be able to reach the cats if they were up there. Maybe I’ll just have to build it anyway and adopt a cat or two of my own.”

  “I suppose Richie and BC could give it a test run, if you’re dead set on it.”

  “I am.”

  “All right.” I let out a dramatic sigh. “Good thing I love you, since you’re so inclined to destroy your house for a cat run.”

  “I’d do just about anything if it meant getting you to come live with me.”

  I kissed Keith’s cheek. “A hidey-hole or two would be more than enough, you know.”

  “I know.” He threaded our fingers together. “But I love you, too, and I want you and your cats to feel like it’s our home, not just my home.”

  “I’ll feel at home as long as I’m with you.”

  “Good.” He made a turn, bringing us closer to the house. “Otherwise I was going to have to handcuff Allison to the bed and force her to stay, and that seemed slightly illegal or something.”

  “Or something,” I agreed, laughing. “You don’t need to handcuff me to get me to stay.” I waited a beat, for emphasis. “But you can for fun.”

  I’D NEVER SEEN a pregnant woman who looked closer to popping in my life.

  Dana had both hands on the small of her back, pacing back and forth in the owner’s box, while the rest of the players’ wives and girlfriends and I looked on. It was the first intermission in a game against the Edmonton Oilers in late February, and the score was tied at one. None of us were overly focused on the game, though. We kept turning our attention to Dana.

  “You think it’s going to happen tonight?” Rachel quietly asked Laur
a.

  Laura nodded, her eyes never leaving Dana. “She was due almost a week ago. It has to happen soon.”

  “What are we going to do if her water breaks in the middle of the game?” Sara Thomas asked.

  “Jim knows that could happen,” Rachel said calmly. “I’ll let him know as soon as it does, he’ll send us down to the ambulance that’s on site, and he’ll get Zee out of the game and in the ambulance with her.”

  “He’d leave the game?” I asked, somewhat surprised. I hadn’t been around hockey players very long, but in what little I’d seen, they got some pretty gruesome injuries and then went right back out on the ice for their next shift. I thought back to the night that Keith had fought the Columbus player, and I couldn’t imagine that any of them would leave willingly. They’d have to be pried off, kicking and screaming.

  “There are eighty-two hockey games in a season, and Zee will probably play for close to two decades,” Laura said matter-of-factly. “His first child is only born once. He’ll leave the game.”

  Dana looked a little unsteady on her feet, and Noelle Payne, Kally’s girlfriend, suddenly jumped up from her seat and crossed over to Dana, putting one arm around her back. I hadn’t spent a ton of time around these women yet, but Noelle always seemed to be in tune with people. She seemed to instinctively know who needed comforting, and she was the first to go to them every time.

  “There’s no point in worrying,” Laura said. “Women have babies all the time. If it happens, it happens.”

  “Right,” Sara said. “No worrying. I’ll be damned if I know how to make it stop, though.”

  My cell phone buzzed, and I pulled it out of my pocket. It was a text message from Devin.

  It’s done. Our video goes live to the world tomorrow. Kellan sent me the link and said I could send it to you. TOP SECRET.

  A link was pasted below his message.

  Sara was leaning over my shoulder. “That’s the video? Top secret means you have to share with us, chickee.”