by Amy Olle
Though a little leaner, he moved with the same fluid grace as he walked toward her.
Emily’s husband, Luke.
Not her Jack.
Why, oh why, had she come?
“Haven, isn’t it?” Luke held out his hand. “We meet at last.”
Haven shook his outstretched hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
He pulled Emily into his side. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to at the wedding.”
Heat rushed into Haven’s cheeks. “Weddings are so hectic.”
A knowing light danced in his bright green eyes. “That they are.”
“Can y-you stay, at least a little w-while this time?” Emily rested her hand on the plane of his stomach.
Haven’s throat seized. With difficulty, she swallowed. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Emily tugged on her arm. “Come,” she said softly. “Help me get your room ready.”
Haven followed Emily upstairs, to the bedroom she’d shared with Jack. With the bed where he’d touched her with heartbreaking gentleness.
Once again, she burst into tears.
Jack had lost his passion.
In Detroit, he’d transitioned into his new role with ease. Top to bottom, the roster was loaded with talent. They played sound, fundamental hockey, and with weapons at every position, they could match any style of play and never beat themselves. They had good chemistry, a professional work ethic, and best of all, no drama. Barring a plague of injuries or some other form of fatal bad luck, they could be a special team.
The team was great.
He was not.
He was… tired. Uninspired. Bruised. Over it.
The travel was a nuisance. The media junkets, always tedious, had become a downright menace. He didn’t want to talk to reporters who were always trying to dig up dirt about injuries, game plans, distractions, dramas. So much tired bullshit.
He had no right to feel that way. In ten seasons, he’d made it to the postseason seven times and had advanced to the final round of the playoffs once, only to miss out on the top prize.
Likely, this would end up being his best shot.
And he could hardly get up for it.
Because he’d lost his passion. Left it in Milwaukee.
His passion had walked out of his life with her.
If she’d thought to escape to the island to mend her aching heart, secluded and alone, she’d sorely misjudged.
The men who looked like Jack were everywhere.
Besides Luke, Noah, the professor, lived in the carriage house on the property while he and his wife renovated a house somewhere on the island, and the man Haven remembered as the handsome, frosty-haired bartender at the wedding was Shea.
One last brother, Leo, had arrived at the inn shortly before Haven. The bad boy type, which a younger, far stupider Haven probably would’ve fallen in love with on the spot, this brother was a little more pensive and protective of his solitude than the others. So she liked him the best.
Drawn like flies to honey by Luke’s baked goods and other culinary works of art, the brothers convened at Emily’s inn with annoying frequency, typically around dinnertime. It was never agreed upon. No one ever said, “Hey, you want to get together tomorrow night for dinner?” They just showed up, every two to three, but never more than four, days.
Without fail.
Still, the weeks passed, and yet, she didn’t leave.
She did, however, become enamored with taking walks on the beach just to get away from all that Nolan testosterone. To pull the fresh air into her aching lungs. To let the lake’s majestic power fill her with the strength she lacked.
That day while on her walk, she ventured farther than she ever had before, in the direction opposite the lighthouse and public beach. That way, the terrain beyond the sandy shore sloped upward with a drastic incline. There were no houses up on the hillsides that she could see.
Until, when she’d almost reached the limits of the distance she could walk, she spotted something. A steep staircase led up the hill and tucked away in the trees high above the pristine beach, was a house. Actually, it was not quite a house yet. Still under construction, the home had a frame and the walls were just starting to go up.
Gooseflesh broke out over her skin as she gazed up at the structure. She knew that house. She’d seen it before, but only in her mind. That day at the hospital when her dad asked her to take over the team. Well, not that house. The house she’d seen in her mind had taupe cedar shingle siding and a bright front door, but the landscape and the view matched her vision.
When she returned to the inn, she asked Emily if she knew who the house belonged to, but her friend hadn’t known the home was even being built.
That night, Haven lay wide-awake in the bed she’d shared with Jack, thinking about that house by the sea. Too wound up to sleep, she flung back the covers and padded downstairs.
The house was dark and quiet when she slipped into the kitchen and flipped on the light.
Movement out of the corner of her eye pulled a strangled shriek from her throat.
Leo blinked into the bright light.
“Oh shit.” Haven sucked oxygen into her starved lungs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was in here. I….” Her voice trailed off when she looked into his green-gold eyes.
Jack’s eyes.
He reached for the glass in front of him, his hand shaking. “It’s fine. I’m done.” Standing, he moved to the farmhouse sink and set his empty glass in the basin.
As he turned to leave, her stomach clenched at the thought of being left alone to wrestle with the eerie mystery of her vision-house.
She swiped a cookie from the jar. “Sitting alone in the dark in the middle of the night? Kind of weird, isn’t it?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Probably not as weird as running around the house turning on all the damned lights in the middle of the night.”
Haven grunted. “So… you wanna do something?”
A look of cornered panic stole into his eyes. “It’s three o’clock in the morning. What did you have in mind?”
Her gaze flitted around the kitchen, searching, until a thought struck. “You play poker?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was nothing like playoff hockey. Fast-paced, high energy, pure emotion and intensity. It took grit, guts, and a reckless determination to make it to through all four best-of-seven rounds, battling the world’s top athletes playing at their highest level, laying it all on the line for the glory of drinking from a ridiculously gigantic silver cup.
Too bad Haven had killed his passion and taken away the thrill.
It’d been more than a month since she’d traded him to Detroit and he thought about her every day. Every goddamned day.
Two nights ago, he’d caught a glimpse of a brunette in the premium seating behind the goal. While he searched the stands for her, a Tampa Bay defender laid him out with an illegal crosscheck.
Pain had exploded in Jack’s body and he’d collapsed to the ice.
He hadn’t seen the hit coming and had been completely helpless to its brutal force.
The classic dirty play—a blindside hit.
Just like Haven. He never saw her coming. She appeared out of nowhere, the force of her emergence in his life jarring and disorienting, only to disappear as suddenly as she’d arrived while he lay prone and helpless in the wake of her destruction.
As he lay out on the ice, the darkness closing in while he stared up at the arena rafters with the crowds’ taunting jeers and cheers raining down on him, he didn’t care about hockey. He didn’t care about getting up and giving his opponent the payback the bastard deserved.
He didn’t care, because it didn’t mean anything without her.
At first, he’d been livid with her for trading him. They’d had a good thing going in Milwaukee and he wanted to see it through. At the very least, she should’ve talked to him about it first.
But as he lay there, d
azed and aching, the anger he’d felt, the anger he’d been holding on to with everything he had, gave way to something else. Something sharp and gnawing, as vicious as the hit he’d just suffered.
He missed her. He needed her.
The next day, he failed concussion protocol and had to sit out of practice.
Hanging out in his dark, soundless apartment, he had nothing to do but think. About her. If he could just talk to her, hear her side of things, maybe he could let go of the anger. What had she really done?
Exactly what he’d asked her to do. If he fixed her daddy’s team, she’d send him to Detroit. He did, and so did she. That was their deal.
And because she kept their deal, there he was, with his first real shot at winning it all in the last several seasons, and he couldn’t get his head in the game. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he so indifferent to the game that’d given him everything?
Because it didn’t matter. If he won the Cup, would he be a better man?
No. He’d be the same man he was now. A shell without the crucial parts. Because he didn’t have her.
His head ached and he laid it in his hands. The misery and frustration felt a thousand times worse knowing he’d done it to himself.
Finally, he picked up his cell phone and dialed her number.
It rang, and when she didn’t pick up, his call went to her voice mail.
Jesus, her voice. The sound of her warm, low register on the shitty phone speaker squeezed his throat. He couldn’t push words past the sudden constriction and disconnected without leaving a message.
He tried her again three times that day. The first two times, it hurt all over again to hear her voice. But when his call went straight to her voice mail the third time, anger took root. She wasn’t taking his call?
She wasn’t talking to him?
He paced the confines of his apartment, trying to think what to do. He had to find her and talk to her. He called the penthouse and badgered the staff person until they admitted she was gone. She’d moved out more than a month ago.
He dropped heavily onto the sofa.
She was gone. She’d left Milwaukee and gone back to her life. Wherever her life without him took place.
In April, Emily’s house became game-viewing headquarters.
Every game day, the brothers piled into Emily’s living room. They’d graze over the platters of food Luke prepared for them and spend some time insulting one another. As their playful ribbing carried on, Shea and Noah’s distinct Irish accents seemed to infect Luke and Leo’s inflections, and the lyrical cadences of all four brothers only seemed to fuel the output of more zingers.
But when the game began, the jawing stopped and they clustered tight around the flat-screen TV hanging over Emily’s large fireplace. They never sat down during game action, but instead stood with their faces close to the on-screen battle, barking at the refs or arguing with something one of the announcers had said, or pointing out an adjustment one of the coaches needed to make.
They watched all of Jack’s games this way.
Every.
Single.
Game.
Once, during the first-round matchup between Detroit and Tampa Bay, Noah had turned to her. “There’s a spot for ye right here, Haven Callahan.”
His thick Irish brogue shivered down her spine. All the brothers had taken to calling her by her full name.
She shook her head and ducked her chin, returning her attention to the bottle of blood-red nail polish open on the table in front of her.
She painted a stripe down the length of a fingernail. “I don’t like to watch hockey.”
That earned her a few snorts and snickers.
She narrowed her eyes at the two women seated on the sofa across from her. Emily’s cheeks flushed with her guilt and beside her, her cousin, Mina, who’d struck Haven as a funny, kindhearted woman up until that exact moment, pulled her bottom lip between her teeth to hide her smile.
“Sure you don’t,” Luke said, turning back to the TV. “That’s why you’re painting the coffee table red.”
Haven frowned and wiped a splatter of polish off the dark wood. “You guys should just go to his games already.” And get out of her space for a while.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get playoff tickets?”
“Is it hard?” Haven’s question hung in the air while the force of four scowls on four ridiculously beautiful faces knocked into her.
“Yes. Very,” Luke said dryly.
“Even if we could get tickets, he doesn’t want us there,” Shea said.
“Why the hell not?” Noah wanted to know.
Shea rolled his shoulders. “I don’t know. He says its bad luck.”
Haven sat back and gaped at Shea. Bad luck? A memory floated through her mind of Jack’s dark scowl.
I don’t need luck to win hockey games.
That’s what he’d told her, and by smug look on his face when he’d said, she knew he’d meant it.
A loud cheer erupted on the TV and four heads swiveled back toward the action.
Haven’s only peace came during her late-night poker games with Leo. They met often in the middle of the night, in the library or at the kitchen table, with a deck of cards and a container of Oreo cookies.
“You ready for your ass-kicking?” Leo asked as he settled into a chair at the kitchen table.
“Aw, aren’t you cute. Thinking you actually stand a chance of beating me.”
He popped a cookie into his mouth and dealt the cards.
On the surface, he seemed so serious, kind of sad and lonely, but a touch beneath that layer, he had a sneaky smart wit and an active sense of humor. Ryan had been much the same way.
She couldn’t recall ever remembering her brother without the suffocating wrench of pain. How sad was that? Ryan deserved all her tears, but he deserved more than that. He was worth remembering with joy and happiness, too.
An hour later, a soft smile curled her lips.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
“You, actually.”
“Because you’ve taken all my money? Or is there some other reason you find me amusing?”
“You remind me of my brother. He was a smartass, too.” She held up a hand to cut him off. “I know, I know. Better than a dumbass.”
Leo’s quick smile coaxed twin dimples into his cheeks, taking him from dangerously sexy to also kind of adorable.
But his smile was fleeting. “Was?”
She rubbed the dent in her collarbone. “Yeah. He died.”
Before that moment, she’d never told anyone who hadn’t asked directly about Ryan. Though she thought about him every day, she never shared his memory with others. Up to now, it hurt too much to talk about him.
It still hurt, but not as much as the thought of Ryan’s memory fading away did.
“I’m sorry,” Leo said softly.
“Thank you.”
He leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking with his movement. “Besides being a smartass, what was he like?”
“He was good-looking, and he played hockey.”
“Uh-oh.”
She laughed. “It took me a while to figure out all the girls at school weren’t actually interested in being my friend. They were only hanging out with me because they wanted a chance to get close to my brother.”
“That’s harsh.”
“You don’t know many teenage girls, do you?”
“So far, I’ve escaped that punishment.”
Outside, the tops of the trees began to take shape in the dark sky. The sun would be up soon.
She tapped a finger on the table. “You going to ante up or chicken out again?”
A light winked in his shifting hazel eyes. Cupping his hands, he shoveled his tall stack of Oreo cookies into the pile.
“I’m all in, Haven Callahan. What you got?”
Haven didn’t care that she’d lost her money—er, cookies, to Leo, and she told him so.
“It
makes me feel good about myself to donate to charity once in a while.” She closed her bedroom door on the sound of his soft chuckle.
At the French doors, she yanked closed the curtains on the morning light and then climbed into bed. She switched on her cell phone to check the time.
But she forgot all about the time when she saw she had a missed call.
From Jack.
Emotions slammed into her, one after another. They came so quickly they robbed her of breath. Annoyance that he’d waited a month to call her. A month! Followed by a wrenching agony at the way her heart soared with the possibility of speaking to him again. Overriding it all, the sharp wrench of fear that if she talked to him, she’d not be able to stop her heart from bursting with her love for him.
A love so strong and full, she knew if she were ever to lose it, to lose him, she’d not survive. Not that time. It was too painful a prospect. She, too weak.
It’d taken her sixteen years to get to a place where she could remember Ryan without the nauseating, soul-destroying wrench of grief and regret. She couldn’t go back to that place of ultimate vulnerability.
Jack hadn’t left a message, and she didn’t call him back.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
She’d disappeared off the face of the earth.
He’d spent hours on the Internet, trying to find her. A name. An address. In any city. Anything at all he didn’t already know about her life.
But there was nothing outside the articles written during her time with the Renegades.
She was gone.
For someone who’d never lived in one place long enough to call it home, he felt bereft. Homesick. Haven was his home, and she was gone.
He called her cell phone every day for a week or more, and she never picked up or returned his call.
Panic took hold.
His chest ached from his heart’s constant banging against his breastbone.
Where the hell was she? Had he never asked her where she lived? Seattle, hadn’t she told him at the wedding? Shit, he couldn’t remember, and there were no signs of a Haven Callahan that he could find living in Seattle or a half dozen other major metropolises.