Game Breaker (Portland Storm Book 14)

by Catherine Gayle

  “It’s okay, though?”

  She smiled. “Better than okay. Much better.”

  “Good.”

  I reached for her hand as we crossed to the dock. She took it, and the soft fabric of her dress tickled my arm as it fluttered in the breeze. I handed in our tickets, and an employee guided us on board.

  “Would you like to sit inside or out?” he asked.

  “Out?” I asked Anne. The weather was nice enough, and sitting up top would give us a great view of the city at sunset.

  “Outside is perfect,” she agreed.

  The worker led us up a couple of flights of stairs and seated us at a table for two. The candles were fake, but everything else was exactly what you’d expect at an upscale restaurant.

  Another employee came along to give us menus, take our drink orders, and make sure we had everything else we needed as the other tables started to fill in around us, although there were several empty spots, as well. They must not have sold out tonight. Not a bad turnout for a weeknight, though. A few minutes later, a jazz trio started playing live music. When we left port not long before sunset, the waiter returned with our drinks and took our food order.

  “I was afraid you were going to try to back out on me,” I said after everyone left us on our own.

  Anne blinked a couple of times. “Were you? Why?”

  “Because of that press conference with Luke Weber this morning. I thought it was going to mean a lot more work for you, and you were going to choose that over me.”

  She smiled as she reached for her glass. “Well, you’re in luck. I actually got a head start on the fallout from that.”

  I raised a brow.

  “David Weber asked me to bring one of my guys over to his house last night, since Luke was going to call and fill the family in on whatever the presser would be about. So we got their immediate reactions already, and I had a plan in place with my team before anyone got to work this morning. My editor is already piecing some of it together as we speak.”

  “Sneaky,” I said with a wink.

  She laughed. “I prefer to think of it as being efficient. There’s still a lot of work to do along those lines. We have to sort out the narrative arc of the episode. To do that, I’m going to have to somehow tie it in to you guys winning your first series, and the beginning of the next series. But that’s something we’ll work on as a team over the next few days.”

  “So you could come out with me tonight,” I finished for her.

  “So I could come out with you tonight.” Anne bit her lower lip again, hiding a smile. “So… Your knee? How bad is it?”

  “On the record or off the record?” I asked, then immediately wished I’d thought that through before speaking.

  She didn’t even bat an eye, though. “Off the record. No cameras here tonight.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s a fair question,” Anne interrupted. “And it’s probably good to get that out in the open. If any of my guys are around with their cameras, then assume things are on the record. If I’m with you in a social situation and not tagging along to film something, then it’s safe to say we’re off the record.”

  “I think it’s easier to understand that when it comes to you and your guys than it is with my friends.”

  “Jezek didn’t mean to cause any trouble. I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “He says he didn’t even post it to Twitter himself,” I said—an answer that only pissed me off more. Why the fuck wasn’t he keeping a closer eye on his phone than that? There’d been enough guys in the league to get into trouble over their friends getting hold of their phones and doing stupid shit as pranks. “He took the picture, but he claims he was just going to use it to tease me with. He thinks Amanda did it while he was napping, or something. He’s deleted it now. Not that it did any good, I imagine.”

  Anne shrugged, brushing it off a hell of a lot more easily than I had. “You still haven’t told me about your knee.”

  “ACL sprain. I get to wear a brace all the time and go in for treatments if the coaches don’t need me in practice.”

  “No surgery?”

  “No surgery.” Unless I fucked it up worse than it already was.

  “Good,” she said, flashing the most amazing smile I’d ever seen.

  The waiter brought out our appetizers. We kept talking as we ate, barely looking out at the amazing view. Looking at each other seemed to do the trick, instead. And once we’d gotten past the initial discomfort over RJ’s stupidity, everything between us seemed to flow, with our natural flirtation coming back in full swing.

  At one point, while she filled me in on how she’d set Dani Weber up with one of her father’s patients for a school project, I reached across and teased the tips of her fingers with my own. It should have been a casual touch, but there was nothing casual about the electricity that seemed to flow back and forth between us in that moment.

  We talked for what felt like hours, paying far more attention to each other than to our food. They brought out dessert and coffee not long before sunset. Most of the other tables around us had already been cleared off, the people who’d been sitting at them heading over to the railings to look out.

  I still couldn’t look anywhere but at Anne. Didn’t want to. I couldn’t care less how gorgeous the city skyline looked from the river at sunset. Not when she was looking at me like there was nowhere else she’d rather be.

  Anne took a small bite from her crème brûlée, leaving the spoon in her mouth longer than was truly necessary. Savoring it.

  And I couldn’t wait any longer. She set down her spoon. I leaned across the table and cupped her cheek in my hand. She met me halfway like she’d been expecting it. But instead of the perfect kiss I’d been hoping to give her, our noses bumped, she jumped, our faces collided in such a way I worried she’d have a fat lip, she yelped, and the table collapsed underneath us.

  Everyone on the top deck spun around to stare.

  Anne looked at me, eyes wide.

  And we both busted up, laughing so hard it hurt.

  DAD TEXTED ME on a break between surgeries the next day, telling me about the call he’d received from Bea Castillo and how she couldn’t stop gushing about her meeting with Dani Weber. Apparently, I’d been right to set the two of them up. It left me with a smile, even if the rest of my day was hectic and stressed.

  The first game of the Storm’s second-round series was scheduled for tonight, but hockey was far from the only storyline my guys and I were suddenly covering. In fact, it was starting to feel secondary to everything else.

  Luke Weber’s press conference yesterday afternoon was completely dominating not only the typical sports media coverage, but it was trickling over into the mainstream media, as well, mingling with all the coverage of racial tensions around the nation. Suddenly, the media outlets trying to get time with the Storm—or more specifically, with David Weber—had quadrupled. It felt like a circus anytime I walked into the locker room, once the rest of the media had been allowed in. So many swarmed around him that there was no chance most of them could get the sound bites they wanted. Before long, a few of them started trickling over to the players and asking them for their take on gay hockey players.

  As I made my way through the crowd to get to Ben and make sure he was ready to go, I overheard Chris Hammond nearly shouting at a few of the reporters in front of him that he didn’t care who a guy went to bed with as long as he could skate—only his language was a bit more colorful than that. Then Keith Burns nearly punched one of the media guys in front of him, shouting about how his brother was gay, too, before a couple of his teammates got in the way and led him out of the locker room to cool off. I’d rarely seen anything so out of control as the spectacle surrounding this team right now. I didn’t know how the guys were going to maintain their focus in order to keep it on what truly mattered for them right now—their matchup against the Blackhawks.

  A little while later, Jamie Babcock told me they were houn
ding his wife just as much, if not more, than the way these people were cornering her father. Only it was a different sort of media chasing after her. With all her Hollywood connections and the history of being followed by the paparazzi, suddenly her life was looking much like it had back when she’d starred on the TV show The Cool Kids. He told me she could hardly leave the house without being trailed. In fact, she was debating not coming to the game tonight, because she didn’t want to detract from the game itself.

  As if that weren’t enough, all sorts of unusual media folks seemed to have followed the Blackhawks, and it didn’t take me long to figure out the reason behind it. Most of them flocked to Nate’s stall after the team’s morning skate as soon as they were given the green light to enter the locker room. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know about the questions they were asking him, but there wasn’t anything I could do to help.

  When I wasn’t making sure my camera crews were getting through the throng to film what I needed, I was busy fielding emails from my editor in the cutting room. Bill and Tim were holed up in Bill’s office working on splicing together the Weber family footage in the way I’d asked them to. This particular piece was so important to the overall production, in my opinion, that I’d turned Tim over to Bill’s care. That way, they could work as a team and be sure they got every moment of it exactly how I wanted it. Tim’s social media responsibilities could be put on hold for a while.

  In the middle of all that—as if this wasn’t already more than enough for a single day—Cody Williams waylaid me to ask for a favor.

  “A favor?” I repeated, confused but more than a little curious.

  We were in a corner of the overly crowded locker room. He’d already changed clothes and looked like he was ready to make his escape.

  So far, my guys and I hadn’t spent much time focusing on him—he’d only been in the periphery of a few segments we’d aired, and we’d never presented him in any sort of a negative light. My initial assumption had been that he wasn’t happy with the way he’d been edited, but that didn’t make any sense once I thought it through.

  “Maybe somewhere with a bit more privacy?” he suggested. He glanced around at the masses of people holding cameras and other sorts of recording devices, then jerked his head toward a quieter hall in the underbelly of the Moda Center.

  I nodded, then followed until he came to a stop in an equipment room that was currently unoccupied.

  “Look,” he said, dragging a hand through his still-wet red hair. “I don’t exactly know how to put this, and I know you’ve got a lot more you need to cover right now with things happening for some of the other guys, but if you could— It’s just— I made Webs a promise, and his daughter’s not making it very easy for me to keep that promise.”

  “You mean Dani?” I asked, and suddenly, the unexplained parts of our conversation from the other day started to click into place. Whatever it was that sticking around Portland for an extra day would allow her the chance to do, it must have had something to do with Cody Williams.

  “She’s not taking the hint,” he said, nodding. “I’ve tried flat-out telling her that I’m not interested. I’ve tried ignoring her. She won’t give up. She even showed up at my place yesterday. I’d thought she was going back to Seattle sometime on Monday, but there she was at my house…”

  I bit down on my lip to keep from laughing, because the picture in my head was more than simply amusing. There was no doubt Dani could be a handful and then some, and I doubted she took being told no lightly. That girl was a firecracker, and it seemed Williams didn’t have the first clue how to handle her.

  “But how can I help?” I asked, thoroughly at a loss. To me, this seemed like something that was between the two of them. And maybe Dani’s father.

  “You just… You haven’t shown me much on the show yet. I was thinking maybe you could send one of your camera guys out with me one night. I’ve got a friend who’s agreed to play the part of my girlfriend, and—”

  “You want to present a lie,” I cut in, again trying not to laugh.

  “It’s not a huge lie.”

  “Big enough,” I said. “What happens when your teammates see it and reveal the truth?”

  Williams shrugged. “I keep to myself a lot. Don’t really let on too much about my private life. They’re always saying I’ve got some girlfriend hidden away from them. Too ashamed of them to bring her around or something. Or maybe the opposite. I don’t know what they think.”

  “And you want to perpetuate the rumors?”

  “Are you saying you won’t do it? Because it’s not like this show is nothing but the facts or anything.”

  I scowled. “But it’s not an outright lie, either.”

  “This lie’s for a good cause.”

  “Breaking Dani Weber’s heart is a good cause?”

  “No,” he said, the word coming out as a frustrated grumble. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings or anything. I’m just trying to keep my promise to Webs.”

  “Is the promise that important?”

  “This one is. And I don’t know how else I can convince her to leave me be.”

  Going along with his request rubbed me wrong in all sorts of ways, but there was something in his eyes—an odd combination of determination and desperation—that compelled me to do it. “Is tomorrow night too soon?” I asked, racing through my mental calendar.

  “I can make it work.”

  Then I supposed I could make it work, too, even if it felt as though I would be compromising my journalistic integrity to do so.

  But if I was already losing this job soon, anyway, I might as well do what I wanted, not what I felt as if I was supposed to do. Right now, I wanted to help Cody Williams. In the process, I might even end up helping Dani, too, although she likely wouldn’t see it that way at first. If he was willing to go to these lengths to drive her away, though, then she was better off without him.

  That said, I couldn’t help but notice that he’d never actually said he wasn’t interested in her. Only that he’d made a promise to her father.

  Very, very interesting.

  I finished making plans with him to send a crew out with him tomorrow, and then we both headed back into the locker room. Once there, I did a quick scan to see what was going on. There was still a large crowd around David Weber, along with smaller groups of reporters surrounding a few of the guys. Nate had the second largest gathering, and he looked miserable. And there still wasn’t any way I could help him out, other than send him a text message that might make him smile when he saw it later, and wait for a time when we could talk without all the cameras around. So, once I was certain that my guys still had things well under control, I took out my phone and tried to think up something funny or otherwise helpful to say.

  BAD KNEE OR not, Nate turned out to be the best player on the ice in Game One of the Storm’s series against the Blackhawks. He’d only scored a single goal, but he and his line mates had put so much pressure the other team that the Blackhawks’ top line had been incapable of generating any momentum. Between the way Nate used his speed and lack of size to swerve away from the defenders’ reach, Johansson’s stick-handling, and Kozlow’s ability to get under the skin of even the calmest players, they’d controlled the play in almost every moment they spent on the ice.

  I didn’t know if they’d be able to keep this same sort of dominance up throughout the series, and particularly not once the games were played in Chicago and the Blackhawks would have the final change. If they could, this might turn out to be one of the more dominant performances of any line in recent playoff memory.

  As expected, dozens of reporters gathered around Nate’s stall in the aftermath, so many of them that Dave could hardly get in there with his camera. I kept my distance—something I was attempting to do more and more when it came to filming anything to do with him for Eye of the Storm. I wasn’t anything close to unbiased, so I needed to let my guys do their jobs and keep myself out of it as much
as possible.

  There were still a large number of unexpected journalists among the ranks, due to Luke Weber’s announcement, but not as many as earlier. It seemed they were far more interested in covering the gay hockey player angle than actual hockey.

  Later, once the press had cleared out and the guys had finished cleaning up after their dominating win, Nate sought me out. “Too late to take you out for coffee tonight? I know you’ve got a lot on your plate tomorrow.” He looked determined to convince me, even if I didn’t immediately jump on the idea.

  I had every intention of spending the majority of the day tomorrow holed up in the cutting room putting the final touches on the next webisode, but the lure of spending some time with him tonight was far too enticing to ignore.

  “I suppose you can,” I teased. “Although I might prefer a meal over coffee.”

  “Stomach growling again?” He winked. “Good, because I’m starving. I was so worked up before the game because of all the press garbage that I didn’t eat like I should have.”

  Ten minutes later, my guys were packing up their gear to head home for the night, and Nate and I were on our way out to his car. He reached for my hand, even though there were still a ton of people around. I hesitated for a moment, but not very long. Any damage that could be done to my career had already been done when my boss had seen that tweet from Jezek—or whoever it was that had gotten their hands on his phone. Besides, I hadn’t been concerned about people watching us last night on that river cruise, and we’d made quite a spectacle of ourselves.

  “Do I make you nervous?” he asked me when we reached the parking garage.

  I narrowed my eyes and tried to give him a glare that said you wish, but my laughter ruined the effect. “Maybe a little.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I just… I’ve never been the girl who dated the jocks, you know? I dated the other geeks and nerds. I reported on the jocks. So I feel out of place being with you.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a nerdy jock,” he said with a wink, and I laughed.