But Rachel lifted her head and smiled before I could leave. “I figured Pumpkin was hissing at you.”
“Is that something special he reserves just for me, or does he hiss at a lot of people?”
“Just men.” Rachel shifted over on the sofa, making room on it like she wanted me to join her. “He didn’t always, though. It started a few years ago when he started hissing at Jason and the repairman for my apartment. I don’t know what brought it on.”
I sat down beside her even though I should have gone back to my place. “I’ve got a couple of ideas on that.”
“Huh?” Her eyes flitted up to meet mine. “Oh. Yeah, you’re probably right.”
That brought a heaviness back to her posture. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have kept my damn mouth shut. “I’m sorry,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulder.
She came to me easily this time, letting me tug her close to my side. She rested her hand on my chest. Her fingers tickled me as she trailed them over my shirt. “Tuck got you just as dirty as he got himself.”
I looked down. She was picking at a crusty bit hanging off the front of my shirt. I put my hand over hers to stop her. “He is a boy,” I said. “Boys are pretty messy, if I remember right.”
Her eyes traveled over to my sleeve and all the blood there. “Oh God. That’s going to set in if we don’t soak it.”
“It’s just a shirt.”
She shook her head and pulled away. In seconds, she’d stood up and gone to the kitchen. “Take it off and give it to me. I can save it.” She turned the faucet on and bent down, sorting through the cleaning products in the cabinet under the sink.
“It’s really not a big deal,” I said.
“It is a big deal. Because it’s Maddie’s— Because you—”
The last thing I wanted tonight was for her to get all worked up and start crying again. Especially over something as ridiculous as my shirt. There’d already been more than enough of that to last us a while. “Okay. It’s a big deal.” I stood up and pulled it over my head. I crossed over to her and passed it across the bar when she met my eyes.
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, and her gaze dropped down to my bared chest. She blushed and immediately dropped her head to focus on getting my shirt treated and soaking.
God, she was so pretty when she blushed. I hated not having her in my arms, not being able to touch her in some way. I moved to the other side of the bar and pulled her back to my front, resting my hands on her belly. Her hair still smelled like her shampoo, vanilla and some floral fragrance or another. The scent tickled my nostrils.
“I don’t know how many times Mom had to do this same thing when I was a kid,” I said.
“I’m sure your mother has a lot of stories.”
“If I’m not careful when she’s here, she’ll talk your ear off telling you all about me, and I won’t get any time with you.”
“That wouldn’t be horrible.” Rachel rinsed her hands under the faucet and dried them on a towel. She tossed it back to the counter when she was done.
“I don’t know. I’m not too sure I’m ready to share you any more than I already have to.” We hardly ever got to be alone, not like this.
She turned around in my arms and looked up at me. “Then I suggest you’d better make good use of the time you’ve got me alone beforehand.”
My cock jerked to life, which wasn’t all that surprising. The more time I’d been around her, the more I wanted her. I didn’t think now was the most appropriate time for it to make itself known, though. She was a single mom, and she hadn’t dated since she was a teen. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an invitation to screw her silly, no matter how much I might want to do just that.
I met her eyes, suddenly dark and needy, fighting the urge to pick her up and set her on the counter and kiss her everywhere she’d allow me to. “And how do you suggest I do that?” My voice sounded strangled, but I kept my hands where they were, right at her waist.
“Kiss me.”
Fuck. She was going to kill me.
I swallowed hard, determined to keep myself from crossing the line. There were kids just down the hall. She wasn’t ready for what I wanted. I could damn well fucking kiss her and keep my hands where they belonged, keep my cock in my fucking pants. I could do this. I would.
I put one hand up and cupped her cheek, inching my fingers into her hair. She was trembling. I might have been, too, from trying to keep myself in check. It was hard to be sure.
She tilted her head up and back, her mouth already open and welcoming when our lips met. I groaned and let my tongue delve inside to explore. Hers met mine, tentatively at first and then with more confidence.
Kissing Rachel was unlike kissing any other woman in recent memory. It was more like kissing my first girlfriend, when everything was new and exciting and a little terrifying, when every tiny movement or sound she made was like an electric jolt straight to my already painfully hard dick.
Her hands were driving me crazy with need, tickling over my chest, first teasing and then more insistent as she explored my pecs and shoulders and upper abs. Everywhere she touched my muscles pulsed. My hands itched to touch her in the same ways, to learn every hollow and curve of her body, to discover the places where a simple touch could steal her breath and make her shudder with need like she was doing to me.
She put both hands on my waist and pulled me closer to her, so close my hard-on was pressed against her stomach. “Touch me,” she said. She stretched up on her toes and kissed my jaw and the hollow of my throat, hot, wet kisses that only made me need her more. “I want to feel your hands on me. Don’t make me beg.”
I was pretty close to begging, myself, but I still wasn’t sure I could trust myself.
I couldn’t stop, though. I did exactly what I’d just told myself I wouldn’t do—I picked her up and set her on the counter, sliding my hips between her parted thighs. She wrapped her legs around me, drawing me closer to her heat. I moved my hands to her ribs, settling them just beneath her breasts. Rachel sucked in a breath when I let my thumbs slide along the undersides, smoothing the pads over her silky sweater.
As soon as I palmed her breasts, her back arched into me. She was so fucking perfect, so absolutely fucking perfect I could barely remember to breathe. These almost voiceless sounds kept coming from her mouth, and I wanted more of them. So many more. I lifted her sweater, let my hands slide up her rib cage beneath it and touch her bare skin, smooth and fevered and the exact opposite of mine. I had more scars than I could count, from skate blades and surgeries and God only knew what else. Imperfections everywhere the eye could see. Her skin was silken and flawless.
With my fingers, I pushed her underwire up until it slid over her breasts and they bounced free. Her nipples were puckered and hard, and she cried out when my thumbs grazed over them.
I stifled her shout with a kiss, desperate to quiet her. We might wake the kids up, and the last thing they needed to wake up to was me mauling their mom on the kitchen counter.
Rachel squirmed, trying to pull her sweater over her head, but I put my hands over hers to stop her. Her eyes flashed up to mine, questioning me without saying a word.
“Not like this,” I ground out. “The kids…”
Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, her breathing erratic. But she nodded and let her hands drop to her sides. I stayed close, holding her close to me and dropping my forehead down to rest against hers while we got ourselves back under control.
“Brenden?” she said after we’d been in that position for a few minutes.
I lifted one hand to her hair, teasing my fingers through the curls. “Yeah?”
“I want to ask you to stay tonight.”
My pulse kicked into gear, and I held my breath. I wanted to stay. I wanted to hold her all night and learn if she slept just as hard as Tuck did.
“But I’m not ready to have the kids wake up and find you here. I need to talk to them first.”
�
��I know.” Hell, I needed to talk to them first, too.
“Soon,” she whispered.
Soon couldn’t come soon enough.
I was a fucking idiot for pulling those kids around on the sled all day yesterday. I was an even bigger idiot for not icing my ankle last night.
Now I was paying for it, and at the worst possible time—right in the middle of a game.
Every time I tried to really dig in, either to get some traction so I could gain some speed or change directions, it hurt worse than it did only a moment before. We were playing the Canucks again, the last time we would face them until the final game of the season.
It had been chippy out on the ice since the opening puck drop. Hell, even during warm ups, there’d been a lot of chirping back and forth between our teams. We didn’t really like each other, the Storm and the Canucks. The game had been full of lots of hard hits, some of them skirting the edge of being legal—and the Canucks were getting the best of us, even if the game was scoreless late in the second period. They were dominating us at face-offs, they had peppered Hunter with over thirty shots already, and every time one of us touched the puck, we knew we were going to get hit. Hard.
At the moment, I just wanted to get the hell off the ice. I’d nearly screwed the team over by passing the puck right in front of our goal crease. I’d been trying to hit Zee with it to let him take it out of the zone, but one of the Sedin twins had picked my pass off and got a point-blank shot against Hunter. When I’d spun around to try to cover my mistake, I’d twisted my ankle again. Now it hurt like a son of a bitch—easily twice as bad as it had been before that dumbass move.
Thank God Hunter had bailed me out of that one. Several of the games he’d started lately had been a struggle for him, but today he was playing lights-out hockey. Nothing was getting past him, no matter how bad we screwed up in front of him, and we’d screwed up a hell of a lot. No one quite as blatantly as me, though.
Jens gathered the puck behind our net and set up our breakout. He took it to the boards behind me on the left-wing side. I was waiting just on the other side of center ice, and he sent a hard pass my way, angling it past a Canuck with the boards. As soon as it hit my stick, I shot it deep into the zone. Half a second after the puck left my stick, Canucks defenseman Kevin Bieksa caught me with his hip and sent me sprawling to the ice.
I got up, made sure the coast was still clear for me to get off for a line change, and climbed over the boards. Jonny took my place and went to work, and I tried to will the shooting pain in my ankle away.
Zee slid into place beside me on the bench a second later. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. Worry about yourself for once.”
“I would if I didn’t have to worry about you making bonehead moves like that.”
I normally wouldn’t have done something so stupid. Maybe my ankle was getting to me even more than I’d thought—messing with my ability to think through the game. I couldn’t tell the trainers, though. As soon as I said anything about another fucking injury, I’d be back up in the press box with Nicklas Ericsson watching for God only knew how long this time. Not that I had anything against Nicky, but I wasn’t really keen to join him right now.
Our fourth line was out there doing a better job than my line had. Jonny forced a turnover in the neutral zone and took the puck into the corner. His linemates, Jared Tucker and Philippe Lafleur—better known as JT and Pepe—joined him. All three of those guys were speedy and tenacious. They cycled the puck down low, playing keep-away with the Canucks defenders.
From the corner, JT sent a no-look pass over to Pepe, who had parked himself in front of the Canucks goal. Pepe tipped it, and it almost went in. JT and Jonny both converged on the net, and all three of them poked away at it. Jonny lost an edge on his way to the net, crashing into Roberto Luongo, the Canucks goaltender. Luongo finally covered the puck and got the whistle.
That should have taken us to the final TV timeout of the period, but the Canucks defensemen weren’t too happy about all that activity right in front of their guy, the way our boys had been poking and slashing to get the puck free. They shoved our guys around, one of them cross-checking Jonny in the back hard enough to get a reaction. Jonny flung off his gloves to fight even before spinning around to see who it was, but the linesmen broke them apart before either of them got a good punch in.
They both got sent to the penalty box with minor penalties for roughing, and so we played four-on-four for the next two minutes.
Scotty sent Gags out with Zee. Normally he would send me. I tried not to let it get to me, especially since I still didn’t know how well I could skate on my ankle, but it did. It pissed me off. Zee and I had chemistry on the ice that we’d been honing since we were kids, and a four-on-four situation was the perfect way to use us together.
When they came off for a change, he sent Pavel Spanov and Sergei Ivanov over the boards. Pasha and Sarge pretty much always played together. There weren’t many people who could read what Sarge was going to do like Pasha could. It probably helped that they both spoke much better Russian than they did English. Communication on the ice was one of the most important parts of the game at any level.
Babs went out next, along with Henrik Markusson. At that point, I shot a look up at Scotty, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Babs and I had played together a lot in my time with the Storm. We each knew what the other would do. Hank never got put out there with players as skilled as Babs. He was more of a checking-line type of player. He couldn’t play off skilled guys like I could.
The four-on-four ended without me getting a chance out there, and both teams were back to full strength. When the guys on the ice came off for a change, Scotty sent out my line—without me. He sent Jonny in my place.
Now it was pretty damn clear. He’d fucking benched me.
The rest of the period, Scotty didn’t give me another second of ice time. When he wanted to send the fourth line out, since Jonny was now playing up with Zee and Gags, he started double-shifting Babs and left me at the end of the bench to stew.
It was still a scoreless tie when the horn sounded to signal intermission. As soon as we got back to the locker room, I threw my helmet in my stall.
“Oh, are you pissed off?” Scotty shouted at me.
“Yeah, I’m pissed. You fucking benched me.”
“Fucking right, I benched you. You pull a fucking dipshit move like that and you think you’re going to play?”
“I screwed up. It won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, that’s right it won’t.” Scotty’s face turned beet red. “If you get back on the ice today, you’ll be playing on the fourth line. You’d better fucking keep up with them, too. And if you get out there with them and pull another stunt like that, you’ll be watching the next game from the fucking press box. Jonny, you’re staying with Zee and Gags for now.”
He kept talking to the team, going over assignments and reminding everyone of the game plan, and I pretty much tuned him out. I knew the game plan. When we headed back to the rink for the third, I took my spot on the bench and waited for him to tell me I could play, trying to keep myself focused, keep my head in the game, even though I was still fuming. Anger wasn’t going to help me right now. It wouldn’t get me back in the game.
The boys scored a goal finally, almost halfway through the period. Zee sent a seeing-eye pass through two Canucks defenders’ legs. It hit Jonny’s stick right on the tape, and he deflected it past Luongo. Now we had a lead to defend. The Canucks only started hitting our guys harder and more often after that, trying to physically dominate us into coughing up the puck and making the same kinds of mistakes I had made.
About two minutes after we scored, Jonny had had enough of the late hits and uncalled cross-checks. He dropped his gloves with Tom Sestito, a goon playing for the Canucks. He probably shouldn’t have done that; it gave their bench some life when we had finally started taking control of the game. Their guys picked two more fights in the next
three minutes, leaving three of our forwards in the penalty box serving time.
“Soupy!” Scotty shouted.
My head whipped around.
“Don’t fuck this up. Get your ass out there.”
At first, I wasn’t sure if he was sending me out to fight or if he actually wanted me to play. But then I saw he’d sent us out against the Sedin twins. This wasn’t to fight—he wanted me, JT, and Pepe to keep those fuckers in check.
I lined up for the face-off. JT won the draw, so I took off for the blue line to head into the Canucks zone. Pepe beat me there, and JT passed the puck up to him. I made for the net, determined to plant myself in front of Luongo and stay there. You don’t score goals in the NHL unless you’re willing to go to the dirty areas of the ice.
Once I got into position, Bieksa started cross-checking me in the back, trying to force me out of that spot. I slashed him with my stick, hoping the refs wouldn’t catch me doing it. They always seemed to get the retaliation, not the initial incident. Granted, today they didn’t seem to be calling much of anything. They were just letting us play.
Instead of cross-checking me again, Bieksa slashed me on the ankle with his stick. The ankle that was already killing me. I dropped to the ice, one of the Sedins blocked a shot and took off with the puck, and everyone headed to the other end of the ice without me.
Fuck! I got up, but I couldn’t put any weight on my ankle. It gave out on me and I dropped back down to the ice just in time to see the puck go in the net and the red light flash.
They’d tied the game with only a few more minutes left.
Eddie Masters, the Storm’s head athletic trainer, jogged across the ice to me. “What’s going on, Soupy?”
“My ankle. I think it’s done.” Not to mention my NHL career. After this, it didn’t look so hot.
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