Defending the Reaper: A Standalone Steamy Sports Romance (The Playmakers Series Hockey Romances Book 5)

by G. K. Brady

  “You should do that more often.”

  “What? Clean up?”

  “No, laugh.”

  A subtle bob of his head, and he added, “So should you.”

  “I do laugh.”

  “You’re pretty damn serious when I’m around.”

  “Oh, look at the pot calling the kettle black!”

  “Touché.” He dipped his head.

  “Anyway, thank you for the clothes. It was unexpected and a very lovely gesture.”

  “Unexpected because you didn’t think I was capable of a lovely gesture?” He winked.

  Flustered, she spurted, “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  “Sonoma told me all about the dress and boots. I’m looking forward to seeing you in them.” Now he wiggled his eyebrows.

  Heat rose from her chest, spreading over her neck, racing up to her cheeks. It seemed to happen whenever she was around him. When was the last time a guy had made her blush so much? God, I hope you end up with my social dinner box!

  She rose on her toes and bounced to disguise how her firing nerve endings were making her jittery. “Looks like you’ve been prepping all day. What can I do to help?”

  “Nothing. Just keep me company while I prepare the stuffing.” His fingers snaked around an amber-liquid-filled shot glass that had been tucked away. He took a healthy sip and set it back down.

  She peered at a mixture in a bowl. “I don’t think I’ve ever had turkey stuffed with wild rice.”

  “And you’re not going to today either. We’re having Cornish game hens with savory wild rice, roasted in white wine.” He let out a puff of air. “By the time I hit the store, the turkeys were wiped out. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Ellie’s mouth watered. “God, no. They sound delicious. Besides, if someone’s willing to cook for me, I’m happy to eat whatever they put in front of me.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  Is he planning on cooking for me in the future? Despite telling herself not to get carried away, tentative tendrils of warmth encircled her heart.

  He picked up the bag of herbs she’d brought, opened it, and inhaled. “Oh wow. These will be great.” As he pulled them out and lined them up on a cutting board, he softly asked, “No one ever cooks for you?”

  Not anymore. “Not lately, no. When I hang out with Finn, we either order pizza or do takeout.”

  “Sounds like he’s your best friend.”

  “Yeah, I guess he is.” She took another gulp of wine. “And speaking of best friends, what happened with yours?”

  Hazel eyes raised to hers. “What best friend?”

  “Your dog, Benny. I’ve been wondering why you didn’t get to keep him.” She’d been tempted to quiz Sonoma about Dave’s “unfortunate” choices in women when they’d gone shopping but had held herself in check. Too middle school.

  He rinsed a bunch of parsley and shook it out, then arranged it on the cutting board and started chopping. “Well,” he coughed, “I got Benny about the same time my girlfriend … uh, ex-girlfriend … moved in.” He paused to sip from the shot glass.

  Wineglass in hand, Ellie leaned her hip against a counter.

  “She has a son, Isaac, who lived with us part-time,” Dave continued. “Isaac’s kind of shy, kind of awkward, and he bonded with Benny. So when Nicole and I broke up, she asked if she could keep Benny.” He met Ellie’s gaze. “How could I say no?”

  Nicole. The beautiful blond in all the pictures with the legs twice as long as mine. And huh. The Grim Reaper’s not grim at all. In fact, he might be a big softie. A stitch of insecurity gave Ellie a swift jab. “How long ago did you break up, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  He paused and stared up at the ceiling. “A little over a year now.” The knife rose and fell as he diced the parsley. “It was rough at first—things ended on a sour note—but I think it’s smoothed out since.”

  “Are you close to Isaac? Do you still see him? Them?” Ellie held her breath, though she wasn’t sure why.

  A wry chuckle. “Not really. Unless Nicky wants something from me. Otherwise, I don’t hear from her. As for Isaac, I’ve seen him a couple of times since we split, but it sounds like he and his dad are closer, and that’s good.” She didn’t miss the sad note in his voice, and her heart tugged. He blinked, seeming to put it aside. “More wine?”

  “I’ll get it.” She topped off both their wineglasses, embarrassed that hers needed more “topping off” than his, until she remembered the nearly empty shot glass. At least her fidgeting was mellowing. “Must be tough on a relationship when you’re on the road a lot.”

  He paused, picked up his wineglass, and, peering over its rim, pierced her with those intense eyes of his. “It shouldn’t be. Other guys in the league do it, and it works for them. The sudden moving can be hard, especially if the woman’s got a career or a business that’s rooted, but I’ve only ever played for one team, and Nicky didn’t work.” He shrugged.

  Whoa! He supported her? Cripes, no wonder she looks so good. With all that time on her hands, she could afford every spa treatment, every … Okay. Not fair, El.

  Ellie pulled in a lung-filling breath and quietly let it back out again. “What happened? If I’m being too nosy, just tell me to mind my own business.”

  Scraping the parsley into the rice mix, he shook his head. “I did something really stupid and got caught.”

  Chapter17

  Attack of the Warm Fuzzies

  Ellie whooshed out a fractured gasp, and Dave’s eyes darted to her startled ones. Oh shit. She thinks … “No, no, it’s not like that. I didn’t cheat on her. I’m not that guy.”

  She let out a scoffing noise that had him shooting her a pointed, arched-eyebrow look.

  Her eyes became big blue rounds. “Oh, that wasn’t directed at you. It’s just that … Well, I’ve been with that guy.” She raked slender fingers through her wavy strawberry locks, causing Dave’s brain to take a hard right from who that guy was, like a roller-coaster car yanking its passengers around its track. Did her hair feel as silky as it looked?

  “So what did she catch you at?” she said.

  What? Taking his time, he rinsed a few sprigs of rosemary, held them to his nose—so fragrant!—and began stripping them, sorting his thoughts after they’d jumped the track. She sipped her wine in the awkward pause, eyes pinned on him.

  “She didn’t catch me at anything,” he finally said. “I got caught by a few teammates using, uh, PEDs.” Holding his breath, he glanced up at her. Her features were scrunched in a question mark. “Performance-enhancing drugs. HGH, steroids, plus painkillers I hadn’t been prescribed,” he explained. “Not recreational drugs, like cocaine or Molly or—”

  “For hockey,” she blurted, light suddenly playing in her expressive eyes. “Because you were hurt, and those helped you heal.”

  He must have looked all kinds of stunned as he stared at her and mumbled, “Mm-hmm.” She got it, but she wasn’t passing judgment. Not from the little he knew of her expressions anyway, and he felt a lift of relief. Why he was telling her any of this shit, he had no idea, but something about the way she asked and her thoughtful expressions made him want to talk. It had been bottled up inside him for so long. He’d barely talked to Sonoma about it because he’d been so embarrassed, but this girl … she had a way of probing gently, cautiously, like a surgeon looking for the source of an infection—as though she genuinely gave a shit—and it made him spill like Niagara Falls. And now he’d just confessed the very thing that had sent Nicky sprinting out of his life like he was damaged goods, or worse, diseased and contagious. Did it really matter what Ellie thought of him? After all, it wasn’t as if they were anything to each other. But the fact that she was still there—not looking utterly horrified while relief washed over him—told him it was, in fact, important to him on some level. Maybe just as some small reinforcement that he wasn’t scummier than the scum of the earth.

  Not only did she not show a flicker of disgust, but s
he slid onto one of the barstools across from him and offered him a half-smile. Setting her glass down, she settled in, lacing her fingers under her chin, looking like she belonged there. Like she wanted to belong there.

  Her eyebrows pinched together over those big, sparkling blue eyes that broadcast they were unraveling a mystery. “Let me see if I have this straight. Your teammates busted you doping, your girlfriend found out, and she took off?”

  Surprisingly, hearing it didn’t send spikes into his chest like it usually did. Maybe a few needle pricks, but no more. “That about sums it up.”

  “No offense, but I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t she stick by you while you were going through all that turmoil? You must have been at a really low point when this all went down.”

  Understatement of the century. He pushed a breath through his lungs. “She was worried about Isaac being exposed to the shit-show.”

  “What shit-show?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. I was a little … moody. I didn’t yell or take it out on them, but I was tough to be around, I guess.”

  “But it’s not like you were injecting heroine or snorting coke!”

  “No, but I was injecting.”

  He kept wary eyes on her, looking for a shift in her open expression, but instead, with a voice filled with curiosity, she said, “It must be a slippery slope. How did it start?”

  To say he was astonished was akin to saying a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals was exciting. Way too obvious.

  He released a sigh. “It started when I tweaked a shoulder, and a trainer said he had a ‘little something’ that would fix it right up. And it did.” Dave had known Bobby was offering him banned substances, and Dave had taken a hard moral line—at first. They were banned for a reason, and using them was unethical. He’d played through the pain, but his performance had suffered, and as a result, so had his team. When it happened again, that hard moral line had fuzzed. After researching the substances in question and arguing with Bobby over the wisdom of the NHL’s stance, that moral line had blurred even further. After all, if something like HGH could actually help a player heal faster without screwing him up, why was the league so dead set against it? Maybe they were in the wrong.

  Dave had been skeptical about the banned substances’ effectiveness, but he’d decided to try them anyway—more research, he’d told himself. Once couldn’t hurt, could it? Yeah, he’d bent the rules, but didn’t guys bend all kinds of rules all the time? On the ice? Off the ice? When his healing time had been cut nearly in half, his moral line had moved, flipped, and he’d climbed aboard the enhancement train, convincing himself that not using what was at his disposal was wrong. How could he behave in a way that hindered his team? That was downright selfish.

  And just like that, treating injuries with PEDs became the right thing to do. With each injury, it got easier to stretch the truth. Not only did they help him overcome injuries in record time, but they made him feel more powerful, more on his game, and he’d never considered he might have punched a one-way ticket. Stopping had been harder than he’d ever imagined. Maybe they weren’t physically addictive, but mental addiction, at least for him, was a different story. He’d kidded himself he was in control, but he’d found out how wrong he was when he’d been forced to quit. If he hadn’t been busted by Gage and the freshly traded Hunter McMurphy, would he have found the willpower to do it on his own? To this day, the temptation was strong, especially as his aches and pains prevented him from being the force he knew he was.

  “I had an iron man streak going,” he explained, “and I wasn’t ready for it to end. Besides, I thought I was helping my team. It was a viable explanation at the time.” But hearing himself now? It sounded like what it was—a lame excuse for cheating.

  “What’s an iron man streak?” She tipped her wineglass to her lips.

  “It means I’d played five hundred consecutive games. In my case, it was over six hundred. I was out to beat some records, get myself in the nine hundreds.” He shrugged. “Ironically, the streak ended when they sat me and I wasn’t even injured.”

  “They sat you for using steroids? But lots of people do it!”

  She’s defending me? Her fierceness surprised and warmed him. He cocked his head, letting an indulgent half-smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “But it doesn’t make it right. I broke the NHL’s rules, Ellie.”

  She blinked. “How did your teammates react when they found out?”

  Now the needle pricks intensified. He cleared his throat. “Most of them didn’t know at first, but let’s just say socializing isn’t what it used to be.” Which is why I need to get traded.

  The pleats between Ellie’s brows deepened. “But you did it so you could recover quicker, get back on the ice, and help your team out, right?”

  “Yeah, which, according to the league, right or wrong, doesn’t matter because it gives me an unfair advantage. That’s why they’re called ‘performance-enhancing drugs.’ What I did was wrong, plain and simple. Exposing my teammates was wrong. Not only did I put my career on the line, but worse, I jeopardized my entire club. I’m surprised more guys didn’t write me off.” Hearing it took him aback. Had he ever admitted any of this aloud before—and meant it?

  “Do they all know?”

  A mirthless chuckle escaped him. “Oh yeah. Didn’t start out that way, but Nicky made sure all the SOs knew and—”

  “What’s an ‘SO’?”

  He kept forgetting she wasn’t part of the world he’d lived in for so long, and his smile grew a little wider. How refreshing to talk to a woman who knew little about the game or the players, and who didn’t seem to care about either. Who wasn’t angling for anything. “Significant other.”

  Ellie rocked backward. Now horror was etched in her delicate features. “She told your teammates’ wives and girlfriends? Why would she do that?”

  “Revenge? Because she was humiliated by what I did? I upset her perfect world.” And here he was, making excuses for Nicky—again—though he’d been grappling with her betrayal ever since Quinn had told him what she’d done months ago. Why? Maybe because he didn’t want to admit the hard, hurtful truth in Nicky’s parting words. She’d left him to find “something better.” His interpretation? A guy with more money, more prestige, although it wasn’t as if his paychecks or his standing had suffered that much with his team suspension. Huh. Maybe in the end he hadn’t been enough for her, and this had been her way out.

  “But she humiliated herself by telling everyone!” Ellie exclaimed, yanking him back to the present. “They wouldn’t have known otherwise.”

  “Maybe. With the team sitting me, guys might have figured it out on their own anyway.”

  “I get being upset, maybe even disappointed, but … I don’t know. I guess I’m being naive, but it seems like your heart was in the right place. You used steroids for the inflammation. I assume they were catabolic—is that the right word?—and not the kind that turn muscles into mountains.”

  “Because it’s so obvious my muscles aren’t the size of mountains?” he quipped. “Damn!”

  A pretty blush colored her cheeks, providing the perfect distraction. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?” he prodded, biting back his amusement as he refilled her wineglass.

  “I meant … well, your … your muscles look … they’re … You’re in really good shape.”

  He found himself buoyed by the fact she’d noticed, and he stifled the ridiculous urge to scratch the back of his head and flex.

  Her blush deepened, and before he realized what he was doing, he reached over and tugged a soft wave of strawberry-blond hair where it cascaded over her shoulder. Even silkier than it looks. “I’m just teasing you.”

  “So … and … um, the growth hormone speeds the healing process,” she continued haltingly, “and painkillers make it all tolerable while you’re healing. Which is why you did it.”

  Is this girl for real? She’s doing a better job justifying than
I ever did. And that’s just what he’d done, hadn’t he? Justified. Somehow it didn’t sound so just when someone else made the argument on his behalf. “I’m guessing you’ve spent time around athletes. Finn?”

  “No. It’s … I read a lot. And watching you play hockey … I mean, watching hockey on TV, it’s staggering how beat up you guys get, yet you hop right back to it and skate full-out, like a freight train didn’t just hit you. Well, I guess in your case, you’re the freight train. But still. It has to take its toll.” A warm chuckle bubbled out of her. “If we mere mortals took that kind of punishment … Well, I know I’d just curl up in a ball until someone scraped me off the ice. You must be one big walking bruise all the time.”

  He wasn’t sure which blew him away more: that she’d registered the effort players put in out there, that she’d noticed his physical play, or that she’d watched him on TV in the first place. Whatever it was, it shifted something deep in his chest and made his insides a little squishy. Way squishier than he wanted. She was tearing down his carefully erected façade and taking a peek behind.

  “I know it doesn’t make it right,” she clarified, “but I get it. And we all make mistakes.”

  He found himself staring at her again. “Yeah, some of us more than others. Thanks for the support, though.”

  He broke eye contact just as she tucked a strand behind her ear. “May I have some water?”

  After snagging her a cold bottle from the fridge, he began stirring the rice mixture. Soft snuffling came from under the dining table, and he glimpsed Casper curled up on the room’s lone rug. The cold, drab walls of his townhouse suddenly felt … cozier. “Would you like to come to a game sometime? Watch it live? You could bring Finn or a girlfriend.” Something surprisingly foreign and possessive jolted him. No Habitat dudes. Or any other dudes unless they’re family.

  Her pretty blues popped, and she paused mid-gulp. “Are you serious? I’d love to come. And I know Finn would die for the chance.”

  “Consider it done. We have a homestand coming up, so we’ll take a look at the schedule and see what works for you.”