by Lane, Stacy
“I love you,” Brooks repeats and my heart stutters. Early evening light cascades behind his silhouette as we stand on the threshold of my front door and Brooks spills everything inside his heart. “And I’m a fucking idiot for not realizing how much I do, but I want a future with you, Angel. You asked me if I saw you there, standing at my side when I win The Cup one day. The answer is yes. Today was another career goal and you should have been there. You were the first person I thought of, the first one I wanted to see and hold and kiss. I was so hung up on love never lasting, but that’s bullshit. The ones that lose it just aren’t trying hard enough. I don’t want to lose you.”
Tears fill my eyes, hands covering the wild, excited beat happening beneath my chest. “What about the future beyond hockey? I know it’s your life and you say you want me to be a part of it, but what about everything else? My love is not fleeting, Brooks. I will love you forever.”
“Then I give you my forever. I don’t want any of it if you are not with me.” Brooks takes a step inside. His taped wrists reaching for my face. Passion and promise written in his eyes. “I will love you tomorrow and next year and thirty years from now. I want our own Christmas traditions like I had with my parents and brothers. The special ornaments with our own family. I want a family skate day do-over where I’m out there playing a game with you and our kids.”
A blubbering bliss comes over me. Emotion lodged in my throat, I whisper, “I want that future, too.”
“I never want you to feel like you’re settling, Jo.”
“After all that, how can I?”
“More often than not, I’ll probably screw up explaining my real feelings. So you should know what you’re getting into.” His happy, playful grin matches my own.
“I get you better than anyone, remember,” I say softly, eyes misty and dropping to his mouth. “All this sharing coming from you is weird. I think you should just kiss me already.”
Brooks grips the nape of my neck, bending me backward with the weight of his full body. My glasses come loose as our faces meet. Hands wrapped tightly around his neck, I hold on as Brooks puts the time spent apart and the time spent falling in love into one kiss.
I used to be afraid of the opposites stacked against us, but now I look at those differences as a way to make Brooks and me stronger.
“You taste like apple pie,” he murmurs against my mouth, deepening the kiss once before pulling back to add, “And pumpkin.”
Pie.
Moms.
Oh crap.
Before I can disengage his eager tongue from mine, a throat clears over my shoulder.
Brooks lifts his face as I turn mine, arms remain locked as he has me bent oddly and would likely drop me if he let go.
“Oh my,” my mother breaths, waving a hand in front of her face.
“Did you even shower after the game, son? Beautiful speech, but it could have waited another five minutes for you to clean the sweat off of you,” Betty fusses, but with a joyful expression.
The moms stand at the entryway from the kitchen to the living room.
“Mom,” Brooks puffs, standing to his full height and bringing me with him. “I thought you were at the game.”
“You thought wrong,” she grins, and I witness for the first time where the Labelle boys get their charming, cunning smile.
“The pies,” he mumbles.
“Yeah,” I let loose a chuckle. “Brooks, meet my mom, Caroline.”
“Honey, Brooks and I can chat later. I think that speech earned him a shower, if you know what I mean.” Mom turns to Betty. “Why don’t we give them some alone time. Go for coffee and hang out, since it seems we’ll share grandkids one day.”
The moms grab their purses, kiss us goodbye and leave us to…shower.
I drag Brooks off to my master bathroom. Peeling away clothes and unwinding tape.
Underneath the steaming fall of water, I kiss him and say, “I love you, Brooks.”
“I love you too, Angel.”
“Keep that up and I just might be at every home game.”
He smiles against the press of our mouths, and repeats his affection aloud and with demonstration.
EPILOGUE
Jo
3 months later…
It’s moving day.
Brooks has three games left in the season. The Fury didn’t make the Playoffs, not even close. He’s been a little salty toward the outcome. Didn’t help when I pointed out that I predicted their team’s less than stellar standings from the beginning.
So sensitive. These guys’ egos are still something I have to get used to.
And I’m shacking up with one of them.
Brooks and I have spent the nights he’s not traveling out of state with each other since December. It kind of already feels like we’re living together, but now we’re making it official.
I did not want to live in his bachelor pad, no matter how gorgeous the view is, or how much I will miss Super Guard Roberto. And then there was my remodeled kitchen that I refused to give up. Alas, Brooks is moving in with me.
Today. If our movers are not hungover.
The guys have a couple days off and agreed to help us move Brooks’s things to my house. Moving day also landed on karaoke night at Triplets. We’re all pushing that last call hour, possibly the latest I have ever stayed out—I’m a rebel, I tell ya—when a muddled trio takes the tiny stage.
Marc, Claude, and Eddie—very drunk and very sad to be “officially” losing a wingman.
“This one is for you, Jolene,” Marc slurs into the mic, pointing a finger to where I sat with everyone else at Cam’s end of the bar.
The twangy picking of guitar strings begin. Immediately, I recognize the sound and start laughing.
“Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Joleeeene. I’m begging of you please don’t take my man.” Marc sings the chorus while the other two dance and bounce in the background.
Claude picks up the first verse. “Your beauty is beyond compare, with flaming locks of auburn hair, with ivory skin and eyes of emerald green.”
Brooks swings an arm around me, dropping his face into my neck and laughing hysterically.
“Okay, I’m so glad I came out tonight just to witness this,” Chelsea’s voice hollers into the fold.
I turn when I hear her, smiling and engulfing her in a big hug. Taytum quickly joins, looping her arms around the both of us.
“We missed you,” I tell her.
Chelsea and Vic split up at Christmas.
Brooks explained all the ends and outs of his bad mood the night he got benched. One of them being how he caught Vic with another woman in Vegas—without remorse.
There was no doubt between us that we would be telling Chelsea, we just didn’t know how or when. But Chelsea returned home before expected and telling her became moot.
Of all people, Vic cheated with Amber. And I was so nice by never slut shaming the redhead for being with Brooks. It would have been uncouth of me considering she backed off Brooks when he and I got together. But now? Let me grab my GoT shame bell.
Chelsea only returned recently when she learned Vic would be going home to Vancouver for the offseason. Tampa is not her home anymore, but she has friends here to try and convince her otherwise.
It’s why we bumped up moving day by a couple weeks. Chelsea is going to stay at Brooks’s apartment for the summer break.
Vic being Brooks’s teammate, and Chelsea my friend, made it hard to hang out together when we went to Triplets. But Vic wasn’t here tonight.
“I missed you girls, too. I love Vancouver and my family, but it’ll be nice to have some peace and quiet. Get my bearings before moving back home.”
“If you move back,” Taytum says.
“There’s nothing here for me. This move was Vic’s, not mine. And I am done doing everything for everyone else and nothing for myself.”
Chelsea let us in on her inhibiting lifestyle she shared with Vic. She deserved better. She deserved to be the only on
e at the controls, steering her hopes and dreams. She had fire, and it was reassuring to see the flame remained alive.
“Enough about me. We’re missing the performance,” Chelsea grinned, squeezing through to the bar.
Brooks pulls me into him, my back leaning against his front. “No getting rid of me after today.”
I turn my face up to his, resting my head on his shoulder. “That ship sailed long ago. There was no getting rid of you from the moment I met you.”
“Are you saying my dad was right? That it was fate?” His lips twitch.
“Better not tell your brothers. They might be next.”
We turn back to the stage, the closing of the song drawing us in as the Dolly wannabes belt out my name over and over.
“I believe in fate now,” Brooks whispers into my ear. His lips kiss the soft spot below, in the dip of my neck. “I would fall in love with you every time, no matter the circumstances.”
“God, I love it when you’re sweet.”
“Only a side of me you get to see, Angel.”
Brooks is a guy anyone would fall for. It was only a matter of time before I did, and I thought I could stop it back then. Prolong the inevitable by waiting to see how two people so opposite would respond to the start of a new relationship.
But falling in love with him was the start. All this time we’ve been telling our prologue, and now we’re beginning our first chapter.
I spin in his arms, wrapping myself around him. My mouth settles on his, unworried and filled with my own set of confidence in the packed bar with tons of onlookers.
To be deeply in love is to not care what others may think. And being in the spotlight with Brooks now, they all have a lot to say.
But I don’t care. As a matter of fact, if they want to talk, I say let’s give them something to talk about.
The Labelle cockiness might be rubbing off on me.
Brooks groans as I pull him closer, devouring him with eagerness. My fingers curl into the hair at the nape of his neck. Running my tongue along his lip, I command with a beguiling murmur, “Take me home.”
The End
——————
Want more Triplets?
Good news, Alex is up next.
Coming Spring 2019
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ALSO BY
STACY LANE
All This Time
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I spent a few years writing different stories and struggling whether or not to self-publish. Like Jo, I beat myself up with self-doubt constantly. After All This Time came out, I worried about jumping into another story and releasing it in a proper time frame and not letting the years slip by again. Jo’s character came to me right away. She was everything I was feeling, and Brooks had that Labelle confidence I needed to channel for myself. Now I’ve created a world around characters I’m slightly obsessed with, revolving around a sport I am really obsessed with (I can get scary angry and excited while watching hockey), and accomplishing my own ambition of having two books self-published by the age of thirty.
To my husband, thank you for supporting me through this new journey. And for taming the kid so Mommy can get shit done. Aidan, I love you, and I hope you become a doctor one day because the scrubs and stethoscope you refuse to take off are too stinking cute.
To Kim, thank you for always just being there. For reading along and being my constant cheerleader as you’ve been my entire life. Love you, sis…and you were the one who threw me on Mom’s glass coffee table and broke it. It’s here, written in a book so that’s final. Hahaha!
To Nicole, thanks for the Vegas tips. I left out some of the darker sides you described—well, one dark side because this is a rom-com book—but you gave me some good notes and they make me laugh when I see them in my notebook.
Family, friends and any new readers and supporters, thank you for sharing the excitement and I hope you continue to enjoy whatever comes next!
xo, Stacy